Clamouring for Education: the struggle in Colonial Kenya
The Kenya eugenics movement came under attack in the 1930’s. Divisions between settler society and the metropole intensified over the issue of African rights and many dismissed Gordon as a ‘charlatan’. However, even as the theories behind Kenya eugenics were displaced, beliefs about White superiority/African inferiority still lingered particularly during the Mau Mau insurgency in the 1950’s when the threat to white rule intensified.Ethnopsychiatry, “the study of the psychology and behavior of non-western peoples” (McCulloch, 1993, p. 35) started in 1900, never received recognition as mainstream science and met its demise in the 1960’s as colonial empires collapsed.
In 1954, Carothers was medical officer in charge of Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi and was commissioned by the British government to write a psychological study of the Mau Mau revolt which he named The Psychology of Mau Mau. This study produced the official account of why the Mau Mau occurred (McCulloch, 1995). Carothers dismissed the fact that there were social, land and economic grievances behind Mau Mau. Instead, by pathologizing the movement, he concealed the settlers’ violence and African resistance to it. Settler atrocities were denied and resided in the hidden history for decades until 2011 when the British government was forced to reveal the contents of its secret archives that resulted in it paying 14 million pounds to former Mau Mau members.
Carothers attributed the Mau Mau to the African’s childlike personality, inability to adapt to change and in many of his writings he referred to the African as a psychopathic type – which according to psychiatric texts of the time could be inferred to mean habitually abnormal (McCulloch, 1993). It is against this scientific backdrop that Africans would be attempting to get an education in the colony of Kenya.
"That theory provides us with a history of Europeans in Africa and it reveals to us their feelings about colonial peoples. It has much to tell us about the colonizer; his secret fears, his excuses, his sense of superiority and his paranoia about all things sexual. As such it is valuable in providing us with an intellectual biography of the colonialist. It tells us little or nothing about the African” (McCulloch, 1993, p. 49)
Campbell, Chloe. (2007). Race & Empire: Eugenics in Colonial Kenya. Vancouver: UBC Press
McCulloch, J (1995). Colonial Psychiatry and ‘the African Mind’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
McCulloch, J. ( 1993 ). The Empire’s New Clothes: ethnopsychiatry in colonial Africa. History of the Human Sciences, 6(2), 35-62
Olumwullah, O. ( 2002 ). Dis-ease in the Colonial State: Medicine, Society and Social Change Among the AbaNyole of Western Kenya. Westport: Greenwood Press
Tilley, H. (2011). Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, development and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge 1870-1950 Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Eugenics and Ethnopsychiatry in Colonial Kenya
British eugenics, a variant of genetics, focused primarily on the threat of degeneration the White ‘pauper’ class - genetically inferior bad stock as they were perceived - posed to the White middle and upper classes. “Our middle classes, the very backbone of our race, are now producing only 40 percent of the numbers required to replace them…If this is allowed to go on we cannot avoid sinking to a level beyond rescue” (Campbell, 2007, p. 46).
In the 1930’s, Kenya eugenicists adapted British eugenics to the colonial Kenyan environment and race rather than class became their focus. Campbell states that Kenyan eugenics was more disparaging, extreme and potent than eugenics that emerged from other British colonies. This could be attributed to class, to the fact that “Kenya’s white settlers tended to be more aristocratic…..Kenya was a colony for gentlemen not for artisans or the white working class” (Campbell, 2007, p. 4).
As outlined by Campbell (2007) in her book Race and Empire: Eugenics in colonial Kenya, the Kenyan eugenicists focused on issues of race and intelligence; they sought to provide biological evidence for racial differences. Most eugenic research in the colony of Kenya focused on amentia or Africans’ mental deficiency. This research pathologised the African brain and attributed African’s ‘backwardness’ to innate genetic differences. Campbell states that the Kenyan eugenics movement should be viewed in the context of broader American and European movements that included Nazi eugenics. The extremely violent and deadly practices adopted by Nazi eugenics would eventually lead to rejection of eugenics movements and scientific racism that fueled them. Despite the skepticism that arose in Britain over the validity of Kenyan eugenics and the isolation and demise of the eugenics movement in Kenya, the ideas it generated remained influential among the settler population.
H.L. Gordon was one of the most senior physicians in the colony of Kenya who had no training in psychology or psychiatry. His eugenics involved creating the profile of the superior White by controlling immigration of Whites to the colony, limiting ‘mental deficiency’ through forced sterilization of ‘unfit’ Whites and developing scientific racism theories of White racial superiority that appealed to White settler society in Kenya.
In the 1930’s, Kenya eugenicists adapted British eugenics to the colonial Kenyan environment and race rather than class became their focus. Campbell states that Kenyan eugenics was more disparaging, extreme and potent than eugenics that emerged from other British colonies. This could be attributed to class, to the fact that “Kenya’s white settlers tended to be more aristocratic…..Kenya was a colony for gentlemen not for artisans or the white working class” (Campbell, 2007, p. 4).
As outlined by Campbell (2007) in her book Race and Empire: Eugenics in colonial Kenya, the Kenyan eugenicists focused on issues of race and intelligence; they sought to provide biological evidence for racial differences. Most eugenic research in the colony of Kenya focused on amentia or Africans’ mental deficiency. This research pathologised the African brain and attributed African’s ‘backwardness’ to innate genetic differences. Campbell states that the Kenyan eugenics movement should be viewed in the context of broader American and European movements that included Nazi eugenics. The extremely violent and deadly practices adopted by Nazi eugenics would eventually lead to rejection of eugenics movements and scientific racism that fueled them. Despite the skepticism that arose in Britain over the validity of Kenyan eugenics and the isolation and demise of the eugenics movement in Kenya, the ideas it generated remained influential among the settler population.
H.L. Gordon was one of the most senior physicians in the colony of Kenya who had no training in psychology or psychiatry. His eugenics involved creating the profile of the superior White by controlling immigration of Whites to the colony, limiting ‘mental deficiency’ through forced sterilization of ‘unfit’ Whites and developing scientific racism theories of White racial superiority that appealed to White settler society in Kenya.
In the 1930’s, at a time of increasing African outspokenness about their desire for better education, Gordon gained prominence by highlighting ‘the uneducability of the African’ and stressing the importance of eugenics in the development of colonial education policy. He argued that African backwardness was a pathological problem and education was not the panacea (Olumwulla, 2002). Gordon opened one of his articles by stating that “Control of human breedings must come before betterment of human brains. Lacking good endowment, education fails” (Tilley, 2011, p. 235). He stressed that it was irresponsible to argue for promotion of education in the colony without taking native backwardness and limitations of the African mind into account (Campbell, 2007). For example, Gordon stated that only Africans who had received European education became afflicted with dementia praecox otherwise known as schizophrenia (Tilley, 2011)
When Gordon observed that a very high number of educated adolescents in the colony were becoming mentally ill, he concluded that western education and the Africans’ inability to absorb complex forms of knowledge were to blame. He stressed the importance of science informing government policy regarding education (McCulloch, 1995)
"“The idea that the East African native was liable to adolescent breakdown under the ‘impact of civilisation’ owing to an under-equipped frontal brain was developed in an article in 1936. Gordon found that of his adolescent African patients at Mathari about whom reliable information could be obtained, all were educated; he took this as evidence of the danger of exerting too much intellectual pressure on a deficient prefrontal brain. ‘I prefer to think of it as a series of pressures; pressure of the developed upon the undeveloped mind….all forming an unprecedented experience for the Native brain involving inevitable adjustment or inevitable catastrophe’” (Campbell, 2007, p. 170)