Tag: Mathari Mental Hospital
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Colonial psychiatry and the pathologizing of the African mind in Kenya
Wanjiku DyerLos Angeles, California, United States In 1910, on the outskirts of Nairobi, the British colonial government converted a smallpox isolation center into what it called the Nairobi Lunatic Asylum.¹ By 1924, the facility had been renamed Mathari Mental Hospital. For the next four decades, it would serve as both a psychiatric institution and an…
