We do not favor specific methods of comparison at CSSH. Some of our authors emphasize technically precise approaches, with emphasis placed on proving that the things compared are indeed comparable. Some rely more on powers of association, trusting that things will be seen in a new light if they are laid side by side in new ways. What we do favor – and prize (literally, with our annual Goody Award) – are comparative studies that connect fields of enquiry and expand frames of reference. The spaces opened up by these studies are filled with possibilities for new knowledge. Often, the broadening effect involves linking up multiple scales of analysis, a technique that frees us to travel in time and space.
Nana Osei Quarshie’s essay, “Spiritual Pawning: ‘Mad Slaves’ and Mental Healing in Atlantic-Era West Africa,” is a marvel of analytic scaling. The proof is in the diversity of geographical locations and temporalities Quarshie brings together in his article. We are sometimes in family spaces, where the mentally distressed are variously cared for, cast out, or placed in the custody of shrine priests. Relations of debt, exchange, protection, and predation connect kinship worlds to transregional structures of trade, to local and imperial politics, and to the traffic in human bodies (whether enslaved, in pawn, or possessed). Across these fields, Quarshie follows the communications of territorial and traveling spirits. The complexity of the analysis is stunning.
At every level of significance, Quarshie sees healing therapies evolving alongside treatments designed to harm. This binary process, he argues, has shaped the exercise of power and the social value of persons in West Africa over centuries. His argument engages with a particular history of slavery and colonial psychiatry in Ghana, but Quarshie does not privilege narratives of pre and post. Instead, he adjusts the dominant frames of colony/modernity using a versatile mix of comparativist tools: parallelisms, mirror effects, juxtaposition of historical and ethnographic data, and the reconstruction of prior conditions. This work generates critique. It puts Quarshie in a position to understand aspects of mental health and harm that influence “the mind politic” in contemporary African states but that standard models of “the body politic” are likely to obscure.
Quarshie has a very clear sense of how he built this essay. Below, he gives a detailed account of who helped him, where he found his best ideas, when and why he decided to modify them, and what they will look like at book length. It is a generous sharing of theory and method.
Enjoy.
CSSH: The Goody panel loved “Spiritual Pawning.” We knew they would. It’s innovative. It covers a lot of time and space. The data are rich. And it’s hard to tell if it’s anthropology or history, which is icing on the cake. Congrats on producing a classic CSSH essay on your first try!
Quarshie: Thank you so much. It is an honor to receive the Jack Goody Award. As a scholar of Ghana, Goody is not only an intellectual forbearer for me, but he is also now an honorific.
CSSH: He would have been fascinated by how you compare things. There’s a lot of recombination in your essay. You take an established way of locating a problem – in your case, the “mad slave” as a problem of diminished “labor value” in the Americas – then break it apart and move it into new spaces. The comparative dimension is a function of this mobility.
And you’re moving incredible amounts of stuff. You bring political economy into an economy of spirits; you transpose shrines and lunatic asylums; you compare multiple forms of captivity and debt; you interweave aspects of African and Atlantic history that others have treated as separate threads. All this you do while pushing key reference points further back in time. The possession, healing, and harming regimes you describe have been developing side by side for hundreds of years, but no one has put them together in quite this way before.
What prompted you to move all these things around?
Quarshie: It is hard to narrate motivations and origins, but this question makes me think of the value of good mentorship. I can only speak highly of the doctoral training in the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, where I was encouraged to think conceptually across disciplines and sub-fields. My dissertation committee, made up of two medical anthropologists (Amal Hassan Fadlalla and Vinh-Kim Nguyen), a cultural historian (Derek R. Peterson), and a historical sociologist (George Steinmetz), never restricted my creativity. My professors in the MA in History and Literature at Columbia University in Paris were also particularly impactful. Together, Carol Gluck – the historian of Japan – and René Collignon – the psychiatric anthropologist of Francophone Africa – sowed seeds that grew into my focus in this article on the Ga people of Accra in the Atlantic era. René introduced me to Leith Mullings’ Therapy, Ideology and Social Change, a brilliant ethnography of Christian spiritualist mental healing among the Ga people in the 1970s. Carol was the first to ask if I found it odd that the studies of mental distress in the global south often began with the colonial emergence of European asylums, as if madness had not existed prior.
That question nagged me as I began writing about psychiatry in Ghana. As Meyer Fortes – Goody’s thesis advisor – commented in an article on cross-cultural contact, “in considering the effects of the contact between African societies and European civilization, one is apt to forget that the exploitation of Africa by Europeans began more than five centuries ago.” Fortes was admonishing early 20th century ethnographers who assumed that the changes they observed in African social institutions were inherently effects of recent colonial encounters. Their approach missed how the long history of European encounters in the region contributed to development of the very institutions they thought were changing due to the formalization of European political control.
I write from the position that, like the ethnographic study of African healing practices, the historical study of the colonial lunatic asylum deserves a careful assessment of its Atlantic era antecedents. I am not a medical historian. I am a political historian and anthropologist who works through a medical archive. I read the colonial psychiatric archive primarily as a ritual and political text. I take the agency of spirits very seriously – not as an intellectual exercise, but as a part of my lived experience growing up in Accra. I am also not an “Atlanticist.” But I am grateful for the kind support of scholars of the Black Atlantic in my graduate training: Paul Gilroy (in the MA in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at LSE’s Sociology Department), Paul C. Johnson and Rebecca Scott (both in the Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan). They all encouraged different facets of my desire to open debates on “mad slaves” in the wider Atlantic world with insights from coastal West Africa.
CSSH: Spiritual pawning is the concept you use as an opener. Tell us more about it.
Quarshie: I first used the term spiritual pawning in my doctoral dissertation. It began as a description of a simple fact. I noted a convergence between the spiritual and economic domains in the scholarship on shrines: the ritual intake process at several shrines to territorial spirits in the Gold Coast mirrored statutory processes of debt restitution known as pawning – a voluntary handing over of a ransom hostage to cover the interest on debt, while principal is still owed. Over time the concept developed into a theory of the role of shrine care in resolving afflictions characterized as madness by European and African observers in Atlantic-era West Africa. Spiritual pawning entails ritual servitude at Afro-Atlantic shrines and, more recently, at Christian prayer camps. Families or individuals confided themselves or their kin to priests who performed intercessions with or against the spirits thought to be causing the ailment. The idea is that afflicted individuals owed a debt to a spirit that had to be repaid. This healing process was also a system of ritual debt exchange that converted the mentally distressed, who by virtue of their psychological state were thought to lack labor value, into a productive labor force.
The chapter from which I generated this concept centered on a wave of municipal lunatic manhunting that had been retroactively categorized as kidnapping. In September of 1884, the Governor of the Gold Coast (colonial Ghana) discovered that due to a legal incongruency dozens of suspected African lunatics rounded up by the Gold Coast’s colonial police and transported to the Kissy Asylum in Sierra Leone had been “illegally sent”: kidnapped and forcibly removed overseas. Political dismay at this legal breach reflected the increasingly sensitive political context of British involvement in the forced mobility of Africans. By the 1880s, the British had occupied forts along the coast of West Africa for over two hundred years, which had primarily been used for the traffic in enslaved Africans to the Americas. This chapter told the history of antecedents to this instance of so-called lunatic kidnapping in late 19th century West Africa, before the arrival of the region’s second lunatic asylum in Accra, which seemed to be shaping imperial responses to the Kissy problem.
While reading literature produced by slave ship doctors and abolitionists for the chapter, I stumbled across what I refer to in the article as the value-problem of the mad slave. I realized that in the primary and secondary literature on enslavement in the Atlantic world, mad slaves in their varying behavioral manifestations were unified by the characteristic of being unsellable. They were deemed to lack labor value. They also lacked exchange value, as the cost of selling a mad slave was equivalent to the cost of transport. There was no profit to be made. Inevitably, to sell a mad slave was to commit fraud. So, I asked, if the lunatic/mad slave was one who lacked exchange value on the Atlantic market, what did it mean to treat lunacy in West Africa prior to the sale of enslaved people? What were the politics and economics of mental healing in West Africa prior to the establishment of the Kissy Hospital (Africa’s first European-run lunatic asylum)?
These questions led me to explore what intellectual historian William Pietz and anthropologist J. Lorand Matory have popularized as “The Problem of the Fetish”: the modes of value conversion and translation across European and African cultures made possible by the ambivalence of West African shrines dedicated to territorial and travelling spirits, who were known both to cause and to heal mental distress. But my earliest understanding of spiritual pawning was monovalent. It helped me explain the mental healing valence of shrine spirits as an economic problem. But I had no explanation for the economics of their harming valence: how spirits caused mental harming in ways that mirrored socio-economic processes in the visible world. I theorized that madness must be akin to owing a ritual debt, but I did not know what kind of spiritual debt bondage triggered mental distress. Only after I turned to writing this article did I learn that the causes of spiritual afflictions associated with madness in West Africa of the late 17th and 18th centuries were framed by some lay observers as spiritual panyarring. Panyarring was the statutory kidnapping of a debtor for sale into slavery to recoup debts or to force payment from their family. This mode of recovering debt ripped families and communities apart. Historian Paul Lovejoy once suggested that pawning may have developed to help overcome the socially devastating effects of panyarring. Likewise, I proposed that if being panyarred by the spirit caused mental distress, then pawning kin into the family of a spirit could provide mental healing.
CSSH: This is rough terrain. It’s filled with occult forces that harm people and restore them to health. You’re ambivalent about it, and you put this mood to use. It’s essential to how you interpret interactions between spirits, priests, the mentally distressed, and their families. The ambivalence that comes through in your article is not just a result of seeing and understanding difficult things; it’s a position you steadily work toward. The Goody jurors consider it an orientation – a kind of method, really – that allows you to analyze “the proximity of asylum and enslavement, healing and subjugation, violence and exchange, in ways that point to a recognition of the intimate co-production of slave economies between West African polities and European mercenaries and slave traders.”
Is it fair to pose “intimate co-production” as an alternative to “ethnographic refusal”? A constructive alternative? Ambivalence is part of both approaches. So is critique. But your method accomplishes more. It empowers you to see and say more, not less, all while respecting the sensitivities that often accompany refusal, ethnographic or historical.
Are we on the right track? Is this how you see it?
Quarshie: I love this question because it allows me to be unambivalently shameless. Let me take this as an opportunity to share the conceptual framing of ambivalence in my forthcoming monograph, African Pharmakon: Mental Harming and Healing in Ghana since Slavery (University of Chicago Press). The book aims to show that West Africans were far from passive victims of European-imposed psychiatric concepts and institutions. Rather, they enchanted the British colonial asylum in Accra by accommodating European psychiatric practices principally as experiences within the dynamic tapestry of African ritual and political concerns over territorial control, bodily afflictions, and psychological belonging within families, communities, and states. That is, European psychiatry did not colonize African minds, nor did it displace African psychotherapeutic norms. It was instead built on and grafted onto a repertoire of African healing and harming practices through socio-economic, political, and ritual transactions that, in the case of coastal Ghana, unfolded over the course of centuries.
I name this repertoire of techniques the “West African pharmakon.” In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates describes the pharmakon as a substance that can be palliative or poisonous, and my use of this term implies that the psychotherapeutic practices with which African people engaged European psychiatric institutions were ambivalent mechanisms for mental healing and harming.
CSSH: So much depends on the simultaneity of this positive and negative potential. You’ve doubled the explanatory power of your analysis.
Quarshie: Yes. Definitely. The pharmakon refers to both ambivalence and catharsis. In the first instance, pharmakon is the dual capacity of pharmacological substances to cure and to poison. When applied in excess, curative substances are weapons of destruction. The second valence of the pharmakon is the sacrifice of a scapegoat, who in the Greek pharmakos ritual was a slave or a criminal who was killed or expelled from a territory as a means of purifying the body politic in times of crisis. Sacrificing a scapegoat was meant to foment social catharsis: to bind those who remained in the polity. In fact, sacrificial catharsis is at the core of the pharmakon even in its ambivalent role as remedy and poison. The broadest and perhaps most accurate definition of the pharmakon is “an agent of change,” which entails tools for harming/healing and rituals for cathartic relief .
Elements of the West African pharmakon are visible in the archival record as early as the fifteenth century, but they crystallize as an ensemble in the denser archival record of the nineteenth century and in the institution of shrines. In the book, I identify five historically recurring techniques that have characterized the West African pharmakon since at least the fifteenth century. Four of them appear in the CSSH article. The first technique is logging: restraining the mentally distressed using carved wood or chains attached to trees and planks of wood. In the Atlantic era, logging was used to imprison criminals and to transport slaves to the West African coast. Logging was then used in psychiatric hospitals in the early colonial period, and it has been widely used in Christian prayer camps since the 1970s. The second technique is spiritual pawning. The third technique is manhunting: chasing and capturing the mentally distressed on the streets for entry into asylums, prisons, poor houses, or prayer camps. The fourth technique is mass expulsion: the anti-convivial and enmity driven enactment of political territorialization through collective immigrant removals, as well as small-scale removals of figures of nonbelonging, such as vagrants and vagabonds. West African campaigns to remove the mentally distressed from public spaces often coincided with crisis-driven operations against these other populations. The fifth and final technique is pharmacotherapy: plant-based substances and manufactured pharmaceutical products. The spiritual shrine, the Christian prayer camp, and the psychiatric hospital all employ dynamic healing rituals tied to the consumption and application of such substances.
African Pharmakon grafts histories of the healing valences of African therapeutics onto an analysis of their equally powerful counterpart: practices of harming. It reveals how African people mobilized practices associated by the mid-nineteenth century with healing and harming at shrines of territorial spirits to politically harness the development of psychiatric social control. To theorize these ambivalent entanglements, I draw on Achille Mbembe’s expanded definition of the pharmakon, first introduced to critical theory by Jacques Derrida in the 1980s, into the political problem of postcolonial enmity. Mbembe reads Fanon—perhaps the most famous theorist of anticolonial cathartic violence—to interrogate why the postcolonial present is increasingly characterized by racism, xenophobic rhetoric, and laws targeting migrants and denizens across the globe. Fanon invites us to confront the dark underbelly of medicine as politics. These can be uncomfortable stories to tell given that Africa and Africans were, for so long, marginalized and excluded from global histories of science and medicine. But to refuse or ignore public harming as constitutive of African healthcare, alongside public healing, is to deny the full spectrum of humanity to Africa and Africans. Generations of African healers, politicians, and entrepreneurs used the ambivalent techniques of the West African pharmakon to invent their own futures, to imagine and effect distinctions between political friend and foe.
CSSH: Shrines were crucial to that project. They’re intriguing places. You tell us how they vary from niches in trees to large sites akin to a settlement/household, with dozens of patients and retainers, big courtyards, and outlying fields. They have jurisdictions. As sanctuaries, they are off limits in multiple ways. You argue that shrines are cosmological, politico-therapeutic spaces that both resemble and are distinct from other local concentrations of power and value.
How did local political leaders and colonial authorities deal with priests and their shrine communities? You give several examples, ranging from collusion to suppression. Was there a pattern of interaction that was dominant?
Quarshie: One important way I think of shrines is through Robyn d’Avignon’s concept of “spirited geobodies”: territorial source points of ritual power and sacrificial exchange for navigating fraught questions of political belonging and property ownership. What is our fair share of the earths resources and how do we claim it? I am also moved by William Peitz’s “schizoanalytic” reading of colonial institutions in the Gold Coast as “organ-machines.” Colonial authorities often conceived of Africa as the “geographical or (‘territorialized’) delirium of a body without organs,” an “irrational” socioeconomic form with a “dark” and unregulated interior. Colonial institutions like trade posts, railroads, forts, and hospitals were thus organ-machines installed to regulate and channel the flow of people and goods from the interior toward the coasts to bolster the mercantilist and civilizational ends of European colonialism. As organ-machines, colonial institutions were born of European colonial capitalist anxieties about the role of the fetish and the fetish shrine as “anti-production machines”: institutions fueling the resistance of local African authorities to colonial capital accumulation by offering an alternative avenue of capital accumulation beyond the reach of colonial authorities. Hence, many shrines were located in the hinterland, had their own system of tolls to reach them, and were thus seen to divert resources from colonial economies.
CSSH: Tolls? That’s intriguing. Again, the mirror effect. A shrine-based economy beside the colonial, extractive one, diverting and draining away its powers.
Quarshie: Shrine priests were often seen as great accumulators of capital. Particularly important for solidifying my ideas around this notion was anthropologist Jane Guyer’s work showing that shrines in Nigeria also served as savings banks. But if colonial economic institutions like the trade post reveal the European competitive will to eliminate the fetish, the therapeutic and penal lunatic asylum exposes the hypocrisy of this colonial annihilation anxiety.
CSSH: How so? What does “hypocrisy” mean in this case?
Quarshie: The history preceding the arrival of the lunatic asylum was not one of enclosure but of forced mobility. The establishment of the Kissy Hospital, for example, Africa’s first lunatic asylum, was a response to the harrowing effects of the slave trade expulsions on mental health. It was designed to redress the mental distress of African captives rescued from the waters off the coast of West Africa from the hulls of illegal slave trading ships after the British criminalization of the slave trade in 1807.
The slave trade ushered in an era of massive, forced migration that was organized on terms dictated by the concerns of African polities to manage economies and communal enmity, and by European merchant classes who financed the avaricious and voracious consumption of human life in the slave trade. Many of the enslaved were prisoners of war, forced migrants who did not belong to the polities from which they were sold. Others committed severe crimes or owed debts—infractions that, in Europe, led to confinement in prisons. In West Africa, these individuals were sometimes trafficked into transatlantic slavery. On their way to the coast, many enslaved Africans passed through “native prisons” built by African chiefs and merchant elites to secure debts and to extort ransoms through the threat of being sold into slavery. Many also found refuge at institutions glossed by Europeans as “shrines,” spaces that served “as a ritualized focal point—for harnessing power, propitiating spirits or securing protection.” Processes of territorial and social expulsion, accumulation, and dispossession came together to sustain “carceral continuums”—tools for maintaining social control over the enslaved—from the West African interior to the coast.
If the mentally distressed were not already part of the masses of war captives rounded up for expulsion, the harrowing journey from interior to coast while being beaten and chained to heavy logs could induce illness. On the coast, European surgeons working on slave ships checked the enslaved for signs of mental distress, an exclusionary criterion for purchase. But the trade was caught in a contradictory loop, triggering mental distress while simultaneously trying to exclude it. One could almost guarantee, as doctors at Kissy noted, that every recaptured slave ship held “mad slaves,” a term used by European slave traders for enslaved people suffering from mental distress.
Beyond asylum walls, the landscape of psychotherapy among African herbalists, priests, and other healers—who remained the primary modes of therapeutic resort—was evolving rapidly. Thousands of migrants from the Northern Territories and from French West Africa were drawn to southern Ghana’s cocoa boom, centered on the forested region surrounding Kumasi. Migrants carried with them novel witch-finding shrines that, by the 1930s, dominated the landscape of mental healing in southern Ghana, a region that venerated healers and healing techniques from distant lands as having some of the most efficacious medicines. If asylum care was mired in the ghosts and infrastructure of the slave trade, by the dawn of the twentieth century, spiritual capture—the statutory debt owed for a failure to propitiate a shrine spirit in the Atlantic era—had lost traction as an explanation of psychological distress. The onus of the cause of mental distress shifted from improper engagements with the agents of the spiritual world to improper interactions with living relatives, associates, and strangers. These social tensions were expressed through the language of witchcraft: a malevolent act committed by an individual against the spirit of another. Margaret Field, the Gold Coast Government Sociologist, attributed this shift to several interlocking historical factors. Particularly significant was the venereal disease epidemic of the early twentieth century, and the bubonic plague epidemics of 1908 and 1924, born in part from overpopulation in the city’s older quarters generated by rapid urbanization. Preexisting ritual institutions could not satisfy these novel health crises. Field’s work suggests that anxiety, paranoia, and depression were on the rise as colonial occupation destabilized the authority of African political and ritual elites and introduced rapid economic change associated with head taxes and cash crops.
Spiritual capture of the Atlantic era entailed a pharmakonical duality in that it signified both a forcible seizure and the potential to become a member of the spirit’s family. In the case of witchcraft, pharmakonical duality was limited to the domain of intent. A person could be a witch without knowing it. But the purpose of witchcraft was always singular: to harm. To combat witchcraft, a new institution, known as the witch-finding cult, gained traction among diverse populations of the Gold Coast in the late nineteenth century. These “personal security cults” largely originated in the savanna of northern Ghana and other neighboring colonies. They included, among others, Tigari, Kundi, and Nangoro from French Ivory Coast, Asasi from the French Northern Territories, and Krakyi Dente. These shrines held the traveling younger spirits from the Northern Territories—the Tongo Hills were particularly significant—that offered protection against malevolent individuals operating as spiritual enemies. The explosion of witch-finding cults emerged from the grafting of the younger onto the older spirits. Witch-finding shrines provided psychological security in the face of new forms of political and ritual change. Migrants also sought protection from these shrines for their journey, often made by foot, from the savanna to southern Ghana. Migrants propitiated at shrines to protective spirits before their departure and upon their safe return. In some cases, migrants carried their own protective spirits in portable talismans. Mirroring the movements of labor migrants, these witch-finding spirits moved in circular patterns, with periodic returns to their source points in the north required for the ritual renewal of shrines. As many will know, several territorial spirits of West Africa have long been travelling spirits residing across the Atlantic in places like Brazil and Cuba.
CSSH: You draw on several types of evidence to construct this account. Oral history. Archaeology. There’s lots of piecing together.
Quarshie: In some ways this resembles the kind of work archeologists do every day – both in their comparative scope and evidentiary flexibility. In fact, I draw heavily on definitions developed by archeologists Ann Stahl and Timothy Insoll to conceptualize the shrine analytically. But considering what archeologists did not or could not conceive, and what kinds of evidence I could use to fill that gap, often proved just as illuminating as I wrote this article. Sandra Greene’s work with the early 19th century testimony of Tenu Kwami, who suffered spiritual capture, became a shrine priest, and then converted to Christianity, gives me hope that there are other similarly rich accounts of shrine care. But no single source or archive can give us the full picture.
This is why I refer directly in the article to the scholarship of Jamaican psychiatrist Frederick Hickling. His clinical practice of psychohistoriography, in which he and a collective of patients in Kingston spent long sessions developing timelines of the political history of Jamaica as a mode of trauma therapy, was itself the development of a kind of collective oral historical source base for Atlantic history. It is from this source base that Hickling developed his rather convincing insights regarding the execution of West African mad slaves despite the availability of shrine care. Hickling put history into action in the world. In doing so, he developed new sources, new ways of seeing, new theories that transform our understanding of that very history. I am inspired by his unflinching multi-disciplinarity.
CSSH: Given all this evidence, can you reconstruct a settlement history for these shrines that relates them to specific flows of people and commodities? The whole configuration, you argue, was part of transregional economies and their systems of value. Can you map it?
Quarshie: Yes. Here’s a map of travelling spirits in my forthcoming monograph (created by the excellent Tim Stallman).
CSSH: Perfect. There it is. So much research is captured in these images! Perhaps we should zoom out. Can you tell us about your larger goals in doing all this work? You describe your essay as an opening. What are you leading us toward?
Quarshie: Ultimately, I want to argue that membership in the body politic is also predicated on a shared “mind politic.” More than political culture, the mind politic consists of “hegemonic struggles” to bring into being or to stabilize an ideological community. Like hegemony itself, the mind politic is not stable: it is shaped by ongoing struggles to define political membership and culture among political, spiritual, medical, and family authorities, who deploy mechanisms of the pharmakon in a bid to bind people into communities of thought. My article in CSSH is in one sense an ethnography and history of struggles over a Ga mind politic in the Atlantic era.
CSSH: That’s a powerful idea. It feels as big as “imagined community,” but it’s more alert to contest and dis/unity. More political, in fact. What’s its genealogy?
Quarshie: My conception of the mind politic builds on a critical literature authored by African intellectuals and political leaders of the 1950s and 1960s, who theorized concepts closely allied to the mind politic in two registers: as things in the world—active struggles over ideological unanimity that can be studied through the tools of the ethnographer and the historian—and as a set of claims about how the world ought to be: a philosophy. The mind politic of decolonizing African nation-states was a prominent concern for West African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, independent Ghana’s first head of state, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of independent Senegal. Nkrumah developed a political theory of Consciencism, which posited a protocol for healing disruptions to the “African personality” caused by centuries of colonial conquest from the Middle East and Europe. Senghor’s Négritude, in turn, elaborated a pan-Africanist theory of the cultural, spiritual, and psychological unity of the African mind. Theorizations of the proper orientation of collective psychology in independent Africa were not just an intellectual exercise. They were a political imperative for independence-era leaders trying to unify disparate ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities within new nation-states whose physical boundaries had largely been determined under the aegis of colonial powers.
The question of how polities strove to forge communal minds in service to nation-building should be at the heart of the study of psychiatry in Africa, which is not a small field. Since the early 1990s, there have been close to 20 books published on African psychiatry. A reviewer of my book wrote about attending a conference where people lamented the dominant numerical and thus historiographical influence of Africa on the study of psychiatry in the global south. Perhaps that lament stems from a certain narrative predictability. Historians of African psychiatry tend to begin our narratives in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, with the establishment of formal colonialism and of colonial lunatic asylums, and conclude in the 1960s, with the rise of independent states. The field also tends to focus on colonial archives and on the internal machinations of the colonial institution: the transition from warders to nurses, the arrival of doctors, the development of new therapies, etc. But this is only one side of the story. There are new and exciting monographs that push the bounds methodologically in their engagement with ethnography and the post-independence era. My book aims to further these new gains. It aims for a balance in which the standard demarcations of precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial exist and matter, but they are not the timeline on which the narrative unfolds.
CSSH: That’s an agenda we support. Getting away from the simple pre and post genres. How do you create alternative timelines?
Quarshie: One way is by pushing the history of mental distress away from histories of individual institutions (the hospital, the shrine, the church, the mosque) toward histories of mind politics and how the pharmakon works across and beyond institutional boundaries. We must venture beyond institutional histories of cross-cultural or transcultural psychiatric practice in the second half of the twentieth century. This will require developing new, nonbinary narrative frameworks of postcolonial mental healthcare in the Global South. In Africa at least, we need to sink into local languages, historic and contemporary ones, to understand the idioms of healing and harming used not only by healers but also by political and military elites. We must understand how antecedent trajectories of healing merged with European forms. This is an increasingly accepted insight for understanding contemporary political formations on the continent. But it must also be at the heart of our histories of medicine and, crucially, of how African entrepreneurs, politicians, and healers have creatively—and destructively—combined the techniques of medicine and politics.
CSSH: Final question. You’ve probably noticed that CSSH publishes a lot of innovative work on slavery and enslavement.
Quarshie: I have noticed the trend!
CSSH: How would you position your work in relation to other essays you’ve seen in the journal?
Quarshie: Before anyone reads “Spiritual Pawning,” I highly recommend Donna Maier’s “Nineteenth-Century Asante Medical Practices” published in 1979 in CSSH. Maier reveals how quests for therapy were empiric processes, prioritizing practical modes of healing. She helps us understand that spiritual healing was a therapy of last resort in cases of dreadful ailments. Despite the attention given to the occult by scholars, so-called African healing is often very mundane. One can read Maier’s article as a history of African healing in the wake of the British criminalization of the slave trade. But it can also be read as a precursor to Pablo Gomez’s The Experiential Caribbean, which examines European witchcraft trials to reveal the central role African healers played via the application of empiric modes of healing in the development of the European enlightenment concept of scientific objectivity.
CSSH: We love it when people explore our cellars. 1979 was a good year.
Quarshie: It was! I also have a lot of overlaps in terms of research questions with several articles on slavery you’ve published recently. I cited Jake Richards’s 2020 article, “The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870.” One would not at first glance read this article as relevant to the history of psychiatry. But the Kissy Lunatic Asylum in Sierra Leone, the first of its kind in Africa, emerged from the very slave ship captures Richards examines.
My favorite piece on slavery in the 2023 issues of CSSH was “Prison of the Womb,” written by Sarah Balakrishnan. I mentioned native prisons earlier in our conversation. Balakrishnan’s article showcases how these prisons became gendered institutions holding lineages hostage by the 19th century. As a I said at the African Studies Association panel Sarah and I organized with anthropologist Alissa Jordan, if I were a better historian (everyone should read Jennifer Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery), I would have pointed out and analyzed the fact that most of the “mad slaves” that Alexander Falconbridge mentions in the abolitionist texts I cite are women. Balakrishnan’s important work helps us see the unique history of the gendered nature of Atlantic era carceral processes in West Africa.
CSSH: You’re not alone in liking the Balakrishnan essay. It won the 2024 Berkshire Prize. Our West African essays are turning heads.
Quarshie: That’s wonderful! The Richards and Balakrishnan articles are about Africa, but I am grouped under the “Extended Enslavements” rubric in my issue with two other excellent pieces on slavery in the wider British and Ottoman empires. I hope more people come to see CSSH as a go-to venue for scholarship on slavery.
CSSH: Your work will bring excellent manuscripts to our door. No doubt.
Quarshie: Thank you so much for these questions. It was great talking to you.
CSSH: And to you. We’re eager to read African Pharmakon. You’ve given us a dazzling sneak preview. Send us another manuscript, too. We really enjoy your work.
Nana Osei Quarshie is Assistant Professor of African History, Anthropology, and History of Medicine at Yale University. Quarshie studies practices of mental healing and harming, political expulsions, immigration, and urban belonging in West Africa since the seventeenth century. His articles have appeared in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Comparative Studies in Society and History, History and Anthropology, and Psychiatric Contours: New African Histories of Madness (Duke Press 2024). His recently published work has been awarded the 2023 Walter D. Love Prize in British History, the 2023 Forum for History of Human Science (FHHS) Article Prize, and the 2024 James L. Clifford Prize in Eighteenth Century Studies (honorable mention). Quarshie’s first monograph, African Pharmakon: Mental Harming and Healing in Ghana since Slavery, will be published by University of Chicago Press.
