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1914 and Nigeria’s Existential Crisis: A Historical Perspective (1) |
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Saturday, 29 May 2004 |
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson discusses the ways in which colonialism created a sense of community among the otherwise insular elites of colonial domains. One of the ways in which these imagined communities of colonized elites were promoted was through travels to the colonial metropole for purposes of study and /or for professional training. Anderson argues that as elites embarked upon this educational and professional ‘pilgrimage’ to the imperial center, their involvement in the same or similar political activities as well as the intellectual and political communication facilitated by the colonial Lingua Franca engendered a trans-territorial political imagination, which inspired the elites to form alliances, consummate political friendships, and to that gradually transformed colonial states into national states (Anderson 1991:114-115).
Similarly, Anderson posits that colonial educational institutions served as platforms for the articulation of nationalist ideals among students from disparate sections of the colonial territory. These institutions, especially the exposure to Western models of nationalism that they offered to the student-elites, impacted the latter’s sense of solidarity and inspired them to begin to form associations and movements parallel to earlier Western ones. Thus, Anderson argues that strong nationalist sentiments crystallized in these institutions or at least around them.The aim of this two-part paper is twofold. First I discuss the usefulness and limitations of Anderson’s thesis in the effort to understand the nature and course of Nigerian nationalism. Second, I show how Nigerian anti-colonial nationalism failed to forge a sense of national cohesion, thus saddling a post-colonial Nigerian state with an existential crisis that continues to undermine the Nigerian nation and to produce crisis, mediocrity, corruption, and centrifugal agitations. I will argue that while anti colonial nationalist activities started and progressed in the model postulated by Anderson, that is, through the networks created by colonialism, these activities, when narrowed down and assessed on the basis of their concern with creating a sense of a single Nigerian nationality, fail to stand up to his theory.The Nigerian colonial entity was created by British fiat in 1914 by the arbitrary merger of two British colonial possessions in the Niger area of West Africa. “Nationalist” responses to colonial rule, however, antedated this development. I look at how these responses, both in the period before and after amalgamation were restricted to the southern territories; how the northern territories remained largely insulated from these activities as a result of their identification with a wider Arabo-Islamic world(view), their being ignored by the southern nationalist potentates, and deliberate British policy of avoiding what they saw as political and cultural contagion. The paper then move to a discussion of how the resultant differences in Southern and Northern political priorities—not to mention the chasm between the two region’s political and economic aspirations—came to be a burden on the emergent post-colonial Nigerian state. British administration in the Northern and Southern territories—and I use “Northern” and “Southern” here loosely to designate the territories that were ruled by the British as separate colonial entities before the 1914 amalgamation which brought them together under a single British colonial administration[i]— differed markedly before and after the 1914 merger. This difference was informed both by a British desire to maintain, even widen, the cultural gap existing between their two contiguous territories (a divide and rule policy) and a genuine—perhaps naïve—recognition of the political incompatibility of the two territories. This differential administrative orientation and other factors that will be highlighted shortly drove a wedge between the northern and southern territories in a way that prevented the emergence of an integrative nationalism such as happened in most colonial territories in Africa and in other parts of the world. Thus, this paper proceeds from the premise that in the context of Nigerian nationalism Anderson's thesis requires modification or complication.Recent scholarship on nationalism has vitiated the kind of sweeping, linear, and overarching analysis of the emergence of nationalist identity in the colonial world that Anderson posits. In his comparison of nationalist developments in Dutch Indonesia and French Indochina, David Henley argues that although the precolonial Indochinese (Vietnamese) state had a credible imperial claim to Laos and Cambodia, and that there was the kind of colonial educational interaction of which Anderson speaks, coupled with an adoption, somewhat, of the Viet language as a national educational language, Vietnamese nationalists still sought to create a Vietnamese state which excluded Laos and Cambodia (Henley 1995: 315). On the opposite end of the spectrum sits the precolonial Java state, which, although it had a much looser hold on the multi-ethnic archipelago that make up today’s Indonesia, was able to evolve into a sustainable national entity through an integrative nationalism aided by the adoption of Malay as a national language and the invocation of the symbol of the precolonial Mujapahit state. These two nationalisms constitute variations in Anderson’s thesis and show clearly that there is no automatic, mechanical transition from the conditions and factors enumerated by Anderson to a cohesive national ideology. More importantly, they illustrate the fact that nationalism took different forms in different colonial situations; that such complicated and convoluted nationalist histories and processes render inadequate teleological explanations that often fail to account for the peculiarities and complexities of each nationalist movement and trajectory.In the Nigerian case, unlike the Indonesian and Vietnamese cases, there was no common cultural symbol to be invoked for the purpose of creating a national solidarity and imaginary. Also, there did not emerge, either by evolution or by adoption, a national vernacular language, as was the case in Indonesia and Vietnam where Malay and Viet came to predominate as languages of business and the conduct of public affairs. Above all, there was no cultural communication between the Northern Nigerian territories and the Southern ones as was the case among precolonial Indonesians who “share[d] certain element of social behavior and material culture” (Henley, 287). This is the parting point of the Nigerian, Indonesian, and Indochinese models of nationalism. The peculiarity of the Nigerian nationalist model is further reinforced by its divergence from the nationalist trends in other African countries. While the trend in Africa was, with few exceptions, the formation of mass-based integrative nationalist ideologies and movements, and while different shades of anti-colonial sentiments gravitated towards a nationalist geographical or ideological center, the nationalist movement in Nigeria, as shall be shown, had no integrative agenda, and this was perhaps informed by the realization of the remote feasibility of such a project. Whereas Indonesia’s and other colonial territories’ national integration was completed at independence, Nigerian nation building efforts started suffering debilitating setbacks from independence as increased regionalization and the sheer political and cultural incompatibility of the North and the South produced two nationalisms and two sets of aspirations, thus undermining the infant British creation.It is not surprising, then, that Anthony Smith, while advancing his thesis of the connection between nation formation and what he calls ethnie, marks Nigeria out as one of those countries that could not be termed nations because they have “no common ethnic experience, no usable ethnie, whose political memories, however dim, and ancestry ties, however dubious might serve the required purpose (Smith 1987;147).” Smith points to the antiquity of group interaction and geo-political relations as factors that could encourage national integration projects. Nigeria, he however contends, is more constrained in its nation-building efforts because, unlike most other African states, it lacks a historically shared symbol, myth, or sentiment to exploit for the formation of a national consciousness. Nigeria therefore remains at the periphery of the prevalent trend in postcolonial states: the transition from disjointed and incoherent colonial creations to nationhood. Smith concludes that the rise to prominence of third-world countries which lack significant national cohesion is a result of self-conscious assimilatory projects and or negotiated compromises. For Smith, Nigeria is an exception which vitiates the near-universality of the modern belief in the ‘naturalness’ of nations. A clear analogue to the Nigerian case is India where Partha Chatterjee’s study makes a case for the recognition of an essentially elitist, hegemonic and Western- inspired anti-British nationalist activity, which failed to accommodate or engage with potential local unifying symbols and institutions, choosing instead to work within the language and models of Western nation-states. The indifference of the Indian colonial elite to local realities of ethnicity, religion, caste, and class and their preoccupation with the largely idealistic project of cultural “normalization” and modernity relegated national consciousness to the background because the inspiration for such a project was drawn not from local realities and concerns but from Western republican models, which did not recognize or guarantee the expression of divergent socio-political, and economic attributes and aspirations.Much like the Indian anti-colonial nationalism, early Nigerian nationalism was elitist in character and was heavily suffused with republican rhetoric and ideals. The difference between the two cases lies in the fact that in Nigeria the elites, at least as from 1914, perhaps owing to their largely Southern composition, began to subordinate their republican ideals to their strong attachment to ethnicity, region, religion and cultural identity. In fact, as I will argue here, this factor of primordial constraint shaped the anti-colonial struggle as much as the desire to gain self-rule from Britain.
Originally conducted along subregional (West African) lines, anti-colonial activities of African elites took on a decidedly national character after World War II. This phenomenon of subregional “nationalism” in the anti-colonial movements have led to questions being asked as to the nationalist content in the “nationalisms” of the African elites and it is in the light of these ambiguities and shiftiness that early Nigerian nationalist activities should be assessed. ‘Nigerian’ nationalism started not as a ‘Nigerian’ movement but as an Anglophone West African one, with active participation by Nigerians. Early Nigerian anti-colonial activities started in the late 19th century in the Lagos colony. At this time there was not yet a southern protectorate, not to talk of a Nigeria. Similarly, there was subsequently no “Nigerian” strategy of colonial conquest; instead, as the Northern and Southern territories were conquered differently with supposedly different motivations, so did Britain’s relations with and treatment of the two areas differ sharply.Strategies of Conquest as Reinforcement of DifferenceThe process of effective colonial occupation of the Nigerian area took about 50 years to accomplish. The British had annexed the colony of Lagos in 1861 after having ruled it informally as a protectorate for 10 years. To this colony was added the remaining Yoruba speaking areas of Abeokuta and its environs between 1891and 1895. The rest of what became Southern Nigeria was conquered in a piecemeal fashion that involved several military expeditions and spanned several years.The conquest of the North and the South progressed differently—the southern conquest preceding that of the North by at least several decades, the conquest of the latter’s having been completed only in 1903 with the fall of Sokoto. The strategies of conquest in the two territories were remarkably different. In the South, treaty making was the major tool but in the North the British used military forces all the way, suggesting a greater resistance against Western, “Christian” rule than was the case in the South, which was already acquainted with Christianity and Western ideas. But the differential conquests were by no means the only disintegrating factors between North and South. As shall be shown, the British administered the two colonial territories using different legal, administrative and social policies and instruments despite their spatial proximity. There was a clear cultural gulf between the two colonies—one that a British administrative policy founded on conservation sought to preserve not dissolve. Separate colonial administrations and the imposition of border controls by the British perpetuated this cultural gap. Thus, the two colonial territories developed separately, obviating the likelihood of integration that common colonial geography and experience could have fostered.British attitude towards the North and the North’s own self-definition, more than any other factor, responsible for its ideological separation from the South and was also largely the cause of its being insulated from the anti-colonial activities of the early and late colonial periods. After the conquest of Northern Nigeria, Frederick Lugard, the first Governor, confronted with the problem of governing such a vast territory without the requisite manpower and funds, and wary of inflaming Islamic passions— Islam being the religion of the Muslim emirates which was the basis of government and the conduct of daily life—opted for a policy of indirect rule. Lugard had promised in his 1900 declaration of the Northern Nigerian Protectorate not to tamper with the existing Islamic establishment. Moreover, the preexisting caliphate system had a complex judicial, political and social apparatuses which the British could use for the administration of the colony. Above all, the emirs of the North commanded significant loyalty among the people, so that replacing their rule with a wholly British system would alter the political balance of the Northern Emirates and alienate the people from the British. Although the question of how indirect this form of rule actually was—which in turn stems from the overbearing presence of British officials and their direct interference in local administration—has acquired currency in recent studies of colonial Northern Nigeria,[ii] the system nevertheless left considerable power in the hands of the emirs.The important point to note here is that this was an important peculiarity of the colonial experience of Northern Nigeria and that it had other peculiar components to it like the Sharia family law and the local Alkali Islamic courts—all of which were continuities from the precolonial caliphate system. Attempts by the British to import Indirect Rule into the South failed as the more republican societies of that region voted with their feet. The result of this was that the principles of Northern traditional administration, which were regarded as being antithetical to Southern egalitarianism and radical political activism, was circumscribed to the North. But more significantly, the British, in spite of the spectacular failures of Indirect Rule in the South, privileged the policy throughout the colonial period in Nigeria, leading to the much-vaunted claim, in colonial and post independence Southern Nigeria that the British intended to subordinate the South to the North by trying to impose Northern institutions on the South. But by far the most important consequence of the conscious preservation of the “Northern system” was that it reinforced Northern exclusivity, which had been engendered by many centuries of the North’s association with the Arabo-Islamic world.The North and the Islamic World(view)Northern cultural and political exclusivity antedated colonialism, and it was perhaps as a result of this that the British sought not to disturb the “Northern system,” whose Arabo-Islamic content, in contra-distinction with the Sub-Saharan African and (later) Western inclination of the South, was remarkably high. The historical experiences of the people of the Islamic North drew them towards the Arab world rather than towards the Western, Christian civilization that the South and other British colonies in West Africa—Ghana and Sierra Leone notably—had come to represent by the turn of the century. The affinities shared by the northern emirates with the Arabo-Islamic world could be traced to the 15th century when Arab merchants and scholars introduced Islam into Hausaland.In 1421 the king of Kano received a religious scholar from Medina, Mohammadu Al- Maghili who stayed in Kano for several years teaching the ways of Islamic living and leadership. It was during his stay in Kano that mosques were built for congregational prayers. Before leaving Kano he wrote the Risala , a religious treatise and the classic political essay on Islamic leadership, The Obligation of Princes both of which he gave to the Kano king for guidance. Almaghili similarly visited Katsina where he caused mosques to be built and on leaving he also gave The Crown of Faith, another political guidebook, to the Katsina king. Thenceforth, Islam did not only become the state religion of Hausaland, but Islamic clerics sprang up from different parts of the region drawing inspiration from the Arab world. Al-Maghili’s visits opened the floodgate for increased interaction between Hausaland and the Arab world in the realm of culture— economic interaction having commenced much earlier by virtue of the Trans- Saharan trade.Over the next three centuries, Hausaland became a major destination of Arab Islamic scholars as many of the Hausa rulers began to retain them in their courts for legal and political advice. The political and legal institutions of Hausaland became recipients of the politico-legal thoughts emanating from the Near East, and, through the pilgrimage to Mecca, Hausaland became integrated with Near Eastern, Islamic civilization. The flourishing Trans-Saharan trade meanwhile was going on in a much more invigorated way, leading to the economy of Hausa states being tied more or less to those of Arab North Africa. The lifestyles of the people in the Hausa States were similarly responding to these developments; dress, food, and material culture were yielding to the models imported from the Arab world. By the 18th century one could safely say that Hausaland had been integrated into the political and economic nexus of the Arabo-Berber world of Islam. Bornu was similarly engaged in the same kinds of cultural and economic conversation with the Arabo-Islamic world.By the late 18th century, therefore, the entire area of the Lake Chad and the Hausa states was one huge outpost of the Arabo- Muslim world. The 1804 Islamic Jihad, merely aimed at purifying an existing Islamic tradition and purging it of vestigial pagan practices. The strengthening of state Islam evidenced by the Jihadists’ injection of Ottoman/Islamic titles into the new caliphate’s bureaucracy contributed further to the inclination of the people towards the Orient. By the time of the British conquest, therefore, a strong sense of affiliation with the wider Oriental/Islamic civilization had taken deep root in the psyche of the people of the Islamic North. The performance of this Arabo-Islamic identity took very expressive forms, trumping any racial or ethnic consciousness that existed in the ideological universe of the Hausa States. This fascination with the Arabo-Islamic model permeated the Northerners’ historical consciousness and began to give shape to their cultural and historical narratives. In the Hausa tradition of origin, which was proudly handed out to British colonial ethnographers, therefore, we see a strong articulation of this supposed Oriental/Near Eastern origin. It begins thus: ‘And a certain man named Abuyazidu, son of Abdullahi, king of Baghdad, quarreled with his father and the people of the city (Hodgkin 1960:54).The legend narrates how the supposed progenitor of the Hausa people emigrated from the East (Baghdad) to Bornu and then to Daura in Hausaland where he is said to have married the queen with whom he had seven sons who founded the ‘seven Hausa states’. Of course, this story has little or no historicity to it and it seems that the Islamization of Hausaland and the attendant valorization of Eastern cultures and institutions are at its core. The proliferation of such traditions of origin even among groups without histories of sustained Islamization attests to the precolonial appeal of the East and its Islamic civilization. Similarly, Bornuan rulers of arguably Berber origins exploited their Arabo-Berber origin for the purpose of strengthening relations with the Arab world. They generalized their Arab ancestry to the whole empire whereas the vast majority of their subjects—the Zaghawas, the Marghis, and the Bulalas, were clearly a Negroid population without the remotest ancestral connection to the Near East. Among the Bornuan populace, as in Hausaland, a strong attachment to Arab identity prevailed. In the official Bornuan tradition of origin, the ancestry of the Bornuans, not just their rulers, was traced even beyond Maghrebian North Africa to the heartland of the Arab world so as to strengthen the Kingdom’s connection to the Orient. According to the legend, the founder of Bornu, (Ibrahim ibn Saif) came to Kanem from Yemen.The pull to the east exerted itself on the people of Islamic Northern Nigeria in diverse forms, each with a bewildering staying power, and Hausa Muslims’ proclamation of their supposed Arab/Islamic identity assumed equally diverse forms. Sometimes it took on even farcical dimensions, such as when the then Premier of Northern Nigeria, Ahmadu Bello embarked on the ahistorical task of tracing his ancestry as well as that of the entire Sokoto ruling house to the Quresh (prophet Mohammed’s) family in his autobiography published in 1951 (Bello 1951, “Appendix”).During the conquest of the Sokoto caliphate the connection to the East became the symbol of protest against British imperialism. Couched in the Islamic creed of Mahdism, which emphasized the emigration of Muslims from unbelievers (the British), it spurred the migration of thousands of people from different parts of Hausaland towards the East by way of Sudan after the fall of Sokoto in January 1903 and the subsequent decimation of the remnant of the Sultan’s forces at Bormi in March of the same year. Migrating in hundreds with the aim of settling in Mecca, many of them eventually founded and populated the town of Sheikh Talhat in present day Sudan. Lovejoy and Hogendorn have noted that this emigration to the East preceded colonial rule (Lovejoy and Hogendorn 1990: 226).The effect of this long history of real and imagined connection to the East and the Islamic World by the Hausa-Muslim people of Northern Nigeria was that the territory got more and more ideologically removed from whatever inchoate nation the British were working on with regard to their two possessions on the Niger. Realizing the desire of the North to identify more with the East than with the West, which its Southern Nigerian possession had come to rightly or wrongly represent, the British took several measures to preserve the “Northern system.” The preservation of a stable status quo that left the exploitative infrastructure undisturbed, rather than the transformation of consciousness in service of a future Nigerian nation, was, after all, the cardinal task of the British colonial officialdom in Nigeria. The Southern educated elites also realized this convergence of Northern Nigerian Islamic preference and colonial expediency and began to actively alienate the North from their anti-British “nationalist” activities, which they carried out as from the 1910s from a strictly Southern standpoint.TO BE CONCLUDED
References: Amoda, Moyibi. 1972. “Background to the Conflict: A Summary of Nigeria’s Political History From 1914-1964” in Okpaku, Joseph, ed., Nigeria: Dilemma of Nationhood, an African Analysis of the Biafran War, New York: Third Press.Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Revised Edition) New York: Verso.Bello, Ahmadu. 1962. My Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.Coleman, James Smoot. 1958. Nigeria: Background to Nationalism, Berkeley: University of California Press.Henley, David. 1995. “Ethnographic Integration and Exclusion in Anticolonial Nationalism: Indonesia and Indochina” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37:5. Hodgkin, Thomas. 1960. Nigerian Perspectives: An Historical Anthology, London: Oxford University Press.Lovejoy, Paul and Hogendon, Jan. 1990. “Revolutionary Mahdism and Resistance to Colonialism in the Sokoto Caliphate 1905-6”, Journal of African History 31:2
Smith, Anthony. 1987. The Ethnic Origins of Nations, New York: Basil Blackwell Inc.______1977.“Introduction: The Formation of Nationalist Movements” Smith, Anthony, ed., Nationalist Movements, New York: St. Martin’s Press Inc. 1977. [i] I am deeply aware of the problem with these categories and the contemporary struggles over their definitions. These are indeed categories that collapse and elide huge swathes of political histories, cultural diversities, and geographical indeterminacies, and economic trajectories. Worse, they’re colonial in origin. Nonetheless, they are conveniently useful in thinking about the differing colonial experiences of Nigerian peoples because they correspond to broad outlines and differences in the ways that Nigerian people engaged with colonialism and imagined their political, cultural, and economic futures. The categories thus have ideological usefulness as they are valid for tracing the contours of political ideas and practices in the colonial era.[ii] See Adamu Mohammed Fika, The Kano Civil War and British Over-rule, 1882-1940, Oxford, Oxford University Press 1978 . The numerous dethronement of emirs and the direct involovement of D. Os in emirate affairs are instances of rather direct nature of British administration in the North.
Moses Ochonu, a US based Academic can be reached at ebe@nigeriavillagesquare.com
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Posted by Robot| 12.11.2005 14:09