Family Commitments, Economies of Emotions, and Negotiating Mental Illness in Late-Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth-Century Natal, South Africa

Histories of the institutionalisation of the mentally ill in southern Africa have largely emphasised the power and perspectives of state officials, including psychiatrists, medical doctors, magistrates, and police. This article considers, however, the involvement of family members in determining when kin were in need of confinement by reason of madness. It argues that while police and state officials remained the major conduits through which patients were brought to mental hospitals, in many cases the initiative of family members in having a person committed can be discerned in a close reading of the official committal papers. Definitions of madness were, therefore, in some instances, dialectical and negotiated, rather than simply a form of ‘state social control from above’. Second, and as an early contribution to the emerging studies of ‘emotional communities’ or ‘emotional cultures’ and ‘the family’ in southern Africa, the paper suggests that by observing the expanding range of reasons being put forward by family members in initiating, supporting or challenging the certification of insanity we have an opportunity to glimpse aspects of the emotional worlds of families in South Africa in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.