Kenya's White Insane Summary

When the colonization of Africa is discussed, it typically focuses on the conditions the Africans endured and how drastically their lives changed when the colonizers arrived. Thus far, in class discussions on mental illness in colonized African nations have juxtaposed the approach that traditional African healers took with that of biomedical doctors. The systems implemented by colonial governments and how they may have conflicted with the culture of the nation have been examined as well. In “Madness and Marginality: the lives of Kenya’s White Insane”, Will Jackson takes an unprecedented approach to analyzing mental illness in a colonized nation. Instead of examining how the arrival of the colonizers changed the nation, he chose to focus on …show more content…
According to Jackson, the European family served as a symbol of the insinuation of Europe into Kenya. As a result, it was idealized and charged with the task of ensuring that Kenyan culture lost its primitive nature and was made to resemble European culture. Jackson’s analysis of the European family reveals an inherent double standard that allowed men to do as they chose under the guise of cultivating a “public image” while women were saddled with the burden of civilizing European men and African women:
As men reveled in the freedom from restraint that Africa’s ‘open spaces’ allowed, they cultivated a noble public image as husbands, fathers and benevolent household heads. Women, meanwhile, found themselves as civilisers in a double sense: of their European menfolk, first of all, for whom hearth and home were thought to provide a necessary protection against Africa’s degenerative effects; and of African women, to whom, it was hoped settler housewives might impart that civility necessary to produce pliant projections of their own idealized bourgeois selves