BY SANUSI ABUBAKAR,
This week marks one hundred years since our "amalgamation" as one country. Many have mistaken the date for what it is not; January 1st 1914 does not represent our day of "birth", nor was it the day we were first "named" Nigeria. Nigeria was in formation hundreds of years before it was named, supposedly by the journalist Flora Shaw who, in 1902, married the colonial administrator, Sir Frederick Lugard, who was to become Governor-General of Nigeria (1914-1919) and is often credited with bringing us together as one nation.
In an essay in The Times of London on 8 January, 1897, she suggested the name "Nigeria" (presumably from NIGER-AREA) for the British Protectorate on the Niger River, in preference to the official "Royal Niger Company Territories", which she considered long and clumsy. This she preferred to "Central Sudan" which was the name given to most of the area by most historians, geographers and travellers, leaving the term "Sudan" to the territory in the Nile basin, the present Sudan (and South Sudan).
"The name Nigeria applying to no other part of Africa may without offence to any neighbours be accepted as co-extensive with the territories over which the Royal Niger Company has extended British influence, and may serve to differentiate them equally from the colonies of Lagos and the Niger Protectorate on the coast and from the French territories of the Upper Niger" she added.
When her husband later had the opportunity to bring these territories together, he opted for the term "amalgamation" to refer to what he was doing. Since then this 'marriage" had come under attack for different reasons. In 1947 Tafawa Balewa complained that "Nigeria has existed as one country only on paper." Obafemi Owolowo termed it "a mere geographical expression" while Ahmadu Bello saw the whole thing as "the mistake of 1914." More recently, others have termed the amalgamation as "a fraud" (Richard Akinjide), "a sham and the root cause of all our woes," and what have you. Some even saw it as a failed experiment set to "expire in 2014." All apparently were (and some still are) under the illusion that Nigeria was a product of British administrative fiat. Latter-day anti-amalgamation squads even assumed that "ethnic" groups were the "federating units that came together to proclaim one nation and now, according to them, only such ethnic entities should decide whether or not we remaining together or go our separate ways, as though the whole issue is just puppet theatre.
Having read history in my secondary school in the late sixties, and especially in my final year when the late Dr Mahmud Modibbo Tukur came to teach for a spell after his higher school certificate, sweeping the cobwebs of the then predominant historiography from our minds, I still was, even then, under the impression that January 1st 1914 was the date Nigeria was created and christened out of parts that had no relationship with each other. My shock came, along with my other classmates', when, at our very first class on Nigerian History (doubly first as we were the first set of School of Basic Studies) a very tall, lanky, moustachioed and stern-looking white man by the rather odd name Abdullahi Smith, walked in and demanded, in his first sentence "How many of you read history in secondary school?" Almost every hand went up, as the subject was then compulsory in most of our schools. We all wanted to show him that we were no strangers to the discipline. Instead of being impressed, the Prof, literally the very first real-life Prof we ever saw, expressed his disappointment, adding that it appeared he had more work to do than he had anticipated. He advised us to ignore all the text books we had virtually crammed as the real "Nigerian History" was mostly in theses and journals, and a few collections of primary sources. Not that we fully understood what he was on about.
In the months that followed, he set out to show us how the area that came to be named "Nigeria" had a long history of relations, interactions, trading as well as wars and empire building, that the rivers and basins, languages and religions were all, even before the first white man set foot on our soil, gravitating towards some sort of political, economic and territorial convergence, and would have ultimately resulted in a nation-state with almost the same boundaries and people.
The people were not only conscious of, and relating to, each other; they traded, intermarried and even visited each other. The Kasar Hausa (later Sokoto Caliphate), Kanem Borno and the Kwararrafa (Jukun, Igala, Idoma and others) had virtually defined Northern Nigeria, Oyo, Benin and the Aja family of states and the Aro were redefining and sketching the South. The Niger and the Benue rivers, as well as their tributaries and basins had in any case put a geographical stamp on a territory destined to co-exist.
As the lectures progressed, Prof. Smith had a map chalked on a mobile blackboard which he was updating as the series progressed, to make his points, and the last time I saw the map was 1974. I am not aware of any paper he wrote on this. It was decades later when I came across a collection edited by Richard Olaniyan titled THE AMALGAMATION AND ITS ENEMIES: An interpretive History of Modern Nigeria which had Adiele Afigbo's excellent piece "The Amalgamation: Myths, Howlers and Heresies", which I believe should be compulsory reading for all of us, especially those actively moulding the dominant narrative of our existence.
But let us go back to the very beginning, as parts of the problem seem to be not only our ignorance of our history, and our simplistic notions regarding how nations were built, but also in the language we use. Part of our problem probably results from the word "amalgamation" itself. To amalgamate (a-mal-ga-mate) is to combine into a unified or integrated whole; to unite. And because the word originates probably from chemistry, we were under the illusion that merely pronouncing that we are one actually created us historically, and it would then lead to our becoming one socially and in every other way. Nation-building, however, is more complex.
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