Ennui, nostalgia and neurasthenia

To be sure, boredom, affairs, sadness and spite were only part of the picture. Adventure and danger were certainly at the centre of colonial expectations. The dangers were long utilised to dissuade European women from setting foot in most colonies—with the excep­tion of those territories deemed apt for settlement—a category based largely on climatic considerations.

Post-conquest, the colonies remained a foreboding place for many. Colonial manuals and prescriptive texts of all sorts only reinforced these fears: in 1901, anthropologist Paul d’Enjoy alerted potential French settlers to the risks linked to everything from sex to anaemia, hepatitis, spiders and malaria in Indochina. In 1910, Paris-based Vietnamese language professor Edmond Nordemann warned his charges that Indochina was not a land of settlement. He advised them on how best to get by: killing mosquitoes, avoiding sleeping on the ground floor of a building, steering clear of liaisons with native women, keeping a proper diet and so on.⁹ Both Nordemann and d’Enjoy warned of the impact tropical colonies could have on colonial minds.

At its least serious, colonial depression was coded as ‘the blues’ or homesickness. At its most extreme, it was categorised as lethal nostalgia and neurasthenia. Thomas Dodman has analysed the important place of nostalgia within French medical discourses around Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, in 1844 none other than General Thomas- Robert Bugeaud, the putative ‘pacifier’ of Algeria, recommended to his lieutenants that they spare their men too many hardships, so as to stave off ‘disease and especially nostalgia’.

As for neurasthenia, Dane Kennedy argues, this later condition was diagnosed with alarming frequency in British colonies at the dawn of the twentieth century. Its onset was attributed to the tropical heat, but also to the colony itself. According to one physician practising in Central Africa, and writing in 1926, its aetiology had to factor in rivalries among colonial officials, ‘loneliness’ and ‘living amidst a native population’. Others con­sidered the disease profoundly linked to colonial ennui. It spared no category: men, women and children were all exposed. Doctors counselled a range of measures to stave off the condition: marriage and exercise, most notably.¹¹ In short, in the logics of both nostalgia and neurasthenia, the colonial realm itself appeared somehow toxic. French colonial doctor Georges Treille distilled the received wisdom of his time when he explained in 1899: ‘The settlement of Europeans in warm lands, especially in inter-tropical Africa, can only have a chance of success in specific, determined conditions.’¹² Much ink and effort was spilled in determining how to improve the conditions in question. Indeed, such concerns lay at the heart of a leisure regimen that shaped colonial life.