Something happened to Nigeria on the road to modernity. The evidence is there in the stultified institutions. They are so estranged and alienated from the principal goal of civilizing humanity that they have assumed a punitive life of their own. You have a political system that breed tyrants, men without economic conscience and moral imagination; an imported religious order that bristles with spiritual predators and afflicted redeemers; financial institutions that cripple initiatives and genuine enterprise; an intelligentsia so historically disoriented that it is incapable of reflecting on its own real condition.
It is a miracle that Nigerians have managed to survive such a debilitating order. But the human toll has been quite prohibitive. Lacking in the most rudimentary formation of modernist rationality, many African societies are stuck in a time- warp; a whirlpool of irrationality and savage superstitions.
Yet some architecture remains in the ancient and modern ruins. But if Pre-colonial Africa had some semblance of traditional order, it was because ancient African philosophers and statesmen, like their counterparts elsewhere, used the power of human imagination to resolve or deflect pressing existential contradictions. That was before modernity and its scientific rationality took over from imaginative resolution and rationalization of concrete contradictions.
Now, huge forests have grown around the ancient mud huts all over again, and they are resistant to primitive cutlasses. In a startling regression to animal barbarity, a cannibal ethos prevails. People still eat other people. At least four post-colonial rulers of Africa are documented cannibals. In the twenty first century, this is a metaphor for political savagery. The most urgent task at hand is how to plot our way out of the historic cul de sac.
It is not going to be an easy task. But we must thank God for small mercies. Help sometimes comes from unexpected quarters. It has been noted that although humanity first civilized in Africa, they have not continued to do so there. But Africa has not always been completely hopeless and helpless.
Despite the ravages of colonization and Arab pillage, despite imperialist occupation, there have been African avatars, particularly from the much storied coast of Lagos, who have heroically attempted to bridge the gap between Africa and western modernity by striving to impose their own vision of modernity powered by an African essence.
The subject matter of this beautifully written and excellently packaged book is one of these unsung and unheralded titans. It is a moveable feast of colonial derring-do and a moving tribute to one of the greatest men ever thrown up by the Lagos Protectorate. Urbane, self-effacing and impeccably well-mannered, Professor Adeyemo Elebute, a retired surgeon and one of Nigeria’s most distinguished medical practitioners, wields his pen like a scalpel and with the thoroughness and finesse of a master surgeon performing a routine operation.
The result is a tour de force of historical exposition which often reads like the magical Simon Schama, the famed historian, at the most sublime summit of his expository art. It is indeed a happy and uncanny coincidence of events that has brought a notable surgeon to focus on the life and times of this colossus of Victorian Lagos. Well-researched and impressively annotated, the beauty of this book lies in the fact that Professor Elebute is too well-bred to make any garrulous intellectual claim. But without doing so, he has contributed to modern Nigeria’s search for self-retrieval and continental self-validation.
The book is also a labour of filial love and affection. According to the foreword written by J.D.Y Peel, the distinguished Africanist and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Elebute had contacted him in connection with what he had written about his grandfather, J.B Sadare, a famed goldsmith of his time, who had provided the house in which Ijebu Ode Grammar School held its first classes in 1913.
Unlike contemporary self-commemorating Nigerian billionaires who steal from government coffers without giving anything back to the society, these giants of colonial history provided the seed money, the accommodation, the selfless devotion and the tireless nurturing that gave birth to most of the iconic higher institutions in Lagos and the Yoruba hinterland which pushed that part of Nigeria sharply forward in the race to modernity. It was this fertile soil that Awolowo would find so conducive to his breathless modernization project.
There are giants even among giants. Among these worthy exemplars, Labulo Davies stood out like a supreme exemplar for his superb courage, his indomitable spirit, his intimidating brilliance, stupendous energy, entrepreneurial wizardry and the immutable hand of destiny which accounts for his miraculous ability to survive and even prosper in adversity. He was one hell of a man.
His life reads like a magical adventure or some African version of Robinson Crusoe. Born on August 13, 1828 to liberated African slaves of Yoruba extraction (Egba and Ogbomosho) who eventually settled in the Sierra Leonean village of Bathurst just outside Freetown, the young boy displayed early promise and exceptional brilliance which did not escape the attention of the visionary colonial abolitionists who wanted to train indigenous Africans who would man essential services for the emancipated continent.
In 1849, the British Admiralty having agreed to this proposal took on a set of African boys for training on ships belonging to the British Preventive Squadron with a view to turning them into captains of merchant ships. After a rigorous selection exercise at Freetown Grammar School, the young Davies and another boy were selected and placed on the HMA Volcano, a formidable war sloop, as cadets under Commander Robert Coote.
Displaying exceptional courage and brilliance, Davies, within three years, had risen from cadet to midshipman and eventually to lieutenant. Echoes of Equaino, the fabled African sea-warrior of Igbo extraction, who together with other liberated slaves such as Cuguano and Sancho were to seize the literary saloons of London by the scruff of the neck towards the end of the eighteenth century?
In December 1851, the young Lieutenant Davies was on board HMS Bloodhound in the Lagos lagoon and participated fully in the historic bombardment of Lagos. He was wounded in action. James Labulo Davies retired from the British Navy in 1852 and became a fully fledged master of merchant vessels plying the West African coast. Despite a naval disaster which saw to the ruin of his vessel at the Igbosere beach, Davies rose swiftly and was soon established as arguably the leading businessman in Lagos with choice property and land all over the future capital of Nigeria.
Renowned for the scruples and the humane integrity of his business transactions and blending visionary entrepreneurship with missionary advocacy, Davies was to become one of the movers and shakers of Victorian Lagos. By this time, the entire maritime world had become the oyster of this enterprising African business mogul and son of former slaves constantly shuttling between the coast of West Africa and London and being feted as he went along. It has been a long walk to real freedom.
On Thursday, 14, August, 1862, after some initial hiccups, James Davies took his belle, the delectable former Sarah Forbes, to the altar in St Nicholas’ Church, Brighton, Sussex in England. It was a marriage that had to be sanctioned and personally approved by Queen Victoria. According to the author: “For several days before the wedding, the whole of Brighton was agog with the news of the grand marriage of an African couple rumoured to be of royal pedigree”.
If the life of Captain Davies reads like pure fiction, the story of his wife is straight out of magical fantasia of outlandish dimensions.
Originally a slave girl captured by the Dahomeans’ army after her Oke Oda/ Ilobi homestead was sacked and her parents slaughtered in 1848 when she was about five years old, she was handed over as a gift to the visiting Commander Forbes by King Gezo of Dahomey on July 5, 1850.
Ina as she was then known—probably a corruption of the Yoruba name Aina—eventually made it to England with her adoptive father where Queen Victoria instantly took a great shine to the bright and precocious. Famously contrarian and eccentric about royal etiquettes where it came to African and oriental former captives, the great British sovereign showered love affection on the young girl and took her to live in the palace. Queen Victoria would eventually adopt a daughter of the union and send her study at Cheltenham, a famous private boarding school for girls.
This work throws rich and fascinating light on a nascent African middle class and the stirring of some form of modernity which now stands tragically aborted. It was no doubt a society that looked towards the west for guidance and enlightenment. But it paid its dues by imbibing the finer aspects of higher bourgeois culture. It eschewed conspicuous consumption, was scrupulous in its business dealing, adopted a Calvinist restraint and rectitude in its outlook, was aggressively modernist in the pursuit of education and massively philanthropic in its vision of an integrated society.
And it had massive restraints and severe deterrents in place for erring members. When he became bankrupt, Davies found himself excluded from consideration for political office until he retired his bankruptcy through massive plantation of cocoa at a place called Ijon. Known felons were shunned and deprived of the oxygen of permissive and primitive adulation. The social services worked smoothly and without the humongous lubrication of greasy corruption. It was a prim and proper society with frugal discipline as its watchword.
To be sure, there was a hint of cultural disorientation such as when one of the grandees of the society was later tell the Reverend Henry Townsend that they considered themselves as middlemen between the white and the Egba. Yet these self-assured men were no lackeys of the imperialist do-gooders as Sir Lugard and his brother would find out. In any case, better cultural alienation than the comprehensive epistemic deracination that has overtaken contemporary Nigeria.
You cannot completely control what you didn’t invent. Let it be with western modernity. Despite centuries of imperialist subjugation, the culturally assured and intellectually confident Chinese, Japanese, Indians and lately the Singaporeans and the desert Arabs of Dubai have shown us how it can be done. But in most of Africa, particularly in a richly endowed country like Nigeria, we have completely surrendered the initiative. The result is the institutional chaos and social anomie that stare us in the face.
From the weighty evidence of this important book, there was going to be another country. But it went under like an overburdened cargo ship. We can go on from here to eternity sharing the blame about what went wrong. It will not change anything. What is now important is to find our way out of the debris of aborted modernity.
