The publication of “Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1885” by the late Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike, the first indigenous Vice Chancellor of University of Ibadan marked a watershed in Nigerian history. The book, which is fallout of the late professor’s doctoral thesis of the same title, cleared the path for Ade Ajayi and the other historians of the same disposition to follow the lead. But suffice it to say that in terms of what is described as African history for Africans and from the perspective of the African, few will question that the late Prof. Ade Ajayi has a greater part of that glory.
Dike – who was the first African to achieve the completion of Western historical scholarship – brought his misgiving about the training he received to a positive use with the setting up of the University of Ibadan History department, the Historical Society of Nigeria and the Nigerian National Archives all of which served the evolution of the Ibadan School of History and the project of national transformation.
Keith A. P. Sandiford, in his book “A Black Studies Primer: Heroes and Heroines of the African Diaspora,” wrote that Dike, as the head of the organizing committee of the First International Congress of Africanists in Ghana in 1963, sought for a strengthened meticulous non-colonial focused African research, and to introduce native speakers to history and for people to view African history through a common eye.
In his essay “Kenneth Onwuka Dike, ‘Trade And Politics,’ and the Restoration of the African in History,” Ebere Nwaubani argued that Dike was the first modern scholarly proponent of Africanist history. His publications were a watershed in African historiography. “He studied Western history within an intellectual framework that was seriously racial, imperialistic and triumphal. Within the context of such scholarship, it requires nothing less than a radical turn of mind for him to reject Western history and its methodology for a regional one in the service of Nigerian identity.”
For the benefit of those who might not know, Historiography – simply put – is the scholar’s device for interrogating issues. It refers to a scholarly attempt to recapture or reinvent history as a discipline. In this regard, what is at stake is the necessity of recapturing the history of Nigeria decimated by the colonial ideology and strategy of Eurocentricism.
What is also needed then was the urgency of recalibrating the methodology for writing that history that would sufficiently serve the purpose of progressive completion of the process of political freedom and independence in order to make the living together of different nationalities to have true meaning.
To this end, the challenge of rewriting history becomes a critical one since the past of any nation or culture serves as the spectacle for reappraising the possibilities of the future. This is why I quite agree with the words of German politician, Karl-Heinz Hansen: “A people not prepared to face its own history cannot manage to face its own future.”
As each generation must necessarily write its own history, Dike set the foundation for Ade Ajayi and other prominent historians of that era to build upon. It is thus in this context that one can appreciate the profundity that informed the inauguration of the Ibadan School of History. This school of history was born out of necessity, not only for the reconstruction of a past that lay in ruin under dubious colonial strategy, but also more important because of the exigencies of a postcolonial/post independent present already compromised in all ramifications.
The Ibadan School evolved essentially as a historiographical challenge to the manner in which Nigerian history had been written by the colonialists. In this sense, we can say that historiography itself commences from the desire to reinterpret the past. According to the American historian Edward W. Bennett; “History, too, has its uses, such as the provision of a ‘usable’ past.” The Ibadan School was therefore motivated by the urgent need to wrest the interpretation of the Nigerian historical past from the intellectual clutch of the premeditated British colonialists.
As one of Dike’s foot-soldiers that deployed intellectual resources, J. F. Ade-Ajayi alongside historians like, Saburi Biobaku, Adiele Afigbo, Emmanuel A. Ayandele, Tekena Tamuno, Obaro Ikime and foreign historians like Michael Crowder, J. B. Webster, Robert (Abdullahi) Smith and others gave Nigerian and African history meaning. The significance of the Ibadan School of History to the reclamation of a usable past towards charting a smooth path for Nigerian postcolonial development cannot be overemphasized.
The school echoed a nationalistic historical programme around which history can be reinvented for the sake of Nigeria. In this sense, history would not just be an attempt at an objective agglomeration of facts. It is precisely this tenacity that recommends the Ibadan School of History as a commendable forerunner of the national project in Nigeria.
With over 60 publications, Ade Ajayi’s scholarly output is formidable by any standard in a country where a scholar has to contend with bureaucratic/political distractions and material deprivations which has grown in the last couple of years. This great scholar’s point of departure always is that history is not just a narrow specialisation or prism to be studied and written for its own glory and sake.
He believed strongly that the discipline should not even be seen from the prism of merely a search for truth, but that the truths history reveals must be spoken to power, not in the spirit of confrontation, or to make the writer popular for a moment, but to make society better. This was why he approached former President Olusegun Obasanjo on the need for the reintroduction of history to primary and secondary schools. Unfortunately that has not been done to date.
It is in this spirit that he turned his prodigious scholarship on the processes and problems of national integration, education, public policy and administration, analysing, clarifying and illuminating issues and pointing the way forward for Nigeria.
Perhaps the best tribute to pay him is to assert that he de-colonised the African narrative by his writings. His area of research focused on Yorubaland, where his intellectual interrogation, curiosity and discoveries were more pronounced. As a historian, he adopted a dialectic approach by not looking at events in isolation, but as parts of bigger historical forces. His dialectical approach equally x-rays societies in broader and deeper perspectives, including the dynamics of cultures, religion, work activities and other ways of life.
Anyone who goes through his works will find these embedded in such works as “Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century” and “Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841-1891.” He was also a collaborationist and an editor. He co-edited “A thousand Years of West African History,” as well as “History of West Africa” with Michael Crowther.
The true goals of history are understanding and interpreting the past. Historians have made repeated calls for a new history or a close study of the recent past of the Nigerian history; a past which will be made more germane to the problems and issues confronting us today. For example, one of the problems facing our rulers today is that of ethnic and religious tension all of which resulted from the fact that colonial rule brought people together in new ways and for new purposes as the colonial rulers sought to forge new administrative structures.
Our nation is among that part of the world now generally referred to as emerging economies or societies in transition. Without a clear sense of identity based on sound historical education, we are in danger of merely drifting along with others. Although we are in the age of globalization; but we must not fail to appreciate that international community is an aggregate of nations, each with its own distinctive character. We failed here because we did not start with a national character; we developed one under stress of circumstances, but with good leadership we can arrive at a common ground.
In closing out, it will appropriate to reemphasise that we need a clear national ideology that will define a common future for the citizens. A clear example is from Italian history. Their leader provided a clear focus for their effort at unification by interpreting the history of their society and prospecting from it the ideology of Risorpemento (resurgence), the political and social movement that agglomerated different states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of the Kingdom of Italy in the 19th century. The British also have their ideology of unity in diversity which we seem to have copied without actually believing in it.
