Nation on Board: Becoming Nigerian at Sea

Abstract

therapies. Meanwhile, the explosion in the availability of psychotropic drugs over the same period highlighted the liminal space Nigerian psychiatrists occupied: although they positioned themselves as the legitimate gatekeepers of these substances, “it is important to note that their conceptions were idealistic” (183) and that in reality they were powerless to control the sale and usage of these increasingly popular drugs. The strength of the book lies in the compelling case it makes for how Nigerian psychiatrists in the late colonial and early postcolonial eras consciously transformed the field from little more than a racist detention system to a therapeutic model espousing the universal foundations of human psychology. Heaton is adept at highlighting the historicity of these developments, making careful note of how these universal ideals were a direct response to the tiered vision of human psychological sophistication espoused by the colonial regime. In this way, he is able to relate the history of an important profession undergoing profound change while also linking it to broader issues of decolonization and intellectual history. The book makes good use of its source material ‒ in this case mainly documents generated by Nigerian psychiatrists ‒ yet it is limited by this insular approach. While Heaton is a pioneer in this area of Nigerian history, his arguments would have been enriched by contributions from additional non-psychiatric sources ‒ particularly concerning the profession’s popular legitimacy and its strained relationship with “traditional” healers. Also, although the author admirably asserts that psychiatric knowledge was not “a unidirectional power flow” (6) descending from Western sources, the case that Nigerian psychiatrists “have significantly influenced what cross-cultural psychiatrists think and do today” (6) could have been more forcefully made. Heaton does aptly demonstrate that Nigerian psychiatrists contributed to global psychiatric discourse ‒ participating in an unprecedented era of psychiatric globalization (not Westernization) ‒ but because of the book’s tight focus on the Nigerian perspective he is slightly less successful in showing what those contributions meant to the international psychiatric community. Despite these quibbles, White Coats, Black Skin is an important contribution to the history of medicine in Africa and particularly the history of psychiatry in Nigeria. Shedding exciting new light on how psychiatrists participated in the decolonization movement, contributed to the global transcultural psychiatric discourse, and altered the course of mental health care in Africa’s most populous state, this book is valuable reading for scholars of medical, political, and intellectual history in Africa. Well written and tightly organized, it is also a suitable text for upper-level undergraduate courses in the history of medicine in Africa.