Mr. Tanka and Voices

Abstract

Hubertus Büschel, “Mr. Tanka and Voices: A Cameroonian Patient Writing about Schizophrenia”: In March 1968, Benedict Nta Tanka, a Cameroonian clerk, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. After hearing voices and suffering from frightening dreams, he consulted “healers” and colonial medical doctors. During his first psychiatric consultation and following stays and treatments in several hospitals, he started to write an “autobiography” of his “illness” dream protocols. Tanka’s writings are an example of an African patient in the 1960s writing about his “experiences” of psychiatric phenomena. Important from a patient’s view was German psychiatrist Alexander Boroffka. He treated Tanka at the University of Ibadan, at the end of 1970, part of a World Health Organization (WHO) global field study on schizophrenia, the most “frightening psychiatric illness” during that time. Boroffka and Tanka became part of WHO’s Aro Field Research Unit in Ibadan. Tanka’s self-narratives show how an African patient delivered epistemological material and negotiated, adapted, and resisted WHO official discourses about schizophrenia.