Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa Julie Parle Richard C. Keller. Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xi + 294 pp. Ill. $70.00, £44.50 (cloth, ISBN-10: 0-226-42972-5; ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42972-4), $25.00, £16.00 (paperbound, ISBN-10: 0-226-42973-3; ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42973-1). There are many reasons why Richard C. Keller’s Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa is an important book: it adds considerably to our knowledge of the history of psychiatry in Africa through to the present; it does likewise for our understanding of the importance of North Africa in the history of psychiatry; and it is a brave book that recognizes the many complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions that such histories should compel us to confront. It is also a timely one that has much to say about the dangerous discourses around the relationship between Islam and irrationality that reverberate around the world today. Keller shows that Orientalism and discourses about “the Other” were powerful framers of supposedly objective science and medicine, including psychiatric knowledge and institutions, in the Maghreb. He makes it clear that from its arrival in North Africa in the late 1800s, and more especially through the work of the “Algiers School” of Antoine Porot and his protégés, which was influential in the interwar period, colonial psychiatry directly contributed to stereotypes of North Africans as “born slackers, born liars, born robbers, and born criminals.”1 According [End Page 746] to such “knowledge,” the normal North African Muslim represented a “mixture of insanities in varying doses.”2 This knowledge had material consequences: “the new discipline of ethnopsychiatry informed educational and professional discrimination against Muslims, shaped discourse about immigration into France, and provided the essential background for the French army’s psychological warfare programs during the Algerian struggle for independence” (p. 7). The significance of the study is far wider than the study of North Africa, however, as Keller challenges the traditional narrative of the relationship between metropole and colonial peripheries. While in France itself, psychiatric theory and practice stultified, the supposedly blank canvas of the Maghreb gave psychiatrists license to experiment and to innovate. “In the twentieth century, colonial psychiatrists honed their discipline’s cutting edge by implementing these technologies at least contemporaneously with—and in many cases far earlier than—their metropolitan colleagues . . .” (p. 6). Moreover, Keller powerfully argues that the history of the discipline is more complicated than its critics, most notably Frantz Fanon, have hitherto suggested and that “colonial psychiatry was more than a system for the defense of settler prejudices. At different periods, . . . the field was less a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism than it was a tool for the emancipation of the colonized, an innovative branch of social and medical science, an uncomprehending therapeutic system, a discipline in crisis, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship” (p. 4). It is this ambiguity that lies at the heart of the book and that is explored through analysis of institutional practices in mental hospitals and mental health services and in medical writings; through a provocative reading of patient experiences and the meanings of madness as resistance; via literary, filmic, and documentary representations of madness as a metaphor; and through an illuminating and important concluding chapter that introduces the reader to the legacy of colonial psychiatry for France as well as for the Maghreb. I close with two observations. First, Colonial Madness ultimately shows that while there is no “Grand Narrative” of psychiatry in Africa or elsewhere, there is also a disturbing common thread in its institutional practices no matter how utopian its originators or sincere its practitioners. As Keller notes of Blida Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria today: “The hospital has become what its founders and caretakers, including Antoine Porot, Frantz Fanon, and Mahfoud Boucebci, had most hoped to avoid: a warehouse of madness that recalls the asylums of the late nineteenth century rather than a vestige of colonial investment and a sign of a progressive outlook on psychopathology” (p. 225–26). This is a troubling but challenging insight for...