My WishList π³π¬
I never once thought I'd write something like this in my lifetime, that I'd care enough to write about my country's independence, π but if you know me, you already know how much I love books, and how much I love to yap about them, because why not!! π
I was reading Half of a Yellow Sun for the third time, and somewhere in Chapter 14 I saw something I'd always overlooked:
the first large-scale massacre of Igbo people happened in 1945, decades before Biafra
1945?? I had never heard about this before when and why did this happen?? It took me down a rabbit hole, and even Wikipedia has little to nothing about it, just a stub on the 1945 Jos riots.
Which brings me to my next question:
why did Nigeria stop teaching history in school?? I did history in JSS1 only, and then it was scrapped.
So I went searching and found this thesis The Abolishment of History in Nigerian Primary and Secondary Institutions: The Aftermath, 1983β2021 and yes, I read the whole thing.
Who is this girl that randomly reads other people's theses π YES it's me! And hellooo, we are not mates!! π«΅πΌ (just joking). But it was quite interesting, and my favorite thing from it was this quote from Cicero:
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
Then she goes on to say that "Nigeria is still a child, it is an incomplete nation, the absence of history in its curriculum has made it an ignorant nation."
Don't worry, I'll give you a quick summary of the thesis, because I know you're too lazy to read it π
According to Obasa (2022), the Europeans believed we were an ahistorical continent (my first thought reading this was: why do we even care what the Europeans think??! well, their opinion mattered because they held the colonial power, and their ideas about what counted as knowledge got embedded into the institutions that governed Africans), and that African history only "began" when Europeans started writing about their own activities in Africa. So we built a nationalist history to prove to the white man that Africa had a history, which in turn strengthened the anti-colonial movements.
And hurray!!, that nationalist history helped push out the British colonial administration by challenging the idea that colonial rule was bringing civilization to a people with no past. But then independence created a different problem, Nigeria now had to figure out how all these different histories, people and identities could coexist inside one state, and nationalist history couldn't solve that.
She also points out that the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), adopted by Nigeria in 1986, severely crippled the teaching and study of history by shifting the entire educational focus toward immediate, market-driven survival. By forcing deep cuts to public spending and pushing purely utilitarian skills, SAP systematically sidelined the humanities causing what scholars describe as a "crisis in Nigerian historiography."
And then, finally, the ongoing conspiracy theory: that the elite removed history from the curriculum to evade accountability.
When all is said and done, my question is:
How are we celebrating independence when we don't even know our own history? Independence from what, exactly? Without history, how is the younger generation supposed to appreciate independence or even understand what this nation actually went through to get here?
Well. I have a solution. Historical fiction.
Calm down π so far so good, I'd say we're trying, there are Nigerian historical fictions out there covering Biafra and colonialism, but nowhere near enough, in my opinion and Nigeria has SO. MUCH. HISTORY.
This is why Born on a Tuesday will forever be one of my favorite books, it felt like being dropped into a part of Nigeria I almost never get to experience in fiction. Afonja is another good one even though I didn't particularly love the writing, the idea, covering the fall of the Oyo Empire, was soo good.
And it's not even just the big events, even the little things I stumble across while reading other books, like how Buchi Emecheta keeps mentioning that her father fought in Burma (now Myanmar) for the British in WWII, she brings it up in The Bride Price, and again in The Joys of Motherhood. NgΕ©gΔ© wa Thiong'o also mentions that Kenyans fought in Burma too, for the British, in his novel A Grain of Wheat. So why has nobody written a book about this!!
Nigerian history is SO much bigger than the handful of stories we keep telling. So if any writer out there is hunting for their next big idea, I am BEGGING, here's my wishlist π€²π½
- The Sokoto Jihad and the creation of the Sokoto Caliphate
- Usman dan Fodio and the world around him
- The fall of the Oyo Empire
- The Nupe wars
- The Owu War
- The history of Benin before the 1897 invasion
- The Hausa city-states before and during the Fulani jihad
- The Kanem-Bornu Empire
- The Yoruba wars of the nineteenth century
- The Niger Delta and its pre-oil history
- The Nigerian coups of 1966β1975 - without collapsing the whole story back into Biafra
- The Western Region crisis and Operation Wetie
- The 1979 transition to civilian rule
- The 1983 coup
- Abacha-era Nigeria
And I can go on and on!! there are SO MANY stories. But here's the thing, what I want most is to read them from the perspective of the people actually living through them, not the current-affairs style of "here is the historical event, here are the important men who caused it, and these are the dates."
Give me the trader watching her city change.
Give me a child growing up during the Sokoto Jihad.
Give me someone in Oyo watching an empire collapse.
Give me ordinary people living through the coups.
Give me someone standing in Lagos on June 12, 1993, not yet knowing they're witnessing one of the most consequential elections in Nigerian history.
I really just want Nigerian history to feel BIGGER in fiction.
I can't wait to get my hands on YorΓΉbΓ‘ Boy Running by Biyi BΓ‘ndΓ©lΓ©, about Samuel Ajayi Crowther. I also want to read Another Man's War, it follows a Nigerian soldier through the Burma campaign, though it's nonfiction.
I know writing historical fiction is a lot more work, all that deep research you have to do to stay accurate and not misinform people, but I beseech you brethren, we can do hard things! Hard things that are worthwhile.
And no, before anyone tells me to be the change and go write one myself, I WON'T! π We can't all be writers. I'm not a writer, I'm a READER!!
My job is to want these stories loudly, to buy them, to shove them into people's hands, and to be first in line when they finally exist. Wanting them out loud is its own kind of contribution.
So consider this my official order. Writers of Nigeria, the rest is on you. π«‘
Happy Independence Day. π³π¬