‘Tracing’ Jean-Louis Renauld: Private Archives as a Way into the History of a Post-Colonial Psychiatric Unit (Bobo-Dioulasso, Upper Volta, 1972-1974)
Authors: Tiquet Romain 
Published: November 2024

This text presents an incursion into the history of the Bobo-Dioulasso psychiatric unit a decade after Upper Volta gained independence, through the career and experience of Jean-Louis Renauld, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked at the unit between 1972 and 1974, within the framework of the French coopération programme. The present article draws on a corpus of varied sources: various interviews carried out with Jean-Louis Renauld, around fifteen photographs taken during his stay, and a small collection of private archives put together by the psychiatrist himself. This latter corpus consists of scattered notes, which indiscriminately bring together free-flowing reflections written during his stay, his correspondence with various authorities, a set of technical notes regarding the projects he initiated, and the reproduction of an article published in a medical journal.The corpus of sources thus collected appears fragmentary and fragmented. Fragmentary in that it mainly focuses on the psychiatrist’s experience; in fact, a whole range of other players, be it the local nursing team or the patients and their families, are rarely referred to or barely visible. And fragmented in that this archive is made up of notes that are sometimes difficult to identify or contextualise. The photographs are useful, but there are only a limited number of them. Finally, during the interviews we carried out, Jean-Louis Renauld’s memory sometimes failed to reliably recall biographical details that go back over fifty years.This varied set of documents nevertheless seems useful and important, especially in a context where the sources produced by the unit itself since it was opened remain very limited, if not non-existent. Renauld’s personal notes, for example, allow us to access more “raw” thoughts, reflections from his experience that are situated (in time and space) and which neither the scientific articles he produced (which he wrote in his capacity as a psychiatrist) nor the interviews we conducted–which required him to activate his memory fifty years after the facts–have been able to reproduce. The diversity of this corpus thus allows us to gain a grasp of his professional career, but also to access fragments of his personal feelings as a young French coopérant.By reading between the lines, and encouraging a discussion-dialogue around the photographs, we were able to a certain extent to move beyond the trap of “self-dramatization” and to get a sense of the history of a medical service in which daily life and the relations between its different players—a lone white doctor, a nursing team, patients, families—still bore the imprint of colonial relations, a decade after independence.The idea for this article thus arose out of both a lack and a desire. A lack above all: the absence of alternative sources produced by the unit or by other players, which it might be possible to cross-reference with Renauld’s corpus, or which might possibly allow us to deconstruct it. And then a desire: to try and produce a record and an analysis on the basis of a limited and fragmentary documentary corpus, all of it produced by the same individual. As such, this article presents both a methodological challenge and an exploratory approach, by engaging in a deliberate back-and-forth between different scales of analysis. By taking as its starting point the figure of Jean-Louis Renauld, and his career and experiences in Bobo-Dioulasso during the two years of his assignment, this exploratory research project attempts to reconstitute the itinerary of an enquiry which, by relying in particular on one individual’s memory, more widely suggests that we reflect on the history of the coopération system and on what the day-to-day operation of the Bobo-Dioulasso psychiatric unit might have looked like a decade after the country gained independence.This article is structured along three lines of argument. Firstly, we focus on the life of Jean-Louis Renauld and his professional career, in order to more broadly investigate the motivations that led him to become a coopérant in Upper Volta. Secondly, by examining a fragmentary but diverse corpus of sources, this text sets itself the task of exploring daily life at the Bobo-Dioulasso psychiatric unit through the “projects” which Renauld initiated there, and which aimed to break with the asylum model and introduce the local nursing team to a new professional code of ethics, by demystifying mental illness and introducing a more “relational” form of psychiatry.Finally, starting from the observation that the corpus of sources used remains very focussed on the figure of Renauld, this article attempts to gain a sense of the reality experienced by other players by analysing certain patient profiles and the relations that existed between families and society, both with regard to mental disorders and to the psychiatric unit.