Decolonising Geography Disciplinary Histories and The End of The British Empire in Africa 1948 1998 RGS IBG Book Series 1st Edition Craggs

You might also like

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 54

Decolonising Geography Disciplinary

Histories and the End of the British


Empire in Africa 1948 1998 RGS IBG
Book Series 1st Edition Craggs
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/decolonising-geography-disciplinary-histories-and-the
-end-of-the-british-empire-in-africa-1948-1998-rgs-ibg-book-series-1st-edition-craggs/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Shaping the Geography of Empire: Man and Nature in


Herodotus' Histories Katherine Clarke

https://textbookfull.com/product/shaping-the-geography-of-empire-
man-and-nature-in-herodotus-histories-katherine-clarke/

Decolonising and Internationalising Geography Essays in


the History of Contested Science Bruno Schelhaas

https://textbookfull.com/product/decolonising-and-
internationalising-geography-essays-in-the-history-of-contested-
science-bruno-schelhaas/

Afghanistan and the Coloniality of Diplomacy: The


British Legation in Kabul, 1922–1948 Maximilian Drephal

https://textbookfull.com/product/afghanistan-and-the-coloniality-
of-diplomacy-the-british-legation-in-kabul-1922-1948-maximilian-
drephal/

The End of British Politics? 1st Edition Michael Moran


(Auth.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-end-of-british-politics-1st-
edition-michael-moran-auth/
Science and the British Empire Rajesh Kochhar

https://textbookfull.com/product/science-and-the-british-empire-
rajesh-kochhar/

Decolonising The Human: Reflections From Africa On


Difference And Oppression Melissa Steyn

https://textbookfull.com/product/decolonising-the-human-
reflections-from-africa-on-difference-and-oppression-melissa-
steyn/

Architecture and urbanism in the British Empire 1st


Edition G. A. Bremner

https://textbookfull.com/product/architecture-and-urbanism-in-
the-british-empire-1st-edition-g-a-bremner/

Globalists The End of Empire and the Birth of


Neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian

https://textbookfull.com/product/globalists-the-end-of-empire-
and-the-birth-of-neoliberalism-quinn-slobodian/

India and the British Empire 1st Edition Douglas M.


Peers

https://textbookfull.com/product/india-and-the-british-
empire-1st-edition-douglas-m-peers/
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British
Empire in Africa, 1948–1998
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
RGS-IBG Book Series Working Lives - Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007
Linda McDowell
Dunes: Dynamics, Morphology and Geological History
For further information about the series and a full list of published and
Andrew Warren
forthcoming titles please visit www.rgsbookseries.com
Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey
Published Edited by David Featherstone and Joe Painter
Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in
Africa, 1948–1998 The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia
Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate Alex Jeffrey

Theory and Explanation in Geography Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage
Henry Wai-chung Yeung Colin McFarlane

How Cities Learn: Tracing Bus Rapid Transit in South Africa Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption
Astrid Wood Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke & Alice Malpass

Defensible Space on the Move: Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social
Loretta Lees and Elanor Warwick Reproduction in Post-Socialist Cities
Alison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská and Dariusz Świątek
Geomorphology and the Carbon Cycle
Martin Evans Swept Up Lives? Re-envisioning the Homeless City
Paul Cloke, Jon May and Sarah Johnsen
The Unsettling Outdoors: Environmental Estrangement in Everyday Life
Russell Hitchings Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects
Peter Adey
Respatialising Finance: Power, Politics and Offshore Renminbi Market Making in London
Sarah Hall Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines
David Ley
Bodies, Affects, Politics: The Clash of Bodily Regimes
Steve Pile State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British Atmosphere
Mark Whitehead
Home SOS: Gender, Violence, and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia
Katherine Brickell Complex Locations: Women’s geographical work in the UK 1850–1970
Avril Maddrell
Geographies of Anticolonialism: Political Networks Across and Beyond South India,
c. 1900–1930 Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of
Andrew Davies South India
Jeff Neilson and Bill Pritchard
Geopolitics and the Event: Rethinking Britain’s Iraq War through Art
Alan Ingram Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town
Andrew Tucker
On Shifting Foundations: State Rescaling, Policy Experimentation And Economic
Restructuring In Post-1949 China Arsenic Pollution: A Global Synthesis
Kean Fan Lim Peter Ravenscroft, Hugh Brammer and Keith Richards

Global Asian City: Migration, Desire and the Politics of Encounter in 21st Century Seoul Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global Networks
Francis L. Collins David Featherstone

Transnational Geographies Of The Heart: Intimate Subjectivities In A Globalizing City Mental Health and Social Space: Towards Inclusionary Geographies?
Katie Walsh Hester Parr

Cryptic Concrete: A Subterranean Journey Into Cold War Germany Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in Vulnerability
Ian Klinke Georgina H. Endfield

Work-Life Advantage: Sustaining Regional Learning and Innovation Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes
Al James Edited by David J. Nash and Sue J. McLaren

Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and Biopolitics Driving Spaces: A Cultural-Historical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway
Steve Hinchliffe, Nick Bingham, John Allen and Simon Carter Peter Merriman

Smoking Geographies: Space, Place and Tobacco Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy
Ross Barnett, Graham Moon, Jamie Pearce, Lee Thompson and Liz Twigg Mustafa Dikeç

Rehearsing the State: The Political Practices of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile Geomorphology of Upland Peat: Erosion, Form and Landscape Change
Fiona McConnell Martin Evans and Jeff Warburton

Nothing Personal? Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities
Nick Gill Stephen Legg

Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations People/States/Territories


John Pickles and Adrian Smith, with Robert Begg, Milan Buček, Poli Rhys Jones
Roukova and Rudolf Pástor Publics and the City
Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin Kurt Iveson
Alexander Vasudevan After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial Change
Everyday Peace? Politics, Citizenship and Muslim Lives in India Mick Dunford and Lidia Greco
Philippa Williams Putting Workfare in Place
Assembling Export Markets: The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel
in West Africa Domicile and Diaspora
Stefan Ouma Alison Blunt
Africa’s Information Revolution: Technical Regimes and Production Networks in Geographies and Moralities
South Africa and Tanzania Edited by Roger Lee and David M. Smith
James T. Murphy and Pádraig Carmody
Military Geographies
Origination: The Geographies of Brands and Branding Rachel Woodward
Andy Pike
A New Deal for Transport?
In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw
David Matless
Geographies of British Modernity
Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy Edited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short
Merje Kuus
Lost Geographies of Power
Everyday Moral Economies: Food, Politics and Scale in Cuba John Allen
Marisa Wilson
Globalizing South China
Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline Carolyn L. Cartier
Andrew Barry
Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 Years
Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural Edited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee
Economy
Maureen Molloy and Wendy Larner
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
End of the British
Histories and the

Empire in Africa,

Manchester Metropolitan University, UK


Decolonising
Geography?
Disciplinary

1948–1998

King’s College London, UK

Hannah Neate
Ruth Craggs
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
This edition first published 2024
© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or oth-
erwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this
title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate to be identified as the authors of this work has been
asserted in accordance with law.

Registered Offices
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley
products visit us at www.wiley.com.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some
content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.

Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons,
Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without writ-
ten permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons,
Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty


While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations
or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim
all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular
purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional
statements for this work. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering
professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should
consult with a specialist where appropriate. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this
work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors
endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it
may make. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared
between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any
loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or
other damages.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Paperback ISBN: 9781119549307; Hardback ISBN: 9781119549284; ePDF ISBN: 9781119549338;
ePub ISBN: 9781119549369; oBook ISBN: 9781119549352

Cover Design: Wiley


Cover Image: The Nigerian Geographical Association Silver Jubilee Conference, 1982, University of
Ibadan. Courtesy of the Department of Geography, University of Ibadan.

Set in 10/12pt Plantin Std by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Contents

List of Figures and Tableviii


Acknowledgementsx

1. Decolonisation and Geography in Africa 1


Introduction1
African Decolonisation 3
Periodisation3
Decolonisation, Education, and the Place of African Universities 5
Contributions10
Historicising Current Debates10
Decolonising Geography’s Histories13
Professional Lives and Histories of Decolonisation16
Biographical Methods 19
Sources20
Case Studies 24
Structure30
2. ‘New, Interesting, and Even Exciting Opportunities’: Geography
and the Founding of Colonial Universities in Africa42
Introduction42
Asquith Colleges and the ‘Imperial Family of Universities’ 44
Geography at the Asquith Colleges: Colonial Networks 46
Early Faculty 47
Building a Department 54
Teaching and Researching Geography 58
Campus Relations 60
Conclusion66
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
vi contents

3. Shifting the Centre: Africanising Geography in Decolonisation73


Introduction73
African Geography Students in Britain 76
Shifting Higher Education Structures 82
Africanisation of Staff 89
Africanisation of Research, Curriculum, and Teaching 95
Conclusion103
4. International Networks, Decolonisation, and the Cold War110
Introduction110
Diversifying Influences and Americanisation 113
Looking to America113
American Orbits115
The Quantitative Revolution in Africa117
Other Eastern and Non-aligned Networks 121
Eastern Bloc Connections121
Moving the Centre122
Radical Geography and Underdevelopment125
Conclusion131
Mobility – for Some131
Decolonisation or Incorporation?132
Innovation134
5. Geography and National Development: Knowing, Planning,
and Exploiting Resources for Independent Africa142
Introduction142
Geography and African Development 145
Producing Development Experts 146
Knowing New Nations (and Resources) through the Census 150
Research for Rural Development in Tanzania 154
BRALUP and Applied Research154
Research for Ujamaa156
Between Commitment and Critique159
Regional Development Planning and New Urban Spaces in Nigeria 161
Rebalancing After War161
Akin Mabogunje and the Geographer as Consultant162
Conclusion167
6. Geography, Apartheid and Anti-Apartheid Activism in
South Africa175
Introduction175
Departmental Spaces, Geography and the Contestation of Apartheid 177
The Tearoom178
Conference Spaces179
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
contents vii

Teaching Spaces180
Campus Politics and Activism 183
Campus Protests183
Geographers as Activists Beyond Campus187
Geographical Research and Apartheid 190
Research for (Separate) Development in South Africa190
Apartheid: An Absent Subject192
Growing Critique195
People’s Geography196
Decolonising South African Geography198
Working for Transformation 200
Challenging Geography’s White Institutions200
Consultancy and Critique205
Conclusion207
7. Legacies of Decolonisation in African and British Geography217
Introduction217
Leaving Africa 219
Pastures New219
Reluctance and Compulsion221
Isolation and Creativity 225
Growing Isolation225
Solidarity and Creativity228
Legacies in the UK 229
Textbook Africa230
Area Studies, Development Studies, and Development
Geography232
African Connections, Colonial Nostalgia235
Conclusion241
8. Decolonising Geography Past and Present?250
Introduction250
Decolonisation, its Histories and Geographies 250
Peopling the Historiography of Decolonisation250
Decolonising Geography’s Histories251
Learning from the Past 253
To What Extent was Geography Decolonised in the period 1948–1998?253
What Does This Mean for Decolonisation Struggles Today?257
Conclusion264

Index 269
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
List of Figures and Table

Figure 1.1 Map of Africa showing case-study institutions (in bold)


and other universities discussed in the book. 25
Figure 1.2 ‘The Chancellors Procession after his installation’.
Inauguration of the University of Ghana 25th November
1961.27
Figure 1.3 Tower Court and Administration Buildings, University of
Ibadan, early 1960s. 28
Figure 1.4 Makerere College, Uganda, 1940s. 29
Figure 2.1 Keith Buchanan.  49
Figure 2.2 S.J.K. Baker teaching in the geography department,
Makerere College.  51
Figure 2.3 Geography students with Petrus Serton centre, front row,
at the University of Stellenbosch in 1953. 53
Figure 2.4 Tedder Hall, University of Ibadan, early 1960s.  55
Figure 2.5 The geography department building, University of Ghana
(now renamed geography and resource management)
in 2017. 56
Figure 2.6 Tower court and part of Mellanby Hall, University of
Ibadan.  63
Figure 3.1 The wedding of Akin Mabogunje and Titiola Ogunmekan,
London, December 1957.  78
Figure 3.2 Students in the geography lecture room, Makerere
college, 1947. 87
Figure 3.3 Photographs of the former heads of the geography
department at the University of Ibadan still adorn the
wall of the head’s office.  92
Figure 4.1 Professor Akin Mabogunje at the University of Ibadan
geography seminar, mid-1960s.  117
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
list of figures and table ix

Figure 4.2 Contents page of the first of two special issues of


Antipode co-edited by Milton Santos (Santos and
Peet 1977).  127
Figure 5.1 President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania being installed as
Chancellor of the University of Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania,
29 August 1970. 144
Figure 5.2 N.I.S.E.R. building, designed by Fry, Drew, and Partners. 163
Figure 5.3 Akin Mabogunje preparing for fieldwork, 1977.  165
Figure 6.1 South African universities discussed in Chapter 6
(pre-1994 names).  176
Figure 6.2 University of the Western Cape students on a field trip,
1984, Gilfellan second from left. 183
Figure 6.3 Student protest at the Indian University College
(the precursor to the University of Durban Westville)
c. 1960s.  185
Figure 6.4 Protests at the University of Durban-Westville Campus,
May 1972.  186
Figure 7.1 Part of an article for school children on apartheid.  237

Table 1.1 
Key higher education institutions and their transition to
university status. 26
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Acknowledgements

This book would have been nothing without the contributions of the geogra-
phers who shared their experiences and shaped our project in oral history
interviews: Tony Allen, Elizabeth Ardayfio-Schandorf, Olusegun Areola, Albert
Aweto, ‘Bola Ayeni, Johnson Ayoade, Randall Baker, George Benneh, Leon-
ard Berry, Michael Chisholm, Hugh Clout, Jonathan Crush, Patricia Cunnan,
Ronnie Donaldson, Michael Dyssel, Adetoye Faniran, Calvyn Gilfellan, Keith
­Hoggart, Anthony Lemon, Akin Mabogunje, Alan Mabin, Brij Maharaj, Ad-
olfo ­Mascarenhas, Jeff McCarthy, Ellsworth McPherson, Ngaka Mosiane, Lin-
da Newson, Sue Parnell, Gordon Pirie, Gina Porter, Debbie Potts, Christian
Rogerson, Stephen Rule, Victor Savage, Dianne Scott, Cecil Seethal, David
Smith, Dhiru Soni, Manfred Spocter, Michael Sutcliffe, and Reuban Udo. Brian
Berry, John Iliffe and Anthony O’Connor offered their memories via letter and
email, and Stanley Okafor, David Narracott and Mike Pugh offered additional
contributions. It was a privilege to speak with and learn from them all. We are
extremely grateful to Joanne Sharp for allowing us to use additional oral history
interviews conducted as part of research about the University of Dar es Salaam.
In addition to those who we interviewed, many others contributed by facili-
tating research trips and making us welcome. We would like to thank especially
James Esson, Chris Ikporukpo, Tolulope Osayomi, Ibidun Adelekan, Trevor Hill,
Oliver Mtapuri, Michelle Hatch, Sithembiso Myeni, Gustav Visser, Sarah Brack-
ing, Mark Pelling, George Owusu, Eben Amankwaa, and Samuel Agyei-Mensah.
Without the invaluable support and expertise of archivists in Germany, Ghana,
Nigeria, South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom, this book
would also have been impossible. Thanks especially to Thirunagaren Munsamy,
Sandra Brits, Karlien Breedt, Clive Kirkwood, Lucy McCann, Bethany Antos,
staff at the Archiv für Geographie and Abraham Olayemi, whose generosity and
knowledge have improved this book immensely.
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
acknowledgements xi

We were grateful for the feedback from audiences for papers we gave at the
University of Ibadan, National University of Singapore, University of the Western
Cape, University of KwaZulu Natal, University of Oxford, University of Sussex,
University of Cambridge, University of Nottingham and the London Group of
Historical Geographers, as well as to audiences at International Geographical
Union meetings in Dublin and Paris, the International Conference of Historical
Geographers in Warsaw, and at the Royal Geographical Society with Institute of
British Geographers in London.
At Wiley, we are grateful to Jacqueline Scott and Grace Ong, and at the
Royal Geographical Society to Phil Emmerson, Ed Armston-Sheret and Cath-
erine Souch who supported the project and the wider teaching focused activ-
ities that were associated with it. James Esson, Iram Sammar and Jo Norcup
have been a brilliant team in delivering these activities and inspiring with their
work on teaching African geographies. Dave Featherstone, as Book Series Edi-
tor, has been encouraging as well as challenging throughout, and as a result the
book is much improved. The reviewers of the manuscript and proposal provided
very useful comments that shaped the argument. Colleagues at King’s College
London, Manchester Metropolitan and elsewhere have provided critical engage-
ment and encouragement in equal measure. Thank you to Innes Keighren, Felix
Driver, Miles Ogborn and the rest of the London Group of Historical Geogra-
phers for their historical geography wisdom. Thanks especially the Contested
Development Research Group at KCL, Steve Legg, James Sidaway and Paul
Ashmore for providing detailed feedback on drafts, and to Katherine Brickell for
reading many versions of proposals, grant applications and chapters and being an
enthusiastic cheerleader and coffee shop companion throughout.
Travel for research was funded by Manchester Metropolitan University,
King’s College London and the British Academy, who through a British Acad-
emy ­Mid-Career Fellowship also supported research leave to write most of the
book. The KCL SSPP Publication Subvention Fund supported the production
of the index. Some of the research has previously been published in different
forms in the Journal of Historical Geography (Post-colonial careering and the dis-
cipline of ­geography: British geographers in Nigeria and the UK, 1945-1990.
Ruth Craggs and ­Hannah Neate, Journal of Historical Geography, copyright:
© 2018 The Authors) and Annals of the American Geographers Association
(reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com
on behalf of © 2019 by American Association of Geographers).
A big thank you to Dave Weatherall for being supportive throughout, to Vic
Craggs, for his company and enthusiasm in South Africa and to Jean Craggs for
her support for the trip and always. Tim has provided academic ideas, archival
contacts, and most of all love and encouragement to keep me going, and Daisy
has provided a (mainly) delightful distraction since her arrival in the middle of
the project and the start of a pandemic.
This book is dedicated to the first generations of African geographers who
worked so hard to create a decolonised discipline of geography.
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Chapter One
Decolonisation and Geography in Africa

Introduction
Decolonising Geography? focuses on the experiences and contributions of
academic geographers to decolonisation in the former British empire in Africa.
Whilst geography’s engagements with the imperial project have been well docu-
mented, accounts have tended to end in the early twentieth century rather than
continuing to examine the period of constitutional decolonisation itself (Craggs
2014). However, geographers, and geography, were entangled with the end of
empire in a number of ways, even if, as Power and Sidaway argue, ‘this connec-
tion was not always acknowledged’ (2004, p. 588). The book focuses on both how
the professional lives of academic geographers in this era were shaped through
decolonisation and how their work shaped that same process. It sheds new light
on the influence of late colonial development, decolonisation, and post-colonial
geopolitics on geography, and demonstrates how the discipline contributed –
positively and negatively – to the broader politics of decolonisation and national
development.
Examining the period 1948–1998, and with a final chapter that addresses
debates about the decolonisation of the discipline (and university) today, the
book explores the careers of geographers working in colonial and post-colonial
universities in Africa during and after constitutional decolonisation. It exam-
ines the practice of geography within the universities of the (former) British
empire, as well as considering the impact of decolonisation on geography
in the UK as British geographers returning from posts in the colonies joined
UK departments. It draws on case studies from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa,

Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1948–1998, First Edition.
Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate.
© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
2 decolonising geography? disciplinary histories and the end of the british empire in africa, 1948–1998

Tanzania, and Uganda, as well as the UK. The first universities in these African
countries were almost all university colleges associated with the University of
London, set up in the mid-twentieth century. They made up part of an expanded
British academic world which connected the UK and British colonies in Africa
(Pietsch 2013).
Whilst Ghana became independent in 1957, followed shortly after by Nige-
ria, Tanzania, and Uganda, the 1980s and 1990s saw liberation for Zimbabwe,
and the end of apartheid in South Africa. Much of the historiography of British
decolonisation focuses on the 1940s to 1960s, yet the formal constitutional pro-
cess was ongoing into the 1980s. The book charts geography’s engagements with
decolonisation in the fifty years following the opening of the first University Col-
leges in Ghana, Nigeria, and Uganda in the late 1940s. It extends the chronol-
ogy of these histories into the late twentieth century as anti-colonial struggles
continued across the continent and academics, students, politicians, and publics
continued to ask questions about the extent to which decolonisation had meant
a complete break from colonialism. The struggle for democratic rule in South
Africa was understood by many as part of the broader process of decolonisation
and the demand for racial justice across Africa, so whilst the issues in South Af-
rica were somewhat different to those in other decolonising states, it is revealing
to explore these alongside one another.
Questions about colonialism and decolonisation reverberated around univer-
sities in Africa in the mid twentieth century and continue to shape the discipline
of geography to the present day. Our book makes three key contributions to
debates about decolonisation. First, whilst Decolonising geography? is a historical
study, it contributes to the rich and diverse debates which see decolonisation
as an incomplete and increasingly urgent project in the twenty-first century. It
does so by bringing the meanings, strategies, and lived experiences of a group of
primarily African academics working to decolonise the discipline of geography
and the university in the mid twentieth century, into conversation with those at-
tempting the same thing today. Second, the book contributes to the decolonisa-
tion of geography’s histories, by highlighting the contributions of scholars from
Africa, as well as the ongoing legacies of colonialism in the discipline. Third, we
contribute to the interdisciplinary study of decolonisation by demonstrating the
value of biographical approaches for understanding the end of empire as a trans-
formation experienced and produced through individuals’ careers worked across
continents, linking postcolonial states and former colonial powers, colleagues
and institutions, in complex ways.
Following the professional lives of a cohort of geographers over many years
the book utilises biographical methods as well as institutional histories to explore
a wide range of academic labour. Whilst the published research of geographers
forms one element of the analysis, the book also explores teaching, curriculum
design, and student work; academic exchanges, grants, scholarships, and funding;
and the often-hidden academic labour of departmental administration includ-
ing aspects such as reference writing, mentoring, and promotion decisions. We
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
decolonisation and geography in africa 3

examine a set of individual professional lives, from undergraduate studies through


often-lengthy academic careers, alongside the institutions, networks, and disci-
plinary knowledges through which they were worked. Through this approach we
are able to explore not only how geographers conceptualised decolonisation in
their research, but also how they practised it through their broader academic
labour. Disciplinary histories tend to focus on publications, and, in the context of
empire and decolonisation, on contributions to either the pursuit, or the radical
critique, of these processes (Livingstone 1992; Clayton 2013). Yet, decolonisa-
tion was (and is) not only about publications, but also about everyday academic
practices. How departments were managed and people treated were as much part
of the practice of decolonisation as geographical work like border commissions
or anti-colonial critique. The book demonstrates that we must take seriously the
everyday work of geographers, as well as their publications, in assessing the inter-
connections between geography and decolonisation. The biographical approach
taken allows the book to bridge a critical gap in historical understanding, by
uncovering the praxis of geography in all its messiness.
The rest of this chapter sets out the contours of our arguments, contexts,
methods, and case studies. The next section first describes the periodisation
of the book before moving on to contextualise the place of African univer-
sities within debates from this period about decolonisation and post-colonial
state-building. The third section sets out our three substantive contributions
to the lively and wide-ranging debate about decolonisation unfolding today.
Following this we set out our methods and then establish our case study insti-
tutions. Finally we introduce the chapters and set out the structure of the rest
of the book.

African Decolonisation
Periodisation

In this book we engage with decolonisation in multiple registers, but our


empirical discussion is anchored in the historical period leading up to and fol-
lowing formal processes of political decolonisation. Clayton (2020, p.2) has
provided a useful description that captures the different overlapping phases of
this process which are explored in the book:

Postwar decolonisation encompasses three phenomena: first, attempts by Western


powers to defend and reform their colonial empires and deal with a rising tide of
anticolonial sentiment (dubbed late colonialism); second, the sometimes peaceful and
quick but often violent and protracted means by which independence was obtained
(and with nationalist and independence struggles often stretching much further back
in time); and, third, the ensuing affairs of postcolonial nations and question of whether
independence heralded a complete break with the colonial past. (Clayton 2020, p. 2)
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
4 decolonising geography? disciplinary histories and the end of the british empire in africa, 1948–1998

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1993, p. 60) was more succinct in his account, personalising
this history into the experiences of African writers like him, who, in the 30 years
from the middle of the twentieth century, had gone through ‘the age of anti-­
colonial struggle, the age of independence, and the age of neo-colonialism’. He
grew up in colonial Kenya, becoming one of the first generation of African stu-
dents at Makerere University College, Uganda, around the time of independence.
Ngũgĩ is not only a key theorist of decolonisation, but a counterpart, colleague
and contemporary of many of the geographers whose contributions are explored
in this book. His academic life reflects the broad trajectories of higher education
in East Africa, as well as in Ghana and Nigeria. He studied as an undergraduate
in a University College in Africa (affiliated to the University of London) that was
a British late colonial development project. Ngũgĩ provides an evocative descrip-
tion of the campus and status of the institution in the colonial and early post-
colonial period, which captures the optimism and excitement of decolonisation:

Kampala is a city of high hills. Makerere, after which the college was named, is
one of the nine hills on which the city stands. But the name Makerere had come to
symbolise higher learning in East Africa for those who ascended the hill it meant a
passage into the membership of the band of the very elect. But the college was more
than that. In the fifties and early sixties Makerere was the intellectual capital of East
and Central Africa … What a time it was those days at Makerere, in East Africa! It
was a replica of the Wordsworthian bliss at being alive at the birth of a revolution
and the possibilities of a new future. Africa, Our Africa was coming back. (Ngũgĩ
1993, p. 164; p. 166)

Ngũgĩ’s powerful account captures the affective experience of decolonisation at


an African university, where political hope combined with new educational infra-
structures, generous funding, and intellectual innovation to produce a heady mix
for the tiny elite who were part of it all.
However, from as early as the mid-1960s, and increasingly into the late 1970s
and 1980s, a combination of dependency, authoritarian governments, shifting
aid priorities, spiralling oil prices, and structural adjustment combined to leave
many African universities hugely underfunded, subject to government attack and
even physical violence (Ajayi et al. 1996). After post-graduate study in the UK,
Ngũgĩ worked as a lecturer at the University of Nairobi from 1967. A well-known
radical figure he was jailed in 1977 for authoring a play which was critical of the
increasingly authoritarian Kenyan government. Ngũgĩ then worked in exile in
the United States for many years. The excitement and then increasing challenges
of working in African universities impacted academic careers and these material
and affective experiences changed substantially over the fifty years explored in
this book. These shifting experiences also fed into the theorisations of decolonisa-
tion produced by African scholars, politicians and activists – like Ngũgĩ – many
of whom studied and worked at these very African universities.
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
decolonisation and geography in africa 5

In the following account we explore the contributions of African scholars


negotiating, theorising, and attempting to do things differently in the post-­
colonial university. In doing so we follow Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) in
arguing that African scholars (and scholars writing in Africa) have made valuable
contributions to the theorisation and contestation of coloniality, and to the elab-
oration of decolonial visions for the future university. Constitutional decolonisa-
tion brought only ‘independence with a question mark’, but that question mark
provided space for possible futures to be imagined, debated, and researched by
African scholars (Ngũgĩ 1993, p. 65). In returning to this period, we hope to
recover what Mbembe (2021, p. 43 emphasis in original) reminds us was the
‘eventfulness, singularity, and intensity’ of decolonisation as it played out in the
lives and work of geographers and geography in Africa, as well as the creativity
of the period.

Decolonisation, Education, and the Place of African Universities

The book places African geographers (and other geographers in Africa) within
the context of debates in the mid-twentieth century about the place of the univer-
sity – and education more broadly – in a decolonising continent. Fundamentally
at issue was the role that education had played in imperialism, and the extent to
which these legacies continued after independence, including through the insti-
tutions of higher education. Ngũgĩ argued forcefully that education was central
in colonialism:

Berlin of 1884 [the conference seen as the highpoint of European colonial expansion
in Africa] was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword
and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The
physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the
classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle …
Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military, cultural and psychological
consequences for people of the world today… The biggest weapon wielded and
actually daily unleashed by imperialism… is the cultural bomb. The effect of the
cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in
their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and
ultimately in themselves. (Ngũgĩ 1986, p. 9; pp. 2–3)

Articulated through the ideology of ‘Black Consciousness’, Steve Biko made


similar arguments about the impact of colonialism and apartheid in South Af-
rica. Biko was a student in the ‘Non-European’ section of the largely white Uni-
versity of Natal, a student leader, and political activist who was murdered by
the apartheid government in 1977. Biko argued that through colonialism and
apartheid, ‘the black man has become a shell, a shadow of a man, completely
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
6 decolonising geography? disciplinary histories and the end of the british empire in africa, 1948–1998

defeated’ (1978 [1969–1972], p. 29). Drawing on Frantz Fanon (2019 [1961]),


Biko argued this impact was produced in part through (mis)education:

In an effort to destroy completely the structures that had been built up in the African
Society and to impose their imperialism with an unnerving totality the colonialists
were not satisfied merely with holding a people in their grip and emptying the Na-
tive’s brain of all form and content, they turned to the past of the oppressed people
and distorted, disfigured and destroyed it. (Biko 1978 [1969-72], p. 29)

Education had supported imperialism, reinforcing Eurocentricity and undermin-


ing African cultures and knowledges. Universities globally embodied colonial
power – Western, white and capitalist – in everything from their architecture to
their disciplinary knowledges. As Walter Rodney put it:

As I come onto one of these university campuses and I stand up and stare upwards
and I see this tremendous structure which I know doesn’t belong to us.
Black people are here in these institutions as a part of the development of black
struggle, but only as a concession designed to incorporate us into the structure ….
Going beyond the symbolism of the building, I’m thinking also of the books, the
references, the theoretical assumptions, and the entire ideological underpinnings
of what we have to learn in every single discipline. (Rodney 1990 [1975], p. 111)

Rodney, like Ngũgĩ, was entangled with these structures, building a career through
(post)colonial universities in the UK, Africa and the Caribbean, studying first at
University College of the West Indies (at that time a college of the University of Lon-
don), then at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, before lecturing
at University College Dar es Salaam (and being appointed to this post by author-
ities in London) (Rodney 1990 [1975]). These experiences fed into his theorisation
of underdevelopment and of the role of the ‘guerrilla intellectual’ working from the
inside to transform the colonial university (Rodney 1990 [1975], pp. 111–113).
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1993, p. 3) has argued that decolonisation in twentieth
century Africa was ‘the political struggle to move the centre’ from Europe and to
Africa. To what extent could the university – as a key site for education shaped
through colonialism – contribute to (or hinder) that process? These questions
were often central in the thinking not only of those within the university but also
in society more broadly. Indeed, they preoccupied African nationalist politicians
who lead their countries to independence. Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Min-
ister and President of independent Ghana was one of many of the new wave of
African leaders to explicitly concern themselves with the role of the university
in Africa. For Nkrumah (2009 [1964], p. 3), studying abroad, or at a colonial
university college in Africa, could strip African students of their local connec-
tions and critical awareness of their own position: ‘The colonial student can be
so seduced by [the western philosophies] … that he surrenders his whole per-
sonality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
decolonisation and geography in africa 7

that he is a colonial subject’, he argued. Nkrumah himself had studied in the


US and reflected on this experience in his most well-known political book Con-
sciencism (2009 [1964]). When Ghana became independent, Nkrumah viewed
universities, alongside multinational corporations and institutions like the civil
service as ‘part of the apparatus of imperialism … which had to be decolonised’
(Ajayi et al. 1996, p. 95). His theory of neo-colonialism emphasised the dan-
gers of ‘political independence minus economic independence’ and the danger
of the creation of new local elites more allied with the West than with Ghana,
through institutions such as the university (Nkrumah 1962, quoted in Ahlman
2017, p. 157). Nkrumah demanded universities demonstrated their allegiance
to independent Ghana rather than continuing to reproduce a colonial mentality
and pushed for the replacement of foreign academics with Ghanaians (Nkrumah
2009 [1964]; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017).
Julius Nyerere, the first Prime Minister and President of independent Tanzania,
was also a central thinker on the role of African universities (Ndlovu-Gatsheni
2017). Like Ngũgĩ, Nyerere had attended Makerere, though in the 1940s before
it became a university college. From 1963, Nyerere was the first Chancellor of
the University of East Africa (which included Makerere as a constituent college,
alongside the University Colleges of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi). Nyerere’s vision
was of a university that took ‘an active part in the social revolution’, prioritising
local needs and relevance, whilst maintaining links to an international community
of knowledge (Nyerere 1966, p. 219–220). In Tanzania, Ghana, and across Africa
after independence, concerns grew that universities were creating a new elite, out
of touch with the majority of the people, rather than a socially engaged workforce
contributing to national development. Fanon (2019 [1961], p. 99) argued that:

In an underdeveloped country, the imperative duty of an authentic national


bourgeoisie is to betray the vocation to which it is destined, to learn from the people,
and make available to them the intellectual and technical capital it culled from its
time at the colonial universities.

However, instead of fulfilling this duty, Fanon argued that the educated elites
aimed for personal enrichment. Nkrumah, Nyerere, and a host of other African
leaders, academics and activists therefore saw the contested future of the univer-
sity as central to the broader politics of decolonisation and independence.
Universities in Africa were the focus of three impulses in the era of independence.
The first was the Africanisation of the staff; replacing Western, mainly British,
European, and American lecturers with Africans across universities but also other
institutions such as national banks, the military, and the civil service (Stockwell
2018). However, this process did not guarantee more than superficial change: as
Fanon (2019 [1961], p. 103) argued early on, in TheWretched of the Earth, ‘The col-
onized bourgeoisie … frantically brandishes the notions of nationalization and Afri-
canization’, seeking out the professional positions, privileges and profits previously
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
8 decolonising geography? disciplinary histories and the end of the british empire in africa, 1948–1998

in the hands of the colonisers for themselves, rather than bringing about revolution-
ary change. For Ngũgĩ, the importance of class and capital was often overlooked in
the era of independence, with imperialism ‘far too easily seen in terms of the skin
pigmentation of the coloniser.’ (Ngũgĩ 1993, p. 62).
A second impulse was towards the Africanisation of the curriculum to produce
knowledge and expertise needed in post-colonial Africa. Describing a specific
controversy at the University College Nairobi, Kenya, in 1968, around the content
of the English programme, Ngũgĩ made it clear that the arguments went much
wider than the specific proposals he and his colleagues had brought forward:

the debate, in other words, was about the inherited colonial education system
and the consciousness it necessarily inculcated in the African mind. What direc-
tions should an education system take in an Africa wishing to break with neo-co-
lonialism? What should be the philosophy guiding it? How does it want the ‘New
Africans’ to view themselves and their universe? From what base: Afrocentric
or Eurocentric? … who should be interpreting the material to them: an African
or non-African? If African, what kind of African? One who has internalized the
colonial world outlook or one attempting to break free from the inherited slave
consciousness? (Ngũgĩ 1986, p. 101–102)

These mid-twentieth century debates were not in themselves entirely new but
echoed long-standing ideas which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century
about the need for universities to preserve the ‘African personality’ by including
African languages, cultures, and oral traditions on the syllabus, and teaching in
African languages (Blyden 1872; Casely Hayford 1969 [1911]; see Ajayi et al.
1996; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). If ‘decolonization was a struggle by the colonized
to reconquer the surface, horizons, depth, and heights of their lives’, as Mbembe
(2021, p. 44) described it, then this included rehabilitation of ‘indigenous forms
of language and knowledge’.
Ngũgĩ’s (1986) critique of the colonial university and disciplines explored
questions of culture not in isolation, but within the context of Marxist critiques
of the post-colonial political economy of East Africa. These debates about dis-
ciplinary knowledges were not reserved only for the humanities. In 1979 the
Nigerian political economist Claude Ake, a University of Ibadan graduate and
lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam 1972–1974 weighed into the matter
in relation to social science, also drawing on Marxist critiques. In a book uncom-
promisingly titled Social Science as Imperialism, Ake argued that

Western social science scholarship on developing countries is imperialism in the


sense that (a) it foists, or at any rate attempts to foist on the developing countries,
capitalist values, capitalist institutions, and capitalist development; (b) it focuses
social science analysis on the question of how to make the developing countries
more like the West; and (c) it propagates mystifications, and modes of thought and
action which serve the interests of capitalism and imperialism. (1982, p. xiii)
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
decolonisation and geography in africa 9

For Ake, it was by the late 1970s ‘becoming increasingly clear that we cannot
overcome our underdevelopment and dependence unless we try to understand
the imperialist character of Western social science and to exorcise the attitudes
of mind that it inculcates’ (1982, p. xiv). Africanisation of knowledge demanded
new subjects, questions, theories and methods.
Alongside the Africanisation of staff and curricula, a final – and connected –
debate focused on the institutional transformation of universities on the conti-
nent, aiming to make them African universities rather than universities in Africa
(Sicherman 2005). This included structural changes – increasing independence
in awarding degrees, changes in faculty structure and so on – as well as debates
about the relationship between scholars and society (Mazrui 1978). An early aim
of post-colonial universities was to satisfy what were known as the ‘manpower’
[sic.] demands of newly independent countries (that is, primarily, in the form of
public administration, but also other forms of expertise such as for those taking
geography, teaching, planning, surveying, and land-use allocation) (Mkandawire
1995). Another was to produce applied research to inform government decisions
on national and local development. As Daniel Clayton (2021, p. 13) has high-
lighted, ‘decolonisation raised a very basic set of geographical questions about
land, resources, territory, identity and development’ and the discipline of geogra-
phy was therefore also seen as useful for supporting the project of independence.
Training and data production were understood as central to decolonisation as a
political and economic project: producing independence and self-reliance through
knowledge and knowledgeable people. But as Mahmood Mamdani (2011, n.p.)
has argued, based on his experience as a staff member at Makerere University
in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently, such applied research could also be
understood as a replication of earlier dynamics of the ‘native informer’ producing
data but not new theorisations or knowledge (Mamdani 2011). As such Paulin
Hountondji (1990) has argued this type of activity could be one element of a
broader intellectual extraversion leading to dependency. For him, a commitment
to applied research betrayed the insidious inculcation of coloniality in the minds
of African researchers where their labour and fields of research were only relevant
to making African lands productive for extraction (Hountondji 1990).
The Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui noted that in the period directly after
independence, many in Africa grappled with the place of the university on the conti-
nent, and ‘that uneasy feeling that the beast in our midst is foreign in origin and too
rational in its supra-social tendencies’ (Mazrui 1978, p. 217). Mazrui was a political
scientist at Makerere College (later University) in the 1960s and early 1970s, and
this feeling of which he wrote shaped his time at Makerere and his scholarship on
education, colonialism, and nationalism. Mazrui’s unease reflected the fact that uni-
versities were understood as Western institutions – not only in structure, staffing,
and curricula, but also in their commitment to detached, supposedly neutral schol-
arship. As ‘detachment’ became ‘suspected of disengagement’, there were increas-
ing demands for universities to support socially committed scholarship relevant to
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
10 decolonising geography? disciplinary histories and the end of the british empire in africa, 1948–1998

postcolonial development (Mazrui 1978, p. 212; see also Mamdani 2019). How-
ever along with demands for relevance came questions over academic freedom and
the extent to which African scholars could be socially committed whilst critical of
government policies (Mazrui 1978; Ngũgĩ 1986).
Taken together, these discussions over Africanisation of staff, curricula, and
institutions concerned the extent to which it was possible, and desirable, to trans-
form African universities, and for what purpose. In these debates we can see differ-
ent understandings of decolonisation as political, economic, and epistemological
project. And whilst the first two elements often dominated, African scholars in
the period of constitutional decolonisation grappled with how to both provincial-
ize Europe and deprovincialise Africa, ‘moving the centre’ from which ideas and
knowledge should be viewed and created to Africa (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Ngũgĩ
1993; Chakrabarty 2009). Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018, p. 3) argues that this amounts
to a demand for ‘epistemological decolonisation’ and ‘cognitive justice’: ‘the right
to think, theorize, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from
where one is located’. The next section demonstrates how attention to these his-
tories can make three important analytical contributions to understanding decolo-
nisation as historical process and political project.

Contributions
Historicising Current Debates

In this book, we recentre the sometimes overlooked but important ideas and
practices which emerged from a generation of politicians, scholars, and activists
grappling with many of the issues central to coloniality in the mid-twentieth century
in Africa. This is our first contribution. Whilst these vibrant debates dominated
African universities in the 1960s and 1970s, they seem to have been forgotten by
many outside the continent advocating for decolonisation today. For once again
over the last decade, decolonisation has once again become a popular term. It has
taken on greater and more diverse meanings than just the constitutional moment
in high politics, when flags were changed, and a country became politically
independent. In the context of higher education, decolonisation has been used to
discuss questions about the coloniality of Western ideologies, methodologies, and
institutions, and about the whiteness of the university and individual disciplines,
including geography (Tolia-Kelly 2017; Bhambra et al. 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni
2018; Radcliffe 2022). Publications have proliferated – including from those criti-
cal (e.g., Táíwò 2022) – as have sustained, creative, and sometimes violent protests
(and their suppression) (Elliott-Cooper 2017; Ahmed 2020).
Specific South African campaigns such as #Rhodesmustfall and the connected
#Feesmustfall have been influential world-wide, spawning a range of associated
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
decolonisation and geography in africa 11

movements, including in the UK (Elliott-Cooper 2017; Gebrial 2018; Jansen


2019). In the UK, Oxford University’s own #Rhodesmustfall movement argued
for ‘critically examining the power struggle that underpins hegemonic knowledge
production, and the material structures that make this possible’, through work on
iconography, curriculum and representation (Gebrial 2018, pp. 20; 23).
Epistemic freedom often forms an increasingly important part of contempo-
rary movements to transform the university in the twenty-first century. Whilst
mid-twentieth century debates focused on the primacy of political, and then
economic decolonisation, seeing the former as the pre-requisite for any other
transformations, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018, p. 5) argues that:

In the co-constitution of political, economic, cultural and epistemological de-


colonisation, epistemic freedom should form the base because it deals with the
fundamental issues of critical consciousness building, which are essential pre-requi-
sites for both political and economic freedom.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) was writing in the aftermath of the #Rhodesmustfall


and #Feesmustfall campaigns in South Africa in 2015–2016, whilst based at Wit-
watersrand University, formerly a white dominated institution under apartheid.
In these protests in South Africa, the meaning of decolonisation, a key buzz-word,
was often contested. For Jansen, protests demanded ‘the quest for racially and cul-
turally inclusive campuses and more specifically to the transformation of campus
symbolism, the university curriculum, institutional cultures and the professoriate’
(2019, p. 51). But Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018, p. 189) and other commentators saw
in them a much more fundamental epistemological and political critique of the
philosophical, economic, and cultural underpinnings of the university, ‘rethinking
and redefining the university as a truly African public institution’. In both under-
standings of the movement, questions of staffing, the student body, the curricula,
the campus, relations with society and government were under debate, whilst for
some the status and divisions of disciplines and knowledges, and the university
itself, were also up for grabs.
These activist campaigns have been matched by an upswell of books and arti-
cles engaging with the ideas and practices of decolonisation in the university
(Moosavi 2020). Much of the published work – nearly half of publications – has
emerged from a South African context (Adefila et al. 2021). More recent research
tends to move beyond theoretical interventions, instead focusing on providing
summaries of the state of university education today and overviews of progress in
decolonisation initiatives (e.g. in a South African context Ammon 2019; Lebelo
et al. 2021; on South African geography specifically see Knight, 2018) and on
specific experiments in decolonial curriculum reform (often undertaken by the
authors) and their relative success (e.g. in Zimbabwe, Gukurume and Maringira
2020). Scholars have also explored current attempts to create new institutions
either within or beyond traditional university settings, such as an ‘indigenous
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
12 decolonising geography? disciplinary histories and the end of the british empire in africa, 1948–1998

pluriversity’ within a Columbian institution (Padilla 2021) or the Pan Afrikan


Marcus Garvey University in Uganda (Mwesigire 2016; see also Schildermans
2021 on university experiments in a Palestinian context).
Much of the recent theorising about decolonisation within and beyond geog-
raphy has taken its cue from Latin American contexts and discussions of colo-
niality. Coloniality is defined as the enduring colonial matrix of power in which
coloniality and modernity are inextricably linked (Quijiano 2000; Mignolo and
Walsh 2018; on the use of these approaches in geography see Radcliffe 2017;
2022; Stanek 2019). These discussions describe how ‘modernity/coloniality has
worked and continues to work to negate, disavow, distort, and deny knowledges,
subjectivities, world senses, and life visions’, whilst decoloniality tries to construct
‘paths and praxis toward an otherwise of thinking, sensing, believing, doing and
living’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 4). But some scholarship on decoloniality has
not engaged in detail with African scholarship, nor with the period of constitu-
tional decolonisation in Africa (Daley and Murrey 2022). This is in part because
of the regional context from which decolonial debates emerged, and also because
these histories and ideas are not always understood as relevant to contemporary
contexts. For example, whilst acknowledging the legacies of non-alignment and
the Bandung Conference – in which African and Asian leaders explicitly engaged
with many of the issues central to coloniality – Mignolo and Walsh (2018, p. 4) do
not see these legacies as ‘the central foundation’ of the decolonial project. They
argue that

Decolonisation during the Cold War meant the struggle for liberations of the Third
World and, when successful, the formation of nation-states claiming sovereignty.
By the 1990s, decolonisation’s failure in most nations had become clear; with
[the] state in the hands of minority elites, the patterns of colonial power continued
internally (i.e. internal colonialism) and with relation to global structures. At that
moment coloniality was unveiled. (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 5–6)

In focusing on continuities, this and many accounts of coloniality today skip


over the optimism of the period and processes of decolonisation, as well as the
geographical and historical specificity of colonial experiences (Craggs 2014).
As Davies argues, the work of some decolonial theorists narrate histories of the
world in which ‘The scale of the ambition is matched by thinly referenced, vast
geopolitical claims. The history of decolonization becomes merely a state project
which ran its course.’ (2021, p. 400). Without attention to the complex, particular
histories of colonialism and decolonisation in Africa, and to the agency of African
scholars, politicians, and others, we risk ‘turning colonisation into an eternal cat-
egory – a form of ontology – instead of a historical one.’ (Leonard 2022, n.p.;
Táíwò 2022).
As the term decolonisation has become popular, Leon Moosavi (2020) has
described a ‘decolonial bandwagon’, as scholars and managers latch on to the
term, but it is applied superficially, in ways that can be ineffective or even harmful.
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
decolonisation and geography in africa 13

Moosavi (2020, p. 332) lists ‘reducing intellectual decolonisation to a simple task;


essentialising and appropriating the Global South; overlooking the multifaceted
nature of marginalisation in academia; nativism; and tokenism’ as some of the
key challenges facing the project of decolonisation today. Whilst Moosavi (2020)
is cautiously supportive of decolonial movements in universities today, others are
much more critical. Olúfémi Táíwò (2022) is one such critic, arguing that decolo-
nisation debates have failed to take African agency seriously.
This book documents the experiences and contributions of African geogra-
phers engaging in important, complex, and ambiguous ways with decolonisa-
tion as constitutional, state-building, and epistemological project. In doing so
we pay close attention to the concerns outlined above and provide one potential
way forward for studying and practicing decolonising scholarship. In examin-
ing continuities between the colonial university, the post-independence univer-
sity and contemporary universities in Africa and beyond, the book is able to
explore the ongoing coloniality of geography (Radcliffe 2022) and trace some of
the specific legacies from these earlier periods which have shaped today’s disci-
plinary landscape. Our book aims to embed current debates, which sometimes
risk being taken over by Western – and often white – academics (Jazeel 2017;
Noxolo 2017a; Táíwò 2022), within the experiences, scholarship, and demands
of African scholars.
Moreover, motivated by recent calls for ‘historical geographies of, and for,
the present’ which are ‘inspired by direct engagement with problems in the pre-
sent and intend to do something about them’ (Van Sant et al. 2020, p. 169), we
demonstrate how historical work might inform more progressive and decolonial,
current and future academic practices. Unlike Táíwò (2022) we do not see any
contradiction between advocating for decolonisation and taking African agency
seriously, rather, we see taking African agency seriously as central to making con-
temporary decolonisation a viable and emancipatory project.

Decolonising Geography’s Histories

A second key contribution of the book is to decolonise geography’s own his-


tories, by taking seriously the period and process of constitutional decolonisa-
tion, examining the role of geographers within that process, and producing more
diverse and inclusive disciplinary stories.
Over the last 40 years there has been a growth in histories of geography that
highlight the peopled and always political nature of the discipline (e.g. Buttimer
1983; Livingstone 1992; Barnes 2008; Maddrell 2009; Farish 2010; Clayton and
Barnes 2015; Albuquerque and Martins 2018; Schelhass et al. 2020). Since the
1990s, scholars influenced by postcolonial theory have carefully deconstructed
the relationships between geography and empire highlighting links between the
discipline and exploration, resource exploitation, and colonial control and vio-
lence (Bell et al. 1995; Driver 2001; Ryan and Naylor 2009). Though Ngũgĩ was
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
14 decolonising geography? disciplinary histories and the end of the british empire in africa, 1948–1998

most interested in literature and language, he noted ‘the [often racist and colo-
nial] images children encountered in literature were reinforced by their study of
geography and history, science and technology where Europe was, once again,
the centre.’ (Ngũgĩ 1986, p. 93). For Ngũgĩ, the discipline of geography was,
then, part of a wider ‘colonial alienation’, the ‘disassociation of the sensibility [of
a colonised person] from his natural and social environment’ (1986, p. 16–17).
Despite this attention to geography and its role in empire building, however,
the relationships between geography and decolonisation have for the most part
been overlooked. This book responds to this lacuna, shifting attention to the
intersections between the period of constitutional decolonisation in the mid-late
twentieth century and the discipline of geography, and contributing to a small
but emerging body of work on this period (Power and Sidaway 2004; Clayton
and Bowd 2017; Clayton and Kumar 2019; de Suremain 2019; Ferretti 2019,
2020; Sarmento 2019; Clayton 2020), and on geography in Africa (e.g. Areola
and Okafor 1998; Visser et al. 2016; Daya 2022).
Our account highlights the role of geographers, and the discipline of geogra-
phy as a whole, in the processes of constitutional decolonisation and postcolonial
development and state-building. If we rely on published research, we may con-
clude that there were few connections between geography and decolonisation.
As Clayton (2020, p. 5) notes, ‘the term appears only a handful of times in the
titles of articles in leading Western geography journals’ between 1945–1980. The
same is true of the pages of geography journals published in the decolonising
world. However, though often obscured in more traditional disciplinary histories,
geographers were deeply involved with decolonisation. They worked for the late
colonial state, surveying, administering forestry and agriculture, overseeing new
development projects and censuses, and they worked for new independent gov-
ernments in similar roles. They delineated post-colonial boundaries (Fitzpatrick
2019). They worked in the geography departments of colonial university colleges,
and in the new universities of recently independent countries. They taught about
the (former) colonies in British universities and worked in new institutes specializ­
ing in development and area studies (Craggs and Neate 2019). And they wrote
about the dilemmas facing newly independent countries through questions of
development and modernisation, under-development and neo-colonialism (Clay-
ton 2020; see for example Blaut 1970; Darkoh 1981; Mabogunje 1980; Slater
1974; Soja 1968). In South Africa in the 1980s, the term decolonisation began
to be used to name a process required to transform a discipline shaped not only
by colonialism but also apartheid (Crush et al. 1982). Paying attention to this
work highlights how new sub-disciplines – such as development geography – were
shaped (Power and Sidaway 2004), how geographers engaged with ideas and
practices of decolonisation (Ramutsindela 2022), and how academic networks
and professional norms were produced and contested through this period.
Crucially, the book shifts the focus to the (post-)colonial world, and its rela-
tions with and beyond the West, and away from Europe and North America. The
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
decolonisation and geography in africa 15

book highlights the role and agency of academic geographers from Africa in the
discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. We argue that to overlook
the contributions of African geography and geographers is to reinforce colonial-
era visions of the agency and creativity of academics from the Global South.
In placing African geographers centre stage, we intervene in ongoing debates
about the exclusionary nature of many histories of geography. Important work
by Mona Domosh (1991), Gillian Rose (1995), and Avril Maddrell (2009) has
highlighted women’s often overlooked roles in geography over two centuries.
Work has also begun to unveil the ‘hidden histories’ of indigenous guides, trans-
lators, scholars, explorers, surveyors, and cartographers in the production of
geographical knowledge under colonial rule (Driver 2012). Despite these inter-
ventions however, our histories of geography remain overwhelmingly western
and white (Craggs 2019). Moreover, many of the experiences of those racialised
as non-white or indigenous within geography continue to be those of exclusion
(Pulido 2002; Peake and Koboyashi 2002; Area special issue, ed. Noxolo 2017b).
Whilst histories of geography have unveiled the discipline’s colonial past, these
critical accounts have rarely addressed the discipline’s continued coloniality
(Radcliffe 2022). Likewise, those advocating for decolonisation now have rarely
engaged in any detail with historical approaches to the discipline, and especially
its connections to decolonisation ideas and practices (Radcliffe 2022; though see
Jazeel 2019). The book is a timely intervention in recent debates about decolo-
nisation in geography which brings these histories into conversation with pre-
sent day disciplinary struggles (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
special issue, ed. Radcliffe 2017, 2022; Area special issue, ed. Noxolo 2017b; de
Leeuw and Hunt 2018; Stanek 2019; Daya 2022).
Academics pursue careers over decades, and their ideas and connections draw
upon long years of professional experience stretching from the period of constitu-
tional decolonisation itself, through to the recent past. As we confront questions
about ongoing and unfinished decolonisation within geography, the university,
and wider society, these longstanding personal experiences of empire and decolo-
nisation provide one important connection between past and present. As Barnes
argues, ‘“now” is produced in large part by actors, scripts, props, ensembles, and
scenes from the past’ (2002, p. 509). The colonial present is produced (in part)
by the colonialism of the past and the processes of constitutional decolonisation;
understanding geography’s entanglements with these helps us to understand the
contemporary legacies of these processes. If ‘the writing of certain kinds of pasts
is legitimated by, and legitimates, only certain kinds of presents’ (Rose 1995, p.
414) then it is essential to produce accounts which reflect the historical and con-
temporary diversity of geography (as well as highlighting its lack of diversity in
many places).
Historical accounts such as this one, which focus explicitly on academic practice,
might also offer lessons for how we approach the labour of academic geography
today, cognizant of the impacts and implications of our approach to colleagues,
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
16 decolonising geography? disciplinary histories and the end of the british empire in africa, 1948–1998

students, research and publication. Such thinking is important in light of the argu-
ments raised by the contributors to these debates who ask all of us to take decolo-
nisation seriously as a radical practice today (Esson et al. 2017; Tolia-Kelly, 2017;
Noxolo 2017a; Ahmet 2020; Esson 2020; Esson and Last 2020; Oswin 2020; Daya
2022; Radcliffe 2022). Clayton (2020, p.16) argues that ‘a decolonial agenda in
geography will be diminished if it becomes disconnected from the history of decolo-
nisation and its everyday geographies (including geographers’ lives) and convened
in a more rarefied or theoretically cloistered politics of knowledge.’ In drawing out
the connections between engagements with decolonisation in the past and present,
between academic theorising and more mundane forms of scholarly labour, and
about the everyday experiences of geographers’ working lives, the book contrib-
utes to calls from Noxolo (2017a), Esson et al. (2017), Daya (2022), and Radcliffe
(2022) to think carefully and ethically about the consequences of decolonisation
work today. The next section sets out the third major contribution of our book: how
our biographical methods can contribute to the historiography of decolonisation.

Professional Lives and Histories of Decolonisation

A recent flurry of scholarship in the history of decolonisation signals a ‘vibrant


and productive period’ in this interdisciplinary field (Milford 2017, n.p.). We
argue that focusing on the entanglements of professional lives and the end of em-
pire provides important new directions for the interdisciplinary historiography
of decolonisation. First and foremost, this focus highlights the specificity of this
period, the opportunities it offered, and the changes that were felt. As Milford
et al. (2021, p. 394) put it:

The era of decolonisation opened up new forms of political community and new
terms of engagement with the wider world; it was not merely a new stage in a his-
tory of external dominance indistinct from the colonialism that preceded it or the
marginalisation that followed in the age of global markets and capital.

Olukoshi et al. (2020) argue persuasively that instead of writing of this period
as one of continuity and failure, there is a need to reclaim Africa’s early post-
independence history as a moment of clarity of purpose and creativity. In the
book, our biographical approach offers the opportunity to explore the legacies
of empire as lived, experienced, and practiced through professional lives, and to
recapture the agency of those working for decolonisation. Conceptualising decol-
onisation through professional lives provides new sources and spaces – cultural,
educational, disciplinary, professional – through which to explore these processes.
Second, many careers were shaped in important ways by decolonisation,
which created new opportunities, including for unprecedented mobility, as well
as closing down others. As Mkandawire (1995, p. 75) suggests, in the context of
African academic trajectories,
Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ by University Of Wisconsin-Stout, Wiley Online Library on [18/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
decolonisation and geography in africa 17

since independence there have been at least three generations of indigenous


researchers in Africa. Each has witnessed changes in their countries’ economic for-
tunes and political trajectories, as well as cultural and societal transformation. All of
these factors have impinged on the nature and meaning of their academic careers.

These experiences of decolonisation shaped many professional realms – from


the discipline of geography which is our focus here – to the related realms of
urban planning (Craggs and Neate 2017) and international development (Ko-
thari 2006a, 2006b). A focus on professional lives demonstrates how disciplinary
and other sorts of professional knowledge were shaped through decolonisation.
Third, the everyday labour of these careers was not only influenced by decolo-
nisation but was itself part of the process, performing shifting power relations,
materialising new norms and priorities, and contributing to the crucial but often
overlooked affective, social, and cultural realms of this geopolitical transition
(Bailkin 2012). Here we follow recent accounts in understanding decolonisa-
tion as a process involving not only politicians and diplomats, but everyone –
in the post-colonies and the former metropole – through the realms of work,
culture, and education (Schwarz, 2011; Bailkin 2012; Craggs and Wintle 2016;
Livsey 2017).
Decolonising geography? contributes to recent scholarship which explores ques-
tions of expertise and professional knowledge, as well as of the role of cultural,
professional, and educational institutions, in decolonisation (Craggs and Wintle
2016; D’Auria 2016; Eagleton 2016; Mew 2016; Waters 2016; Stockwell 2018).
The university has been a productive institutional site through which to under-
stand empire and decolonisation beyond the realm of high politics (Pietsch 2013;
Jons, 2016; Elliott-Cooper 2017; Livsey 2017; Surman 2018; Sharp 2019). Shift-
ing the frame from an imperial and national one as utilised by Tim Livsey (2017)
in his account of Nigerian universities, decolonisation and development, or an
institutional one as deployed by Tamsin Pietsch (2013) in her account of selected
British and ‘British world’ universities in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth
centuries, here we show how a biographical approach with a disciplinary fram-
ing can unveil further, and different, intersections between the academy and (the
end of) empire. The book contributes to a vibrant set of literatures surrounding
western disciplinary knowledges – from anthropology and sociology to urban
planning and history – and their relationships with empire and decolonisation
(Bhambra 2007; Chakrabarty 2009; McIntyre 2009; Bailkin 2012; Home 2013;
Steinmetz 2016). Providing an account that goes beyond the contributions and
experiences of Western professionals to explore also the professional lives of colo-
nial subjects and post-colonial citizens, the book demonstrates how disciplinary
knowledges and academic labour were deeply intertwined with decolonisation.
Finally, a focus on professional lives helps to address longstanding concerns in
postcolonial history to view the ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ within one analytic lens (Stoler
and Cooper 1997). Porter (2004) has long argued that empire (and decolonisation)
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
degrees F.—and are immediately succeeded by marked increase in
the severity of the symptoms, both mental and physical, especially if
the attacks follow each other in rapid succession or last for a number
of days. They may be due to hemorrhage, embolism, or effusion,
and be marked by any or all of the usual symptoms and sequences
of those conditions, permanent or transient. General and aural
vertigo are not uncommon.

The muscular tremor before the last stages varies in different


muscles—excessive perhaps in the tongue, moderate in the fingers,
and so on. It may also seem slight as compared with the other
symptoms, or, on the other hand, be enormously exaggerated in
certain groups of muscles out of all proportion to all other indications.
At the end extreme and constant tremulousness accompanies every
voluntary movement.

Spastic paralysis, muscular tension, contractures, rigidity of the most


persistent character seem at times to be under the influence of the
will, although of cortical origin and in a certain sense automatic, like
convulsions.

The knee-jerk is changed in somewhat more than half the cases, a


little oftener exaggerated than abolished; but sometimes the reflexes
are enormously increased all over the body, so that a strong puff of
air in the face even will set the arms and legs going like a jumping-
jack. I have twice seen the patellar reflex abolished in one leg, and
so marked in the other as to seem to me exaggerated.24 I have also
known it to disappear absolutely in both legs two weeks after it had
been found to be excessively exaggerated. It also varies under
conditions of rest, fatigue, excitement, etc. Intense pain in the joints
occurs, and I have found it where the knee-jerk was exaggerated, in
one case giving rise in a physician to the delusion that his arms and
elbows had been resected. This may disappear in time. Charcot's
joint disease has been observed.
24 There was no evidence, and there had been no history, of a hemiplegic attack in
either case.
In the final stages the bones are fragile and easily break;
hemorrhages under the periosteum or perichondrium arise from
trifling force or injury, giving rise to hæmatomata, the most common
of which are on parts exposed to pressure, etc., as the ear. The
patient is confined to his bed, fed like a small child, demented, hardly
able to articulate the extravagant delusions which form such a
grotesque contrast to his actual state, until the mind is as incapable
of forming or receiving ideas as of expressing thoughts; and the
body is simply a filthy, helpless mass of humanity, dying of
exhaustion or decay, unless lung gangrene, bed-sores superficial
and deep, necrobiosis, exhausting diarrhœa, pneumonia, pulmonary
consumption, perhaps asphyxia from an epileptic fit or choking, have
followed incontinence of urine and feces to the fatal end, or heart
failure or apoplexy have closed the scene.

PATHOLOGY AND MORBID ANATOMY.25—General paralysis of the insane


is, according to Mendel, following Rokitansky's idea, a connective-
tissue disease, affecting the nerve-cells and tissues secondarily,
while Tuczek and Wernicke think that the primary disease is of the
nerve-elements (primäre Atrophie der Nervenelemente)—a diffuse
interstitial cortical encephalitis on the one hand, or a diffuse
parenchymatous cortical encephalitis on the other. There is also, in
well-marked cases, atrophy of the white substance, due, according
to general opinion of pathologists, to primary interstitial encephalitis
ending in sclerosis.
25 For a detailed statement of the post-mortem appearances in general paralysis
compare Spitzka's Insanity, pp. 218-243; Beiträge zur pathologischen Anatomie und
zur Pathologie der Dementia Paralytica, von Dr. Franz Tuczek; Die Progressive
Paralyse der Irren, von Dr. E. Mendel; Lehrbuch der Gehirnkrankheiten, von Dr. C.
Wernicke, iii. pp. 536-541. Westphal's classical work is not referred to, as his latest
views and others of interest are given in a report of a discussion by the German
Association of Alienists in the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, iv. 1883, pp. 634-
638 and 648-654. In the third number of the Neurol. Centralblatt, Mendel reports an
autopsy of a patient diagnosticated to have melancholia, who died a violent death,
where he thought that he found evidence of the early stage of general paralysis in
moderate opacity of the pia mater, with nodules as large as a pin's head in both
parietal regions, and in slight indications of diffuse interstitial inflammation of the
cortex, the blood-vessels in the frontal convolutions being extensively filled with white
blood-corpuscles.

In the majority of cases there is pachymeningitis, often extensive and


excessive, with hemorrhages, but which may be no more than is
quite commonly found in persons dying of phthisis or chronic
nephritis. There is also, usually, leptomeningitis, with adhesions to
the cortex, especially of the anterior and antero-lateral portions, so
firm that the arachnoid cannot be removed without tearing off
portions of the brain; but it is sometimes scarcely observed, and may
be no more than is found in persons dying simply of old age. The pia
may be in places thickened, opaque, and without adhesions.
Ependymitis is usual.

In the terminal stage of general paralysis there is well-marked


atrophy (with compensatory serous effusion), which is, as a rule,
most marked in the cortex of the brain, but which is of varying
degrees in its different portions. Rarely there is scarcely any atrophy
of the cortex. The central portion of the brain may be of leathery
consistence, but usually shows marked sclerosis, which also may
affect its different portions and the different ganglia very differently.
The changes resulting from inflammatory, degenerative, and atrophic
processes are general and profound.

An opinion is beginning to obtain that general paralysis is primarily a


disease of the small cerebral blood-vessels, functional or vaso-
motor; and Meynert holds that the transition line between that stage,
which he considers curable, and organic disease may be recognized
clinically.

In general paralysis, as in other mental diseases, the nervous


discharge is accompanied by a greater disturbance in the structure
of the gray substance of the brain, a more extensive decompounding
of it, and consequently by a more complete exhaustion of nervous
force than in healthy mental processes. Longer periods of rest and
improved nutrition are therefore necessary to restore healthy
function. In general paralysis, as in all other mental diseases
dependent upon destructive disease of the brain, there is not only
decompounding, but decomposing and disintegrating, of the
structure of the brain.

Posterior spinal sclerosis is frequently found. If alone or


predominating over sclerosis of the lateral columns of the cord, the
knee-jerk is abolished if the morbid process has gone far enough. If
descending degeneration of the lateral columns is chiefly found, and
is sufficiently advanced, the knee-jerk is increased. At least one of
these forms of sclerosis exists in the vast majority of cases.

There is also a distinctly syphilitic disease of the smaller cerebral


arteries, together with a diffuse parenchymatous and interstitial
encephalitis of syphilitic origin. At present we have no means of
differentiating it at the autopsy from general paralysis following a
subacute or chronic course, except inferentially from the presence of
other evidences of syphilis. It is not always possible, therefore, to
distinguish between syphilis and a syphilitic diathesis as the chief
factor in diffuse encephalitis.

DIAGNOSIS.—Although a well-marked case of general paralysis is


unmistakable, the diagnosis in the early stages or in obscure cases
may be extremely difficult. The varying degrees in which the various
portions of the cortex, medullary portion, and different ganglia of the
brain may be involved in the morbid process naturally give rise to a
great variety in the symptoms, mental and physical, sensory and
motor, emotional and intellectual, and in the relative preponderance
of one or another in individual cases. The usual symptoms of any
form of mental disease may for a time obscure the dementia which
sooner or later must appear in general paralysis, and which, as has
already been said, is the only mental symptom universally present in
all cases. This mental impairment must also be associated with
progressive muscular loss of power, although the relation of the two
symptoms to each other, the degree to which a given amount of the
one leads to a fair inference of a certain amount of the other, is liable
to the greatest variation, the range of which can only be learned by
observation and experience. There is a certain quality to the
dementia, as already described, which is often sufficient of itself to
establish the diagnosis with a practised physician.

The early mental symptoms may simulate those of cerebral


neurasthenia, in which the patient thinks that there is decided mental
impairment, although there is no progressive dementia. The tremor
in neurasthenia is greater and more universal than in the stage of
general paralysis with which it might be confounded, and the
subjective symptoms are much more prominent.

Muscular malaise and pains throughout the body give rise to the
diagnosis of malaria or rheumatism, in which there may be loss of
power, but no ataxia or dementia.

The sclerosis may be predominating or pronounced in the basal


ganglia and bulbar nuclei, giving occasion for a hasty diagnosis of
labio-glosso-pharyngeal paralysis, until it is found that the clinical
history of that disease is not followed. In the same way, any motor or
sensory ganglia or nerve-roots may be so early implicated in the
degenerative process as to mislead the physician into giving
attention to only the local symptoms.

Once I have known the early convulsions of general paralysis in a


very self-conscious woman mistaken for hysteria, the mental
impairment and physical weakness having been overlooked on
account of the prominence of the convulsive attacks and the
hysterical symptoms, which may be a complication of any form of
insanity in young and middle-aged people, particularly women.

It is not uncommon for the attacks to so thoroughly resemble


epilepsy as to be mistaken for it, the dementia not being observed or
being supposed to be the ordinary mental deterioration generally
following epilepsy. In such cases the progressive dementia, ataxia,
and muscular weakness may advance so slowly as to entirely
escape observation for a long time, and give rise to the confident
diagnosis of epilepsy for five or six years. Epilepsy, however, arising
in a vigorous, middle-aged person without evident cause, should
always suggest the suspicion of syphilis, cerebral tumor, or general
paralysis, when careful scrutiny of all the symptoms will show where
it belongs.

Embolisms, hemorrhages, cerebral effusions, more or less diffuse


encephalitis from an injury to the head, sometimes give rise to the
suspicion of general paralysis, until it is found that its characteristic
progressive symptoms do not appear, but chiefly when the history of
the case has not been definitely ascertained, or when the usual
symptoms of those conditions are not well marked.

Chronic endarteritis, arterio-sclerosis, atheroma of the cerebral


arteries may be so diffused as to simulate general paralysis,
especially in drunkards and syphilitics, but the symptoms do not
advance in the manner characteristic of that disease.

Multiple cerebro-spinal sclerosis of the descending form may be


confounded with general paralysis while the symptoms are obscure
and consist in change of character, when, indeed, organic disease
can only be suspected to be present.

Lead has been known to attack the central nervous system in such a
way as to produce an intellectual apathy and muscular weakness
somewhat resembling the early stage of the demented form of
general paralysis, but without its ataxic symptoms and its regular
progress. The presence of lead in the urine, and the marked
improvement from the use of iodide of potassium, tonics, and
electricity, are sufficient to establish the diagnosis.

Chronic and persistent alcoholism is always attended with some


mental impairment, which may so resemble the dementia of general
paralysis, with marked moral perversion, mental exaltation, grand
delusions, muscular tremor, ataxic symptoms, and impaired
muscular power, as to make the diagnosis doubtful for several
months, until removal of the cause (alcohol) in the course of time
causes the symptoms to so abate as to make the real character of
the disease evident.
I have once seen chronic interstitial nephritis without its usual
prominent symptoms and with mild uræmic convulsions mistaken for
general paralysis.

A tumor of the brain, if not attended with the common symptom of


vomiting, may be the cause of convulsions and headache
resembling those often seen in general paralysis. Optic neuritis or
atrophy is usual in cerebral tumor, but rare in a stage of general
paralysis so early that the diagnosis might be doubtful.

Hemorrhagic pachymeningitis also now and then simulates an


obscure case of general paralysis in the early stage, but a few weeks
at most settle any doubts in the matter.

Although diffuse cerebral syphilis is more apt to be associated with


distinctly localized symptoms than the demented form of general
paralysis, and although it is characterized by a mental apathy and
physical torpor which follow a more regular course with more definite
symptoms, resulting in a slow decay, yet there may be doubtful
cases in which the differential diagnosis is impossible, and in which
antisyphilitic treatment does not throw any light on the subject.
Syphilitic new growths, endarteritis, and meningitis may so far
improve from the use of mercury or the iodide of potassium as to end
in an apparent cure, but in those cases the symptoms are not so
marked as to make an exact diagnosis always possible. A distinct
syphilitic cachexia is presumptive evidence of syphilitic encephalitis
when there is doubt whether the syphilis is the cause or the
diathesis.

Profound melancholia is not so often as varying gloom or moderate


despondency a symptom of general paralysis. When it is such, there
are developed in time the other marks of that disease, and it will only
be necessary to hold the diagnosis in reserve for their appearance.
The melancholia masks the dementia unless it is very carefully
sought for, and the tremor may be as marked in melancholia as in
the early stage of general paralysis, but more universal.
Acute mania is not uncommonly mistaken for general paralysis,
when, as often happens, the delusions are as expansive and the
tremor as great in the mania as in general paralysis; and it may be
several months before the differential diagnosis can be made with
certainty. In the presence of a high degree of maniacal excitement,
with great emotional agitation and muscular tremor, it is difficult to
establish the fact of the existence or not of dementia in doubtful
cases until it is well developed. Acute mania has been known to
constitute the prodromal period of general paralysis for a number of
years.

Primary mental deterioration cannot be always differentiated from


general paralysis of the demented type in its early stage. After the
age of sixty the probabilities are in favor of primary mental
deterioration in doubtful cases, but general paralysis occurs—
seldom, to be sure—up to the age of sixty-five.

Early senile dementia may simulate general paralysis of the


subacute form, but has not its clinical history. General paralysis of
the quiet, insidious type and primary mental deterioration have been
called premature senility. The three diseased conditions have certain
points of similarity, and the pathological processes involved in them
do not differ sufficiently to authorize the assumption that they are not
closely related, if not simply variations, due to age and other causes,
in one morbid process.

Finally, the mental impairment caused by the prolonged use of


bromide of potassium and hydrate of chloral has been mistaken for
general paralysis, until a critical examination unmistakably showed
the presence of the well-known symptoms of those drugs.

In examining the patient it is especially important to avoid leading


questions, as in general paralysis and in those conditions which
simulate its early stage the mind is in a condition to readily fall into
the train of thought suggested to it. The fact should be kept in mind,
too, that the symptoms in early general paralysis are so variable as
to be sometimes quite evident, and at other times not to be got at
with certainty at all or only after long and patient examination; that
they sometimes quite disappear under the influence of complete
mental and bodily rest; and that in all stages, until near the end, such
complete remissions may occur as to make the diagnosis,
independent of the history of the case, difficult if not impossible.

A gentleman once committed an offence characteristic of general


paralysis in marrying a pretty servant-girl while temporarily away
from his home. His wife, daughters, and friends saw that the act was
so contrary to his natural character that he was placed in an insane
asylum and kept there several weeks under observation for an
opinion as to his responsibility. He appeared so well in the absolute
quiet and rest that he was declared sane, tried, and sentenced to the
State prison, where he showed his marked mental impairment as
soon as he was set to work. He could not concentrate his mind
sufficiently for the simplest labor, and a couple of years later he was
sent to the insane asylum to die, a complete mental and physical
wreck, in the late stage of general paralysis.

PROGNOSIS.—The very few reported cures in so common a disease


as general paralysis, and the circumstances under which they have
been reported, lead to the suspicion that there was an error in
diagnosis or that the mistake was made of supposing a remission to
be a cure, as has often happened. The course of the disease is more
rapid in men than women, and in young persons than in the older.
From the galloping cases of a couple of months to those slowly
advancing, with long remissions, over twenty years, the average,
including the prodromal period, is probably not far from five (perhaps
six) years. Collected from asylum statistics, it is given as from two to
three years. When I am sure of the diagnosis, I generally say that the
patient may die within twenty-four hours (of paralysis of the heart,
from suffocation by an accident in an epileptic attack, from choking,
from cerebral hemorrhage or effusion, or suddenly with cerebral
symptoms of which the autopsy gives no satisfactory explanation),
within a short time of intercurrent disease, especially diarrhœa or
pneumonia, or that he may live several years, as he probably will,
and possibly have a remission, during which he may lead for a while
somewhat the same kind of life as other people.
Persons presenting symptoms which can in no way be positively
distinguished from those at the beginning of the prodromal period of
general paralysis recover, but not many come under the physician's
care so early. We are not yet in a position to say whether they were
suffering from a mild, transient illness or from what would otherwise
have become serious organic disease.

TREATMENT.—Life may be prolonged in general paralysis, and usually


is prolonged, by the use of such measures as contribute to the
patient's comfort, and which in a general way have already been
considered under the head of treatment of mental disease on a
previous page.

In my experience, stimulating tonics, wine, and even coffee, increase


the morbid cerebral energy of the early stage of the disease, but are
sometimes of use later. Cod-liver oil and the hypophosphites do
better, and many of the disagreeable symptoms of the period of loss
of control over the involuntary muscles are relieved by strychnia.
Ergot and the judicious use of the bromides abate the cerebral
congestion. Gastro-intestinal disorders, when not controlled by
attention to diet, require the usual treatment.

Iodide of potassium in the large or small dose, and mercury, I have


never found to benefit those cases of general paralysis with a
previous history of syphilis. On the contrary, they have proved
debilitating and harmful.

When furious excitement is not relieved by prolonged warm baths,


with cool applications to the head if possible, and quiet, chloral is of
use, and sometimes opium and its preparations.

Frequently-repeated violent convulsions, the epileptic state, are


usually at once mitigated by chloral given by the rectum; the
inhalation of nitrite of amyl is reported also to have been of use.

There are few cases in which I find that morphine does not quiet
restlessness, calm delusions, abate distressing hallucinations, and
make the patient generally more comfortable; and I give it freely,
seldom more than twice a day, often almost daily, for two or three
years. In this way it can be used in quite moderate doses. Coca also
relieves symptoms.

Rest and quiet are most important in all stages of the disease. This
can be best accomplished in a quiet private house in the country,
which can be made a virtual hospital, and next in a private asylum.
But such care is beyond the reach of the vast majority of the insane,
to whom the public asylum becomes a necessity. Wherever they are,
an orderly life is best for them, with as little irritating interference with
their ways or control of them as is possible.

If the results of treatment are in the highest degree unsatisfactory,


and consist chiefly in meeting symptoms as they come up, without
hope of permanent recovery, it is not impossible that when we can
put the patient under treatment at the very beginning of his disease,
as we can now do in pulmonary consumption, the prognosis in the
former disease may change as much for the better as it has changed
in the latter.

A general paralytic is at any time liable to congestive or maniacal


attacks of short duration, and so is always, potentially, a dangerous
person. In the prodromal period the risk is small; in all stages there
will, in the majority of cases, be some warning; but in the developed
disease the only safe way is to have some responsible person near
at hand, both to prevent the patient from doing harm to others and to
save him from injuring himself, whether by intent or through not
knowing better than to wander off or fall into all sorts of accidents. In
many conditions several should be readily available, or else the
security of an asylum must be sought.

In the treatment of general paralysis by society the same rule should


obtain as in all forms of insanity—that distinct mental disease is
presumptive proof of irresponsibility, or at least of limited
responsibility; that a diseased mind means lessened intellectual
power throughout and diminished ability to choose the right and
avoid the wrong; that there are changes in circulation or nutrition, or
some unknown condition in the brain, especially in general paralysis,
by virtue of which the mental state and power of self-control vary
from time to time, and as a result of which a person seeming
responsible one day may have been quite irresponsible some
previous day.

INSANITY FROM GROSS LESIONS OF THE BRAIN (tumors, new growths of


all kinds, exostoses, spicules or portions of depressed bone,
embolisms, hemorrhages, wounds, injuries, cysticerci, etc.) is
attended with the usual indications of those conditions which may
determine diffuse disorders of the brain, giving rise to any of the
symptoms of the various psycho-neuroses and cerebro-psychoses.
The lowered mental and moral tone after cerebral hemorrhages is a
matter of common observation, and after one an individual is rarely
observed to be fully himself again.

The PROGNOSIS is very unfavorable. Although there are rare cases of


improvement, the tendency is toward profound dementia.

CEREBRAL SYPHILITIC INSANITY comes either under the head of the


insanity last described or belongs to the slowly-advancing dementia
with final paralysis already referred to under the head of Diagnosis in
General Paralysis, and called by some authorities on mental disease
pseudo-paralytic dementia from syphilis.

Antisyphilitic treatment is of value in the first class of cases, and


although most of the recoveries end in relapses and incurability, the
prolonged use of iodide of potassium seems sometimes to effect a
permanent cure. It is claimed that similar treatment is followed by the
same result in the cases of dementia with paresis, but the weight of
authority, and certainly my own experience, are against that
statement.

CHRONIC ALCOHOLIC INSANITY depends upon the vascular and other


changes due to abuse of alcohol so long continued that the
pathological condition has become organic and incurable. It is
commonly associated with delusions of suspicion or persecution. It
may be a purely moral insanity, with gross beliefs rather than
distinctly insane delusions, and it rarely fails to be at least that when
the persistent excessive drinking is kept up until the age of beginning
dissolution of the brain. It then gives rise to all sorts of embarrassing
complications in regard to property, family relations, and wills.
Chronic alcoholic insanity may take the form of mild dementia, by
virtue of which the patient cannot control himself, but can be easily
kept within bounds of reasonable conduct by various degrees of
restraint, from the constant presence of a responsible person to the
seclusion of an asylum. In well-marked cases this dementia is
associated with muscular weakness, tremor, and exhilaration to such
an extent as to simulate general paralysis. It is then called by some
—especially French—writers pseudo-paralytic dementia from
alcohol.

The condition is susceptible of improvement by removal of the


cause, alcohol, and by a carefully-regulated life, hydropathic
treatment, etc., but complete recoveries cannot be expected.

SECONDARY DELUSIONAL INSANITY is slowly developed from various


mental diseases, incurable or uncured, where the progress to
marked dementia is slow, by the persistence of delusions in those
forms of insanity characterized by delusions. It is chronic and
incurable. In melancholia and mania the mental depression and the
exaltation and motor excitement disappear to a great extent, and
there are left a slowly-advancing dementia, confusion, and
expanding delusions, with apathy or with agitation, for which the
asylum is the only safe place unless physical weakness makes the
patient harmless. It is either a terminal state in which many forms of
insanity end, or a stage through which they pass to terminal
dementia. It depends upon incurable, and therefore organic,
changes in the brain, like all incurable insanity, although those
changes are not yet determined exactly. It might be a question
whether chronic delusional insanity properly belongs under the head
of Organic Mental Diseases, and a similar criticism may be made
regarding terminal dementia. But in this paper no definite
classification of insanity is attempted, because our knowledge of the
subject is still so indefinite, although the several mental diseases are
grouped in a certain order for convenience to the reader and the
writer; and this order of course approximately follows natural lines.

TERMINAL DEMENTIA is the end to which most of the insanity not


resulting in recovery finally comes. The features marking the disease
in its early stages for the most part disappear, leaving all the
functions of the mind impaired in all degrees up to total extinction—
the whole character on a lower plane. It is the disease which to so
great an extent crowds the wards of insane asylums and
almshouses with the (1) agitated or (2) apathetic chronic insane, the
worst of whom are mental and physical wrecks, squatting on floors,
uttering an unintelligible jargon, noisy, filthy, without intelligence for
the simplest natural wants. Their chief function, under the prevalent
methods of construction and management of lunatic hospitals in
most places, is to blight with a certain feeling of hopelessness many
of the curable insane who are obliged to go for rest and quiet to
institutions where the overwhelming majority of the inmates are
manifestly and painfully incurable.

French writers include a great part of chronic delusional insanity


(secondary confusional insanity, Wahnsinn, secundäre Verrücktheit)
and terminal dementia (Blödsinn) under one head, démence; and
with much reason, as it is not always possible to differentiate
between the two.

The proper TREATMENT of the incurable, demented insane should


provide not only that they be not at large, where they annoy the
strong and the well, but also that they shall not disturb the insane
who are acutely ill and in need of treatment suited to sick people,
and whose chances of recovery at best are none too favorable.
Experiments, now quite numerous, have shown that the lives and
occupations of many of them may be made not entirely unlike those
to which they were reared, and that nearly all may be suitably
provided for without the expensive hospitals and appliances
necessary for the proper treatment of acute mental disease.

A comparison of countries in which there is and is not a


comprehensive system of State supervision of the insane by a
competent board seems to me to reveal so unquestionably the fact
that such a system alone provides the proper protection for the
insane, and the needed variety and uniformly high standard of
excellence in the provisions for their treatment, that I hope to see the
medical profession using its vast influence upon public opinion to
secure it.

If we meet in the wards of our insane asylums hopeless mental and


physical wrecks, if we find there the extremity of human
wretchedness, the supreme control of all that is evil or vile in our
nature, the worst antitypes of all the virtues, so, on the other hand,
nowhere else do we see such struggles for the mastery of the better
impulses, such efforts against such odds to hold back the mind in an
unequal fight. Nowhere else, too, are developed finer sympathy,
more beautiful unselfishness, more generous charity, or more heroic
resignation where no hope in life remains but for death.

The State has taken charge of these most unfortunate people,


shutting up behind the same locked doors and barred windows
people of all social grades, often mingling together in one presence
the so-called criminal insane, insane criminals, idiots, imbeciles,
epileptics, paralytics, the chronic insane, and the demented, with
patients suffering from acute mental disease. Some of them are
unconscious of their condition, many are better off than ever before,
but others are painfully alive to their situation and surroundings, fully
aware of the gravity of their illness, keenly sensitive to the
distressing sights and associations, disturbed by the noises, and
discouraged by the many chances of becoming like the worst
incurables around them. The State cannot evade the responsibility of
seeing that their confinement is made the least rigorous, wretched,
and injurious possible.
HYSTERIA.
BY CHARLES K. MILLS, M.D.

DEFINITION.—Hysteria is a functional disease of the cerebro-spinal


axis, characterized either by special mental symptoms or by motor,
sensory, vaso-motor, or visceral disorders related in varying degree
to abnormal psychical conditions.

This, like all other definitions of hysteria, is imperfect. No absolutely


satisfactory definition can well be given. It is not abnormal ideation,
although this is so often prominent; it is not emotional exaltation,
although this may be a striking element; it is not perversion of
reflexes and of sensation, although these may be present. Some
would make it a disease of the womb, others an affection of the
ovaries; some regard it as of spinal, others as of cerebral origin;
some hold it to be a disease of the nerves, others claim that it is a
true psychosis; but none of these views can be sustained.

Sir James Paget1 says of hysterical patients that they are as those
who are color-blind. They say, “I cannot;” it looks like “I will not,” but it
is “I cannot will.” Although, however, much of the nature of hysteria is
made clear in this explanation, hysteria is not simply paralysis of the
will. A true aboulomania or paralysis of the will occurs in non-
hysterical patients, male and female, and of late years has been
studied by alienists.
1 “Clinical Lecture on the Nervous Mimicry of Organic Diseases,” Lancet for October,
November, and December, 1873.

In many definitions the presence of a spasmodic seizure or


paroxysm is made the central and essential feature; but, although
convulsions so frequently occur, typical hysterical cases pass
through the whole course of the disorder without suffering from
spasm of any kind.
In a general neurosis a definition, well considered, should serve the
purpose of controlling and guiding, to a large extent at least, the
discussion of the subject.

The definition given asserts that hysteria is a functional disease. In


the present state of knowledge this is the only ground that can be
taken. It is claimed that in a strict sense no disease can be regarded
as functional; but it is practically necessary to use such terms as
functional in reference to affections in which disordered action
without recognizable permanent alteration of structure is present.
Temporary anatomical changes must sometimes be present in
hysteria; organic disease may be a complication in special cases;
post-mortem appearances may occasionally be found as accidents
or coincidences; it is possible that structural alterations may result
from hysteria; but no pathologist has as yet shown the existence of a
special morbid anatomy underlying as a permanent basis the
hysterical condition.

The mental, motor, sensory, and other phenomena of hysteria


cannot be explained except by regarding the cerebro-spinal nervous
system as the starting-point or active agency in their production.

The term vaso-motor is used in a broad sense to include not only


peripheral vascular disturbances, but also cardiac, respiratory,
secretory, and excretory affections of varying type. Some of these
disorders are also visceral, but under visceral affections are also
included such hysterical phenomena as abdominal phantom tumors,
hysterical tympanites, and the like.

That all hysterical phenomena are related in varying degree to


abnormal psychical conditions may perhaps, at first sight, be
regarded as open to dispute and grave doubt. It is questionable
whether in every case of hysteria the relation of the symptoms to
psychical states could be easily demonstrated. I certainly do not look
upon every hysterical patient as a case of insanity in the technical
sense, but hold that a psychical element is or has been present,
even when the manifestations of the disorder are pre-eminently
physical. James Hendrie Lloyd,2 in a valuable paper, has ably
sustained this position, one which has been held by others, although
seldom, if ever, so clearly defined as by this writer.
2 “Hysteria: A Study in Psychology,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. x.,
No. 4, October, 1883.

The alleged uterine origin of hysteria has been entirely disregarded


in the definition. This has been done intentionally. It is high time for
the medical profession to throw off the thraldom of this ancient view.
The truth is, as asserted by Chambers,3 that hysteria “has no more
to do with the organs of reproduction than with any other of the
female body; and it is no truer to say that women are hysterical
because they have wombs, than that men are gouty because they
have beards.”
3 Brit. Med. Journ., December 21, 1861, 651.

SYNONYMS.—Hysterics, Vapors. Many Latin and other synonyms


have been used for hysteria: most of these have reference to the
supposed uterine origin of the disease, as, for instance, Uteri
adscensus, Asthma uteri, Vapores uterini, Passio hysterica,
Strangulatio uterina seu Vulvæ. Some French synonyms are Maladie
imaginaire, Entranglement, and Maux ou attaques de nerfs. Other
French synonyms besides these have been used; most of them are
translations from the Latin, having reference also to the uterine
hypothesis. In our language it is rare to have any other single word
used as a synonym for hysteria. Sir James Paget4 introduced the
term neuromimesis, or nervous mimicry, and suggested that it be
substituted for hysteria, and neuromimetic for hysterical.
Neuromimesis is, however, not a true synonym. Many cases of
hysteria are cases of neuromimesis, but they are not all of this
character. Among the desperate attempts which have been made to
originate a new name for hysteria one perhaps worthy of passing
notice is that of Metcalfe Johnson,5 who proposes to substitute the
term ganglionism, as giving a clue to the pathology of hysteria. His
main idea is that hysteria exhibits a train of symptoms which are
almost always referable to the sympathetic or ganglionic nervous
system. This is another of those half truths which have misled so
many. The term hysteria, from the Greek ὑστερα, the uterus,
although attacked and belabored, has come to stay; it is folly to
attempt to banish it.
4 Op. cit.

5 Med. Times and Gaz., 1872, ii. 612.

METHOD OF DISCUSSING THE SUBJECT.—It is hard to decide upon the


best method of discussing the subject of hysteria. One difficulty is
that connected with the question whether certain affections should
be considered as independent disorders or under some subdivisions
of the general topic of hysteria. Certain great phases of hysteria are
represented by hystero-epilepsy, catalepsy, ecstasy, etc.; but it will
best serve practical ends to treat of these in separate articles. They
have distinctive clinical features, and are capable of special definition
and discussion.

HISTORY AND LITERATURE.—To give a complete history of hysteria it


would be necessary to traverse the story of medicine from the time
of Hippocrates to the present. A complete bibliography would require
an immense volume. Volume vi. of the Index Catalogue of the
Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, United States Army, which
has appeared during the present year (1885), contains a
bibliography of nearly seventeen double-column pages, most of it in
the finest type. The references are to 318 books and 914 journals.
The number of books and articles cited as having appeared in
different languages is as follows: Latin, 99; Greek, 2; German, 180;
British, 177; American, 159; French, 449; Italian, 75; Spanish, 45;
Swedish, 12; miscellaneous, 34. Even this wonderful list probably
only represents a tithe of the works written on this subject. Those
desirous of studying it from a bibliographical point of view can do so
by consulting this great work.

Many as are the names and voluminous as is the literature, certain


names and certain works are pre-eminent—Sydenham, Laycock,
and Skey in England; Tissot, Briquet, Charcot, and Landouzy in
France; Stahl, Frank, Eulenburg, and Jolly in Germany; and in

You might also like