I'm ashamed to say that I know next to enough about Psychiatry in Colonial Africa, I've done some digging though and there is something to get our teeth into so let's go on a little journey...

What happened when this relatively new perspective was exported to African colonies and forced on various groups of people?

Just to save time later on, I'm going to put the field of African psychiatry within the context of the colonial era & of from what McCulloch describes: Psychiatry in Colonial Africa was described as "ethnopsychiatry" which held it's place in between that of standard psychiatry & social anthropology even though McCulloch says there's a clear distinction between all of these terms.

Historian, Jock McCulloch tells us that some psychiatrists abused their medical expertise & didn't treat their all that spiffingly. In British Kenya, Psychiatry wasn't taken all that seriously as McCulloch states that when the senior medical officer of Nairobi's Mathare mental hospital (a psychiatrist called "Cobb") was let go there didn't seem to much urgency or much attention given to find a suitable qualified replacement thus Carothers (an ordinary physician who wasn't a psychiatrist by trade) was employed. However Carothers did make colonial african psychiatry into somewhat of an importance as by the time he returned to the UK in 1950 after spending 12 years in Kenya he'd written several papers & was hailed as the foremost expert on "the african mind".

The colonists didn't see treating ill mental health as all that important compared to keeping outbreaks of cholera & malaria at bay plus the fact that it would cost a bit to travel. & This then meant few psychiatrists actually had experienced African societies or spoken to Africans themselves however that didn't stop psychiatrists theorising about how mental illnesses affect the african mind.

One such person was French anthropologist & philosopher, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl who believed in the concept of "primitive mentality". (this concept who later influence Carl Jung's theory of the "collective unconscious") In Levy-Bruhl's How Natives Think (1910), he proposed two minds: western minds & primitive minds. Whereas western minds used logic & could differentiate fantasy from reality primitive minds could not & therefore primitive minds had to resort to using symbolism to make sense of the more complex ideas (e.g. this is similar to how some countries speaking by majority worship one faith & its majority as well as the symbols used in conjunction with said belief). It's my belief that Levy-Bruhl used his theory of primitive mentality to try and explain to his fellow scholars why the African perception & experience of mental illness might differ from a European one not taking into account any other contributing factors. So you can see that even though this idea can & was used, it doesn't necessarily mean it has any academic, scientific or ethical merit. I do believe though that unfortunately Levy-Bruhl's theory helped to firmly cemented how colonists would perceive & go about treating mentally ill africans.

Going back to Jock McCulloch, he states that in the first two decades of 20th Century, colonists thought so little of mental health that they classed psychiatric asylums as types of prisons.

Apart from South Africa (which was colonised by a variety of different european groups) & French Algeria, white settlements in Africa were very small^[1] add that to resistance, drought, economic poverty etc & those small settlements were fragile & not worth really nothing in this context.

One psychiatrist that was certainly influenced by Levy-Bruhl's primitive mentality was Sigmund Freud. Freud in his Totem and Taboo (1913) proposed that a copy of how prehistoric humans lived could be found in settlements of africa. E.g. Freud believed that Africans were more susceptible to incestous relationships than their European cousins as they had a stronger id (the unconscious primal part of our brain) & a weaker ego ("realistic compass" of the brain) and superego ("moral compass" of the brain) compared to Europeans.

Do we see differences in British versus French colonies, power struggles between European and African parties, white doctors less/equally committed to their patients than back in Europe?

Essentially, there were differences in how different colonial powers treated the people they governed e.g. As I stated above the treatment of psychiatric patients in French Algeria would've been more sustained & stable than in say Portuguese Angola. Even though in the larger settlements you'd think treatment would be more inclusive (especially when we think that one of the most influential psychiatrists in Algeria was Franz Fanon of Martinique afro-caribbean descent) they weren't. Using Fanon & Algeria as an example; Fanon defended the colonised people's right to use violence against the French in the Algerian War however Fanon also wrote that humans that were not considered as such by their colonisers then they shouldn't be classified by humanity's law. In the context, Fanon was arguing that those colonised powers who use armed force shouldn't be punished in the same way because they weren't seen as being on the same level, However this could also be extrapolated to the medical ethics of psychiatry.

Hopefully that wasn't too convoluted, I'm going to ping /u/EsotericR, /u/khosikulu, /u/seringen & /u/profrhodes just incase what I've discussed about Africa needs to be corrected.

[1] = For example in 1940, the european populations of Angola was 44,000, 27,000 in Mozambique & 10,000 in Tanganyika.

Sources & Further Reading:

1. McCulloch. J (1995): Colonial Psychiatry and the African Mind

2. Keller. C. R. (2008): Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa

3. Carothers. C. J. (1953); The African mind in health and disease: A study in ethnopsychiatry

4. Levy-Bruhl. L (1910); How Natives Think.

5. Freud. S (1913); Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics

6. Fanon. F (1961): The Wretched of the Earth

If you have any more questions feel free to ask & I'll do my best to answer them