When he went the way of mortal flesh on November 19, 2020, Professor Peter Palmer Ekeh, the Urhobo-born eminent Nigerian political sociologist, had inscribed his indelible imprints on the shores of time as one of Africa’s most profound and insightful thinkers. Virtually all the innumerable tributes to him from his intellectual contemporaries and mentees across the globe made specific reference to his 1975 seminal article, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement” described by Wikipedia as “one of the most cited works in the field of African political and sociological studies in several universities all over the world”.
Ekeh, who taught in leading universities in Africa, Europe, Asia and the United States, was the pre-eminent figure in the Department of Political Science at the University of Ibadan between the late 70s and 1988 after the death of the towering Professor Billy Dudley in 1980. His insights into the hazardous moral consequences of what he perceived as the bifurcation of the public sphere in Africa into the primordial and civic realms, each animated by conflicting value systems, as a result of the colonial intrusion are still relevant to discourses on state legitimation, corruption, citizenship and alienation on the continent.
Professor Ekeh’s most enduring contributions to the understanding of state and society in Africa derive essentially from his focus on colonialism and its pervasive implications for the continent. He analyzed colonialism’s impact on Africa in epochal rather than merely episodic terms as assumed by certain schools of historical scholarship. Those who argue that we cannot continue to blame colonialism for the continuing dysfunction and underdevelopment of Africa over six decades after political independence forget that the colonial fingermarks are so deeply ingrained in our mental and psychological structures and processes sustaining an intellectual dependency that is at the root of our protracted backwardness.
The dismantling of the manifest political structures of colonialism is not enough avers the radical Kenyan writer, Ngugi Wa Thiongo. He advocates for what he describes as a fundamental decolonization of the African mind. The more insidious and subtle corrosive effects of the persistence of a neo-colonial intellectual mindset and framework behind the veil of farcical, nominal political independence has been rigorously interrogated by such progressive scholars as Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Claude Ake and Okwudiba Nnoli among others.
Last week, I came across to my great delight, a paper published by Professor Ekeh at the State University of New York, Buffalo, where he was Chairman of the Department of African American Studies until 2014. Titled “Nigerian Political History and the Foundations of Nigerian Federalism”, obviously published in the early years of this political dispensation which commenced in 1999, the paper vividly illustrates why it is difficult to make sense of the challenges of politics and governance in contemporary Nigeria without a deep appreciation of the governance traditions, processes and structures of our precolonial, indigenous past and the consequent corrosive effects on them of the colonial encounter.
As Ekeh asserts in the paper, “One of the most unappreciated aspects of colonialism was its intellectual and ideological barrier between us and our past traditions. For instance, there was in the colonial firmament an obstruction between us and our past traditions of governance. Colonialism magnified its own presence and rendered insignificant the epochs, including traditions of governance, that were abroad in the West African before the Arab and European slave trades devastated our lands from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century especially, and before the onset of slave trade’s historic successor, European imperialism”.
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In his analysis of governance traditions in West Africa with specific emphasis on the territory today demarcated as Nigeria, Ekeh focuses on the Songhai Empire which thrived between the 15th and 16th centuries. Wikipedia writes that “At its peak, Songhai was one of the largest African empires in history. The state is known by its historiographical name, derived from its largest ethnic group and ruling elite, the Songhai people. Sonni Ali established Gao as the empire’s capital although a Songhai state had existed in and around Gao since the 11th century “.
Ekeh stresses that the Songhai empire is not as historically and spatially distant to the pre-colonial communities that constitute post-colonial Nigeria as ‘imperial manners of scholarship’ suggest. Beginning from 1513, he notes, Songhai invaded and ruled several Hausa states which she perceived as having become unstable and posing a threat to the peace and viability of the region. Given its strength, Songhai was able to manage the affairs of these territories effectively while protecting the region from undesired foreign influences. There was, however, considerable Arab displeasure with Songhai influence in the Hausa states even though the Arabs had not felt threatened by the less extensive earlier Ghana and Mali empires. Ekeh cites the writings of an Arab scholar and traveller, Leo African us, as evidence of the prevalent Arab resentment against Songhai.
After visiting Kano and other Hausa territories in the 1520s, Leo African us wrote, “King Askia of Songhai sent governors hither who mightily oppressed and impoverished the Hausa people that were before rich; and the inhabitants were carried captive and kept as slaves by him”. For Ekeh, such unjustifiably harsh condemnation of Songhai rule only reflected Arab antagonistic intentions towards the powerful black Songhai state. Thus, he writes, “Less than seventy years later, Morocco, the most aggressive of the Arab states in the Maghreb, invaded Songhai in 1591, sacking its political system and leaving behind chaos and mayhem. That was the beginning of the fall of the great traditions of politics in our region. The year 1591 is a crucial demarcation date in our political history”.
But why does Ekeh come to this conclusion? He cites his reasons. First, the states that emerged in the region after Songhai’s fall lacked the latter’s territorial expansiveness, economic viability and relative coercive might. Second, these post-Songhai states and empires were rendered dependent on the benevolence and patronage of foreign powers. In the understandably desperate bid of these successor entities to retain their sovereignty and autonomy no matter how circumscribed by the new realities, they subordinated their governance practices and principles to Arab,and later, European overlords.
According to Ekeh, “Those, like the Hausa states and Benin, that stayed close to their indigenous traditions of governance lost out. But many states and empires began their existence in the period after Songhai’s fall. These newer emergent political entities were mostly bereft of the great traditions that informed governance in the West African region before the collapse of Songhai. Most of these owed their allegiances to alien Arab and European powers and to foreign values of governance”. Professor Ekeh’s analysis lays bare the foundations of the disconnect between governance and leadership systems in pre-colonial Africa and the contemporary post colonial nation states described by the late historian, Basil Davidson, as a curse and burden because they are anchored on alien, imported modes of governance that, decades after formal colonialism, do not appear adaptable to the African environment.
