Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part One The Foundation of Knowledge
- 1 A Preface to Academic Historiography
- 2 K. O. Dike and the National Archives of Nigeria
- Part Two Varieties of History
- Part Three Nationalist Historians and Their Work
- Part Four Reflections on History and the Nation-State
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
1 - A Preface to Academic Historiography
from Part One - The Foundation of Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part One The Foundation of Knowledge
- 1 A Preface to Academic Historiography
- 2 K. O. Dike and the National Archives of Nigeria
- Part Two Varieties of History
- Part Three Nationalist Historians and Their Work
- Part Four Reflections on History and the Nation-State
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We were trained to be inferior copies of Englishmen, caricatures to be laughed at with our pretensions to British bourgeois gentility, our grammatical faultiness and distorted standards betraying us at every turn. … We were denied the knowledge of our African past and informed that we had no present. … We were taught to regard our culture and traditions as barbarous and primitive. Our textbooks were English textbooks, telling us about English history, English geography, English ways of living, English customs, English ideas, and English weather.
Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must UniteIntellectual history does not emerge in a vacuum. First, it has to be created by those who think, talk, and write about events and people and places. Second, what they write, think, and discuss has to be located in the context of the interactions of people in society, and of the interactions of that society with other places and spaces. Third, by turning ideas into some sort of power, those who generate knowledge envisage a future for themselves and their society. The foundation of writing about Nigeria—a component of African historiography and intellectual history—was laid during the nineteenth century, although with events and traditions that preceded that era. The circumstances that led to modern Nigerian historiography contained a combination of external and internal factors, and a small group of individuals with the facility to write exploited this opportunity to inaugurate a process of documentation and reflection.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History , pp. 3 - 26Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011