OPINION
NOW AFRICA MUST TELL ITS OWN STORY MAX SIOLLUN Nigerian historian and author of What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule
A common complaint from Nigerians is that the teaching and dissemination of their history has been deprioritised or even forgotten. For years, school students in Nigeria were not taught their country’s history… until the government restored it to the curriculum in 2019. This lacuna was filled with accounts written by British colonial officers and expatriate historians. For decades, young Nigerians grew up on a diet of the coloniser’s narrative. Reading much of the written history of Nigeria is like observing the country through the telescopic sights of a British rifle. Now there is a growing demand to hear Nigeria’s story told from the perspective of its indigenes. Although partly this is due to the greater racial awareness generated by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) campaigns and racial and social justice unrest of
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2020, other trends have coalesced to bring Nigerian history to the centre stage. Firstly, Nigeria’s habit of recycling its political elites; secondly its overwhelmingly young population growing up in the short-attention-span era of YouTube and social media; and thirdly, the global wave of video streaming that has also swept Africa. When the first generation of post-independence Nigerian historians – such as Jacob Ade-Ajayi, Adiele Afigbo, Kenneth Dike, Tekena Tamuno and Yusufu Bala Usman – departed, few talented historians had lined up behind them. Perhaps that’s unsurprising in a developing country obsessed with fast oil wealth and training young people for the professions. Nigeria’s history was relegated to the wilderness for decades. Government failed to prioritise it. Now Nigeria’s demography may help make history big business. Two-thirds of Nigerians are under 30 years old. The country’s youth contrasts with its elderly political leaders. Nigeria emerged from two decades of military rule and transitioned to elected civilian rule in 1999, but its
THEAFRICAREPORT / N° 118 / JANUARY-FEBRUARY-MARCH 2022
leadership has been dominated by retired generals from prior military dictatorships. President Muhammadu Buhari is a 78-year-old retired army major general who led a military regime between 1983 and 1985. He returned to power as an elected civilian president 30 years later. More than two-thirds of Nigerians had not been born when Buhari was first head of state. They struggled to reconcile conflicting accounts of him as a severe and uncompromising military disciplinarian with his new demeanour as avuncular senior citizen. Despite Buhari’s promise that “before you is a former military ruler and a converted democrat who is ready to operate under democratic norms”, young Nigerians puzzled over their president’s antecedents. Clarissa Ebuzeme, a young lawyer in her 20s who lives in Abuja, told me: “Millennials and Gen Z are finally becoming real adults and more self-aware and want to know what happened in Nigeria in [the past].[…] People wanted to know more about what happened in the 1980s when he [Buhari] was military head of state.” Young people consider that a way to discover the nature of the man now leading their country is to delve into history and learn about the military coup plots that took Buhari in and out of power three decades ago. Other ghosts from our past are haunting today’s youth. For years, activists in the south-east have campaigned for secession. The attempted secession of Biafra in 1967 led to a civil war that lasted almost three years, claimed a million lives and split the army into rival warring factions. For the first time in African history, Western television viewers were presented with footage of emaciated, starving African children, imposing another stereotype of Africans. Although Nigeria was reunited, the emotionally explosive faultlines and structural problems that led to the
