Steve Michel's Journal of Lateral Modernism********************** Vol. VII No.2 February 2007
Editorial:
Back in the day What follows is an excerpt from an excellent article 'Thomas Adeoye Lambo - Nigerian psychiatrist - Interview' that was published way way back in the day in the now defunct Omni magazine which some of you may remember. This was a great magazine that is surely missed by many with its coverage of art, science fiction and science article. The content was always new and original. This article also marks the Black History Month and reminds us how much has been lost and changed hands over the countless millenias of human history. Enjoy!SM07
Thomas Adeoye Lambo - Nigerian psychiatrist - Interview
from: Omni, Feb, 1992
A Nigerian psychiatrist employs traditional techniques of so-called "witch doctors:" free association, group therapy and behavioral modification
Savages are happy They laugh and dance and forget their problems in the blink of an eye. Or so said the missionaries who penetrated the interior of Africa. It took an African psychiatrist--the continent's first--to explode this myth.
When Thomas Adeoye Lambo looked into the villages of his native Nigeria, he found plenty of psychotics and schizophrenics. The per capita incidence of mental illness in Africa is, in fact, the same as in New York City. But because Africans treat crazy people as part of everyday life, aberrant behavior had always escaped the notice of Western eyes. Lambo also discovered that African village life with its strong tribal and familial bonds, has therapeutic benefits of its own. Employing what he calls "methodological syncretism," the fusion of Western and traditional ideas, he began incorporating family members and villagers into his patients' psychiatric treatments.
The missionaries made another mistake: dismissing Africa's traditional healers as "witch doctors." They were, Lambo realized, adeptly employing many of the psychiatric techniques he had learned at the University of London. Centuries before Freud, they invented the "talking cure," free association, group therapy, and behavioral modification. They also used an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal and psychotropic drugs. "Their psychotherapeutic sessions were vastly superior to ours," says Lambo. "They showed we hadn't got it right." Faster, more effective, and costing one-fifth the price of a Western cure, Lambo's village-based model for treating mental illness has been adopted by 60 countries throughout the Third World
One of more than 30 children fathered by a Yoruba chief with 12 wives, Lambo was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria in 1923. His early missionary schooling included burning African statues and masks on Sunday bonfires. He studied medicine at Birmingham University and went on to advanced degrees at London University's Institute of Psychiatry.
In the first of several famous research projects, Lambo was hired by the Nigerian government to study mental illness and nervous breakdowns among his fellow African students in England. Touring the wards, he discovered that sick students, in spite of their Ph.D.'s and Saville Row suits, cast their delusions in terms of witchcraft and juju. Lambo already suspected that only an indigenous African psychiatry could deal with the African psyche.
Returning to Nigeria in 1950, he was appointed director of the Aro Hospital for Nervous Diseases Africa's first mental hospital. But before it was built, Lambo's British wife, in suggesting he billet his patients in neighboring villages, gave him his first idea for deviating from psychiatric orthodoxy. Colonial administrators looked aghast at his next experiment. Using his own money, Lambo hired a dozen traditional healers to practice alongside clinical staff. For 12 years he filmed and analyzed the "witch doctors" at work.
At the same time, he began studying the psychological effects of modernization in postcolonial Africa. Depression, anxiety and other neuroses are the price paid for social change. In its malignant form, this anxiety spawns secret societies devoted to ritual murder. In the late fifties, Lambo invited colleagues from Cornell University to join him in the first comparative study of mental illness in the Third World. Working with control populations in New York City and Halifax, Nova Scotia, they showed that Africans and Westerners alike suffer from mental illness, although the symptoms will be specific to the culture from which they arise. Their book, Psychiatric Disorder Among the Yoruba is now a classic text on African civilization and its discontents.
Lambo became head of the department of psychiatry, dean of the medical school and vice-chancellor of the University of Ibadan. In 1971 he left Africa for Geneva and the WHO, by 1975 emerging as WHO's Deputy Director-General. Now retired and living in Nigeria, he travels the world advising everyone from popes to presidents.
We had missed each other during an earlier rendezvous planned for Geneva, and our second appointment in Washington, D.C., was nearly canceled by a coup attempt. Over six feet tall, spare, elegantly dressed, Lambo, at 69, cuts an impressive figure. But he was visibly shaken by this last in a series of bloody turns in Nigerian politics. --Thomas Bass
Omni: What's your opinion of the term "witch doctor?"
Lambo: It's a derogatory term coined by missionaries. When I went to mission school, every Sunday we were sent into the villages to collect all the idols and carved objects that now fetch millions of dollars at Christie's auction house. We'd pile them in the middle of the village and burn them. This was part of our mission to convert the savage to Christianity. But just as there's no one single religion, there's no one single way to practice medicine. I could call quite a number of modern physicians witch doctors," such as the ones who do "exploratory" surgery so they can hand you a heavy bill.
Omni: What was your family like?
Lambo: My father was paramount chief in the ancient town of Abeokuta. But in Africa, especially among the Yoruba, a child has no one single father. Your mother's brother is also your father. Psychodynamically, this substitution allows for extended care and a choice of role models. My grandmother gave me her own breast to suckle for years. There was nothing in it, but it kept me quiet! I spent my early years thinking she was my mother. We lived in a large compound, and even today there are people there whose relationships are so ill-defined I can't trace them. My cousin Joseph Lambo is a traditional healer. Even in grade school he was interested in herbalism, which he practiced on all of us.
Omni: Does he have magical powers?
Article Source: read the rest of article at (c)1992 OMNI MAGAZINE
In the News:
Speculation Dept..:
Gradualism: the rise and fall of the internet.
by Dalani
By the end of the 20th century we have seen technological turnovers and changes sweep entire cultures under the rug of history. We may admire and study the woven patterns we see on that rug as the ‘history taught in schools’ but beneath each thread are origins lost and cultures forgotten. Sure the 8track tape jokes have now gotten stale but a visit to the remains of the long defunct OMNI Magazine revealed to me what may well be the microcosm sum total history of the internet.
OMNI was a sucessful print magazine launched in 1978 and sold so well, it was one of the highest paying writers market around. Eventualy with the advent of the internet, its popularity waned until it ceased print publication in 1995. Then it went online and knew a certain revival with 100,000 vistors within the first month of its introduction. Magazine staff, volunteers and famous authors, scientists and forum participants contributed to its content and popularity. By 1998 the owners of the OMNI copyright did not see a profit and General Media, the company that owned OMNI, closed down the site and in 2003 the archived material was taken offline.
Many skepticals would point out that case is hardly representative of the tendencies in culture and the internet. But think again. General Media, an apt name for this case, may well symbolize the eventual control of a two tiered internet divided by the killing of net neutrality by large carrier monopolies. Gradually a large shift in internet traffic would be evacuated into the media controlled high premium content providers(who by then would have consolidated analog and digital radio/television). Many of the ISP and webhosting services would see diminishing profits and cancelled contracts with their slower net T1 backbone service. The data of a billion lives in the form of blogs and myspace like pages residing on servers would be shunted around until purchased en vrac in bankrupcies buyouts and auctions into the hands of a few large data silos- if at all. Similarily the data residing in Myspace accounts will eventualy fade away as its young users age and go on to the next thing. Never happen you say? Remember Lycos and its DIY website tripod.com service? It was hot then; now it barely exist on the net; thousands of ‘do-it-youself’ webpages ,the data contained in the countless abandonned user accounts, have long since been archived or deleted. If you doubt the analogy with OMNI’s case, consider that its articles dated after 1992 (with digital print publishing data) are now in stored in relative obscurity in a easily forgetable article domain site saturated with google ads. Now OMNI, once king in the magazine circulation numbers, no longer even has its own domain name.
One might point to the immutability of the digital data. But what data? When music went from vinyl to digital CD many music albums never got transfered into the new media. Like the old VHS tapes and vinyls languishing in boxes, it’s not long before your family DVDs follow suit. .
The remedy: respect your data assets and watch out for obscolescence. Upgrading too often only worsens data loss since every time one must transfer data from one medium to another, some is left out -no every one has time to convert thousands of family footage into the latest format. If you spend your time and money upgrading, you're only putting more value in technological hype than your own content. The key is in knowing the reason why to upgrade. You want to share your photos and videos on YouTube? Be warned that unless google eventually pays large carrier fees to guarantee top tier access, your videos will be shunted on the slow lane to make way for media giant trailers and advertising. If you think transfering old VHS onto DVD is hard, downloading all your YouTube footage to a newer premium speed site may be harder.
Much of what I say is speculation. Politicaly, protecting net-neutrality (where all data gets the same access speed) may the best answer for now. But consider if OMNI, the multi-million dollar magazine, fared so badly into obscurity, what will become of all those amateur YouTube videos and blogs down the line? The long term answer may be in the ability of culture to transform itself over time.(dalani07)
Back issues 12/03 ,01/04 , 02/04 ,03/04 ,04/04 ,05/04 , 06/04, 07/04, 08/04, 09/04, 12/04, 01/05, 02/05, 03/05, 12/05, 01/06 ,02/06, 03/06 ,05/06 , 06/06 ,07/06 , 08/06 ,09/06 ,10/06 ,11/06, 12/06, 01/07
Dalani News : Monthly blog magazine on Environment, design science, culture, technology and art.
Disclaimer: The opinions and information presented and expressed are intended for discussion purposes. Copyrights of web pages and/or articles belong to their respective owner(s). Some externally referenced sites may become inactive or modified. Please notify editor of any malfunctioning or missing pages .
© smichel design co. 2006 all rights reserved **********************contact:webmaster@dalani.com
>Reduce Greenhouse gases: plant a tree"
