The back cover of Lynette Jackson's book says that she ‘maintains that the asylum in Southern Rhodesia played a significant role in maintaining the colonial social order’. In fact she doesn't and it didn't. As she herself is at pains to emphasize, ‘there was no “Great Confinement” in Southern Rhodesia’ (p. 188). Ingutsheni asylum was ‘born too small’ (p. 54) and never grew large enough for its purpose. Its history could better be used to demonstrate the Rhodesian refusal to provide services to Africans than to show how African opposition was repressed. The one famous dissident whose incarceration in Ingutsheni Jackson does discuss – the independent church leader Matthew Zvimba – walked out of the institution the day after admission and was never returned there. The Rhodesian authorities were anxious that African lunatics should be treated as far as possible in their own communities. Jackson begins by demonstrating the ruthless use of force in the establishment of Rhodesian rule and there was enough direct force available during the period she discusses to make the indirect force of psychiatry unnecessary.

The back cover is on much sounder ground, however, when it claims that ‘focussing on the history of the Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum [she] explores the social, cultural and political history of the colony … Jackson uses Ingutsheni as a reference point’. This is precisely what she does do. Ingutsheni makes an admirable reference point for many reasons. It was one of the few state-run institutions in Southern Rhodesia which contained both black and white men and women. It formed a sort of laboratory for theories of gender and race. Jackson has a particularly perceptive chapter on the black women who were in Ingutsheni and the reasons why they were there. The extraordinary imperatives and irrationalities of racial discrimination are wonderfully illustrated in the context of the mad. White female lunatics had weekly hair-dressing and beautifying appointments, attention to appearance being essential to white female identity. Black women were held hardly to have personalities, let alone appearances.

Ingutsheni was the subject of one of those vastly illuminating Rhodesian Commissions of Inquiry. It was inevitably called upon in the many discussions of African mentalities – or of white colonial tendencies to madness. After Zimbabwean independence in 1980 the inimitable Herbert Ushewokunze, Minister of Health, with whom Jackson both starts and finishes her book, used reforms at Ingutsheni (and the unshackling of a chained lunatic in the communal areas) as a symbol of national emancipation.

Jackson comes to some surprising conclusions as a result of her focus on Ingutsheni. One of them concerns so-called ‘responsible government’, which the settlers achieved in 1923. We are so used to the fact that the late 1920s saw a move from ‘civilization to segregation’ and that the early 1930s witnessed an economic depression that undercut all development, that we have not considered other meanings of ‘responsible’. But Jackson writes: ‘as the power of settlers rose they demanded more responsible government, which coincided with a changing worldwide view of mental health care as more curative than custodial. In Southern Rhodesia, this resulted in a mental health system that restored “social usefulness” according to a settler colonial social order. Southern Rhodesian psychiatric care became more interventionist and began to imagine a socially productive role for itself, the production of recovered colonial citizens and subjects’ (p. 67). Jackson writes of ‘Southern Rhodesia's reinvention as a modern, self-governing settler society’ (p. 134). She shows how sensitive Rhodesian settlers were to metropolitan criticism and how they often turned to South African experts as a solution, combining as they did science and segregationism. These and many other insights make this a fascinating book.