In August 1938 a young British psychiatrist named Cobb was dismissed, following a scandal, from his position as senior medical officer in charge of Mathari Mental Hospital, Nairobi. His dismissal had left the colony without a psychiatric specialist and the director of public health had been forced to appoint, temporarily, a physician named J. C. Carothers. As a district medical officer Carothers had had no formal training in psychological medicine, and his appointment was consistent with the low priority given to mental health in the colony. Much to his own surprise Carothers showed such a flair for clinical psychiatry and hospital administration that he was to remain at Mathari for the next twelve years. The research papers he published during that period and after his return to England in 1950 made him the foremost authority on mental illness in the African. From the beginning of the 1960s, however, Carothers's reputation began to wane and by the end of that decade his work, along with that of his fellow ethnopsychiatrists, had been all but forgotten. Despite that demise colonial psychiatry has much to tell us about settler societies in Africa and about the preoccupations that sustained them.

Throughout the colonial period the term ethnopsychiatry was used both by practitioners and their critics to describe the study of the psychology and behaviour of African peoples. It occupied a small and uncomfortable niche between the disciplines of psychiatry and anthropology.