Nostalgic for modernity: reflecting on the early years of the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal

Abstract

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Fann Psychiatric Clinic was celebrated as a model institution of the new Senegalese state. Likewise, the clinic's director, a French military psychiatrist named Henri Collomb, was praised by President Senghor himself for pursuing a distinctly Senegalese style of modernity. Looking back upon that era, many Senegalese women and men who worked alongside Collomb express a sense of nostalgia for the clinic that is deeply embedded within their nostalgic feelings for Senghor's Senegal. Examining their nostalgia as both a narrative mode and a social practice, this paper extends popular and scholarly understandings of nostalgia while also diverging from the literature in one important way. In the stories told here, nostalgia is not merely a by-product or side effect of a jarring modernity. Instead, it is modernity itself – specifically Senghor's distinctly Senegalese style of modernity – that is the very object of nostalgia.