ARTICLES

 

Making strange: Race science and ethnopsychiatric discourse¹

 

 

Chabani Manganyi

National Research Foundation (NRF) Pretoria

 

 

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ABSTRACT

The inscription of racial difference - or what I refer to as the discursive practice of making strange - is to be found in many of the most revered texts of Western modernity. The irreducible recognition and constitution of otherness is evident in Hegel, Marx and indeed Freud, whose preoccupation with the primal horde, primitive man, the cannibalistic savage and the unruly child show the extent to which psychoanalysis, and thereby early psychology, has been a crucial link in the chain of colonial discourse. The discursive practice of making strange is evident in ethnopsychiatry - particularly in the colonial discourse on Africa and Africans - and it continues through the history of psychology where the inscription of blackness is perhaps best epitomized in notions of intellectual inferiority or - turning to the Southern African context - in the domain of "African psychological research".

Keywords: discourse, ethnopsychiatry, Freud, otherness, psychoanalysis, psychology, racism

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I

Discourse about Europe's Others, about "primitive races", about "Orientals", about Jews, Africans and so-called Negroes is omnipresent even in such momentous intellectual undertakings as psychoanalysis and Marxism. What one encounters are a series of significant tendencies all amounting to the verbal device through which something familiar is made to appear strange - "making strange" as Volosinov (1976) would put it. Volosinov discusses this formalist notion in the context of what he describes as the Freudian "wholesale sexualization of the family" and adds "The Oedipus complex is indeed a magnificent way of making the family unit 'strange'" (1976: 91).

If we disregard the earlier claims of scientific racism, and Poliakov (1974) amongst others has demonstrated the abundance of such claims, we are able to find inscriptions of Otherness in the most unexpected quarters. Hegel could pronounce and there is no tremor in the voice whose echo one hears: "The Negro, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality - all that we call feeling - if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character ... They have no knowledge of the immortality of the soul... the devouring of human flesh is altogether consonant with the general principles of the African race" (Hegel, as cited by Poliakov, 1974: 241).

What a salvo! All the power and authority of recognition is asserted. To get the full impact of similar enunciations one leaves the domain of German philosophy and Europe's cultural narcissism which contemplated racial and linguistic purity and returns to Freud. Not, mind you, in the creatively violent fashion in which Lacan returned to Freud. In his essay on Freud and Lacan, Althusser (1984) cryptically describes the meaning of Lacan's return to Freud in the following terms: "A return to Freud means: a return to the theory established, fixed and founded firmly in Freud himself, to the mature, reflected, supported and verified theory, to the advanced theory that has settled down in life ... to build its home, produce its method and give birth to its practice. The return to Freud is not a return to Freud's birth: but a return to his maturity" (Althusser, 1984: 152). Hegel we may presume, strayed into unfamiliar territory in his constitution of the African but his authority is not thereby reduced by this lapse since apart from having been a member of a super-ordinate race the authority of his discourse is established by something beyond a single utterance - by his work as a whole (see Barthes, 1979: 141-160). Even in his case, the inscription of the Other is fixed and it feels as complete and permanent as it could possibly be and, will always be. But Freud went even further, more so since it was years after The interpretation of dreams. And we encounter him at his most cynical, if genius can countenance such gestures. It would be error, no: an illusion to say that Freud was fascinated by the Other, by savages in outlandish jungles. When he turned his hovering attention to the question of the Other as he did on a number of occasions it was to move on to something more momentous than a mere declaration. The strokes he uses are bold and firm. Accomplished facts: there is no room for additional questions. The solemnity of the moment conjures up damnation and much else.

In Beyond the pleasure principle, it is the concept of "natural death" which is decidedly foreign to primitive races (Freud, 1955: 45). Primitive races; not man. Freud writes approvingly of Le Bon's notion of the identification of the group mind with that of primitives. It is a "well justified" conclusion, we are assured (Freud, 1955: 79). The savage is spontaneous, ferocious and violent. And yet, is in some fundamental fashion not unlike the child or the neurotic. Freud continues his discourse on primitive races and their similarity to present-day children in Moses and monotheism (see Freud, 1955: 113). It must be remembered that the primal horde in which the decisive rapture occurred; the act of parricide and the subsequent development of civilisation and Oedipus complex, was the scene of lust and bloodthirstiness.

A veritable orgy; not devoid of spectacle. Similarities amongst primitives, children and neurotics assumed the form of an identity. They plagued Freud's (1955: 113) mind time and time again and he could write: "In our children, in adults who are neurotic, as well as primitive peoples, we meet with the mental phenomenon which we describe as a belief in the 'omnipotence of thought.' In our judgement this lies in an overestimation of the influence which our mental (in this case intellectual) acts can exercise in altering the external world. All the magic of words, too, has its place here, and the conviction of the power which is bound up with the knowledge and pronouncing a name."

Like most texts, Freud's discourse is plurivocal and there is sufficient appropriation of the discourses of others such as Le Bon and McDougall. His intervention undermines the filiation of the discourses of others. He appropriates them and in a most charismatic fashion, endows them with his own signature. It is not always possible in Freud's case to ask: "what does it matter who is speaking?" For in his case, one is entitled to depend on Foucault's (1979: 147) wisdom when he writes: "The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of discourse within a society and a culture". Freud is certainly one of the "founders of discursivity" (ibid: 154). And in a different vain, Althusser is utterly exacting when he tells us that Freud set up in business: alone (see Althusser, 1984: 152). To set up business alone - to be child and father all at once is to confirm beyond doubt Foucault's insight that there are indeed "founders of discursivity" (Foucault, 1979: 154) because they establish "an endless possibility of discourse" (ibid: 154). Freud's approach to the discourse of his predecessors such as Le Bon and McDougall is not one of recognition but that of appropriation such that it is little surprise that we encounter lengthy verbatim quotations. Freud (1955: 80) quotes McDougall at length on the "unorganised" group and its resemblance to savages and an unruly child. Freud's appropriation of McDougall's theory is the more disconcerting since Billig (1982: 81-82) has shown in his discussion of the "tendency towards Fascism" that popular as McDougall's writings were, they contained racist notions about the racial origins of ideas and the superiority of the white race.

Freud's discourse like that of Hegel, Le Bon and McDougall is intriguing. In each case, we encounter a great amount of narrative pressure in which epithet after epithet is dislodged as if the intention were to secure a permanent and irreducible recognition and constitution of Otherness. And yet, what is more, this tendency remains evident even in later ethnopsychiatric discourse as we are to establish later. The inscription of the Blacks, the recognition of difference which disperses itself in several directions in these discourses is a paradoxical one.

These early inscriptions attempt to harmonise in a single image: the tantrums of a child, the omnipotence of thought, a passionate intensity which knows no limits, as well as the cannibalistic savage in whom violence, murder and sexual transgressions are but the order of the day. The paradox: innocence and treachery! But what is even more important with regard to Freudian discourse and the paradox which it enunciates with such recklessness is the other image. I am referring to the notion, craftily developed to the status of an explanatory principle; the image of the primal horde and the decisive act of parricide.

We note a shameless exuberance as Freud (1955: 81-82) declares in Moses and monotheism: "The first decisive step towards a change in this sort of 'social' organization seems to have been that the expelled brothers, living in a community, united to overpower their father and, as was the custom in those days, devoured him raw. There is no need to balk at this cannibalism; it continued far into later times. The essential point, however, is that we attribute the same emotional attitudes to these primitive men that we are able to establish by analytical investigation in the primitives of the present day - in our children". The recognition is total - closed. There appears to be nothing else outside this inscription. The opacity has dissipated and what is left is a declared truth sanctioned by a man who set up business alone.

It is the dispersion of this discourse in later texts which arouses our interest. From now on, mankind must recognise the role of sexuality in social formations. Indeed mankind must recognise murder and violence as instances with revolutionary possibilities. Power has come into its own and what is more, from then on the inscription of Otherness includes an absence of individuality because the subject has arisen in its place. The black man is constituted individually as though he was part of a permanent mob. He is, since the connection is not a difficult one, a group man. Notably, all these inscriptions which recur in various forms in colonial and related discourses remain hostage to the "archetype" of the primal horde and its excesses.

Although the transformation of the individual into a subject is now paramount, the dangerous tendencies are in the domain of sexuality power and rebellion. In an extended essay on "Ideology and the state", Althusser (1984: 48) describes the transformation by ideology of individuals into subjects through the process of interpellation of hailing: "Hey, you there!"

"Lacan's first word is to say: in principle, Freud founded a science. A new science which was the science of a new object: the unconscious" (Althusser, 1984: 150). Freud's entire discourse, a significant part of it that is, centred around this new object. But then there was another founder of discursivity, one who did not pay any significant attention to the unconscious, to personality, to subjectivity, to "language" as such: Karl Marx. More optimistic about human nature than Freud, Marx could contemplate the future of mankind positively: "Marx did, however consider the mode of existence (culture) more important than biological essence (nature). One can also see two contrasting sides to him: the more racist Marx of the letters, where he opened his heart as a man and a son of his age (in one of his letters he referred to the 'sexual swinishness of the savages') and the universalistic Marx of the philosophical and sociological writings, for whom all the natural differences of the species were to disappear in the socialist city of the future" (Poliakov, 1974: 246).

Both Marx and Engels considered "civilized" man morally and intellectually superior to savages and Marx for one is said to have been anti-Semitic (see Poliakov, 1974: 245). Although terms such as "primitive races" and "savages" introduce a certain degree of referential ambiguity, there can hardly be any doubt about the fact that some of these "primitive races," "tribes" and "savages" were to be found in Africa (darkest Africa!) and much of what is to-day termed the "South" - third world. It would, however, be uncharitable to expect a man, working as Marx did, with the conceptual categories which intrigued him to have had more than a passing and disdainful interest in primitive man. For in a sense, primitive man, unlike the peasantry and proletariat were not yet on history's conveyor belt. They were not, so to speak, in the arena of class struggle - they were (out) side history. It is the familiarity of what Hegel, Freud and Marx and other founders of discursivity proclaimed about "people of colour" which reminds us that through and through they are our contemporaries having contributed the status of their discourse to the chain of discourse which is sometimes described as colonial discourse.

 

II

In the Foreword to Michael Billig's pamphlet (1979) on Psychology, racism & fascism, Robert Moore points out that: "Most social scientists regard scientific racism as dead. But it will not lie down and many believe that there is some sort of case to answer because the noise continues. It is not enough for us to effect boredom, and detachment from what in intellectual terms has become merely irritating, because the political consequences are real especially when they break through into 'legitimate' politics" (page not indicated). For a while I will not be discussing the varieties of ethnopsychiatric discourse. It might appear as if I am taking a devious route by interposing the problem of scientific racism at this point. But it should be remembered that "scientific racism" like ethnopsychiatry proper is concerned with the psychological study of people other than westerners, often in comparative fashion. A qualification is necessary here. The domain of scientific racism in as much as it involves psychological discourse includes more than cross-cultural study since most of the investigations such as those of intelligence may involves blacks and whites in countries such as the United States, for example. I want to draw attention to the contemporary problem of scientific racism in view of the fact that, the "dispersion" and "circulation" of its discourse is wide ranging and its linkages are discernible in South Africa as well, but of that later.

What Billig (1979) attempts within the space of a closely argued thirty-nine pages, is to establish whether there are any connections between "contemporary fascism" and psychological theories of racial differences in intelligence. Billig (1979) begins with a concise but detailed account of race science in Nazi Germany and singles out the work of, amongst others, Hans Gunter who believed, inter alia, that an understanding of race was a central concern of all the sciences of "man". In fact, Gunter believed that the study of race was the key to the understanding of all the human sciences (see Billig, 1979: 4-7). After the Second World War, elitist racial theories appeared to have lost their appeal and this occasions little surprise since Nazism pointed the way to the outer limits which a crude mixture of racism and fascism can lead to. Psychologists, like other scientists and intellectuals, provided much of the assumed scientific basis of Nazism.

What the experience of war on a large scale (including genocide on a large scale) failed to achieve was an enlightened humility and tolerance for difference. Instead, it was not long before race science began to rear its head. Old images, cushioned firmly on past "scientific" discourse reasserted themselves. The primary "object" of this postwar discourse, the object that is, of postwar race science became the problem of differences in intelligence between blacks and whites. Arthur Jensen introduced the discursive shift when in 1969, he published an article in The Harvard Educational Review, entitled "How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?" (see Billig, 1979: 9). In his 1969 article, Jensen studied racial differences in intelligence (intelligence quotient) between blacks and whites. His conclusions: the innate intellectual qualities of blacks are on the average inferior to those of whites. Jensen favoured a genetic explanation of this racial difference and went so far as to say that enrichment programmes to improve the intelligence of blacks were not cost effective and were, therefore, a waste of time. "However", writes Billig (1979: 9), "the effect of Jensen's work on fascist groups throughout the world was immediate and electric. The fine details of the various arguments were irrelevant to their purposes: what mattered was the chance to make race-science respectable once again".

Jensen earned himself the dubious honour of launching racist science into mainstream psychological discourse. And yet it was Britain's "most influential psychologist" who appropriated Jensen's theories (Billig, 1979: 9). Hans Eysenck, a German by birth wanted this appropriation to be something more than a mere declaration of recognition and support of Jensen's theories (ibid: 9). Eysenck's appropriation of Jensen's discourse took the form of a book: Race, intelligence and education.

One of the conclusions to be drawn from Billig's analysis is that Eysenck's appropriation of Jensen's discourse is not only a matter of scientific concern for, Eysenck is but one (prominent without doubt) of a number of American, European and South African intellectuals who are nurturing racist science and racist culture. None of them is working in isolation, that is, all the important figures are linked together in terms of their work through editorships of a specific set of semi-academic journals (see Billig, 1979: 9). What is striking also is the circulation internationally of a series of texts which are not only published through a limited number of fascist journals but are appropriated by fascist groups in Europe and the United States (see Billig, 1979: 34). Most of the journals identified by Billig have actively promoted the theories of Jensen and Eysenck. The kinds of questions which Billig's discourse is meant to answer also show the relationship between racist science and contemporary fascism (see Billig, 1979: 34).

The fixity of the representation of the Other (blackness) which race-science places before our eyes pronounces the genetic inferiority of blacks particularly with regard to intelligence. The discourse says: It cannot be helped and no one should fret about it: let it be so! What makes matters worse is that this intellectual vulnerability is presumed to be biological thus pushing the discourse beyond the domain of genetics, evolution and that which is shrouded in mystery: creation itself. Here too we bear witness to the phenomenon of making strange, only this time, the discourse is not pressured beyond itself by a torrent of epithets. The discourse is numerical thus appropriating unto itself the authority of empirical science. This time, the black man is not a child, he is not a beast. He is afflicted with a condition which cannot be alleviated. In short, since he cannot be helped by anyone, least of all himself in changing his innate genetic endowment, he is cursed. And since as Foucault has said, "visibility is a trap", the black man cannot get out of sight, get lost and give his interlocutor a respite. And so it is that besides Freud, Marx, Hegel, Jung, Eysenck and Jensen other interventions should be considered. While the work of Eysenck and Jensen represents part of the internationalisation of race science there is a well established tradition of discourse by Euro-American savants concerned with the broad field of ethnopsychiatry and what some writers describe as "African psychology".

The discourse on the intellectual inferiority of blacks is a resplendent inscription (a substitution) proffered by empiricist psychological science. Sanitised with a bountiful presence of numerical representation, this kind of "science" of the Other fails in its mission to make us know its object (know in the sense of knowledge). Inferior to art as it is, it is a discourse whose predominant quality is a charismatic allusion to its object. It is a discourse which makes the reader feel and perceive. It offers us decisive conclusions which are preceded by tenuous premises and concepts. Looked at in this light, it could be taken for a perverse aesthetic but since we are able to discern its ideological underbelly, we are able today to recognise it for the artifice it really is.

The discourse on intelligence within the colonial and race-supremacist cultures is a sign (a decisive one no doubt) in a larger separation of reason (western and white) and unreason (primitive and black). As a sign, intelligence is not amenable to an arbitrary separation from a larger net-work of signs, namely those invoking personality. If the notion of black intellectual inferiority is a curse in colonial and neo-colonial discourse, the psychological discourse on African personality offers no salvation. Ethnopsychiatric discourse is assertive, and unequivocal in its inscriptions of the intelligence and personality of the Other, less so than is the case with the body which, as we know, has been the locus of both discipline and desire. When we read locutions such as The mind of man in Africa, Mind in the heart, of darkness, The pagan soul and Black Hamlet to mention the most illustrative instances we experience an uncanny feeling of being privileged. At the threshold of a discourse these kinds of locutions are not only devices for making the object of discourse strange, but allow us to escape momentarily into what Edward Said describes as radical realism. Said (1978: 72) describes radical realism in the following terms: "Philosophically, then, the kind of language, thought, and vision that I have been calling orientalism very generally is a form of radical realism; anyone employing orientalism, which is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities and regions deemed Oriental, will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or a phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality ... The tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength ... For all these functions it is frequently enough to use the simple copula is". I believe that this radical realism is always paradoxical in the sense that its determination is always metaphorical or to put it differently, it carries with it the momentum of primary process activity in spite of the fact that it intends to be unequivocal. Should the victim of racism (whether it be the colonial or Apartheid variety or for that matter anti-Semitism) succumb to the seduction of this radical realism by engaging in a lopsided dialogue with the coloniser, the ultimate fate will be no other than that which Fanon has so forcefully presented to us in his writings. Since it is not possible in the present context to deal with Fanon's anti-colonial discourse, it is necessary to make the point that his intervention is deserving of closer study in its own right. Recent work on Fanon, such as the study by Jock McCulloch (1983) suffers from too traditional a mode of discourse to enable us to see more clearly the difficulties of a radical response to colonialism and colonial discourse. What seems to be required at the present time is anti-colonial discourse of a variety represented in the work of Edward Said (1981) and Homi K Bhabha (1983).

 

III

Colonial discourse respects no boundaries, its geography is that of a limitless terrain and I consider this characteristic so decisive that I will not bother to introduce conceptual distinctions between the so-called "African psychology", "Ethnopsychiatry" and "race science". I find no strategic value for the present analysis in such distinctions. Small wonder then that I have and will continue to use these terms as signifiers in a single semantic field. In the orthodox register of the social sciences, Ethnopsychiatry is a domain of study whose primary object is the study of psychology and behaviour of non-western peoples. Its development has been closely associated with the history of the development of colonialism and neo-colonialism.

What about South African Apartheid discourse? As I have pointed out earlier, the dispersion and circulation of colonial discourse is such that its terrain is vast such that South Africa is only one of the strategic locations at its disposal. I prefer, therefore, to search elsewhere, for another beginning, for locutions which are much more general -directed as they are to Africans on the African continent.

Before proceeding, however, I need to clarify much that has been implicit in my approach to texts. First let me say with Ricoeur (1979) that in the social sciences (including the "dubious science" called psychiatry) the question relating to interpretation no longer concerns that which is veridical but that which can defeat a particular claim or interpretation. The first important consideration is to make the text speak; to speak in such a way that the original intentions of the author pale into insignificance. In a similar vein, one should eschew the temptation of a psychoanalysis of the author and concentrate instead on that which is at the vanguard of the text as opposed to that which is behind or below it. In the case of all discourse, we are more than entitled to ask: who is speaking and from which strategic location? And finally, since the text (at the "instance of discourse") presents us with an entirely novel situation, we need to interrogate it such that it can create a "world" of discourse unique because of its referential features.

 

IV

The colonial discourse on Africa and Africans is a historically specific one. It will be evident in the course of my discussion that there are a whole series of texts spanning both the continent and historical time culminating in the 1980s with the South African version of colonial discourse called Apartheid. For example, the work of Professor Porot in Algeria antedates that of J C Carothers. But of the two, Carothers is the more significant due to the role which his work has continued to play in colonial ethnopsychiatric discourse. Professor Porot studied Muslims and presented a characterlogical and personality profile of the Muslim which included the following features: the Muslim is credulous, suggestible, mentally puerile, violent by nature (hereditary), suffers from neurologic immaturity (di-encephalic dominance), is less curious than a child and rather commits murder than suicide (see McCulloch, 1983: 17-18).

The psychology of Mau Mau: that is the object of Carothers' discourse, the object of his science. On the one hand is psychology - a promise of scientific understanding and on the other, the Mau Mau conjuring up images of savages in revolt reminiscent no doubt of Freud's primal horde. Further still: cannibalistic orgies in a primeval jungle. Carothers is privileged both professionally and in terms of the company he keeps (the World Health Organization and later, the British Colonial Office). Because of this strategic location in his texts, he cannot but produce a discourse which is plurivocal. So you and I are expected to feel privileged since by reading his texts we too will be keeping "good company" (incidentally a favourite phrase of his). But one must remember that because of his strategic location in his texts he could count on the power of those who were to be the original recipients of his discourse.

The African under-employs the frontal lobes which is notable as a form of cortical sluggishness. He is a character of extremes who is guided by emotion rather than insight. He is prone to extreme violent acts and has a low frustration tolerance level. Carothers' African thinks like a child and is characterised by a tenuous sense of security. What is more, he displays an inability for synthesis. Again we are face to face with the "child" who kills, with the mysteries of Creation and with a universe in which the coloniser is absent or silent. Only the African's culture and his geographical location count for is it not true that studies of culture are, in fact studies of psychology? Carothers repressed issues relating to the political societies and denied that the Mau Mau insurrection had anything to do with the historical and material conditions of their lives. The revolt is explained away through a misrecognition in which the Kikuyu are constituted as a people with a "neurotic" predisposition who are unable to adjust to the stresses and strains of cultural transition. This absence of the coloniser is intriguing and it is one of the more fundamental inscriptions in Carothers' discourse. It is a silence of the powerful and who should dare to disturb it?

In The mind of man in Africa we find Carothers moving from one strategic location to another, in each case, in a desperate attempt to "know" his object, to produce scientific discourse. He achieves this aim in two questionable ways. The first is represented by a distressing reliance on esoteric and archaic texts. A more sinister element in his discourse is keeping what he calls "good company". It is not difficult to show that Carothers was not keeping good company at all except if it can be assumed he too was a conscious promoter of race science like Eysenck and Jensen (see Billig, 1979).

Carothers admires Eysenck, Shuey, McGurk, J D J Hofmeyer and of course Africa's most "prominent" Psychologist, Simon Biesheuvel. A link with race science and with individuals connected with fascist journals like The Mankind Quarterly may be difficult to substantiate but the tendency on Carothers' part must be recognised for what it is. It is the South African connection, however, which is intellectually more sinister. Social science discourses about the Blacks in South Africa and discourses about Black Americans should never be taken at face value and yet we find Carothers appropriating these discourses, without question. Biesheuvel, Hofmeyer, Eysenck, McGurk, Shuey, Carothers says: if you had not spoken I would speak. Two years before the Nationalists came to power, Simon Biesheuvel became the first Director of the National Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR). It was the National Institute for Personnel Research under the commanding presence of Dr Simon Biesheuvel (an ex Lieutenant-Colonel in the South African Air Forces' Aptitude Testing section) which became the nerve-centre of African psychological research (see Bulhan, 1981: 28).

The dispersion of South African psychological discourse in The mind of man in Africa achieves significance if we consider a number of scenarios. In the first instance, since 1948 when the National Party assumed power it refined to a fine art the techniques of ideological control of the country's black majority. South Africa was also poised after the second world war to become a major outpost of capitalism such as she has become today.

It was also about this time that Simon Biesheuvel became Director of the National Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR). The appointment of Biesheuvel (NIPR) and the establishment of the National Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR) was to have far-reaching consequences not only on the contours of the political economy of South Africa but led also to the internationalisation of South African psychological discourse coming from the very heart of the Apartheid society. Small wonder then that Carothers busks so much on the "good company" he keeps in his most recent discourse (see Carothers, 1972: 81, 89, 98-102, 104, 107, 112, 119, 135, 139, 161, 166, 180).

As recently as 1981, Bulhan was able to demonstrate the penetration of racist themes within South African psychological discourses as well as within the methods of psychological testing devised by the National Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR). Tests for the selection of African workers developed at the NIPR spread into several English speaking countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Zambia with the net result that thousands of African workers through a significant part of English speaking Africa have been subjected to selection procedures developed at the National Institute for Personnel Research (see Bulhan, 1981: 34-37).

What kind of African psychological discourse was being appropriated by Euro-American psychologists, near-psychologists and psychiatrists like Carothers? Bulhan has identified a number of telling statements attributed to Biesheuvel, statements which are a pointer to inscriptions of blackness which Biesheuvel patronisingly offered to South African ideologues, mining magnates and international race science (see Bulhan 1981: 34-37). One day Biesheuvel will say he was betrayed by the written word, that the meanings we attach to his discourse are fabrications and that as a scientist he remained "objective" ...

In his 1958 paper on "Objectives and methods in African psychological research" published in the Journal of Social Psychology Biesheuvel, encouraged no doubt by his national and international reputation, could tell the world what the ground rules in "African psychological research" are. These ground rules, the bottomline as it were, Biesheuvel stated along the following lines. The aims of African psychological research must include: (1) "to gain an understanding of the behaviour of African peoples"; (2) "to provide means of testing the general validity of psychological hypothesis concerning human behaviour" and finally (3) "to determine the extent to which (the African's behaviour) is modifiable" (see Biesheuvel, 1958: 161-168).

As is often the case, Biesheuvel recognises difference, a difference of the Other which must be subjected to the gaze of "African psychological" science in order that the opacity of Africans must be substituted by a permanent transparency. This would then become a new kind of visibility of the Other, a visibility that would no longer be mediated only by the body's blackness (the sociological schema of the body) but by the special peculiarity of the black psyche.

The "understanding of the behaviour of African peoples" is not disciplined curiosity. It is an understanding in the service of ideology: one which must maximise the opportunities for surveillance, discipline and social control. African psychological research must indicate the degree to which the behaviour of the Other can be "modified" to serve the interests of the powers. Like race science, Biesheuvel's African psychological research selects for itself a space, a strategic location from which it can help in the reproduction of relations of racial and class domination in South African society.

The racist tendencies in this type of discourse should not surprise us. What should surprise us is the wholescale appropriation of this discourse together with its technologies (psychological tests) by Euro-American psychologists and psychiatrists such as Carothers. Described as a "distinguished psychiatrist" and a man with connections at high places, Carothers' discourse is an important link in the dispersion of ethnopsychiatric discourse about Africans and Afro-Americans. Having said that, I should add that like the South African psychologist De Ridder, whose discourse I consider a little later, Carother's representation of Africans includes a neurotic disposition in which anxiety and insecurity are paramount. So it can be seen that beginning with Freud, the inscriptions, child, neurotic are not only fundamental to the discourse about Africans but are part of a net-work of signifiers that "radical realism" has appropriated for itself.

 

V

Since the text of Mannoni's discourse, Prospero and Caliban has been the subject of much discussion, a passing reference should suffice (see Fanon, 1967: Chapter 4; see also McCulloch, 1983: 21-26). Fanon's response to Mannoni's discourse as well as his intervention in its entirety are deserving of a separate essay. The issues are complex and cannot be adequately dealt with in the present paper. We have noticed how in Car others' discourse the coloniser is either absent or arrogantly silent. In Mannoni's case, however, the coloniser is not only present but, what is more, he is a powerful presence requiring immediate recognition. "In short, then", Mannoni says, "what I want the reader to realize is that a colonial situation is created so to speak, the very instant a white man, even if he is alone, appears in the midst of a tribe, even if it is independent, so long as he is thought to be rich or powerful or merely immune to the local forces of magic, and so long as he derives from his position, even though only in his most secret self, a feeling of his own superiority" (Mannoni, as cited by McCulloch, 1983: 22).

Both coloniser and colonised are trapped since the colonial relationship is prefigured in the historical circumstances which have led to inferiority (white, western) and dependency (black, preliterate) as communal personality types. The sense of inevitability of the colonial relationship, coupled with its "unrealistic", "emotional" and "neurotic" character presents us with a psychoanalytic diagnosis, the treatment of which even Freud could not have readily contemplated. Mannoni assures us: neither the coloniser nor the victim are to blame for this complicated state of affairs which leads to colonial racism and exploitation. So, although Mannoni tried to bring in the coloniser into his discourse; to accord him sufficient recognition as an angle from which to contemplate Otherness, it is the former's unconscious which remains the motive force. All other expressions of white power, military, economic and political are subject to the primacy of the unconscious. No other forms of response by the colonised are contemplated. Neither are they permissable since only a response at the level of a deep structure is all that the unconscious and the colonial situation will countenance. Here again, as elsewhere in colonial discourse, is the ubiquitous impulse for the medicalisation of the inscription of Otherness (in terms of psychopathology) only this time, the coloniser occupies a space.

Nevertheless, psychoanalytic theory and practice produced other discourses about Africans apart from Mannoni's text. One such a remarkable text was produced in South Africa one year before the historic victory of the Nationalist party in 1948. Once the Nationalist Party was in power it embarked on a vigorous Apartheid legislative programme. Acts intended to entrench racial discrimination and segregation included in those early years: The Population Registration Act, The Coloured Voters Act, The Bantu Authorities Act and the Bantu Education Act. All this legislation was promulgated within a time span of six years (see Manganyi, 1983: 94-96). The very first paragraph of Wulf Sachs' Black Hamlet (1947) tells us that part of the discourse we are about to hear is familiar. It reads as follows: "He had lived in South Africa all his life. 'So', he said to me, 'you are going to settle in Johannesburg. Well - here's the best advice I can give you. Leave your ideas in Europe. You're going among blacks - gentle, happy savages - children, children who never grow beyond the age of ten or twelve. So if you have any notion of treating them as equals, forget about it'" (Sachs, 1947: 3).

This is an utterance of a white South African before 1948. From what we know, neither is it an utterance from one who speaks as a scientist should speak. Yet, what strikes us is the authoritative manner in which the utterance is made as well as its proximity to inscriptions of Africans found in Ethnopsychiatry and "African" psychological discourse. By the 1920s and 1930s, much of the "scientific" discourse about Africans had become part of the white people's folk wisdom. Wulf Sachs uncouples himself from this folk wisdom at the very outset of his discourse. He was intent on exploiting the potential of the psychoanalytic situation to the full. (See L Stone's The Psychoanalytic situation: An examination of its development and essential nature [1961] for a classical description of the critical elements which are constitutive of the treatment relationship.) The most remarkable aspect of the "psychoanalytic" story of the traditional healer-in-waiting, John Chavambira is not so much that a semi-literate African can survive the rigorous demands of daily one hour sessions for a period of a little over two years. (John Chavambira was not a patient in the regular sense of the word. Instead, he had come to Johannesburg from what is today, the Republic of Zimbabwe. It was Sachs who needed John Chavambira as a subject for psychoanalytic study [see Sachs, 1947: 7]). It is rather that Sachs text is an early instance of what we could in todays' terminology describe as psychobiography: a type of psychohistorical discourse. It has become traditional in the field of psychobiography and psychohistory to refer to Freud's study of Leonardo da Vinci as the marker event in the development of this variety of discourse (see Manganyi, 1980: 34-52; see Stannard, 1980: 3-30). It is not as if Wulf Sachs ignored the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. Neither did he fail to explore dreams, resistance and transference when occasions presented themselves. But Sachs did more: he transgressed some important psychoanalytic prohibitions.

His relationship with John Chavambira continued outside the fifty minute hour such that the imperative demand for abstinence was violated, Sachs and Chavambira engaged in a long process of mutual self-enrichment in a situation in which interracial mistrust was rife. The outcome is a text about Wulf Sachs and John Chavambira together and separately. What is more, it is a discourse about traditional Africa, about psychoanalytic discourse and about the social history of early Johannesburg in the 1920s and the 1930s. It is a discourse about slum life in Swartyard, Sophiatown and other early Johannesburg ghettoes. In short, it is not one man's story. It is a story of a people's despair under blatant white oppression and the stirrings of resistance and revolt. That which John Chavambira achieves for himself in terms of his limited understanding of the political situation; sustaining his ancestoral beliefs and joining and organising political resistance in the same breath is symbolic of the African peoples' capacity for political struggle. The constitutive elements in Wulf Sachs discourse on Africans departs in important respects from what we have noted with regard to ethnopsychiatry, African psychological research and race science. This time, even the semi-literate African is a man and political and economic factors are given an importance in the discourse which is often missing in the texts and discourses we have considered thus far.

Black Hamlet deserves closer study as an example of South African pre-Apartheid discourse about Africans and their political and economic circumstances before 1948. However, even though I have already referred to Biesheuvel's work most of which, it must be remembered, is post-1948, I need to consider, in some detail a later example of South African psychological discourse to suggest the continuities in the psychological representations of Otherness. If Biesheuvel concerned himself with questions relating to African psychological research in general and its internationalisation, a contemporary Johannesburg psychologist set himself a much more ambitious task, namely to "bridge the gap between opinions and facts" about the personality of urban Africans in South Africa (De Ridder, 1961: ix).

His research sponsors, he tells us were Shell South Africa and PUTCO Operating and Technical Services. Lest we should, in the end, doubt his conclusions the usual technical assurances about sample size and so on are provided. And indeed, difference between the blacks and the whites have to be established at the outset and De Ridder's solution is a description in full measure of the African's "tribal" and "urban" environments. For him, culture constitutes the royal road to the understanding of difference and his indebtedness to the earlier work of Carothers is evident in the preliminary strategies of his discourse (see De Ridder, 1961: xii).

De Ridder cannot be accused of superficiality. Apart from his dependence on psychoanalytic metapsychology he chose a modified version of a depth technique, the well known Thematic Apperception Test. The x-ray of the African psyche, the unconscious which delivers itself to us as narrative is copiously presented throughout the text and at last we encounter what De Ridder constitutes as the personality of the urban African (see De Ridder, 1961: 66-168).

What are the cardinal inscriptions of the African which this particular discourse displays? In the urban African, anxiety and insecurity are endemic (see De Ridder, 1961: 84). De Ridder ascribes this characteristic to the African's ignorance about law; fear of attack by fellow Africans (tsotsis and gangsters); fear of arrest for technical offences; living in the slum conditions; and bewilderment in the face of a menacing environment (see De Ridder, 1961: 81). The personality of the urban African is dominated by the Id - which is to say, by the most "primitive" and pleasure seeking system in the entire personality matrix as formulated by Freudian theory (see De Ridder, 1961: 86). Africans suffer from a lack of emotional control (underdeveloped Ego, super-ego?) and "as a group appear to be an aggressive people" (ibid: 84).

The urban African's motivation occasions surprise since it is so "personally biased" and directed at the acquisition of wealth (see De Ridder, 1961: 90-91). After proclaiming the existence of moral laxity among urban Africans De Ridder (1961: 97) sums up his perception by describing the relationship between males and females as one "characterised by an almost animal-like primitivism". Once more, this propensity is ascribed to "weak ego controls," and the preponderance of Id dominated behaviours (ibid: 97). An aside of immense importance in the recognition of blacks says: the black man's approach to women is aggressive and one wonders what else lies beneath this metaphorical type of discourse. An aggressive sexual approach with its allusions to penetration and potency, coupled with the Africans "immature exhibitionism" conjures up images of danger. But as I pointed out earlier, this type of imagery in psychological discourse about Africans is part of the elaboration of the psychoanalytic myth of the origins of the social organisation of society. Here too, as in some earlier examples, one is made to feel, perceive and not to know the African. And here too, in the early 1960s, the African is still a child who is not only sexually potent and mischievous but is also prone to violence, Immature, anxious, insecure and naively exhibitionistic: is he not an inadequate personality or, worse still, simply neurotic as has often been suggested?

De Ridder's (1961) preference for "facts" over "opinions" about the Africans "communal" personality characteristics is not sustained by a devotion to science. He says this much in a statement tucked away on page 170: "The urban areas are the African political melting-pots of the union, and the type of personality emerging from this cultural cauldron is of political and economic interest as well as being of psychological and sociological significance". Political and economic interests are primary and the social science significance of understanding and constituting the African personality in this fashion is secondary. And here too, the white man and his political, economic and military power is absent. The African must be understood in terms of his culture and the conditions of violence and poverty with which he has surrounded himself.

It is worthy of note that De Ridder's discourse makes greater claims than those which are associated with discrete psychological processes such as abilities and aptitudes. Its aim is a total representation which takes aspects such as intelligence and aptitudes for granted. Beyond this, is the fact that the decade of 1960s was not only one of unprecedented economic growth but it was also a period during which black resistance to apartheid was escalating. In a context such as this, the "political economy of truth" (Foucault) becomes of more than usual significance (see Foucault, 1980: 112-133).

The problematic surrounding discourses about the blacks boils down to considerations regarding the manner in which discourses of the kind discussed in this paper circulate within the social body (the economic, political and cultural spheres) as well as their elevation to the status of truth and the reign of "opinion". Amid many statements which could be cited, it seems to me that one can summarise the consequences of psychological discourses by quoting Foucault (1980: 154) when he says: "This reign of 'opinion', so often invoked at this time, represents a mode of operation through which power will be exercised by virtue of the mere fact of things being known and people seen in a sort of immediate, collective and anonymous gaze. A form of power whose main instance is that of opinion will refuse to tolerate areas of darkness".

We would be naive if we thought that the discourses of ethnopsychiatry, race-science and African psychological research have not been appropriated by Apartheid ideologues for their own purposes. What more rational legitimation of racial discrimination, segregation and domination of blacks could one need beyond the limits of "scientific" discourse? The potential uses of this kind of "truth", this "knowledge" of the African as childlike, as innately inferior, as dangerous sexually and as a violent being, and a neurotic to make matters worse must surely have had a role to play in the various strategies of white power: separate education, residential segregation, exclusion of blacks from the exercise of political power, exploitation of African labour and the absence of equal economic opportunities. Various ideological state apparatuses came into being to circulate the effects of this knowledge in the educational domain as well as the media. And in the circumstances, Aime Cesaire (1972: 43) is talking for all of us when he writes: "I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement". This is a twentieth century reality which sadly is often taken for granted.

 

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1 This article was first published as: Manganyi, N C (1985) Making strange: Race, science and ethnopsychiatric discourse, in Barker, F et al (eds) (1985) Europe and its others - Volume 1. Colchester: University of Essex. Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1984. Only minor editorial changes have been made to the original.