By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. I know the title of this week’s column sounds a little verbose, even melodramatic, but it captures the se...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
I know the title of this week’s column sounds a
little verbose, even melodramatic, but it captures the sensation of outrage I
felt when I read Vanguard’s March 12 editorial
titled “History Ends in Nigeria.” The editorial laments a recent decision to expunge
history from Nigeria’s secondary school curriculum putatively because students disdain the subject and because there are no teachers to teach it.
After a little digging, I discovered that the
decision to discontinue the teaching of history in Nigerian secondary schools
was actually taken in 2012. A professor of pharmacology at the University of
Nigeria by the name of Peter Nwangwu is one of the first people to call
attention to the idiocy of this policy. In a January 24, 2012 interview with
the News Agency of Nigeria, he noted that “The study of history nurtures a
spirit of critical inquiry and assists the young learner in the formation of
historical consciousness.”
He is right. Cicero, the famous Roman statesman and
orator, also once said, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to
remain always a child.” Malcolm X was blunter. He is widely quoted to have said, “History is a
people's memory, and without memory man is demoted to the lower animals.” By discontinuing the teaching of history, Nigeria’s policymakers are
condemning future generations to the tragedy of being perpetual children at
best and “lower animals” at worst.
This is particularly worrisome because even in the
best of times, Nigerians are some of the most historically ignorant people I’ve
ever met. Historical knowledge has never been popular with Nigerians. They hate
for historical facts to stand in the way of their jingoistic fantasies. Take,
for instance, the Usman Dan Fodio jihad. Almost every region of Nigeria
cherishes barefaced historical lies about this relatively recent historical
event.
Many people in the far north, for example, think
that it was the jihad that brought forth Islam to Nigeria. I used to think it
was only barely educated folks who held on to this historical fallacy until I had a
conversation with a professor of political science three years ago. He told me
he was fired from his high-ranking government position because his detractors
convinced the late President Umaru Yar’adua that he’d undermined Muslims in the
organization he headed. “That’s a ridiculous charge,” he told me. “I’m a
descendant of Usman Dan Fodio. My ancestors brought Islam to this part of the
world.”
I was embarrassed on the man’s behalf. I couldn’t
resist telling him that the presence of Islam in Nigeria preceded the Usman Dan
Fodio jihad by several centuries. What Dan Fodio did was to reform Islam where
it already existed. And this happened only in the 19th century. The earliest
record of Islamic presence in northern Nigeria (in the ancient Kanem- Borno
Empire to be specific) dates back to the 9th century, that is, just two
centuries away from the birth of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. In Hausaland,
Islam had been widespread since at least the 13th century.
Islam came to West Africa primarily through the
trans-Saharan trade, which lasted from about the 8th century to the 16th
century. The trade saw Arab traders travel from Arabia through North Africa to parts
of West Africa in search of gold, salt, and human labor. All communities on
this route, which include Hausa land, Borgu, Nupe land, parts of Yoruba land,
the Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, etc. are historically Muslim.
In the Middle Belt, too, non-Muslims like to brag about
their ancestors’ resistance to Usman Dan Fodio’s Islamic proselytization. That’s a
historical lie. Usman Dan Fodio’s jihad didn’t seek to convert non-Muslims to
Islam; its raison d'être was to purge Islam of syncretism. What people in the
Middle Belt resisted were slave raids by jihadists. Since Islam forbids the
enslavement of fellow Muslims, it was in the economic interest of the jihadists
to ensure that their non-Muslim neighbors remained non-Muslims so that they
would continue to provide a ready source of slave labor.
In the south, there are also several narratives of
how communities purportedly resisted the attempts by jihadists to “dip the
Qur’an into the Atlantic Ocean.” That, too, is a lie. Historical records show
that the Usman Dan Fodio jihad didn’t even attempt to go to the south. Insights
from the late Professor Abdullahi Smith’s writings (which are distilled from
translations of the travel notes of Arab travelers who witnessed events in
nineteenth-century “Nigeria”) tell us that the Ilorin jihad wasn’t even a
direct offshoot of the Usman Dan Fodio jihad.
Alimi, the progenitor of the current ruling family
in Ilorin, was an itinerant Fulani preacher in Yoruba land whom Afonja, the
Yoruba leader in Ilorin at the time, invited to Ilorin to be his “Alfa” to help
him defeat the Alaafin of Oyo with whom he was engaged in battles of supremacy.
After settling in Ilorin, many of his Yoruba students decided to follow him to
his new place. In time, Alimi grew so popular that Afonja feared that he would
eclipse him, so he asked him to leave. It was Alimi’s students, most of whom
were Yoruba, that fought and defeated Afonja. This happened during the period
of the Usman Dan Fodio jihad, but Alimi and his disciples were not given the
“flag” of the jihad until after at least three visits to Sokoto. They weren’t
given the flag because they weren’t directly connected to the Sokoto jihad.
Yet people talk of stopping the jihad at Ilorin and
preventing it from getting to the south. Northern Muslim politicians from the
First Republic also encouraged this ignorance. For instance, Muhammadu Ribadu,
Nigeria’s first Minister of Defense, was reported to have once said, “The political
conquest of the South was a religious obligation that the Northern People’s
Congress owe the world of Islam; the Quran has to be dipped into the Atlantic
Ocean before the Jihad could stop.”
A country that is so scandalously amnesic, that is
so insufferably ignorant of its most recent history, can’t afford to stop the
teaching of history to its youth. There is no serious nation I know of that
doesn’t make the teaching of history mandatory.
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