Power, Culture and Modernity in Nigeria

Beyond The Colony

Oluwatoyin Oduntan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351591621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

In this book, Oluwatoyin Oduntan offers a critical intervention in the scholarly fields of Nigerian, and West African history, as well as towards understanding the intellectual ideas by which modern African society was formed, and how it functions.

The book traces the shifting dynamics between various segments of the African elite by critically analyzing existing historical accounts, traditions and archival documents. First, it explores the lost world of native intellectual thoughts as the perspective through which Africans experienced the colonial encounter. It thereby makes Africans central to contemporary debates about the meanings and legitimacy of colonial empires, and about the African cultural experience. It shows that the resettlement of liberated and Westernized Africans in Abeokuta and after them, European missionaries, merchants and colonial agents from the 1840s, did not dismantle preexisting power structures and social relations. Rather, educated Africans and Europeans entered into and added their voices to ongoing processes of defining culture and power.

By rendering a continuing narrative of change and adaptation which connects the pre-colonial to the post-colonial, Power, Culture and Modernity in Nigeria leads Africanist scholarship in new directions to rethink colonial impact and uncover the total creative sites of changes by which African societies were formed.

1 Before the Modern

The Burden of Origins and Traditions

I have always disliked the conventional genre of historiography because it is too bloodless, too faceless, and too [settled] likely to praise predestination.¹

The wide-ranging implications of the spread of modern ideas during the 19th century are far more complex than they seem. Their roots may reach back to Europe, but the full awareness of the modern – the consummation of socio-cultural norms and attitudes by which certain persons and groups differentiated themselves from others – began to be more fully formed during the 19th century in Western Europe and across the world. By 1850, there was already a substantial population in West Africa of new men claiming the attributes of modernity, differentiating themselves from those they thought were uneducated and stuck in old ways, drawing upon and circulating in modernistic intellectual circuits, and staking claims to leadership and capacity to drive society towards new and modern ways of life. In rendering an explanation of how modern Africa came into being, historians focus on these agents of change; they explore their evolution from the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and their resettlement and Westernization in colonies in Sierra Leone and Liberia and trace how they spread modern ideas to indigenous societies. Broadly, in this perspective, most educated elite accepted and worked with European missionaries and colonial agents as a means of modernization, but on maturity they became nationalists to secure independence for their countries. By them, we see the modern as distinctive European ways, which were imbibed by specially inculcated Africans who tried to pass them on to other (often) obstinate Africans.

For the Egba of Abeokuta, the context of this dispersal story starts in 1839, with the influx of settlers from Sierra Leone. Some of these returnees were former slaves who had been liberated by the British antislavery squadron and resettled in Sierra Leone. Upon acquiring Western education and Christianity, and because of difficult conditions in the British colony, they chose to migrate back to where may have been their ancestral origins. They were soon followed by European missionaries and began establishing churches and schools and generally planting the roots of modernization. By 1850, they had constituted a powerful ideological bloc, and through many struggles against traditional chieftaincies and cultures, they set up a modern government by 1865. Sometimes allying with and at other times opposing the British, they became colonial agents, culture brokers, nationalists on course to building a modern society.

However, these dramatic accounts of Western educated Africans introducing European modernity to Africa, though conventional it has become, should not convey the sense that modern society in Africa evolved from a neat intrusion of powerful European, modern ideas that tried to systematically displace traditional or premodern ways of African life. First, as I will address below, the very manner of their resettlement, i.e. their choice of risking re-enslavement over settling in the colony, underscores that these liberated slaves and returnees were not necessarily enamored with European living in Sierra Leone. To read them as simply harbingers of European culture demeans their wide-ranging experiences. Secondly, contemporary European culture was not one coherent set of practices that may be contrasted to any coherent African culture. Rather, European culture in mid-19th-century West Africa consisted of many competing national, linguistic, denominational, commercial and political identities and interests. The indigenous societies into which returnees were resettling were also very dynamic ones undergoing significant social, economic and political changes. A different picture of the mid-19th-century Abeokuta emerges therefore, one that differs from a neat story of Westernized Africans and European missionaries bringing new ideas to change an African society. Neither the returnees, nor the Europeans, nor the Egba constituted definite or fixed identities. Rather, we see uncertain individuals and dynamic groups trying to make sense of the opportunities and challenges imposed by evolving ideas and new realities. Seeing the elite as new sets pre-existing society in sharp contrast with the premodern or pre-European and establishes a distinction between African traditions and European modern. Two factors underlay this error: first is the unquestioned notion that modernity equates neatly to European culture, and, second, the notion that African ways are sharply different from European ways. Drawing from these, the agenda of African historiography has been to find what is African, aside from what is European. Abeokuta’s early history serves the main purpose of this book in how it demonstrates that the African past might be recovered if historians look past the centering of Europe as the driving force of modernity and change. Rather than claiming a single descent or social order, Abeokuta’s early history was of intense competition among its component parts to define its politics, history and culture. New settlers entered into, and added their voices to, pre-existing and ongoing discourses and contestations. Its early history demonstrates measurable contemporariness with similar questions about defense, migration, power, and modernity as were being grappled with in other parts of the world, making it a human story rather than a restrictively African one. The popular account of Egba origins does not capture this diversity and is here re-evaluated in light of its incongruities and of the historical evidence.

Constructed Identities: Of Origin and Home Around 1850

The broad synopsis of the popular account of origin is that the Egba migrated in three different waves from Ile-Ife, the Yoruba ancestral home, to settle in the Egba forests, a region described imprecisely as lying north of Abeokuta but south of Oyo.² According to Saburi Biobaku, these waves correspond to the three Egba sub-nationalities: Ake, Oke-Ona and Gbagura, each of which grew many townships, was ruled by a monarch in its capital, and shared a federal arrangement with the others. Ake was the leading town, partly because some pre-ordained authority from Ile-Ife, the Yoruba ancestral root. It thus exercised judicial powers over the other two Egba kingdoms and the many towns they controlled. Gbagura, with its most important city at Iddo (present day Ibadan) ruled by the Agura, included over 400 settlements. The Oshile ruled the Oke-Ona from Oko. National cohesion was achieved not only on account of ancestry, cultural similarities and contiguity, but also by a tradition of combined resistance against Oyo imperial rule during the 18th century. The reasonable tranquility that this federal system secured for the Egba was disrupted following the devastation of the Egba homeland by marauding forces from the Owu War in 1820, when Egba towns were sacked and the people scattered or enslaved.³ The Egba warriors and a significant population of the displaced settled in Ibadan with the ravaging Yoruba army, but, following more attacks on their lives and nation, moved in about 1830 to the security which Abeokuta (literally “under the rock”) offered.

This account of origin of the Egba of Abeokuta is based mainly on select oral traditions and a scattering of written records by European explorers. Hugh Clapperton and Richard Lander, the first European travelers to record information about the Yoruba, make no mention of the Egba, but we gather from them the wide influence of the Oyo empire over the Yoruba. Though this empire was in decline, Clapperton and Lander record that, through their journey in 1825 from Badagry to Katunga, natives and chiefs recognized the authority of the Alaafin. Their accounts also capture a sense of the cohesion, common destiny and common awareness of security in this region by mentioning the dread which people on their route had of the rebelling Ilorin and Hausa slaves.⁴ The CMS missionary Dr. E. C. Irving provides some detailed accounts of the devastation of the Egba homeland in the 1820s, which he gathered by interviewing eyewitnesses in the 1850s. He also passed through some of the ruins while travelling from Ibadan to Ijebu in 1854. Joseph Wright leaves perhaps the only first-hand account of growing up in an Egba town and of the conquest of his town and his enslavement and travels.⁵ Subsequently, missionaries who settled in Abeokuta and educated Africans affirmed these sources to be the classic sense of how the people of Abeokuta conceived of themselves and their history. The historiography took more a definite form with the publication of Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas, and subsequent historians have adopted it as the official, substantive account of Egba origins and identity.⁶

More recent studies have pointed to the political influences upon this history. J. D. Y. Peel has argued that the idea of Yoruba nationality originated among Aku-speaking liberated slaves in Sierra Leone and was promoted by a Christian intelligentsia who sought to create an identity based on their collective experience of estrangement and to promote their visions of modernity. From this “ethnogenesis,” further layers of construction to fulfill colonial exigencies, to claim or solidify power bases, and promote individual and group interests further entrenched the idea of the Yoruba as a nation with a primordial heritage and a future destiny. Peel shows how different generations of the Yoruba intelligentsia bought into this nationhood idea, promoted it and fitted it to suit their particular colonial conditions and local political needs.⁷ The history of the Yoruba therefore comes across much less as the total historical reality, but as a comparatively recent selection of data, the silencing of others, the close mapping of geography, and the convergent appropriation of power and knowledge in pursuit of elite identity. The same may be said for the history of the Egba, in which alternative possibilities have been sacrificed on the altar of nationhood and in defense of power and the dominant ideology. There is much value in revisiting these historical axioms, traditions or dominant narratives to engage the silenced voices of the past.⁸ Many interconnected assumptions have dominated historical accounts about the Egba. These include claims of an eternal nationhood (pre-existent Egba identity), collective victimization, orderly migrations and settlement, and well-ordered traditions of hierarchical government. They make Egba history national and orderly. Such ideas of historical order promote the notion of the normal state of things, that traditions are longstanding and immutable. However, as with other oral histories, these accounts leave as many gaps as they explicate. It is valuable to examine them even on their own terms.

The notion of a pre-existent nation connects the Egba to the larger Yoruba identity. Claiming location in the Yoruba ancestry makes the ideological values of Yoruba cosmology available to Egba elites. Yoruba conventions of origins and ancestry, the pantheons of gods and heroes and extant social mores and regulations had assumed hegemonic status until the 19th century, when the Fulani invasion turned their world upside down.⁹ Yoruba notions of divine kingship (Alase, ekeji Orisa, literally, “power,” “next to the gods”), of age, seniority and patriarchal authority, of gender relations were all coordinated in Yoruba cosmology; backed by local laws, conventions, traditions and ancestors, these were tools of social control which the powerful could not bypass. Claiming connection to the Ife traditions made their resources available to elites and explains why rulers across the region identified themselves as branches of the Yoruba.¹⁰ The ideological value of the dominant Yoruba cosmology is also visible in its inclusiveness and universalistic claims. Not inflexible nor totally insular, it rather carries an elastic worldview which makes space for new ideas and inputs and tries to localize them. We find this in the efforts made by ruling elites at various times to appropriate Islam, Christianity and Western civilization into their ruling ideology and national culture by claiming conversion, employing clerics, deploying charms, explicating innovations as though they conformed to or justified conventions and demanding that their subjects adopt the loyalty which new religions preached and that they practice the nationalistic passions and obedience sanctioned by these forms.¹¹ Therefore, Egba connection to the larger Yoruba group was promoted for the utilitarian values of the ideology as much as for any ancestral homogeneity shared with the Yoruba.

Claiming eternal identity legitimizes identity and power in other ways. The whole process of historical construction, adaptation or fabrication, including accounts of origin, migrations and connection to some known ancient identity serve more purposes than satisfying curiosity. It affirms that the present order of things is not new; rather, it has worked and is natural. Jean and John Comaroff show that the aspiration of power is hegemony – that state in which the patterns of domination are taken as natural, as the culture and as the only way.¹² Despite the notion that the Egba had an ancient and pre-Abeokuta identity and claims that they were a cohesive nation with a long history for which they should share identifiable characteristics, there is no clarity on what constitutes these peculiarities. Since Samuel Johnson’s goal was to affirm a common Yoruba heritage, his History of the Yorubas predictably glosses over Egba peculiarities. Curiously, there is little in Biobaku’s The Egba and Their Neighbours or Ajisafe’s History of Abeokuta to affirm Egba difference.¹³ Other than deducing that life in the Egba forest somehow produced an Egba dialect, there does not appear to be any sense of the factors that separated the Egba from the rest of the Yoruba country. In both the scholarly and public history versions, the Egba claim similar Oduduwa-era migrations into the “forest” with the Ijebu, Owu, Ijaye and Ketu. They equally experienced domination by imperial Oyo, as did other Yoruba peoples during the 18th century. How then do we account for an Egba identity in the ancestral homeland? What makes the Egba an ancestral nation? Not even their language or dialect were nationally peculiar. Rather, as Biobaku notes, the “Egba Alake people … tend to approximate their speech to that of the Ijebu Remo and the Gbagura to Oyo.” He further notes that not even facial marks, the most prominent feature of ethnic identity, differentiated them from other Yoruba until the wars of the 19th century forged a common Egba facial calligraphic identity.¹⁴ There is the relative absence of peculiar rituals or re-enactments of origins at coronations and ceremonies, which scholars such as Ulli Beier, P.C. Lloyd and Andrew Apter have interpreted as the cultural evidence for the validation of peculiar historical identities elsewhere among the Yoruba.¹⁵ Acco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Colonialism and the African Modern
• 1. Before the Modern: The Burden of Origins and Traditions
• 2. Incipient Order: Settlers and Returnees Making the Nation, 1850–1880
• 3. Making Monarchy: Political Centralization on the Colonial Margin, 1893–1914
• 4. Making the Nation: Identity and Modernity on a Colonial Margin, 1918–1940
• 5. Elites Know Their Boundaries: Power in Medical Discourses, 1937–1950
• 6. A Nation Unfulfilled: Global Ideas, Nigerian Nationalism and the Reorientation of Elite Power in Abeokuta, 1930–1950
• Conclusion
• Primary Source
• Bibliography
• Index