Explores how psychiatry in Ghana was never just about medicine; it was about migration, exile, and the politics of who gets to stay and who must be cast out.
For centuries, mental distress in West Africa has been navigated through a mix of healing, harming, ritual, and regulation. In African Pharmakon, Nana Osei Quarshie questions conventional narratives about colonial psychiatry. Instead of displacing African therapeutic traditions, he argues, European psychiatric institutions built upon them, adapting long-standing techniques of social control and healing.
With a focus on Ghana, Quarshie explores the shifting landscape of West African mental health practices, outlining their transformation from shrine-based rituals to colonial asylums and modern psychiatric institutions. Through extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, including the first scholarly examination of patient records from the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, Quarshie identifies five enduring techniques that have shaped the treatment of mental distress: spiritual pawning, logging, manhunting, mass expulsion, and pharmacotherapy.
Rejecting the simplistic opposition of Indigenous healing versus colonial oppression, African Pharmakon provides a nuanced account of how psychiatric care in Ghana became a tool of empowerment as well as exclusion. This pioneering study reframes our understanding of psychiatry and mental health governance in West Africa, past and present.
By:
Dr. Nana Osei Quarshie Ph.D
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 20mm
Weight: 481g
ISBN: 9780226839189
ISBN 10: 0226839184
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 30 December 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction: West African Pharmakon 1. Spiritual Pawning in Atlantic West Africa Mammy Water 2. Asylum as Shrine in the Gold Coast Colony Kaaŋaaɗo, the Hunter 3. Political Lunacy and Migration to Asante Akla-Osu, Ghana’s SUPERLANDLORD 4. Consciencism as Crisis in Independent Ghana The Congregant 5. Mass Expulsion for a Spiritual Revolution Conclusion: The Recrudescent Pharmakon Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
Nana Osei Quarshie is assistant professor in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, with affiliations in the Departments of Anthropology and Religious Studies and the Yale School of Medicine.
Reviews for African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return
“African Pharmakon offers a deep and powerful rethinking of West African mental health from the birth of the Black Atlantic to the present. Quarshie’s novel analytic, the mind politic, is an absolutely precious gift.” * Julie Livingston, New York University * “In this compelling and historically rich account, Quarshie shows how the West African ‘pharmakon’ became entangled with—or even codified into—colonial and postcolonial law, migration policy, and psychiatric care.” * Claire Wendland, University of Wisconsin–Madison * “With African Pharmakon, Quarshie greatly expands the field of the history of madness. He makes it diasporic, he crosses historical time periods, and he calls us to fundamentally rethink histories of confinement and capture in new and exciting ways.” * Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, University of Texas at Austin *
