In this first history of the practice and the theoretical underpinnings of colonial psychiatry in Africa, Jock McCulloch describes the clinical approaches of well-known European psychiatrists who worked with indigenous Africans, among them Frantz Fanon, J. C. Carothers and Wulf Sachs. They were a disparate group, operating independently of one another, and mostly in intellectual isolation.

But despite their differences, they shared a coherent set of ideas about 'the African mind', premissed on the colonial notion of African inferiority. In exploring the close association between the ideologies of settler societies and psychiatric research this intriguing study is one of the few attempts to explore colonial science as a system of knowledge and power.