By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi My last week’s column that exploded Natasha H. Akpoti’s wildly unfounded conspir...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
My last week’s column that exploded Natasha H. Akpoti’s wildly
unfounded conspiracy theories about Nigeria highlights the imperative for a radical,
systemic curricular overhaul of Nigeria’s education system to make history
compulsory from primary school to university. It also dramatizes the truism
that you can’t build something on nothing.
Aristotle popularized the idea that nature abhors a vacuum.
I would add that even the mind abhors a vacuum. Most human beings are intrinsically
inquisitive and have an abiding yearning to learn about their past. If no
systematic, empirical, and veridical body of historical knowledge exists to
satisfy this longing, they will either invent it themselves or fall prey to the
crackpot conspiracies of charlatans.
The enthusiasm with which people shared—and believed—Akpoti’s
conspiratorial, logically impoverished, and chronologically impossible history
of Nigeria is proof of this. So is the unnerving ignorance displayed by Buhari’s lawyers on Atiku Abubakar’s citizenship and the position of British northern
Cameroon in the formation of Nigeria.
Plus, it’s impossible to fashion a functional country out of
a disparate fragment of people such as Nigeria without a deliberate,
well-thought-out collective history as a part of formal pedagogy in schools.
Nations, as Anglo-Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson points out, are
imagined communities. History is an important part of the imagination that
brings forth nations out of aggregates of dissimilar people. That is why in the
United States, to give an example I am intimately familiar with, history is mandatory
from elementary school to university irrespective of course of study.
The result is that in spite of their own peculiar fissures,
Americans have a fair grasp of their history—even if it’s only the sanitized,
officially sanctioned version of their history. My my 9-year-old son knows more
about American history than most Nigerian university graduates who didn’t study
history know about Nigerian history.
In the last few years, the claim that the Nigerian
government “banned history” from the national curriculum has become a hackneyed,
predictable refrain. It’s often uttered in moments of glaring display of
historical ignorance, especially by young people. But this refrain is both
dishonest and inaccurate. History was never a mandatory subject at any point in
Nigeria’s history. It was always optional before it was discontinued because of
progressively dwindling student enrollment.
When I started secondary school more than three decades ago,
history and government were offered as alternatives to each other for students
in the humanities and social sciences concentration. That is, you enrolled in
either history or government but not both. In my secondary school, no one chose
history. Apparently, this is a national phenomenon, which caused the ministry
of education to discontinue offering the subject.
Nevertheless, even the secondary school history curriculum that
students were taught (with which I am familiar because I studied it on my own)
is deficient, poorly focused, and incapable of nurturing the sort of historical knowledge
that is indispensable to national self-fashioning. At some point, the curricula
of history and government were indistinguishable.
So people who
advocate the return of history to the national secondary school curriculum
should go beyond merely advocacy for its return; they should also insist that
professional historians radically reorder the history curriculum and then
compel the government to make it compulsory, not merely an option, for all
secondary school students. A history curriculum appropriate for primary schools
should also be designed and made mandatory. Finally, every higher education
student, irrespective of disciplinary orientation, should be made to take at
least two semesters’ worth of history courses as part of general education.
I ended my August 10, 2013 column titled “A Know Nothing Nation” by observing that, “Until our educational system and national
orientation are reformed to deepen and broaden our knowledge about ourselves,
our quest for nationhood will continue to be stuck in prolonged infancy.” History
is the vehicle to reach that goal.
History bridges our past, our present, and our future. That
was what Irish-British philosopher Edmund Burke meant when he said, “History is
a pact between the dead, the living and the yet unborn.” We ignore history at
own peril. And this leads me to why Nigeria needs to change its name.
Why Nigeria Needs a
New Name
I have written copiously on the need to change our colonial
name. After formal independence from British colonialism, we changed our
constitution, our national anthem, and our national currency, but we are still burdened
with the name and national colors handed down to us by colonialism. Whenever
Nigeria gets a thinking, self-respecting leadership, we need to throw away
these avoidably odious holdovers of colonialism.
Nigeria is one of only a few previously colonized countries
in the world that still bear the name imposed on them by their historical
oppressors. As I showed last week, the name Nigeria was invented by Flora Shaw,
Lugard’s wife, from the term “Niger-area,” and she intended for the name to
refer only to what is now northern Nigeria. She didn’t have southern Nigeria in
mind when she came up with the name. In fact, part of the reasons she invented
the name was to differentiate the north from the south.
Well, that’s now an insignificant point. What is significant
is that the name “Nigeria” traces lexical descent from the River Niger, which
has symbolic significance for most communities in what is now Nigeria. However,
as I showed last week, even “Niger” is a foreign word—whether you think it’s
derived from the Latin niger or the
Berber ger-n-ger.
I pointed out in my February 25, 2017 column titled “A Vote for ‘Naija’ and Against ‘Nigeria’”— in response to the misguided campaign by
the National Orientation Agency to ban the use of the affectionate diminutive
term Naija in place of Nigeria—that, “If we must name our country after the
longest river in our land, why not adopt one or all of its local names? Yoruba
people call Rive Niger ‘Oya,’ the Baatonu people call it ‘Kora,’ Hausa people
call it ‘Kwara,’ Igbo people call it ‘Orimiri,’ etc.”
If you blend the local names for River Niger from our
country’s three major ethnic groups, you may come up with something like “Kwoyamiri.”
Or, perhaps, “Oyakwamiri.” That’s an infinitely better, more authentic name
than “Nigeria.”
If that doesn’t work, what stops us from adopting the as yet
unclaimed name of a powerful precolonial West African empire called Songhai—on the
model of Ghana, Benin, Mali, etc.? I pointed out in a previous column that, “it
was actually an Igbo man from Ohafia by the name of Dr. Kalu Ezera who first
suggested, in 1960, that Nigeria’s name should be changed to the United
Republic of Songhai. But the reactionary colonial lackeys who formed the core
of Nigeria’s early ‘nationalists’ ignored him. So the campaign to change
Nigeria’s name to Songhai is neither new nor informed by ethnic or religious
loyalties.”
A lot of the resistance to changing Nigeria’s name is often
predicated on the notion that it’s too late. Well, the southern African country
of Swaziland recently changed its name to Eswatini, and the entire world now
refers to it by that name. In any case, it’s never too late to do the right
thing.
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Anyway, a food for thought. But our current predicaments are so deep and varied that just changing our name is not part of the solutions. Except if the change of name is part of a more broader radical reform. I am exhausted with Nigeria' unending ethical, moral and social crisis
ReplyDeleteI've racked my brain endlessly in a quest to fathom how nomenclature can correct the numerous wrongs that have become traditionalised.
ReplyDeleteHowever, adopting your opinion on history is quite important.
I agree with you that our citizens need to know more about the history of their country. There seems to be an appalling lack of knowledge among the educated in this area, and it's a welcome development that history will be given renewed emphasis on the school curriculum. However, I have just a few observations to make: 1) You didn't explode any "conspiracy theories" of Natasha H. Akpoti about the origin of the word Nigeria,from the river Niger, which is disputed even in scholarly circles.She only drew on what she knew, as most of us do. The most likely meaning of the word "Niger" in several west African languages is "mother of waters" (see M. D. W. Jefrreys, 'Niger: origin of the word'), but how many Nigerian history teachers are aware of this meaning, let alone Ms Akpoti? 2) Don't blame Lady Lugard for suggesting the name Nigeria for us; she simply found it handy. After Sir George Goldie ("Founder of Nigeria") had sacked the old Nupe power centred on Bida in January 1897 under the Royal Niger Company, a suggestion was put forward to name our country "Goldesia" after his name (as Rhodesia had been named after Cecil Rhodes in present-day Zimbabwe), but he rejected the idea. 3) At independence in 1960, our political leaders had an ample opportunity to change "Nigeria" to something else, but they didn't so. It seems too late now. Zaire and Zimbabwe and Burkina Faso are today no better off than they would have been under their colonial names of Belgian Congo, Rhodesia and Upper Volta respectively. What we need in Nigeria is development, not change of name. 4) If your nine year old boy knows the history of America more than a Nigerian university student does of Nigeria, then you're a bad father! Teach him the history of his fatherland before brainwashing him with the history of America.
ReplyDeleteI am always intrigued with your style of articles which are engaging and informative. But going by your research prowess in all aspect of our nation's endevour, i found it absord to learnt that, you once rejected a call to serve your country. And i wonder where the rage comes from Prof?
ReplyDelete