Mixed Race Studies

Afro-Saxon psychosis or cultural schizophrenia in African-Caribbeans?

The Psychiatrist
Volume 24, Issue 3 (2000)
pages 96-97
DOI: 10.1192/pb.24.3.96

Hari D. Maharajh, Psychiatric Hospital Director
St Ann’s Hospital, Trinidad, West Indies

“Everybody in Miguel Street said that Man-man was mad, and so they left him alone, but I am not sure now that he was mad and I can think of many people much madder than Man-man was… That again was another mystery about Man-man. His accent, if you shut your eyes while he spoke, you would believe an Englishman—a good class Englishman who wasn’t particular about grammar—was talking to you.” (Naipaul, 1959)

The experience of both the psychiatrist and population is of critical importance in the description of indigenous phenomena. This becomes even more relevant when both the researcher and the tested population are influenced by diverse cultures. In the paper entitled ‘Roast breadfruit psychosis’ (Hickling & Hutchinson, 1999), the authors have extrapolated a cultural concept enshrined in Caribbean humour and pathos into a diseased state. We wish to demonstrate the widespread use of a host of metaphors within the Caribbean and other communities illustrating the concept of cultural marginalisation. This is reflected in the song, prose, poetry and art of the region.

The effect of social and cultural factors in the aetiology, course and outcome of mental illness appears to be an area of renewed interest in British psychiatry. While British psychiatrists have abandoned the fading image of the visiting messianic doctor, the island-hopping academic and the colourful description of culture-bound syndromes in exotic and distant lands, it appears as though there is today a reversal of role.

More recently, new African-Caribbean psychiatrists in Britain seem content to invent syndromes exhibiting mimicry, defying nosology, logic and rational thought and devoid of scholarly description.

The ‘Black-White man’ has never been an issue of the ‘windrush’ of 300 000 West Indians who migrated to Britain between 1951-1961. Nevertheless, politicians, poets, writers and calypsonians have adequately described the phenomenon of ‘Black people who think themselves White’ in the Caribbean. These social commentators did not consider acculturation and assimilation into a new culture as negative factors but as processes of social ascendancy and respectability. This transition was actively pursued voluntarily en masse; in fact, the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett described the exodus from her island as follows:

“By de hundred, by de t’ousan From country and from town By de ship-load, by de plane-load Jamaica is Englan boun.” (Ferguson, 1999)

Following independent status from Britain in 1962, a Trinidadian academic, Lloyd Best introduced into the Caribbean literature the term ‘Afro-Saxon’. It was not intended to be a pejorative term, but a descriptive analysis of the ruling class then, that had adopted, absorbed and internalised the values of the White colonial masters. This, he pointed out was a natural phenomenon, since post-colonialisation, the ruling elites pursued the norms of respectability of the White man and aspired to it for acceptance and survival (Best, 1965). Similarly, Samuel Selvon’s (1956) novel The Lonely Londoners captured the feelings and aspirations of West Indian immigrants in Britain.

Selvon, a Trinidadian of mixed Indian and Scottish parentage arrived in London in 1950. Creating from his own experience, he captured in narrative form, the atmosphere of West Indians in London. In his novel, which is part comic, part tragic, Selvon sought “to evoke the bittersweet existence of a rootless community that is both excited and terrified by its new life and the leaving behind of the old” (Ferguson, 1999). Through a number of characters, he most vividly described differing responses to the experience of migration. Such feelings would be expected of any migrant group into a new environment regardless of their colour, race or culture. Disturbed racial identification is, therefore, a natural phenomenon of any colonised or migrant people. It is non-specific and no ethnic group should be singled out.

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