Raphaël Gallien used more than 1,400 patient dossiers from Anjanamasina to reconstruct the history of Madagascar’s colonial asylum. The files trace the institution from 1906 to the late 2000s and show how it was presented as a medical center while operating within a colonial system.
Jean R., a Malagasy schoolteacher, was interned after asking his colleagues and students to kneel before him. He wrote essays on various subjects while in the asylum and died at 31. Gallien described his suffering in one line: "Sa souffrance est le produit des impossibilités de la colonisation".
Anjanamasina archive
The asylum of Anjanamasina, near Antananarivo, was inaugurated in 1912 after receiving patients since 1901. More than 1,400 files were found in a disused pavilion, and the archive later became the basis of Gallien’s book, À en perdre la raison. Folies et colonisation à Madagascar.
The records show a rise in the patient population from about one hundred at the beginning to 600 at the time of independence. They also show that three quarters of the inmates were men, mostly indigenous people, while European patients were housed separately.
Patient records and categories
The indigenous quarter was divided into three categories: calm, semi-calm, and agitated. That classification system sits at the center of the archive because it turns the institution’s own paperwork into evidence of how patients were sorted and managed inside the asylum.
The archive is unusual for another reason: the institution was the only one established by France outside metropolitan France for a long time. In that setting, the records offer a rare large body of documentation on confinement in Madagascar, including mortality, patient categories, and the different treatment of indigenous and European patients.
What the files leave open
Half of the people admitted to the institution ended their lives there. The source does not explain what specific diagnoses or medical criteria were used to intern Jean R. and the other patients, leaving the asylum’s paperwork to show who was confined and how, but not the full basis for each decision.
For readers in Madagascar, the practical value of the archive is not abstract: it identifies the institution, the period it covered, and the categories used inside it. Gallien’s work turns a surviving paper trail into a record that can still be checked against the center’s history in Anjanamasina in Madagascar.
