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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
The removal from history follows logically from the loss of power which colonialism represented. The power to act independently is the guarantee to participate actively and consciously in history. To be colonized is to be removed from history except in the most passive sense.
Kenneth Onwuka Dike (1917-1983) is a definite turning point in African historical scholarship. West Africa (28 September 1957) appropriately called him “The Pioneer Historian.” Robert July credits Dike with being “responsible for many of the advances in historical scholarship that marked the two decades following the conclusion of the Second World War.”
Dike was born in Awka, Nigeria, on 17 December 1917. In 1933 he entered Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DMGS), Onitsha, Nigeria. After three years at DMGS, Dike spent another two years at Achimota College in the Gold Coast. From Achimota he moved on to Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone. At the time, Fourah Bay was affiliated to, and awarding the degrees of, Durham University. This meant that through Fourah Bay, Dike took the B.A. (in English, Geography, and Latin) of Durham University. In 1943, he went home to Nigeria, but not to stay for long. In November 1944 he left, on a British Council scholarship, for the M.A. degree in History at University of Aberdeen. In June 1947 he graduated, taking a first-class honors (the best of his year) at Aberdeen. Four months later, Dike registered for his Ph.D. at King's College, University of London. Under the supervision of Vincent Harlow and Gerald S. Graham, he did a dissertation entitled “Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1879.” He earned his Ph.D. degree on 28 July 1950. With it he became the first African to “pass through professional training” in Western historical scholarship.
1 Rodney, Walter, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London, 1972), 246.Google Scholar
2 July, Robert W., A History of the African People (Prospect Heights, IL, 1992), 538.Google Scholar
3 Uzoatu, Uzor Maxim, “Late Professor Dike's Home for History,” The Democrat (Lagos), 21 July 1988, 7Google Scholar; Anon, “Nigerian for Ibadan,” West Africa, 20 February 1960, 201Google Scholar; CO 981/28, 1944-51, “Dike, K. O.” (Public Record Office [PRO], London); Omolewa, Michael, “The Education Factor in the Development of the Historical Profession in Nigeria, 1926-1956,” paper presented at the 25th Annual Congress of the Historical Society of Nigeria held at the University of Ibadan, 26 September-3 October 1980.Google Scholar
4 See Curtin, P. D., “Recent Trends in African Historiography and their Contribution to History in General” in UNESCO General History of Africa, I (Portsmouth, 1981), 54–71.Google Scholar
5 CO 981/28, PRO
6 Omolewa, “Education Factor”; Curtin, “Recent Trends.”
7 Ajayi, J. F. Ade, “Towards A More Enduring Souse of History” in Ajayi, J. F. Ade, History and the Nation and Other Addresses (Ibadan, 1990), 43.Google Scholar
8 Ibid., 41.
9 Ibid., 42. Also see July, , History, 538–39.Google Scholar
10 Ibid., 43.
11 Page references to Trade and Politics are indicated in the text.
12 For example, see Hill, C. P., Britisb Economic and Social History 1700-1975 (London, 1977).Google Scholar
13 Hallett, Robin, Africa to 1875 (Ann Arbor, 1970), 170.Google Scholar
14 Other sources confirm that Liverpool reaped profits from the slave trade. In the words of C. P. Hill, “Between 1783 and 1793 Liverpool trades carried 300,000 slaves to the West Indies and sold them for £15,000,000.” Hill, , British Economic and Social History, 59.Google Scholar Also see Baran, Paul, The political Economy of Growth (New York, 1968), 138.Google Scholar
15 See Inikori, Joseph E., “The Global Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Lingering Consequences,” Guest Lecture delivered at the Museum of African Life and Culture, Dallas, Texas, 1 May 1994Google Scholar; idem., “Slavery and the Development of Industrial Capitalism in England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17(1987), 771-93; idem, “Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England” in Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham, 1992), 145-81.
16 The phrase “traders' frontier” comes from the title of chapter 2 of Hancock, W. K., Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, II/2: Problems of Economic Policy 1918-1939 (London, 1941).Google Scholar
17 For example, see Cain, P. J., Economic Foundations of British Overseas Expansion in 1815-1914 (London, 1980), 53–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hopkins, A. G., An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973), chapter 4.Google Scholar
18 For a reconstruction of the complex background leading up to the bombardment, see Kopytoff, Jean H., A Preface to Modern Nigeria (Madison, 1965), 63–79Google Scholar; Smith, R. S., The Lagos Consulate 1851-1861 (Berkeley, 1979), 14–33.Google Scholar
19 See Afigbo, A. E., “The Bini Mirage and the History of South Central Nigeria,” Nigeria Magazine, no. 137(1981), 17–24.Google Scholar
20 Williamson, Kay, “Languages of the Niger Delta,” Nigeria Magazine, no. 97 (1968), 124–30.Google Scholar Her glottochronological estimates give a separation period of 5000 years of Ijaw from its neighboring language groups (Igbo, Edo, and Yoruba).
21 See the following by Alagoa, E. J., “Ijo Origins and Migrations,” Nigeria Magazine, no. 91 (1966), 279–288Google Scholar, no. 92 (1967), 47-55; “The Development of Institutions in the States of the Eastern Niger Delta,” JAH 12(1971), 269–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A History of the Niger Delta: An Historical Interpretation of Ijo Oral Tradition (Ibadan, 1972).Google Scholar
22 See Alagoa, E. J., “Long-Distance Trade and States in the Niger Delta,” JAH 11(1970), 319–329CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the following by Northrup, David, “The Growth of Trade Among the Igbo People Before 1800,” JAH 13 (1972), 217–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trade Without Rulers: Precolonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford, 1978).Google Scholar Also see Jones, G. I., The Trading States of the Oil Rivers: A Study of Political Development in Eastern Nigeria (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Oguagha, Philip A., “The Impact of European Trade on Igbo-Igala Commercial Relations in the Lower Niger c. 1650-1850 A.D.,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 11/3–4 (Dec. 1982-June 1983), 11–27Google Scholar; Ebere Nwaubani, “The Political Economy of Aboh, 1830-1857,” forthcoming in African Economic History.
23 Jones, , Trading States, 188.Google Scholar
24 Ibid., chapter 12.
25 Flint, John, “African Historians and African History,” Past and Present 19 (November 1956), 96–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Afigbo, A. E., The Poverty of African Historiography (Lagos, 1977), 3.Google Scholar
27 There is a passage in Shakespeare's Love's Labors Lost, Act IV Scene iii, which is germane here: “Black is the badge of hell/The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night.”
28 Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of History, trans, by Sibree, J. (New York, 1956), 99.Google Scholar
29 Ibid., 91.
30 Ibid., 99.
31 Ibid.
32 Quoted in Chamberlain, M. E., The Scramble for Africa (London, 1974), 3.Google Scholar Far worse pontifications were made at the time. In an 1854 address to the American Colonization Society, its vice president, U.S. Navy Commander Andrew H. Foote contended that “if all that negroes of all generations have ever done were to he obliterated from recollection for ever the world would lose no great truth, no profitable art, no exempfary form of life. The loss of all that is African would offer no memorable deductions from anything hut the earth's black catalogue of crimes.” See his Africa and the American Flag (New York, 1854), 207.Google Scholar
33 Coupland, Reginald, Kirk on the Zambezi: A Chapter in African History (Oxford, 1928), 3.Google Scholar
34 See Curtin, Philip D., The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 (Madison, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hickey, Dennis and Wylie, Kenneth C., An Enchanting Darkness: The American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century (East Lansing, 1993)Google Scholar; In “An Ignorance of Africa As Vast as the Continent,” New York Times (20 November, 1994) Howard W. French observed that “For many Americans, the ‘real Africa’ is a blurred concatenation of game parks…a Disneyfield cradle of civilization.”
35 Wilson, J. Leigaton, West Africa: Its History, Condition and Prospects (Westport, 1856), 31.Google Scholar
36 Ibid., 317. Two western anthropologists, the Keesings, have noted how “silly it is to conceive of Columbus, Magellan, and Marco Polo as ‘discovering’ anything”; adding: “Our hopelessly smug and provincial Europe-centered view of world history assumes that strange creatures and places were out there waiting to be ‘discovered’ by us civilized folks.” See Keesing, Roger M. and Keesing, Felix, New Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology (New York, 1971), 104.Google Scholar
37 Dike, K. Onwuka, “African History and Self-Government,” West Africa (14 March 1943), 225.Google Scholar
38 Ibid.
39 Seligman, Charles G., Races of Africa (London, 1930), 85.Google Scholar A major critique of this hypothesis is Sanders, Edith, “The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin anil Functions in Time Perspective,” JAH 10(1969), 521–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Adu Boahen's review of Flint, J. E., The History of Nigeria and Ghana, JAH 8 (1967), 541–46.Google Scholar
40 Seligman, , Races of Africa, 19.Google Scholar
41 See Journal of the African Society 22 (1922/1923), 267.Google Scholar
42 But, as Dike later pointed out, these works, although useful, “belonged more to the literature of polemics than to objective [historical] writing” since their claims for the African past were often based on slender evidence. Dike, , “African History and Self-Government,” West Africa (28 February 1953), 117.Google Scholar
43 Lugard, Lord, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London, 1922), 66.Google Scholar
44 Quoted in Ogot, Bethwell A., “Three Decades of Historical Studies in East Africa, 1949-1977,” Pan-Africanist 8 (July 1979), 24.Google Scholar
45 “Pioneer Historian,” West Africa (28 September 1957), 917.Google Scholar
46 “The College and the Institute,” West Africa (6 September 1952), 818.Google Scholar
47 Correspondent, “An Historian's History,” West Africa (24 January 1953), 62.Google Scholar Biobaku received his Ph.D. in History from London a year after Dike; his dissertation was published as The Egba and Their Neighbours, 1842-1872 (Oxford, 1957).Google Scholar In terms of method and ideology, Biobaku's work was in the same cast as Dike's Trade and Politics.
48 “African History Conference in London,” West Africa (11 July 1953), 646.Google Scholar
49 Hodgkin, Thomas, “The Study of African History,” West Africa (25 July 1953), 676.Google Scholar
50 Temu, A. and Swai, B., Historians and Africanist History: A Critique (London, 1981), 4.Google Scholar
51 “Tribe” of course has pejorative connotations. Even in the 1960s the Oxford English Dictionary defined “tribe” as “A race of people now applied especially to a primary aggregate of a people in a primitive or barbarous condition under a headman or chief…. A class of persons: a fraternity, set, or lot—now often contemptuous.” In the Webster's New International Dictionary of the same era, “tribe” was defined as “any aggregation of peoples especially in a primitive or nomadic state believed to be of a common stock and acting under a more or less central authority as that of a headman or chief.” At the same time, Collin's Dictionary defined a “tribe” as “A clan or group of clans, especially a group of savage clans under a chief.” The dictionary—and therefore, the popular—meaning of “tribe” has not changed in any substantial degree.
52 Quoted in Ogot, , “Three Decades,” 26.Google Scholar
53 See Oliver, Roland and Fage, J. D., A Short History of Africa (first published, London, 1962, and then New York, 1964)Google Scholar
54 Fage, J. D., An Introduction to the History of West Africa (London, 1955), 15–16.Google Scholar
55 Omolewa, “Education Factor.”
56 Jaja, an Igbo ex-slave had worked himself up to the headship of the Anna Pepple House of Bonny. Under him the House became wealthy and the envy of its rivals. To avoid a brewing civil war, Jaja pulled out in 1869, taking with him 14 of the 18 Bonny Houses to found a new settlement called “Opobo.” The geographical location of Opobo enabled Jaja to control the palm oil markets of (Igbo/Ibibio) hinterland. The emergence of Opobo therefore meant the decline of Bonny, since all trade was now diverted to Opobo. The definitive work on Jaja is Cookey, Sylvanus S. J., King Jaja of the Niger Delta: His life and Times, 1821-1891 (New York, 1974).Google Scholar
57 Ajayi, , “Towards A More Enduring Sense of History,” 41.Google Scholar
58 Simmons, Jack, “Trade and Politics in Nigeria,” West Africa (11 February 1956), 134.Google Scholar
59 Quoted in Uzoatu, , “Late Professor Dike's Home of History,” 7.Google Scholar
