Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908–1968 (review)

Like the histories of colonial psychiatry that have preceded it, this study of Ingutsheni Mental Hospital near Bulawayo in the former Southern Rhodesia proposes to read the tensions, conflicts, and "madnesses" of the colonial system through the prism of the mental hospital and those deemed mad-listening hard for African subjects' individual voices where the regime that governed them heard only "noise." Surfacing Up begins and ends with a postcolonial moment, highlighting the revolutionary reform tactics of independent Zimbabwe's first black minister of health, who personally led the movement to expose and then dismantle the appalling race-based system of mental health care employed by Ingutsheni Hospital since its establishment in 1908.