ON JADUM

There are forty kinds of madness, only one kind of common sense—Akan proverb

Jadum: The Great Madman
Jadum would qualify as one of Nigeria’s most famous madmen. So famous that he makes appearances in Christopher Okigbo’s poetry and in Chinua Achebe’s fiction. Jadum was the “commander-in-chief” of the popular Ekwulobia market in present-day Anambra State, and was known for his wise and witty sayings and observations on life. He was named from the trademark prefix he attached to his wise sayings: “Jam Jam Dum Dum.” Bede Okigbo, the poet’s brother, in an interview published in the Chinua Achebe Foundation Interview Series, says of him:

“Jadum had many sayings; [one] was: when a poor man is eating vegetable cowpeas he does so in a hurry lest someone comes in and shares it with him. There are many proverbs like these that Jadum recited and we used to joke with them. Apart from that he used to dance as he recited these sayings.”

Jadum’s popularity represents the fascination—and the ironic esteem—with which madness and its sufferers are viewed in Nigerian popular culture. It should not be surprising that, for example, the Yorubas of southwest Nigeria call the street lunatic Omo Ijoba, Government’s Child, a backhanded reference to the fact that a lunatic lives what is considered to be a sheltered, pampered life, utterly free from subservience to the rules and laws that bind other citizens, much in the same manner that a child would get away with the misdemeanours that would spell trouble for his father’s servants.

The first asylum (as they were then called) in Nigeria was established in Calabar in 1904, followed by another in Yaba, Lagos (now known as the Yaba Psychiatric Hospital) in 1907. The Yaba Lunatic Asylum admitted its first set of inmates in October of 1907. Before the establishment of these asylums, Nigerian mental case patients were occasionally sent to Sierra Leone for orthodox psychiatric treatment.

Nollywood or Madwood?
A century later, it is our home videos that we now send to Sierra Leone and beyond. Nollywood, the Nigerian movie industry, is said to be the third largest movie industry in the world, only behind Hollywood and Bollywood. I can testify to the fact that Nollywood has established itself as arguably the most potent influencer of foreign impressions about Nigeria. Some years ago, a journalist in Kampala, Uganda informed me matter-of-factly that I did not “speak like a Nigerian.” A few moments of perplexity on my part followed, before it finally dawned on me that my “accuser” had come to assume—erroneously of course—that every Nigerian speaks in the exaggerated, dramatic accents of the typical Nollywood actor. It is also evident that the perceptions of Nigerians as a diabolical people, a perception common even in neighbouring countries like Ghana and Togo, is contributed to in no small part by the heavy voodoo content of many home videos.

Mad characters are another Nollywood staple—movies, especially the Yoruba-language ones, are full of people going mad, or someone conspiring to render another mad by supernatural means. This is understandable in popular drama, considering the fact that the Yoruba believe that madness is a fate worse than death, and that the greatest punishment one can inflict on an adversary is not to kill him, but instead to keep him alive in such a state that would make death seem desirable. The madness-inducing schemes of these movies are as comic as they are tragic—in one movie the babalawo engineered the voodoo such that the sanity of the intended victim was connected to the state of a village stream. As long as the stream remained undisturbed, the victim—who was thousands of miles away, across the seas in the white man’s land—remained normal. But whenever a crowd of children entered the stream to bathe or to fetch water, they were, unknowingly, tampering with the calm of a man’s mind. As they stirred the waters in their playfulness, the hexed man would begin exhibiting signs of mental instability, in a manner proportional to the degree of disturbance of the water.

Inflicting madness diabolically, as popular belief holds, is supposed to be a means of preventing a person from achieving his or her destiny. A wife might do this to her co-wife; so also might a man seeking career advancement have recourse to this means to prevent a rival from claiming a juicy office position. But the most baffling of these stories often involves the charm done by a mother to bring her son home from abroad, perhaps as revenge for neglecting her, or to prevent him from marrying a strange white woman. Whatever the case, the most effective way, according to the Nollywood ethos, to bring a distant son home is to afflict him with madness. Once he is hit, he hops onto the next available flight to Nigeria, not even sparing a moment to pack anything along with him.

The Neighbourhood Jadum
We see these Jadums every day, instinctively pitying them and also getting amused by them at the same time. We pay them attention and ignore them at the same time. They are a part of our everyday lives, so much so that we no longer consciously ponder on the fact of their ‘madness’. They almost begin to seem like people who have chosen that way of life for themselves. We marvel at them, at how they can eat out of garbage and not grow sick; we ponder on how they got to be the way they are; we sometimes take a morbid pleasure in imagining what or who they were before they came to be what they are now. Were they once normal human beings, at whose births mothers and fathers rejoiced? Where is that father, that mother, who rejoiced, where are the siblings? Did Jadum simply wake up one morning and begin to exhibit this madness? For most of us, we dwell on these in our idle moments and then we move on. On occassion, we meet one madman or madwoman whose background, or story, people seem to know. And we shake our heads at the wickedness of the world. For, behind every instance of mental illness in Nigeria is, I suspect, a voodoo-heavy explanation secured in place by the minds of sympathizing onlookers.

There is, however, these days, an increasing tendency for Nigerian society to be wary of these Jadums, and to believe that a good number of them are normal persons masquerading as lunatics in order to carry out criminal activities undisturbed. Every now and then the news media brings us stories of supposedly “mad” persons who are found in possession of such incongruous belongings as mobile phones, business cards and large sums of money—the evidence suggests they are acting as front men for syndicates involved in armed robbery, ritual murder and kidnapping. The most famous case in recent city lore involved Clifford ‘the Cannibal’ Orji, a Jadum who lorded over the environs of a popular Lagos bus stop. He was eventually caught in his den in possession of human parts, mobile phones and money, and was generally believed to be the reason for the wealthy individuals in posh cars who flocked to the area every night, supposedly in search of human parts for money-making ritual purposes.

The Origins of Madness
Some time ago I decided to do a quick e-survey amongst friends and colleagues. It was a simple survey: I asked the questions, What would you define madness as? and What comes to your mind when you hear the word “madness”?
I got a handful of responses:
Madness is a contrast to and deviation from the norm.
Madness is a system that is totally dysfunctional, in disarray and turmoil.
Madness is excess. An excess of everything: of reality. Of money. Of fame. Of poverty. Of faith. Of creativity. Of genius. Because excesses remove one from reality.
Madness is relative and has degrees; it is a state of mental disability or “unwellness”.
What comes to my mind when I hear the word madness is mental instability that can no longer be managed and has now become lunacy. When someone who is mentally unstable can no longer be managed and communicated with, I would say that madness has set in.

Another Nigerian study (said to be “the first large-scale study of knowledge and of attitudes towards mental illness in sub-Saharan Africa”) carried out by a team of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers at the University of Ibadan, and published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, established the following, in descending order of frequency of citation, as the “ten most commonly reported causes of mental illness”: drug or alcohol misuse, possession by evil spirits, traumatic event or shock, stress, genetic inheritance, physical abuse, biological factors (other than brain disease or genetic inheritance), God’s punishment, brain disease and poverty.

The Great Debate
At this stage we should leave the playgrounds of narration and opinion and sidle into the classrooms of “hard” data.

The British psychiatrist Kwame McKenzie, in his article “Being black in Britain is Bad for your Mental Health” (published in the UK Guardian) noted: “The rate of serious mental illness in the Caribbean and in Africa is not high, but the rate of mental illness in Britons of Caribbean and African origin is.”

Let us consider the second assertion first.