“My Father Is Mad, and I Do Not Like Him Doing Bad Things”: Masculinity and the Embodiment of Madness in Colonial Nigeria

This paper examines how colonial psychiatry functioned as a regime of gendered verification in which madness destabilized masculine legitimacy. On May 1, 1956, a resident of Osogbo, Lasisi Adelakun, submitted a petition to the Magistrate Court in the Osogbo Division seeking the internment of his father, Lawani Adelakun, whom he described as mentally ill for several years and causing damage in the streets. His words, “my father is mad, and I do not like him doing bad things,” reveal not only a desire for cure and social order but also a shift of care responsibilities traditionally linked to women. The petition illuminates the gendered experience of madness and shows how masculinity was negotiated through everyday encounters with mental illness in colonial Nigeria. This paper studies cases like Lawani Adelakun’s, drawing from hundreds of petitions and case files in colonial archives. These records show how narratives of insanity shifted from portraying women as diseased to expressing concern about unstable men. Tracing this transition, I argue that colonial legal scripts and medical filters redefined the abnormal male body and tied madness to masculine credibility. The paper also investigates asylum stories from the “underground world,” where institutional confinement reshaped identity, discipline, and ideals of respectable manhood. Situating these cases within the colonial historiography, I ask what it meant for men to descend into madness and how this differed from interpretations of female insanity rooted in assumptions about emotionality or domesticity. By situating lived experience alongside institutional categorization and drawing methodologically on microhistory and subaltern approaches, the study demonstrates how madness functioned as a social and gendered condition. Rather than treating psychiatry as an imported medical system, it reveals how colonial governance translated mental instability into a crisis of masculine legitimacy, reshaping domestic authority and gendered belonging in mid-twentieth-century Nigeria.