Nancy Rose Hunt and Hubertus Büschel, eds., Psychiatric Contours: New African Histories of Madness (Durham, NC., and London: Duke University Press, 2024), pp. 360, £25.00, paperback, ISBN: 9781478030348.

How are we able to discern madness in any history or archive?' asks Nancy Rose Hunt at the start of her introduction to this arresting collection of essays.It is a beguilingly straightforward question: to even begin to imagine where its answers might lie leads scholars into highly complex interpretive, interdisciplinary terrain.The book builds on a well-established body of scholarship on the history of colonial psychiatry in Africa but takes it into new theoretical directions.Madness, as Hunt argues, cannot be either reduced to the psychiatric or positioned in opposition to it.There are no closed or easy definitions here.How can we contemplate madness without also contemplating dreams (and nightmares), affective traces, phantasms, and deliria?How to plot psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychopolitics togetherand apart?And how to grasp, conceptually and historically, the vernacular in worlds where the power of the state was attenuated both by shifting global understandings of health and sickness and by local idioms of distress?In manifold ways, the book recasts conventions.It unsettles the chronology of colonialism and its end: most chapters focus on the late colonial and early postcolonial years but all speak powerfully to the present as well as much deeper pasts (Hunt's own chapter offers two milieux in counter-point: the transatlantic slave ships of the eighteenth century and the lorries of the 1950s Gold Coast).It puts histories of health and healing in dialogue with a distinctive tradition of Africanist anthropology.And it works across a dizzying array of perspectives and scalesfrom close-up, person-centred micro-histories to accounts of diagnostic categories to forays into unseen archives and overlooked sources.One essay uses a psychiatrist's photographs, another the artwork of hospital patients.All are sensitive to the discord, the polyvalence the opacityof their sources.Psychiatric Countours comprises ten substantive chapters, the first four of which work with patient histories and biographical frames.Nana Osei Quarshie explores the writings of Akla-Osu, a Ghanaian confined to the Accra Psychiatric Hospital four times between 1969 and 1976.Historians have long wrestled with the meanings to be gleaned from delusions: what Quarshie explains is the value that Akla-Osu's delusions have not just for medical but for intellectual histories of Africa.Akla-Osu 'dared to invent the future', in Quarshie's words, and his writings demand a new approach, 'one that engages the creative conceptual work of patients'.Richard Hlzl traces the life of an African missionary priest -'Father John'in colonial Tanzania.African priests were liminal figures, Hlzl explains, valued as local experts but, as embodiments of African culture, generating deep disquiet amongst the European missionaries.The deeper they penetrated the mission itself, the more anxious the mission became at the reach, 'the unfathomable depth', of African 'tradition'.At independence, Father John called for a liberation of the church as well as the state.For that, he was marked out as a problem -'a psychological case'.The rector of the seminary where he trained called him a megalomaniac and a psychopath.As with several of these essays, the single life story illuminates 'much larger political and psychopathological processes'.Raphal Gallien has studied over 1,000 patient case files from the Anjanamasina hospital in Madagascar, from 1906 to the turn of the twenty-first century.Here, he works with just four, all from the 1920s.All 'fell into madness', Gallien writes, when faced with the 'impossibility of reaching the social status to which they aspired'.All were situated 'on the border between the world of the colonized and that of the colonizers'.Their madness was a response to the 'social and racial immobilities' that colonialism, and its attendant racial hierarchies, laid down.Hubertus Bschel offers a biographical account of Benedict Nta Tanka, a Cameroonian clerk who began hearing voices in 1968.In 1969, Tanka travelled to Nigeria where he met the German psychiatrist and World Health Organization (WHO) visiting professor Alexander Boroffka.Before setting off, Tanka began to writea first draft of an autobiography,