‘A German Whore and no Money at that’: Insanity and the Moral and Political Economies of German South West Africa

Abstract

While the links between colonial psychiatry and racism figure prominently in histories of the diagnosis, treatment and institutionalisation of the mentally ill in Africa, there is an absence of patient-centred accounts, in the analysis of the efforts of the colonial-era subjects themselves to be pro-active not merely as the mentally ill, by clinical or court definition, but as persons embedded in social relationships with their kin and significant others. Moreover, despite an emerging scholarship, little is known of the experience of European settlers. In this respect there is a need for a more balanced representation, one that shows the ambivalence of colonial psychiatry and its reach into the lives of colonial subjects, Africans and Europeans alike. In this paper I focus on the narratives of a settler in German South West Africa and her efforts to escape diagnosis and institutionalisation. In building on a feminist approach to illness narratives, in particular on the idea of bearing empathic witness, I will explore the ways in which illness narratives can reveal the complex moral and political economies of the colonial world.

Intimacy, comradeship and everyday police violence: the rape of Sophie M. in German South West Africa in 1910

“…With the arrival in the 1910s of growing numbers of white settler women in the colony, and accompanying racialized and moral fears of ‘miscegenation’, settler nervousness over the labour supply gained gendered undertones (Fumanti 2020; Lindner 2009; Lindner and Lerp 2018). With a white woman present in the intimate space of a settler household, both African women and African men were considered dangerous – as seductresses and sexual predators respectively.…”

The ‘haunting’ and the ‘haunted’: Whiteness, orthography and the (post)-apartheid condition in Namibia

“…I am aware of the very different experiences that whiteness encompasses, and how these intersect inter alia with nationality and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, class, generation and education. An emerging literature has begun to uncover the relationship between whiteness and vulnerability in the colonial world (Falkof 2015;Fumanti 2020;Schmidt 2008;Wilbraham 2014), and in settler colonial societies in particular. Against the perceived understanding that white societies were uniformly wealthy and culturally homogenous, recent scholarship on Southern Africa has brought to the fore the ways in which social class constituted a key aspect of settlers colonial societies (Money and van Zyl-Hermann 2020).…”

“…Against the perceived understanding that white societies were uniformly wealthy and culturally homogenous, recent scholarship on Southern Africa has brought to the fore the ways in which social class constituted a key aspect of settlers colonial societies (Money and van Zyl-Hermann 2020). White colonial societies were divided along economic and class lines, between the rich and the poor (Hyslop 2020;Mhike 2020), but also in moral terms, between 'desirable' and 'undesirable' whites (Bishi 2020;Freund 2020;Fumanti 2020;Simões de Araújo 2020). These political and moral economies shaped the politics of race in the colonial world, and continue to shape the postcolonial condition across the region.…”