After a glamorous 'Dayty December' celebration in Lagos, which reached its peak at the Eyo Festival, it was curious to speculate how the complexity and spiritual synthesis of the Yoruba culture might appear to people of other cultures. A post circulating on the internet for the past few days wonders with awe about people who can celebrate Christmas on Thursday, go for Jumu'ah prayers on Friday, dance with 'Adimu', 'Ologede', 'Oniko' and other 'Orisha Iyo' on Saturday, and, yes, go to church on Sunday.
The issue of the spiritual life of the Yoruba has long been a subject of speculation and study by experts in the mental and sociological sciences.
The story of Dr. Raymond Prince makes for an interesting discussion. He was born in 1925 in Ontario, Canada. He studied psychiatry and received Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada in 1955. In 1957, he responded to an advertisement in the British Medical Journal for an 'expert alienist' – an old description for a psychiatrist who was willing to go to western Nigeria to work. He was offered a job by the government of the Western Region.
Thirty-two-year-old Dr. Prince arrived at Arrowe Psychiatric Hospital, Nigeria's first mental hospital, soon after his job. He was a restless and adventurous young man who was trying to find himself and find his passion. Born to Baptist parents, he abandoned his faith along the way. He retained a healthy curiosity about spiritual matters and was very interested in the influence of culture and traditional beliefs on the expression of mental illness among people in non-Western societies.
As he settled into the warm environment of Abeokuta, he became fascinated by the Yoruba people. It was during the period that Thomas Adeoye Lembo, the first Western trained Nigerian psychiatrist to be appointed as the medical superintendent of the facility, was in the United Kingdom on an assignment for the Government of Western Nigeria to research the worrying frequency of developing symptoms of mental illness in students on scholarships in foreign universities.
The nineteen months that Dr. Prince spent in Abeokuta and its environs irrevocably determined the course of his life and career. His legacy in the mental health profession includes the coining of a diagnostic category called 'brain fog syndrome', which describes a common set of physical and psychological symptoms observed in local students, which he considered a culture-bound illness.
Prince's most significant achievement ultimately lies in his efforts to understand the Yoruba mind in sickness and in health. He made his way into the hearts of the local people and was very interested in exploring their world view and belief system that helped them interact with the world around them. He began meeting traditional medical practitioners in Abeokuta and surrounding areas, traveling as far as Okun Owa near Ijebu Ode, where he stayed for two weeks with a native doctor, Chief Jimoh Adetona, who was renowned for treating the mentally ill. Strangely, people who were notorious for shrouding their knowledge and practices in mystery opened up to him, and he was able to learn much about the underlying beliefs that underpinned their religious lives and their efforts to heal the sick. He learned and wrote about the role of the spoken word (Ọ̀rọ̀) in Yoruba culture. He learned the difference between the 'Babalawo', a priest who relied on divination with Ifa, and the Onisegun, who relied mostly on herbs. He learned that herbal preparation also often involved some ritual and the recitation of certain 'power-words'. He learned about the use by some herbal experts of Rauvolfia alkaloids – including a drug called reserpine, which was well known in the West. He learned about curses and invocations, which could be used for both good and evil purposes by the same practitioner. He linked this to the experience of many of the patients he saw in Arrow, who attributed their illnesses to being 'cursed'.
Later, as his reputation grew, he played a role in the collaboration between Lambo and Canadian Alexander Leighton and his team to carry out the so-called Cornell-Arrow study, the first major cross-cultural epidemiological study of mental illness symptoms in Africa. This resulted in the publication of a publication entitled 'Psychiatric Disorders in Yoruba'.
Many of the Prince's later academic achievements were derived from the thinking initiated during his stay in Abeokuta. He made a genuine effort to understand the experience of non-Europeans from the inside, and did not attribute the things he did not understand to Africans' lack of ability to experience higher mental functions, as some colonial psychiatrists of the past had done. His fascination with the Yoruba mind, his emphasis on the importance of Sri, and his understanding of the interrelationship of good and evil in Yoruba philosophy made it possible for him to understand why some babalawo sometimes seemed to act without asking what was right or wrong in what their client was requesting. It also opened his eyes to how people saw the connection with the Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam and blended them with the culture in a seamless syncretism.
Prince died in 2012. He lived the life he chose. His 'Brain Fag Syndrome' has lost most of its relevance in the present day, but he introduced concepts such as culture bound syndrome and transcultural psychiatry which are ongoing fields of study. They made mental health less Eurocentric. Finally, his insistence that mental health workers be trained locally is a respectful nod to what he learned in Nigeria and how he attempted, with only partial success, to understand the Yoruba mind in illness and health.
