2011 Anglo-American Conference: Health in History
Healing and Religion in African Colonial History
Nina Studer (University of Zurich/University of Oxford), Protective Device or a Sign of
Degeneration? The Role of Islam in the Writings of French Colonial Psychiatrists
Kathleen Vongsathorn (University of Oxford), In the Image of Britain: Lake Bunyonyi Leprosy
Settlement as a Model Community, Uganda, 1931-1951
Georgina Endfield (University of Nottingham), "No place for a woman": health, medicine and
women's work among missionary wives and female missionaries in British colonial Africa
Session Proposal
In the growing field of medical history in Africa, it is too rare that scholars come together to
compare and contrast the role that medicine played in different colonial regimes across the
continent. This panel attempts to address this need for a cross-colonial discussion of
medical history by bringing together historians and historical geographers of French, Belgian,
and British colonial Africa. Uniting all of these papers is a thread that is of great importance
in understanding the provision of healthcare in African history: religion. The panellists look
at religion and health in colonial Africa in a variety of ways, from the goals that divided and
connected colonial governments and missionaries as they coordinated the provision of
medicine in Uganda and the Congo, to the way that perceptions of Islam determined the
interpretation of madness in French North Africa, and the way that women missionaries in
South Africa and Uganda influenced global pathological discourses and debates. Religion
influenced the provision, perception, and reception of medicine and health in Africa, and in
bringing together four papers that discuss the interaction between missionaries, religion,
and health in several different colonial contexts, this panel hopes to contribute to a better
cross-colonial understanding of health across Africa.
Panel Organiser and Chair: Kathleen Vongsathorn
Protective Device or a Sign of Degeneration? The Role of Islam in the Writings of French
Colonial Psychiatrists
Nina Studer, University of Zurich/University of Oxford
In colonial psychiatric accounts about the Maghreb everything concerning “indigenous”
mental health is either explained through, or contrasted with, Islam. This has to be seen in
the wider context of the Orientalist Weltanschauung, where all institutions, customs and
laws in Muslim countries had their source, explanation and meaning in religion. Some
psychiatrists located a special immunity to disease in either a specific aspect of “Muslim
lifestyle” or, more generally, in Islamic prescriptions, to explain the low numbers of
indigenous patients. Other authors argued that the North African insane were too similar to
the general population to be distinguishable; segregation in asylums under the supervision
of psychiatrists was therefore impossible. One radical instance of this reliance on Islam as an
explanatory pattern is shown in an article by Maurice Boigey in 1908, where he describes
the adherence to Islam as a sign of a pathological condition - the patients in the asylums are
those unfortunate enough to suffer from a combination of Muslim insanities, which make
them stand out even in their “almost mad” surroundings.1
Looking at the role of Islam in psychiatric theories (reported in psychiatric dissertations and
articles) I am especially interested in the question of where psychiatrists obtained their
“expert” knowledge about Islam; what they wrote about the psychiatric danger/helpfulness
of Islam; and in how changes in opinions regarding native religiosity mirrored the broader
psychiatric and colonial context.
1
Boigey, Maurice. Etude psychologique sur l’Islam. In: Annales Médico-Psychologiques. Series 9, vol. 8, 66th year
(1908). 9.
In the Image of Britain: Lake Bunyonyi Leprosy Settlement as a Model Community,
Uganda, 1931-1951
Kathleen Vongsathorn, University of Oxford
In the 1930s, the British Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the British colonial
government of Uganda shared a vision for the future of the country as ‘civilised’ and
Christian. One of the ways in which this vision was enacted was in the foundation of two
CMS leprosy settlements in Uganda, in 1929 and 1931. One of these settlements in
particular, on Lake Bunyonyi in southwest Uganda, was held up as a model for social
engineering and the creation of a new community that blended aspects of ‘traditional’
Uganda life with British modernity. CMS missionaries structured aspects of life within this
settlement to conform to this blended ideal, endeavouring to recreate ‘normal village life’
for Ugandan leprosy patients, only better. Within this island settlement they had four
villages, each represented in the council that governed the island’s inhabitants. There were
schools, brick houses, a hospital, church, shop, and policeman, cultivation plots, informal
training programmes, and a variety of social and leisure activities such as football, Boy
Scouts, Girl Guides, and a brass band, all of which were visible symbols of Britain in Uganda.
The leprosy settlement was held up as an example of the successes of colonialism, and it
was a popular destination for European travellers in East and Central Africa who wanted to
see this success for themselves. By moulding Ugandan adults and youth in the image of
Britons, the Lake Bunyonyi Leprosy Settlement was a model by which the British believed
the future of Uganda could be assured.
"No place for a woman": health, medicine and women's work among missionary wives
and female missionaries in British colonial Africa
Dr. Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham
As the first British women to live and work in some parts of colonial Africa, missionary wives
and missionary women may have played a particularly important role in the application,
propagation and development of pathological constructions of empire. British geographical
and historical discourses on empire and acclimatization. have, however, until recently,
tended to neglect the role of women. The last couple of decades have seen the publication
of a considerable body of scholarship exploring the contribution that white women,
including missionary wives and missionary women, made to the British imperial endeavour,
particularly through the production of popular geographies of ‘other’ places (Chiltern 2007;
Mills 1991; McEwan 1996, Blunt 1994; Blunt and Rose 1994). This work has served to
demolish the coupled assumptions that the empire was a predominantly male space, and
that the colonies were “no place for white women.” Feminist scholars in particular have
begun to focus on the involvements of women in the British Empire, on the nature of their
location and agency in the process of colonial domination (Burton, 1994; Callaway, 1987;
Strobel, 1991; Haggis, 2000: 108-109) and there has as a result been something of “a
remapping” of the colonial landscape to incorporate women. In this paper I wish to explore
the role of missionary wives and women missionaries in health and medicinal work in two
British imperial spaces, Uganda and Southern Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and to consider the degree to which their experiences contributed to pathological
discourses and debates of the period.