Megan Vaughan is a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. She is working on a history of death in Africa.
In 1953, Frantz Fanon took over as director of the Hôpital Psychiatrique de Blida-Joinville in Algeria. It is said that Fanon’s first act on taking charge of this overcrowded colonial hospital, in which electroconvulsive therapy was liberally dispensed and lobotomies regularly performed, was to unchain the patients. The story echoes that of Philippe Pinel breaking open the doors of...
In the final episode of the TV series Joanna Lumley’s Nile, Joanna Lumley stretches out next to the muddy dribble that is apparently the furthest source of the White Nile, deep in the mountains of Rwanda, and muses on the fact that this unimpressive wet patch gives rise to such a mighty river. Indeed, it is surprising. Determining the ‘source’ of a river is, it turns out,...
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