Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria (review)

Jonathan Sadowsky. Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria. Medicine and Society, no. 10. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. xi + 169 pp. $45.00 (cloth, 0-520-21616-4), $16.95 (paperbound, 0-520-21617-2).

In 1959, on the eve of Nigerian independence, a twenty-nine-year-old clerk was admitted to the Aro Mental Hospital in southwestern Nigeria. At some later stage he wrote his own account of the "attack" that had led him to be institutionalized. This account is one among many used by Jonathan Sadowsky to write his imaginative, sympathetic, and perceptive narrative of the history of madness and of psychiatric institutions in colonial southwestern Nigeria. As the "patient" wrote, "I drew a flag showing the boundary of the Western Region should be, i.e. the River Niger. Then I wrote, 'We are wonderful.' Then I packed my clothes, bible, ruler & prayer Garment (I am an Aludura), my wristwatch, my shorthand fountain pen. . . . I was displacing everything, so I was brought here. When I got to Abeokuta I heard the voice of a spirit which asked me to say 'Irapada' [redemption], so I shouted 'Irapada'" (p. 49). The patient may have been "displacing everything" but, as Sadowsky shows, he and others made a kind of sense. In this short excerpt he refers to many of the major themes of the colonial experience--the impact of Christianity and the conflicts that surrounded religious change, the ethnic tensions created by arbitrary colonial boundary-making, the new tools of literacy and time-keeping.

Nigeria was the location of tropical Africa's first "lunatic asylums." Sadowsky concentrates on the southwest section of the country, an area dominated by the Yoruba ethnic group, and traces closely the history of two institutions: Yaba and Aro. Colonial asylums were reluctant creations rather than sophisticated instruments of social control, and in this particular case they evolved into a rather remarkable experiment in African psychiatry. Late colonial Nigeria produced a group of pioneering psychiatrists, including T. A. Lambo, Tolani Asuni, and A. A. Marinho, and Sadowsky draws on interviews with all three. Under Lambo's direction in the 1960s the mental hospital in Aro was to evolve an innovative and successful system of "care in the community"--one that recognized cultural differences in the perception and treatment of mental illness, and utilized local therapies and therapists alongside conventional drugs and ECT.

Sadowsky locates this story within a number of intersecting literatures. He addresses the question of the "social construction" of mental illness and that of "cross-cultural" diagnosis, arguing from his evidence that there was a large measure of agreement between Nigerians and colonial physicians on the basic definition of "madness," as well as differing views on the best way to treat it. He also, in the interstices, makes a number of important contributions to debates on the writing of African history and of colonial history in general. But the book's major contribution is its attention to the words of the patients themselves and to the content of their "delusions." Sadowsky deals with this material carefully and sensitively, demonstrating that these individuals were often expressing, sometimes very powerfully through their experiences of "persecution," the profound conflicts and confusions engendered by colonial rule.

 

Megan Vaughan
Oxford University

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