AS the events commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11wound down in the evening of September 11 this year, I received a phone call from an older Nigerian friend living in a different part of the United States. In response to my casual joke about his attendance at a 9/11 event as the reason he was not available to answer my call earlier, the man sighed wearily, then remarked on what he perceived as the tiresome narcissism of the commemorations. I admitted that there was something over-the-top in the whole show but noted that as Nigerians, for instance, we would go to the other extreme of forgetting events that we ought to remember and put into perspective. I was thinking about the floods in Ibadan, the tragedy of 1980 never seeming to have prepared the residents for the repeat occurrence this past August. There was also the case of the disastrous explosions at the Ikeja arms depot in January 2002, a catastrophic event by all standards, but where are the signs that we have learnt anything from it?
Some days ago, a similar case of amnesia caught my attention. The 150th anniversary of the annexation of Lagos passed on August 6, 2011 without remark, to the best of my knowledge. Why did Nigerian newspapers, public affairs commentators, or just Lagosians with a sense of history not consider this date worthy of notice? As much as any event in the making of modern Nigeria, the formal occupation of Lagos by the British in the middle of the 19th century was decisive. It created a deep wound in the civic pride of patriotic residents in the following years, and as time passed, the wound healed into a big scar, marking the deportment of the educated elite who would set themselves against the colonial authorities. Without a doubt, the political ramifications of the Cession Treaty were indispensable for jump-starting Nigerian nationalism as we have come to know it. Forgetting to observe such a day, even through routine gestures like newspaper editorials or civic ceremonies is a shirking of an intellectual duty, an inexcusable lack of a sense of history.
It was not always like this. The centenary of the annexation of Lagos was marked memorably in August 1961, possibly in different ways (not being around then, I would not know), the most enduring being a special issue of Nigeria magazine. This special supplement, edited by Onuora Nzekwu, featured articles by leading members of the country’s intelligentsia, such as the historian J. F. Ade Ajayi, the writer Cyprian Ekwensi, and the geographer Akin Mabogunje. Even then, this sumptuous feast of texts and images would be a collector’s item, if only because it brought memorable events together and alive barely one year after independence. A facsimile of the treaty was reproduced, and a typed version printed alongside, verbatim. The editors and contributors to this supplement viewed the city of Lagos in ways that made the recent independence festivities appear like on-going parties, and you could still hear the laughter, the drumming, the singing! The reader senses that whatever was considered worth remembering about the history of Lagos was also adjudged an integral part of the Nigerian reality. More to the point, for those fascinated with perfect arcs, there was something of a closure in Nigeria becoming independent exactly a hundred years after the formal occupation of the country’s capital. Hence the melding of the independence celebrations and the centenary of the annexation of Lagos, in that special issue. At this distance, when the fact of the country’s viability as an ethical idea is a debater’s delight, it is both saddening and challenging to be reminded through the printed form of a time when being a Nigerian was confidence-boosting.
We can leave the sad parts to the sentimentalists and face up to the challenges, remembering as a way of reminding. The forces that made the annexation of Lagos practically inevitable one hundred and fifty years ago are alive and well, in different guises to be sure, but uncannily so.
The formal articles of the cession of Lagos to the British Queen were ratified in the morning of August 6, 1861, between Oba Dosumu (often misspelt “Docemo”) and some of his chiefs on one side, and Norman Bedingfield, commander of the ship Prometheus, and William McCoskry, the acting Consul, on the other side as representatives of Queen Victoria. The island had had a semi-official relationship with Britain for about a decade after Oba Akintoye, Dosumu’s father and predecessor, signed a treaty giving consular rights in the city to the British government, on the pretext of ending slave trading on the West African coast. But there were rival claimants to the throne of the King of Lagos: Akitoye had been recently deposed by his nephew, the formidable Kosoko Morohunfolu, who remained a thorn in the king’s side. Although British support helped Akintoye through the last days of his reign, his successor was no match for Kosoko and his remarkable aptitudes for both statecraft and mercantilism. (Accounts of this rivalry always presented Dosumu as “weak,” but my sense is that such a judgment could be refined in relation to Kosoko’s unusual abilities as king, military leader and trader.)
Another aspect of the rivalry routinely painted Kosoko as an implacable slave-trader and Akintoye and Dosumu as anti-slave trade activists. The historian Ade Ajayi has made the compelling argument that the real rivalry lay elsewhere – between two camps of a ruling dynasty. The British and the missionaries only opportunistically weighed their own agendas into an admittedly complex family quarrel. These agendas were commercial, political and religious, and putting an end to slave trading just happened to be a useful pretext in humanitarian terms. The offspring of these agendas are very much with us.
Following the formal end of slave trading in the British Empire in 1834, policymakers coined the phrase “legitimate trade” to indicate the kinds of commercial activities permissible by and with British merchants. Trade in agricultural produce took the place of the trade in humans, the most profitable business in the Atlantic world in the previous 300 years. All the treaties which the British either forced, cajoled, or manipulated local rulers in the Niger areas to sign were designed to “open up” the country to legitimate trades and traders, and to missionaries. The explicitly political act of partitioning the different regions of the African continent came later, after the terms of trade had been relatively formalised between the European powers and among some of the merchants in their colonial possessions. How does one make sense of Nigerian realities today in terms of these kinds of currents in global politics?
Beginning around 2008, but intensifying since the election of Goodluck Jonathan as the president in April 2011, the fundamentalist sect, Boko Haram (“Western Education is Sacrilegious”), has violently insinuated itself into the political calculus in the country. Prior to this onslaught, the most intractable instance of political violence was the armed rebellion in the Niger Delta, manifesting itself in routine cases of hostage-taking directed mostly at the employees of foreign oil companies. Responses to these two phenomena have fed into the discourse of global War on Terror, such that the sheer despoliation and impoverishment of the Niger Delta, like the unrelieved misery in which the ordinary youth in Northern Nigerian lives, are perceived as security issues in the most instrumental, shallow manner. In other words, rather than seeing these phenomena as arising from the scandalous inequities of Nigerian life, agents of the Nigerian state and their international advisors prefer to approach them as “terrorist” activities.
This is reminiscent of the mindset behind the occupation of Lagos in the middle of the 19th century. Boko Haram may well have links with Somalia’s al-Shabbab and al-Qaeda, as Kosoko certainly had business links with the slave traders in Portugal and Porto Novo. However, as the political commentator Edwin Madunagu argued recently in his column in The Guardian, it is necessary to differentiate between “terrorism in Nigeria” and “Nigerian terrorism.” Boko Haram has fundamentalist agenda and employs terrorist tactics, but it is gaining traction in part because Nigeria is not a just and humane society. There is no knowing whether an argument like this could have prevented or complicated the annexation of Lagos in 1861. Today, however, and ironically because the annexation of Nigeria takes other forms, President Jonathan is better placed to deal with the commandant of Africom than Oba Dosumu could have been with the British commander of the Prometheus.
• Adesokan teaches film and literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, in the United States.
AS the events commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11wound down in the evening of September 11 this year, I received a phone call from an older Nigerian friend living in a different part of the United States. In response to my casual joke about his attendance at a 9/11 event as the reason he was not available to answer my call earlier, the man sighed wearily, then remarked on what he perceived as the tiresome narcissism of the commemorations. I admitted that there was something over-the-top in the whole show but noted that as Nigerians, for instance, we would go to the other extreme of forgetting events that we ought to remember and put into perspective. I was thinking about the floods in Ibadan, the tragedy of 1980 never seeming to have prepared the residents for the repeat occurrence this past August. There was also the case of the disastrous explosions at the Ikeja arms depot in January 2002, a catastrophic event by all standards, but where are the signs that we have learnt anything from it? Some days ago, a similar case of amnesia caught my attention. The 150th anniversary of the annexation of Lagos passed on August 6, 2011 without remark, to the best of my knowledge. Why did Nigerian newspapers, public affairs commentators, or just Lagosians with a sense of history not consider this date worthy of notice? As much as any event in the making of modern Nigeria, the formal occupation of Lagos by the British in the middle of the 19th century was decisive. It created a deep wound in the civic pride of patriotic residents in the following years, and as time passed, the wound healed into a big scar, marking the deportment of the educated elite who would set themselves against the colonial authorities. Without a doubt, the political ramifications of the Cession Treaty were indispensable for jump-starting Nigerian nationalism as we have come to know it. Forgetting to observe such a day, even through routine gestures like newspaper editorials or civic ceremonies is a shirking of an intellectual duty, an inexcusable lack of a sense of history. It was not always like this. The centenary of the annexation of Lagos was marked memorably in August 1961, possibly in different ways (not being around then, I would not know), the most enduring being a special issue of Nigeria magazine. This special supplement, edited by Onuora Nzekwu, featured articles by leading members of the country’s intelligentsia, such as the historian J. F. Ade Ajayi, the writer Cyprian Ekwensi, and the geographer Akin Mabogunje. Even then, this sumptuous feast of texts and images would be a collector’s item, if only because it brought memorable events together and alive barely one year after independence. A facsimile of the treaty was reproduced, and a typed version printed alongside, verbatim. The editors and contributors to this supplement viewed the city of Lagos in ways that made the recent independence festivities appear like on-going parties, and you could still hear the laughter, the drumming, the singing! The reader senses that whatever was considered worth remembering about the history of Lagos was also adjudged an integral part of the Nigerian reality. More to the point, for those fascinated with perfect arcs, there was something of a closure in Nigeria becoming independent exactly a hundred years after the formal occupation of the country’s capital. Hence the melding of the independence celebrations and the centenary of the annexation of Lagos, in that special issue. At this distance, when the fact of the country’s viability as an ethical idea is a debater’s delight, it is both saddening and challenging to be reminded through the printed form of a time when being a Nigerian was confidence-boosting. We can leave the sad parts to the sentimentalists and face up to the challenges, remembering as a way of reminding. The forces that made the annexation of Lagos practically inevitable one hundred and fifty years ago are alive and well, in different guises to be sure, but uncannily so. The formal articles of the cession of Lagos to the British Queen were ratified in the morning of August 6, 1861, between Oba Dosumu (often misspelt “Docemo”) and some of his chiefs on one side, and Norman Bedingfield, commander of the ship Prometheus, and William McCoskry, the acting Consul, on the other side as representatives of Queen Victoria. The island had had a semi-official relationship with Britain for about a decade after Oba Akintoye, Dosumu’s father and predecessor, signed a treaty giving consular rights in the city to the British government, on the pretext of ending slave trading on the West African coast. But there were rival claimants to the throne of the King of Lagos: Akitoye had been recently deposed by his nephew, the formidable Kosoko Morohunfolu, who remained a thorn in the king’s side. Although British support helped Akintoye through the last days of his reign, his successor was no match for Kosoko and his remarkable aptitudes for both statecraft and mercantilism. (Accounts of this rivalry always presented Dosumu as “weak,” but my sense is that such a judgment could be refined in relation to Kosoko’s unusual abilities as king, military leader and trader.) Another aspect of the rivalry routinely painted Kosoko as an implacable slave-trader and Akintoye and Dosumu as anti-slave trade activists. The historian Ade Ajayi has made the compelling argument that the real rivalry lay elsewhere – between two camps of a ruling dynasty. The British and the missionaries only opportunistically weighed their own agendas into an admittedly complex family quarrel. These agendas were commercial, political and religious, and putting an end to slave trading just happened to be a useful pretext in humanitarian terms. The offspring of these agendas are very much with us. Following the formal end of slave trading in the British Empire in 1834, policymakers coined the phrase “legitimate trade” to indicate the kinds of commercial activities permissible by and with British merchants. Trade in agricultural produce took the place of the trade in humans, the most profitable business in the Atlantic world in the previous 300 years. All the treaties which the British either forced, cajoled, or manipulated local rulers in the Niger areas to sign were designed to “open up” the country to legitimate trades and traders, and to missionaries. The explicitly political act of partitioning the different regions of the African continent came later, after the terms of trade had been relatively formalised between the European powers and among some of the merchants in their colonial possessions. How does one make sense of Nigerian realities today in terms of these kinds of currents in global politics? Beginning around 2008, but intensifying since the election of Goodluck Jonathan as the president in April 2011, the fundamentalist sect, Boko Haram (“Western Education is Sacrilegious”), has violently insinuated itself into the political calculus in the country. Prior to this onslaught, the most intractable instance of political violence was the armed rebellion in the Niger Delta, manifesting itself in routine cases of hostage-taking directed mostly at the employees of foreign oil companies. Responses to these two phenomena have fed into the discourse of global War on Terror, such that the sheer despoliation and impoverishment of the Niger Delta, like the unrelieved misery in which the ordinary youth in Northern Nigerian lives, are perceived as security issues in the most instrumental, shallow manner. In other words, rather than seeing these phenomena as arising from the scandalous inequities of Nigerian life, agents of the Nigerian state and their international advisors prefer to approach them as “terrorist” activities. This is reminiscent of the mindset behind the occupation of Lagos in the middle of the 19th century. Boko Haram may well have links with Somalia’s al-Shabbab and al-Qaeda, as Kosoko certainly had business links with the slave traders in Portugal and Porto Novo. However, as the political commentator Edwin Madunagu argued recently in his column in The Guardian, it is necessary to differentiate between “terrorism in Nigeria” and “Nigerian terrorism.” Boko Haram has fundamentalist agenda and employs terrorist tactics, but it is gaining traction in part because Nigeria is not a just and humane society. There is no knowing whether an argument like this could have prevented or complicated the annexation of Lagos in 1861. Today, however, and ironically because the annexation of Nigeria takes other forms, President Jonathan is better placed to deal with the commandant of Africom than Oba Dosumu could have been with the British commander of the Prometheus. • Adesokan teaches film and literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, in the United States.
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