Racial segregation and medical discourse in nineteenth‐century Cape Town

Abstract

This study considers the timing and the nature of the emergence of racial segregation in two key colonial institutions of the nineteenth century Cape, the Breakwater Prison and the General Infirmary on Robben Island. Whereas many historians have pointed to the early 1900s as a crucial decade in the development of systematic racial segregation in society as a whole, the Robben Island hospitals and the Breakwater prisons provide evidence of segregatory pressures from the 1860s and 1870s. In this regard, medical and scientific discourses played an important role, as they did in defining the need for urban segregation (on ‘sanitary’ grounds) at the turn of the twentieth century. Institutional segregation on grounds of race occurred earlier, in part because prisons and hospitals offered controlled environments suitable for experimentation. Racial segregation was also linked to other segregatory practices, such as those which were defined in terms of gender and social status. The precise timing for the introduction of racial segregation differed between institutions; a process which has to be accounted for in terms of the particular character and ethos of each individual institution. Tensions between the universalist ethic of health care and the increasing pressures in favour of segregation were not easily resolved. By the 1890s, however, the social and scientific consensus in favour of racial segregation was overwhelming, and this was soon to be reinforced by wider political developments.