Deepening our democracy beyond elections

[ayo_ol...@yahoo.com]

http://www.punchng.com/opinion/viewpoint/deepening-our-democracy-beyond-elections/

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.

[Okey Iheduru]

"Regrettably, not only is the Ibadan history school in tatters, a question mark lingers over the survival of history as a discipline in Nigeria. Africa’s preeminent historian, Toyin Falola, turns out books from the University of Texas, Austin, while the flagship publication of the history school, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, has long become history. There may be no greater service to the memory and outstanding labour of our intellectual heroes past than to resuscitate at least in some measure the quality education, of a world class character which Tamuno and others symbolise."--Ayo Olukotun

Dear Prof. Olukotun:

A very interesting column piece, as usual, Sir. 

However, I'm not sure your claims about the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria is accurate because I saw and read up-to-date issues of the journal between 2011 and 2013. Besides, the president of the Historical Society of Nigeria, Prof. Yemi Akinwumi, was my colleague Visiting Professor and Directing Staff at the National Defense College, Abuja from 2011-2013. In spite of the well-known constraints of running such an academic organization in Nigeria and keeping contributors' feet to the fire as it were, Prof. Akinwumi and his colleagues continued to keep the flag flying, especially through their annual meetings. I very much wished the Nigerian Political Science Association could get their acts together and borrow a leaf from the HSN and emerge from their continued coma. If there's any criticism, I'd say it's their inability to have the journal indexed by relevant databases and also hosted online.

I've copied Prof. Akinwumi in this reaction; hopefully, he can reach out to you regarding where things stand now regarding the HSN.

Regards,

Okey

On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 5:21 PM, ayo_olukotun via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

http://www.punchng.com/opinion/viewpoint/deepening-our-democracy-beyond-elections/

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.

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Okey Iheduru, PhD

You can access some of my papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at: http://ssrn.com/author=2131462.

[Okey Iheduru]

Greetings to all.

History is and has always been highly contested. Certainly, it was less so when only the hegemonic or colonizers' versions of history wwere written and taught in schools. Later, the sub-alterns (racial, gender, spatial, geographic, inter-generational, religious, ethnic, etc.) began to challenge that view of the world. That challenge, as we may recall, gave rise to the multiculturalism movement and culture wars in academia--in the US, Canada, UK, mainland Europe, Australia and New Zealand, etc. Biafra is not the only historical issue that divides Nigerians. There is hegemonic and counter-hegemonic histories of the Yoruba vs the Bini; Usman dan Fodio as a "reformer" vs empire-builder and even Mohammed Shekau of a by-gone era, Tiv vs. Fulani; even Igbo history vs. Nri history, etc. Just think of the recent vitriol about the history of Lagos. Or, the contestations over the hegemony of the Ibadan History epistemic gate-keepers --not sure if these amount to Nigeria's version of "culture wars", though.

The biggest problem I see in Nigeria is the tendency among academics to always run to Government to bankroll most of their activities -- cf. the culture of academic organizations making "courtesy calls" on state Governors and/or the President who reciprocate with "welfare packages" which these academics sometimes fight over viciously. Why would any government worth its name allow you to write history that challenges or undermines its legitimacy--especially if that same government is paying for it? The military rulers who were expected to pay for a "balanced" history of the Nigerian civil war hinged their sense of entitlement to rule Nigeria as their patrimony on their (ignominious/gallant???) roles in the events that precipitated, during and after that war. For them, the academics who were swarming around the military in the name of a national history project were not really different from the ten-for-a-penny praise-singing musicians down the street. And, there were lots of coffee table verbiage that were produced by academics to massage the egos of their paymasters during those locust years of military rule. My point is that those military rulers (and, indeed, any Nigerian government) are not different from those in France, Belgium, Germany (and indeed, the West) where governments do not allow the "truth" about their enslavement/genocide/colonialism to be included in history books for schools, for instance.

Finally, the politics over what constitutes "history" is actually the best argument for "true federalism" or significant devolution of powers. Local control of cultural and historical memory is at the core of what the theory and practice of federalism celebrates as "unity and diversity", at least as articulated by K.C. Wheare. The history taught in Scotland and Wales does not have to please the knowledge police in England; just as the Fulani or Yoruba cannot ban the Angas, Igbo, or Kanuri from teaching their history because someone's identity is going to be threatened, and vice versa. You can't ban the teaching of history because it's controversial--and this again is one area I fault those otherwise knowledgeable and respected academics who supported or lent legitimacy to the military dictatorships' tendency to ban anything they didn't like or understand.  We are yet to exorcise this demon from our psyche. The day we do it, that's the day we'll be on the road towards the democratization of the Nigerian state.

Peace as always!

On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 11:45 AM, Richard Joseph <richard...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Bolaji:

Greetings. I will transmit your question to a colleague who is a specialist on Spain.

Regards,

Richard

On Apr 17, 2015, at 1:10 PM, Bolaji Akinyemi <rot...@gmail.com> wrote:

Please permit me to join this debate even if only to provide the background information to the abolition of history from our curriculum.

Sometime in the late 70s, the Federal Government set up an academic task force under the late Professor Tekena Tamuno made up of scholars from several Nigerian Universities, myself as Director General of NIIA and Dr. Dele Cole from Cabinet Office. The task force was commissioned to produce volumes on Nigerian history. We divided the themes into volumes. We had no problems until we got to the volume designed to cover 1966-1970 (the coups and the civil war). I even took issue with the volume dealing with the 1962 declaration of the state of Emergency in the old Western Region. When we could not reach a consensus on the Civil War volume, we commissioned two volumes, one from the Federal side and another one from the Biafran side. When both volumes were produced, it was like a civil war all over again. You would have thought we were dealing with two different issues. Yet these volumes were produced by university lecturers.

That the emotion is still raw showed up during the last National Conference with threats of law suits being thrown around over individual assessments of anything relating to the coups and the civil war.

One can also remember the furore over the screening of the film "Half a Yellow Sun" with the Censors Board insisting on cuts before clearing the film for public viewing. 

It is against this back ground that government simply decided not to allow history to be taught in our schools since we cannot agree with whose history: Federal story or Biafran story.

Does anyone know how Spain which also fought a bitter civil war before us resolved this matter in their own case?

Professor Bolaji Akinyemi

On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Obadiah Mailafia <obmai...@gmail.com> wrote:

Many thanks Ayo and Okey for these insightful thoughts. My worry is mainly about younger people at the school level (primary and secondary). As we all know, over the last two decades our young people are totally alien to the study of history. History was replaced with something called "Social Studies". Funnily enough, some of did History in primary school. But when we went to secondary school we were confronted in forms 1 and 2 with this strange animal called "Social Studies", a nondescript menu of a bit of history, a bit of cultural studies and a bit of civics. Very anodyine and unpalatable. I remember from those days stories about "heroes and heroines": King Jaja, Queen Amina, Emotan, Usman dan Fodio etc. It was in form three onwards that we did History proper. Even then, it was badly taught. The book by Adu Boahen (Topics in West African History) was something of a Bible. After O'Levels I did History at the School of Basic Studies. The curriculum was world class: African History and World History (WW1 WW2, the Russian Revolution; China). The teachers were Oxbridge and really top in their profession. 

I am convinced that the study of history is of utmost importance in the formation of responsible, patriotic citizens. 

I humbly submit that we neglect the study of History for our children to our peril as a country. It is dangerous to allow World Bank and others to determine the school curriculum where the mindsets of our young people are formed. In Japan, Korea, India etc, even in America and England, the authorities take charge on the type History taught in schools. The Japanese for example teach their young people that Japan was a peaceful country when foreigners came and attacked them. There is good and bad mystification. To me, the Japanese are practising good mystification. Every nations lives by its own myths. We must take the sovereign prerogative in transmitting the right myths to our children. In this era of change, we should pressure the new government to commission the likes of Prof. Falola to write a new History for our schools that will help transmit the right myths.  We must do so speedily, because our young people are being fed on hopeless stuff from Google and others. They are thus unpatriotic and lacking in civic culture. We are the worse for it.

Obadiah Mailafia 

--

Prof. A. Bolaji Akinyemi. B.A, M.A, M.A.L.D, D.Phil (Oxon), CFR.
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