Thomas Adeoye Lambo and the Decolonization of Psychiatry in Nigeria

Abstract

Too often, the history of science in European empires is told solely as the story of how Europeans applied ‘modern’ science to ‘primitive’ environments. It is a story of the goals, actions, and outcomes, good or bad, of European efforts to order, control and exploit the territories that came under their domain. In other words, it is a history about colonized people and places but rarely of colonized people and places. To the extent that indigenous actors are integrated into histories of colonial science, it is usually either as enthusiastic converts to European knowledge systems¹ or, following Frantz Fanon, as quintessential resisters of alien rule and the knowledge regimes that sustained it.² A small, but growing, body of literature is recognizing the important role that non-Europeans played in developing and interpreting scientific knowledge in European empires. As Kapil Raj has noted, the time has come to move away from viewing European science and indigenous knowledge systems as diametrically opposed constructions whereby Europeans either imposed European science on ‘unscientific’ populations or appropriated indigenous knowledge and put it to ‘scientific’ use. Rather it is important to see colonial settings as ‘contact zones’ in an ‘emerging world order of knowledge’ that is not, and never was, wholly European.³ By examining the work of Thomas Adeoye Lambo (1923–2004), Nigeria’s first European trained psychiatrist of indigenous background, this chapter argues that a more comprehensive understanding of the complex negotiations involved in producing, circulating and implementing scientific knowledge can be obtained by recognizing the active, purposeful and engaged contributions that non-European scientists have made to imperial and global scientific networks.