Black Hamlet (review)

Reviewed by: Black Hamlet Edward T. Morman Wulf Sachs. Black Hamlet. Originally published in 1937. New introduction by Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose. Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xi + 340 pp. $45.00 (cloth), $15.95 (paperbound). Black Hamlet is at the same time a case study in psychoanalytic therapy, the report of a scientific investigation, a political polemic, a collection of ethnographic observations, and the biography of a common man whose remarkable features would otherwise have been overlooked. It was first published in 1937; a revised and expanded postwar edition appeared several times as Black Anger—once in a series that featured books by Frantz Fanon, Leroi Jones, and Malcolm X. The current edition reprints the original text, with extended introductory essays by two contemporary scholars whose respective fields are psychoanalytic literary theory and the history and ideology of South African apartheid. Wulf Sachs’s writings now comprise a primary document of sorts, and are not really appropriate for review in the pages of this journal. On the other hand, this edition as a whole—with the introductions by Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose—is a new contribution to the history of medicine (in particular, the history of psychiatry in a colonial setting), and it merits both mention and praise here. Sachs was a Lithuanian Jew who studied medicine in St. Petersburg, Cologne, and London in the period around World War I. He emigrated to South Africa in 1922, where he established himself as a physician with a special interest in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In 1928 he underwent analysis in Berlin and established ties with several significant people in the Freudian milieu. In 1934 he published Psychoanalysis: Its Meaning and Practical Applications, and it is fair to regard him as an early leader of the Freudian movement in South Africa. Not surprisingly, given his background, Sachs was also a leftist, and he sought to apply his professional skills to the political ends of racial equality and anticolonialism. He died in 1949 at the age of fifty-six. In the late 1920s, through an anthropologist friend, Sachs made the acquaintance of “John Chavafambira,” another recent immigrant to South Africa who had walked overland to Johannesburg from his native village in what is now Zimbabwe. Chavafambira was the descendant of a line of ngangas (healers), and regarded himself as a natural healer whose process of training and certification had been interrupted by his father’s premature death and his own subsequent travels. Sachs (who had worked with institutionalized psychotic black Africans and was convinced that their mental illnesses were not fundamentally different from those of Europeans) saw his encounter with Chavafambira as an opportunity to test the hypothesis that the neuroses of an essentially healthy black were no different from the neuroses of Europeans and were equally susceptible to Freudian therapeutic techniques. At the same time, Sachs regarded himself as particularly sensitive to the stresses that came with being a member of a subaltern group in a colonial country, and he set out to help Chavafambira overcome his own indecisiveness and become a full human being by engaging in healing work and political activity. The book’s title alludes both to Chavafambira’s hesitance to [End Page 803] act and to the fact that his paternal uncle had taken his father’s place—in the family, and also in the formal role of nganga. It is difficult to read Sachs’s description of Chavafambira’s life and his own intervention into Chavafambira’s affairs without feeling sympathy for Sachs’s purpose and revulsion at his unconsciously condescending tone (not to mention his misogyny, and his failure to recognize how severely he had compounded Chavafambira’s troubles at times). Dubow and Rose do a good job of historicizing Sachs’s narrative and of helping the reader appreciate the text as a telling document authentically derived from the mix of cultures that existed in South Africa in the interwar period. Edward T. Morman New York Academy of Medicine Copyright © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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