Racist brain research at Mathari Hospital that shocked the world

According to Dr Sloan Mahone, a specialist in the history of psychiatry at Oxford University, Kenya provided a perfect environment for this dubious project. Mathari became a laboratory for all sorts of bizarre experiments where the mentally sick Africans were scrutinised to purportedly determine and make conclusions about the intelligence of black people.

These were some of the worst cases of scientific racism to have emerged from any other part of the British Empire, according to some scholars and declassified documents. The aim was to use racial science to justify the alienation of Africans in Kenya while at the same time reinforcing the edifice of white supremacy.

European settlers

At the turn of 1900, Kenya became home to European settlers who couldn’t resist the allure of expansive, fertile land and easy life that was being dangled to them by colonial officials in Kenya.

In encouraging Europeans to migrate to Kenya, the colonial state’s main aim was to create a profitable British colony that would also produce goods that met the demands of the Britain empire. However, to achieve this, the colonial government also needed a skilled African workforce. But there was a dilemma.

While the education of Africans was key in achieving the government’s objectives, it was also seen as a threat to European rule. Compounding this fear was the growing agitation for equal opportunities and rights by African political associations. To the settlers, the fact that these associations were being led by church mission-educated Africans expounded the danger— in the eyes of some colonialists — of educating an African.

In 1922, associations such as the Young Kavirondo Association and Young Kikuyu Association were at the forefront of the push for educational, social and economic advancement of the indigenous people. In 1928 , the Kikuyu Central Association, which had been formed in 1924, sent its secretary-general Jomo Kenyatta to London to present grievances by the African population in Kenya, among them education and taxation, to the colonial office.

Because of the growing agitation, the government started to get involved in the education of Africans. However, it was proposed that African education should be provided in a manner that was appropriate to African conditions. This was highlighted in a memorandum on African education prepared by the Advisory Committee on Native Education, which stated that “education should be adapted to the mentality, aptitudes, occupations of various people, conserving as far as possible all sound and healthy elements in the fabric of social life.”

Dr Chloe Campbell in her book, Race and Empire, observed that the idea that education should be tailored to the needs of Africans brought up the issue of racial differences in educable capacity. Some began to question whether Africans had the mental capacity to absorb academic education, triggering a number of controversial research on the matter.

'Dangerous' education

In 1933, Dr HL Gordon, the medical officer at Mathari Mental Hospital, in a column in the Times of London and in an address to the African Circle in England, said that Africans lacked the mental capacity for “idealistic education”, that is, academic education, arguing that his research on 444 Kenyans at Mathari had revealed a consistent inferiority in brain capacity of Africans. Therefore, he warned, European education would obviously be “dangerous” to the Africans.

To supposedly prove his case, he made the incredible claim that even though dementia was quite common among Europeans, in the course of his work at Mathari, he had discovered that the condition also affected Africans who had been exposed to European education and religion.

Dr Gordon had studied medicine at Edinburgh University before working in various hospitals in London. He arrived in Kenya in 1925 and bought a farm in the white settlement of Koru near Kisumu under the government’s scheme of providing cheap land to doctors who would provide medical services to settlers. Here, his work ethics came to question following complaints by white settlers that he was always hesitant to treat their African servants.

He would later move to Nairobi to set up a private clinic. At that time, Mathari Hospital, which was overcrowded and short of staff, hired Gordon as medical officer despite him not having any formal training in psychiatry.  The large number of African patients accorded the unethical and racist doctor the opportunity to carry out bizarre research on “African backwardness” that had always been obsessed with.

Pathologist

He worked closely with Dr FW Vint, the government’s pathologist, who equally aroused controversy with his findings that the weight of the brain influenced intelligence. According to Vint, a post-mortem of the brains of 100 Africans showed a 15 per cent quantitative deficiency in the grey matter as compared with the cortex of a white man. He consequently wrote, “The stage of mental development reached by the average native (sic) is that of the average European boy of between 7 and 8 years of age.”

Following these controversial claims, a journalist from The Guardian, a British newspaper, visited a prominent Scottish anatomist and anthropologist Prof Sir Arthur Keith at the centre of scientific progress in Kent to get an expert’s view.

Keith, while agreeing with the findings, refused to come out clearly stating, “I believe in the correlation, but in practise you can’t use it. We don’t judge a man by the size of his brain nor can we judge him by the way he organises his life…”

When the journalist prodded him further, he became more precise, giving a racist view that African Americans were a good example of how supposedly an African’s brain was much inferior to that of a white person.

Without putting into consideration racial discrimination and prejudice that were prevalent in the US at the time he opined, “A whole population of West Coast negroes , who are not greatly different from those of Kenya was transported to the US, and has been planted for a long period in the midst of a white man’s. And what happens? Do we find many of them prominent in Congress, in science, in the arts?”

Professional ethics questioned

The journalist shot back, “No, but that may be due to political reasons.” In response, Prof Keith remarked that the blacks kept the “qualities of boyishness and girlishness much longer”, which was a disadvantage. Nevertheless, it was pointed out that the purported research on the “mental capacity of an African” was based on the mentally ill and was conducted by medics with no background in psychiatry — and whose professional ethics had been questioned. It was, therefore, not surprising that the racist findings were discounted by future studies. It was not until 1937 that Mathari got its first specialist in psychiatry, Dr James Cobb, who had studied and worked In England.

But within a short period of working at the hospital, his mental fitness was brought to question because of his drunkenness and various acts of bestiality with his pets. It later emerged that he had also been hospitalised in a mental facility in England after he attempted suicide. As a result, he was forced to retire by the Kenya Medical Board. But Mathari’s name remained in the history books for the dubious racist experiments whose findings were disputed.

The writer is a London-based Kenyan researcher and journalist