The vast majority of Nigerian after the amalgamation in 1914 continued to live their lives as before without noticeable change traceable to the imposition of colonial rule. The most noticeable outcome of amalgamation was the gradual extension of the Beit-el mal (native treasuries) first introduced to the North by Sir Fredrick Lugard to the rest of the country beginning in Yorubaland and Benin. The attempt to extend this to the acephalous Igbo societies by creating ‘Warrant’ chiefs where there were no traditional rulers met with failure. The economic implication of this system was the levying of taxes in the names of native rulers who were now made to enjoy political and economic power out of tune with pre-colonial tradition and culture.
Resistance to this imposition did not succeed in the face of superior physical force in the hands of the colonial administration. Rebellion and revolts were shot down by the use of soldiers and Nigerians were cowed and made to face the responsibilities imposed by modern mode of governance which involved payment of taxes as a passage of citizenships rite.
The colonial phase of Nigerian history witnessed rapid economic changes, building of railways roads and ports and even aerodromes. Gradually our people were sucked into the western economic, political and social vortex. With this came increasing contact between our people and the outside world. Nigerian soldiers fought in two World Wars first between 1914 and 1918 in theatres in Togo, the Cameroons and East Africa. Some naval ratings were even sent all the way to Palestine.
The Second World War saw more extensive use of our soldiers in the Ethiopian campaigns against the Italians and in Burma against the Japanese. The involvement of our troops in these global cataclysms had serious political consequences. The weakening of the British in a changed world hastened the process of decolonization. This process was hastened by the rise of African nationalism and the emergence of political parties each of which in different ways fought for the political emancipation of our country. The growing political awareness led to cultural nationalism and the cry to “boycott all boycottables” that is to say Africans should go back to their cultural roots by jettisoning imported names and taking on native names. This was particularly the case among the descendants of Nigerian repatriates from Sierra Leone resident in Lagos. They cast away their European and Hebrew names thus David Brown Vincent took an African names of Mojola Agbebi, Edmund Macaulay became Kitoyi Ajasa, Joseph Pythagoras Haastrup became Ademuyiwa Haastrup, Jacob Henry Samuel became Adegboyega Edun. Their examples were later to resonate with Azikwe and Awolowo when they dropped their biblical names of Benjamin and Jeremiah respectively.
The wearing of African clothes became fashionable. Lugard would in his grave have approved this development unlike what he condemned in 1914 when he described educated natives as the “trousered Negros of the coast dressed in bond street attire, who send their laundry abroad every other week for dry cleaning”. In this changed cultural preference, the cultural gap between southerners and northerners in Nigeria began to close. Northerners never abandoned their babanriga for western suits and in most cases stuck to their languages especially the Hausa language rather than taking to English. This was to be their undoing in a world in which English was the lingua franca. This cultural recrudescence also led to greater interest in the study of Nigerian languages literature and history. The vanguard in this regard was provided by the University of Ibadan which by the eve of independence in 1960 began to develop new curricula for students in liberal arts and the social-sciences as well as adapting the physical and biomedical sciences for the African environment.
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The so-called Africanisation gathered pace in the civil service, the church and the judiciary and it was only a matter of time before Africans began to occupy the commanding heights of the economy and the politics of Nigeria and this had its cultural dimension in African pride and the assertion of what was called the “African personality”.
The post-colonial cultural development
With independence in Nigeria came a rising tide of expectations. People wanted increased prices for their primary produce like cocoa, groundnuts, palm kernel and palm oil as well as cotton, rubber, hides and skins on which post-independence Nigerian economy depended. The various governments of Nigeria tried to meet the expectation of the people but they were not always successful. With the decline in producer price of farm produce, there was increasing migration of the youth to swell the urban conurbation of Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Kaduna, Jos, Maiduguri, Benin, Aba and Port Harcourt. The cities therefore became melting pots of cultures. The various governments particularly the one in the western part of the country spent vast sums of money from accumulated funds of the marketing boards on social welfare schemes such as education and health and urban planning and renewal. The cities became more attractive to the youth who left the dreary existence of the villages for the cities in what has been appropriately described as rural-urban migration phenomenon. With too many people in the cities, the infrastructure could not cope and there began a gradual and slippery slope to a situation of urban decay and dilapidation. Crime increased and there was a corrosion of values everywhere. Money became the most desirable object without consideration of how it was acquired. Bribery graft, fraud and corruption alien to our culture have become the order of the day. This phenomenon was accentuated and exacerbated by the incursion of the military into governance. Force was seen as a veritable instrument of success. There has been growing culture of aggression in Nigeria and a noticeable breakdown of the culture of respect for elders and others. Some have ascribed this decline to exploding population which has led to increased competition for resources and jobs particularly among the people.
Nigerian fraudulent practices have even gone international with advance fee fraud and drug and human trafficking being increasingly, associated with Nigerians. Surprisingly or perhaps because of the prevailing hardship, the religion of Islam and Christianity have witnessed revival. The orthodox aspect or traditions of these religions are increasingly challenged by sometimes extremist or even millenarian tendencies sometimes leading to a clash of votaries of these religions. Sometimes the battle-line as in the North of Nigeria is between the traditional Islamic religion and groups preaching a Shiite form of Islam in a largely Sunni milieu. Among the Christian orthodox traditions such as the Catholics and Protestants have seen huge erosion of membership who now troop to the so-called Pentecostal churches.
Founding of churches have become big business and many of the churches have gone beyond what orthodox Catholic and Protestants missions used to do in terms of establishment of schools and hospitals. Some now have housing estates where the ordinary lives of the people are rigidly controlled. Pentecostalism shares much in common with Islam in the sense that it is not just a religion but a way of life. This has radically affected the culture of Christians, particularly as it affects marriages, child naming and burials. The absence of government has also been replaced by the role Pentecostal churches play in the lives of Nigerians. Some now provide educational facilities from kindergarten to universities. This is also being emulated rather slowly by Muslims in a struggle for the souls of the people. Religion has become so fundamental in the lives of Nigerians that the role of men of God and Mallamai has become much pronounced.
Nigerians from their external appearances and what they say appear to be very religious. This however is not reflected in the morality and behaviour of the people. There is therefore a feeling of superficiality in the religious cultures of our people. The churches and mosques are full every worship day and even political leaders have appropriated God while continuing with their nefarious looting of the state and national exchequers.
The culture of insincerity perfidy and religious perversion is everywhere. Syncretism in our religious belief has led many observers to say our religion is skin deep, yet the culture of religious confrontation occasioning mass slaughter of the innocents has become a recurring decimal in Nigeria. The culture of religious intolerance is sometimes fed by events outside our shores with many Muslim youth either out of frustration or fad are being found to support the call for Jihad against non-Muslims or those Muslims who are seen to be deviating from Islamic orthodoxy.
While all this is going on there is also the effect of globalization on Nigerian culture. Our economy is open to the rest of the world and with this openness come the importation of all kinds of things namely wine, food, films, educational materials and other things promoting particularly western culture. It is not unheard of nowadays to hear calls for gay rights that would have been met with the worst kind of reaction in the past. The modes of dressing of the youth even the kind of English spoken are pitifully American. The dot.com generations have also exploited computers to perpetrate fraud internationally. Nigerians like other people in the globalised world are not immune to the spread of pornography and even paedophilia and other kinds of sexual perversion unheard of in times past.
