Pathologies de l’« âme indigène »

Abstract

The writings of French colonial jurists and administrators in the first half of the 20th century are Interspersed with phrases such as “Indigenous mentality”, “primitive mentality”, “Indigenous soul” or “Indigenous mind”. Connoting some otherness in the mental universe, these formulations are used to legitimize recourse to a special law, adapted to the le psychic development level of the colonized populations. What happens when the constitutive otherness of the Indigenous person is coupled with an additional difference that affects the sphere of mental health? Under which circumstances and in which contexts do judges and colonial administrators deal with mental illnesses in colonized populations? What role do medicine, psychiatry and, more broadly, the sciences of the psyche play in the progressive definition of any legal-administrative knowledge of madness in colonized populations? In the light of these questions, this article examines certain legal-administrative discourses and practices that take into account the Indigenous mental universe in the territories of French sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar during the inter-war period. The analysis of these discourses and practices reveals the lability of the frontier that separates the “ordinary” from the “pathological” In the Indigenous soul. Strongly marked by ethnic and racial assumptions, the legal-administrative fantasies about madness In African populations have been constructed through borrowings from, and exchanges, convergences and confrontations with the knowledge of alienist physicians and “colonial psychiatrists”. On the threshold of the 1940s, the legal-administrative treatment of mental illness in Indigenous populations was defined by permanent negotiations between the different forms of operating power and knowledge in the colonial setting. Whereas the political and administrative authorities were using all knowledge about the psyche as a tool, during the 1920s the alienists demanded active participation in political decision-making by trying to tame, or even exclude, the local judges and administrators. Hence a fragmented legal status for the mentally ill African.

Keywords

• colonial law
• colonial administration
• otherness
• indigeneity
• mysticism
• indigenous mentality