Mental asylums provided in Africa in the first few decades of the 1900s were scarce and more often resembled prisons instead of hospitals, “the insane were treated like wild beasts, chained like felons in dank, pestilential shelter. They were also crammed together in tight quarters which, while not as horrific as the hold of a slave ship, were nevertheless alarmingly bad” (Sadowsky, p.27). Later in the twentieth century, ideas of breaking away from European rule grew stronger and seemed more attainable with a growing number of native Africans obtaining a western education and beginning to gain power among the white colonial government, “with the coming of independence, ethnopsychiatry had to change” (McCulloch, p.121).
Two of the most predominant psychiatrists that lead the way for nationalism and decolonization in Africa were Frantz Fanon and Thomas Adeoye Lambo. Frantz Fanon was not only a psychiatrist, but also a phenomenal revolutionary writer with a vast audience; his main focus in his writings was to expose the political basis which supported ethnopsychiatry. Fanon was born in West India and fought for France during the Second World War, however he felt that he was not seen as a French citizen and was inferior to his white counterpart. Fanon began to practice in a psychiatric ward in Algeria in 1952. As a psychiatrist he helped professionalize European psychiatry in Africa, and lead the way in Africans gaining independence through changing popular beliefs in ethnopsychiatry. Fanon believed that violent revolution was the only means of ending colonial repression and cultural trauma in Africa, “the war of liberation introduced medical technique and the native technician into the life of innumerable regions of Algeria. Populations accustomed to the monthly or biennial visits of European doctors saw Algerian doctors settling permanently in their villages. The revolution and the medicine manifested their presence simultaneously” (Fanon, p.142). Thomas Adeoye Lambo was Nigeria’s first European trained psychiatrist of indigenous descent. Lambo is most known for his successful experiment at the Aro Mental Hospital in Abeokuta during the 1950s through 1960s. Adeoye Lambo understood that the previous European methods of dealing with Africans with mental illness were insufficient, so he began his own out-patient treatment services at the Aro village, initiating the first uses of modern healing techniques with traditional religion and native medicines. Lambo, while at Aro, received help from farmers near the asylum who took several of the patients as , while additionally undergoing medical treatment, the patients also had to pay for any further services such as housing. He traveled around the country and brought in a few traditional healers from different parts of Nigeria. His style helped reduce public mistrust of mental health and brought the care and treatment of mentally ill citizens into the public eye, “understanding indigenous African cultures was not only important in terms of diagnosing mental illness in African patients. Lambo also believed that cultural sensitivity could go a long way towards improving the treatment regimes available to mental patients in Nigeria” (Heaton,p. 4). Thomas Adeoye Lambo is credited with providing a starting point for helping mentally ill patients to return back into a normal setting and environment and dismantling a little bit of the stigma connected to those who suffer from mental illness, “ Lambo and other Nigerian psychiatrists who followed in his footsteps were intent on distancing themselves from a colonial psychiatry that had been more or less universally recognized as unbeneficial to the populations it was supposed to have served” (Heaton, p.21). Both Fanon and Lambo helped lead to independence and decolonization in African countries during the mid nineteen hundreds. Through these two men’s work in psychiatry, the concept that the African mind was inferior and unable to function without European rule was beginning to unravel. African nations at the time of Fanon and Lambo were gaining independence from colonial rule. Through the political and social revolutions of these psychiatrists, the indigenous people of Africa finally began to have a voice outside of what the European officials translated and interpreted for them.
In Raymond Prince’s article, ‘The “Brain Fag” Syndrome in Nigerian Students’ he described young African adults, mainly male, that were experiencing, “intellectual impairment, sensory impairment (chiefly visual), and somatic complaints most commonly of pain or burning in the head or neck” (Prince, p. 559). The article stated that the majority of those complaining about these ailments seemed to be “brain workers”, students from secondary schools or universities, teachers, or government associates, who were suffering from a distinct condition known as, brain fag syndrome. Prince claimed that the most probable cause of brain fag in Nigerian students was, “in some way related to the imposition of European learning techniques upon the Nigerian personality. It is suggested that European learning techniques emphasize isolated endeavor, individual responsibility and orderliness, activities and traits which are foreign to the Nigerian by reason of the collectivistic society from which he derives…” (Prince, p. 569). Brain fag was an example of a and it provided an excuse for European colonial rule to claim that Africans were mentally inferior and unable to cope with the changes in western civilization. During the 1950s it was a popular term for mental fatigue, and it was found almost exclusively in West Africa. However, twenty years after Prince’s article, R. Olukayode Jegede’s wrote the “Psychiatric Illness in African Students: ‘Brain Fag’ Syndrome Revisited” which examined the validity of the condition and, “concluded that brain fag syndrome is a misnomer and that more specific diagnostic terms such as anxiety neurosis and depressive neurosis should be used in its place” (Jegede, p.188). Unlike Prince’s belief that ‘brain fag’ or anxiety neurosis mainly affected Nigerian people participating in European schooling, Jegede contended that mental exhaustion was a universal problem spanning between both races and cultures Jegede also disproved brain fag syndrome as a new disease, and showed that it was only a cluster of many ailments associated with mental exhaustion. ‘Brain fag’ is now generally considered to be a depressive disorder that could possibly be linked to multiple disorders.
Psychiatry in Africa has come a long way since the beginning of the twentieth century. European psychiatrists that worked in Africa during the colonial period held to the belief that Africans could not suffer from depression because of the assumption that Africans lacked the capability to be self-reflective or self-critical and therefore a mental disease like depression wasn’t possible to develop in the African mind. Later, research during the 1950s showed that this view was nonsense. European psychiatrists developed ‘scientific’ comparisons between the European and African brain that have now been proven completely invalid and solely based on racial differences. Africans, along with all the people throughout the world, suffer from a wide variety of universal mental disorders. Psychiatry in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s began to switch over into the hands of native Africans and helped lead to independence and decolonization. Although there were many great breakthroughs and improvements in the quantity and quality of scientific knowledge in the psychiatric profession, the main thing that changed the view of Africans as mentally inferior lied within the political and social revolutions occurring in Africa in the nineteen hundreds.
Work Cited
Matthew M. Heaton. ‘Thomas Adeoye Lambo and the Decolonization of Psychiatry in
Nigeria.’
Frantz Fanon. ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’. In Les Damnés de la terre.
Paris: Francois Maspero, 1961. Translated by Constance Farrington as The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 249-310. New York: Grove Press, 1978
R. Olukayode Jegede. ‘Psychiatric Illness in African Students: “Brain Fag” Syndrome Revisited.’ Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 28 (1983): 188-92.
Jock McCulloch. ‘Towards a Theory of the African Mind.’ In Colonial Psychiatry
and ‘the African Mind,’ pp. 46-64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Jock McCulloch. ‘From Psychiatry to Politics.’ In Colonial Psychiatry and ‘the
African Mind,’ pp. 121-36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Raymond Prince. ‘The “Brain Fag” Syndrome in Nigerian Students.’ Journal of Mental
Science 106 (1960): 559-570
Jonathan Sadowsky. ‘Material Conditions and the Politics of Care.’ In Imperial
Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria, pp. 26-47. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Vaughan, Megan. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991.
