Paper short abstract:

Drawing on recent ethnographic material, I will reflect on the notion of ‘madness’ in relation to the ordinary, in the context of NGO-initiated, community-based mental health self-help groups in the zongo communities of Accra. I will do this by drawing on the microhistory of two sisters who were born in a well-known family house. The paper will show how engaging different infrastructures of care strongly contribute to shaping the perception of ordinariness or, conversely, madness, and can hence unclench processes of unmaking madness.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on recent and raw ethnographic material, I will reflect on the notion of ‘madness’ in relation to the ordinary, in the context of NGO-initiated, community-based mental health self-help groups in the zongo communities of Accra. I will do this by drawing on the microhistory of two sisters who were born in a well-known family house, and whose lives were suddenly disrupted by similar mental troubles. Their intimate circles responded with very different gestures of care and, consequently, the sisters’ life trajectories unfolded along almost opposite tracks. I use these two very diverse life stories as a lens to descend into the history of mental health care in the zongos, where institutional care is, or rather was in the days of the sisters’ first troubles, (close to) non-existent, while today, the kin-based care infrastructures are semi-formalized with the help of NGOs and community leaders.

Engaging different infrastructures of care fed into the different ways in which the sisters came to be perceived by their community: one sister is considered ‘normal’, while the other one is labelled ‘mad’. I claim that the intimate infrastructures of care (family, neighbours, kin, community) strongly contribute to shaping the perception of ordinariness or, conversely, madness, and can hence unclench processes of unmaking madness.

Paper short abstract:

This talk opens a research agenda on madness and enslavement in Atlantic-era West Africa through a case study of the role of Ga shrines as spaces of mental healing in the Gold Coast, today coastal Ghana, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Paper long abstract:

When enslaved people became “mad,” they lost exchange value as labor capital on the Atlantic

market, as neither African nor European merchants considered the mentally distressed as valuable

bondsmen. Historians of slavery in the Americas have drawn on accounts of “mad slaves” to

understand how labor value was generated, and disrupted, through the transport and sale of captive

Africans. But historians have yet to examine the relationship between psychological distress and

enslavement in West Africa, where many of the captives in question originated. This article opens a

research agenda on madness in Atlantic-era West Africa. It does so by examining the role of

shrines—spread along the coast of what is today Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries—as spaces of mental healing. When shrine priests healed cases of mental

illness, they engaged in spiritual pawning: converting mad persons, deemed unfit for sale due to

mental incapacity, into potential subjects of enslavement. Shrines were thus spaces of value

conversion that reflected a broader monetary and ritual economy of capture, enslavement, and

raiding that proliferated in Atlantic-era West Africa.

Paper short abstract:

Archives and disputes gather around the last Kwanyama king (from 1911-1917), Mandume ya Ndemufayo. Disputes over Mandume’s head and decapitation obscure questions of his putative state of mind, as detailed in colonial archives, and his thought, as locally apprehended.

Paper long abstract:

Archives and disputes gather around the last Kwanyama king (from 1911-1917) in northern Namibia/southern Angola, Mandume ya Ndemufayo. Boyhood stories of being hidden in an antbear hole to preserve his life, emerging as a scarred and cruel youth, echo motifs of outsiderness, proximity to animals, seclusion and abnormality from traditions of origin. Mandume instituted radical reforms to recentralize internal judicial functions and punishment. He pushed back against Portuguese expansion even after military occupation in 1915 and his migration to South-African controlled territory in South West Africa. A military expedition in February 1917 ended in Mandume’s death, with ongoing disagreement over whether he was buried intact or decapitated. In this bifurcation of knowledge systems, colonial rationality and clinical – but civilised – violence meet with another imaginary that endows the colonial aggressor with barbaric violence, needing postcolonial reparation. The former coloniser disavows this, even as they collected other body parts for their museums after 1915. But such disputes over Mandume’s head tend to obscure the question of his putative state of mind, as detailed in colonial archives, and his thought, as locally apprehended. Descriptions of the former include Mandume’s suicidal moodiness, violent disposition, disregard for rules and an unspecified ‘old complaint.’ Local memory dwells on how he tested others, how he reset the rules, and his drive for productivity and ecological duration for the future. Such features gesture towards the historical depths of ‘the vernacular’ of which Hunt writes.