| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sub-Saharan Africa

Jonathan Sadowsky. Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 169. Cloth $45.00, paper $16.95.
Madness raises questions about the nature of reality. It brings into sharp focus the thin line separating the normal from the pathological. It interrogates the ambiguities of the firm distinction between the physical and the surreal realms of the mind. What do we mean when we apply psychiatric labels such as "madness," "insanity," and "lunacy" to someone? What is a "lunatic"? Who decided who was insane, and how did they come to that decision? In this book, Jonathan Sadowsky attempts to grapple with these and other questions that have for years been at the core of cross-cultural psychology. Sadowsky's intention is not to discover what constitutes the essence of madness, an ahistorical encumberance and an elusive reality over which much energy has been dissipated; rather his objective is a historical inquiry into the ways madness has been construed, defined, treated, and challenged through a focus on colonial southwestern Nigeria.	1
In 1906, after warding off the request for many years, the British colonial government reluctantly adopted the policy of confining vagrant Africans in insane asylums. For decades, however, the new policy succeeded in ridding the society of the nuisance posed by wandering lunatics but did little to alleviate the suffering of those incarcerated. The insane were viewed and treated more like prisoners than patients. The emphasis was on social control rather than comprehension or cure. Far from being panoptic, and built more for the people outside than for those within, the colonial asylums served as custodian institutions where conditions were lamentable, to say the least. Treated as wild beasts, the Nigerian insane were "chained like felons in the dank, pestilential shelter" and "crammed together in tight quarters" that were "alarmingly bad" (p. 25). Calls for reform were treated with disdain and indifference by the colonial administration until the late colonial period, when the push toward decolonization began to bring Nigerians into the saddle of power.	2
However, the significance of Sadowsky's book is not in its exposition of the culpable neglect of the welfare of the insane by the colonial order; rather it is in his successful representation of asylum institutions as the veritable exemplar of the colonial order. The British adopted a "hands-off" approach that justified parsimony as a means of cultural preservation, disdained reform, and disavowed interference as an imposition on the African way of life. But this was an irrational logic, a kind of self-deception based on the faulty reasoning that one could have colonialism without imposition. Against this background, Sadowsky rejects Anthony Appiah's warning against adding "the colonial mental hospital to the long bill of indictment against colonialism" and insists that the indictment must stand. Thus, created as an expedient after years of stasis and in response to the mounting scandal of troublesome lunatics, the asylums become enduring scandals of the colonial era.	3
Beginning with Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1963), apparently the most biting critique of the late colonial social order, critical studies of mental pathology in colonial Africa are not new. However, this book expands the frontiers of our knowledge of colonial psychiatry in many ways. While acknowledging the contribution of Fanon, Sadowsky rejects the inconsistency of his interpretation, acknowledging that, although Fanon correctly stresses the specificity of the vivid and powerful case histories he draws from the French-Algerian colonial wars, he ultimately makes bold generalizations that go beyond what his data can support. Sadowsky's subsequent analysis is, nevertheless, in many ways consonant with Fanon's thesis that colonialism strongly determines the nature and content of its own mental pathology. (The most wide ranging of the scholarship following Fanon's is that of Jock McCulloch's Colonial Psychiatry and the African Mind [1995], which argues that even though colonial psychiatry is a useful window for understanding colonial mentality, it provides only limited insight into the African mind.)	. . .

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