Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (New African Histories)

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Black Skin, White Coats is a history of psychiatry in Nigeria from the 1950s to the 1980s. Working in the contexts of decolonization and anticolonial nationalism, Nigerian psychiatrists sought to replace racist colonial psychiatric theories about the psychological inferiority of Africans with a universal and egalitarian model specializing in broad psychological similarities across cultural and racial boundaries. Particular emphasis is placed on Dr. T. Adeoye Lambo, the first indigenous Nigerian to earn a specialty degree in psychiatry in the UK in 1954. Lambo returned to Nigeria to change into the medical superintendent of the newly founded Aro Mental Hospital in Abeokuta, Nigeria’s first  “modern” mental hospital. At Aro, Lambo started to revolutionize psychiatric research and clinical practice in Nigeria, working to integrate  “modern” western medical theory and technologies with “traditional” cultural understandings of mental illness. Lambo’s research focused on deracializing psychiatric thinking and redefining mental illness with regards to a model of universal human similarities that crossed racial and cultural divides.

Black Skin, White Coats is the first work to center of attention primarily on black Africans as producers of psychiatric knowledge and as definers of mental illness in their own right. By examining the ways that Nigerian psychiatrists worked to integrate their psychiatric training with their indigenous backgrounds and cultural and civic nationalisms, Black Skin, White Coats provides a foil to Frantz Fanon’s widely publicized reactionary articulations of the relationship between colonialism and psychiatry. Black Skin, White Coats may be on the cutting edge of histories of psychiatry that are increasingly more drawing connections between local and national developments in late-colonial and postcolonial settings and international scientific networks. Heaton argues that Nigerian psychiatrists were intimately conscious about the wish to engage in international discourses as part and parcel of the transformation of psychiatry at home.

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