| This thesis examines the history of mental healthcare in colonial Kumase from 1888 to
1951, a period defined by persistent institutional neglect and the repeated failure of the colonial
government to build the mental hospital that its own officials recognized as necessary. The thesis
draws on archival sources from the Public Records and Archives Administration Department in
Accra and Kumase, the Manhyia Archives of Ghana, the Wellcome Collection Library in
London, and published colonial medical reports to reconstruct a history largely overlooked in
existing scholarship.
Colonial mental healthcare in the Gold Coast was custodial rather than therapeutic from
the outset, designed to manage and contain rather than treat. The prolonged failure to establish a
psychiatric facility in Kumase was the product of financial restraint, bureaucratic inertia, and
local resistance over land acquisition. This thesis, by focusing on Kumase, challenges the
dominant narrative of colonial psychiatry in Ghana and contributes to the broader scholarship of
colonial medicine in Africa. It also shows why mental healthcare in Ghana remains unevenly
distributed presently.
Keywords: British Colonialism, Lunacy, Asylum, Colonial Psychiatry, Indigenous Healing |