Emirs in London

Subaltern Travel and Nigeria's Modernity

Moses E. Ochonu

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253059130
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Geschichte

Emirs in London recounts how Northern Nigerian Muslim aristocrats who traveled to Britain between 1920 and Nigerian independence in 1960 relayed that experience to the Northern Nigerian people.

Moses E. Ochonu shows how rather than simply serving as puppets and mouthpieces of the British Empire, these aristocrats leveraged their travel to the heart of the empire to reinforce their positions as imperial cultural brokers, and to translate and domesticate imperial modernity in a predominantly Muslim society.

Emirs in London explores how, through their experiences visiting the heart of the British Empire, Northern Nigerian aristocrats were enabled to define themselves within the framework of theempire.In doing so, the bookreveals a unique colonial sensibility that complements rather than contradicts the traditional perspectives of less privileged Africanstowardcolonialism.

Emirs in London was named in the Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2022 list.

1

LITERACY, NARRATIVE, AND THE COLONIAL IDEATIONAL SPACE

My hope is for [this book] to serve as a catalyst for the modernization of Northern Nigeria.

—Abubakar Imam

NORTHERN NIGERIA’S ARISTOCRATIC TRAVELERS, THE SUBJECTS OF THIS book, wrote their metropolitan experiences into an emergent colonial literacy culture. In several respects, the aristocrats were part of a fast-evolving intellectual culture in which reading and writing acquired a social allure for Western-educated young men and women and for an older generation socialized into a colonial world of adult literacy. In the intellectual and literary space in which metropolitan travel narratives were written and read, writing and reading had moved from the sacred spaces of religion and morality to one marked largely by the production and consumption of stories and ideas as aesthetic forms. In this space, the writing and reading of secular texts and their associated practices were thriving and evolving, underwritten by a slew of colonial initiatives designed to promote Romanized literacy. The ensuing literary production was dominated by fictional and nonfictional stories whose overarching motifs harkened back to local folkloric traditions.

This chapter analyzes the emergence and evolution of a Northern Nigerian intellectual and literary culture that developed between 1930 and 1960 and provided a vibrant, engaged audience for aristocratic travel writers who returned from Britain and wrote about their experiences there. This story of literary ferment in the context of colonial domination—the backdrop to the travel-writing endeavor analyzed in this book—has three aspects, each encompassing a realm of programs and actions that fed into an inchoate world of lively intellectual transactions between writers and readers, between those purporting to possess experiential resources for storytelling and those eager to vicariously access these stories through the medium of Romanized Hausa literacy. The first aspect of this intellectual history was the development of a colonial infrastructure of story writing, publishing, and literary production. The second was a vigorous colonial promotion of adult literacy, mainly in rural areas but also in some urban centers. The third was the evolution of a school culture of secular, modern education in Northern Nigeria that developed simultaneously with the growth of literary practices, for which travel and adventure provided material and inspiration.

The last section of the chapter analyzes the metropolitan travel memoir of Abubakar Imam. It highlights the literary and discursive techniques and modes of critical commentary deployed by Imam to make sense of Britain, capture his experiences there, recall his encounters with British acquaintances and interlocutors, and translate many aspects of metropolitan life for his Hausaphone Northern Nigerian audience.

In 1906, shortly after the departure of Frederick Lugard, the first governor of colonial Northern Nigeria, colonial administrators banned Christian missionary educators from opening mission stations and schools in the Muslim-majority districts of colonial Northern Nigeria.¹ Lugard had initiated the ban, claiming he was honoring the religious and intellectual heritage of these Muslim-majority districts. As part of his initial outreach to the Muslim rulers after the military conquest of the region, Lugard had assured them that he would not undermine their religious heritage and practices. British missionaries, such as Hans Vischer and Walter Miller, disagreed with Lugard and believed that the British colonial administrator was pandering to Muslim emirs and aristocrats because he needed their cooperation and partnership to administer the vast region.

Whatever Lugard’s motive, he found a ready, credible alibi in the precolonial Islamic intellectual heritage of emirate Northern Nigeria. Here, in the vast Muslim region to the far north of the Benue and Niger Rivers, there was a “long-established world of Arabic and Hausa Ajami literature and learning.”² Some secular writing in the precolonial Hausaphone world had been done in Ajami, a modified Arabic script configured to convey Hausa speech and phonological systems. In the nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate, much of the literature produced in Ajami was religious in nature, focusing on “the tenets of a Sunni way of life for Muslims in the region.”³ The literary and intellectual corpus of the precolonial world of the caliphate and Muslim Bornu consisted of religious and moral writings, with secular poetry, philosophy, and other types of nonreligious thought accounting for only a small portion of this intellectual heritage.⁴

The increased engagement of the caliphate with a succession of European actors, a mid- to late nineteenth-century process that culminated in the British colonial conquest between 1900 and 1903, “signaled a turn toward secular concerns in Hausa [literature].”⁵ Much of this literature followed the traditions of Islamic verse pioneered by the Dan Fodio ruling family of the Sokoto Caliphate. Hausa secular writings in Ajami mainly consisted of expressions of the quotidian realities and vagaries of everyday life in relatable verse, in contrast to esoteric Islamic verse. Some of this poetry creatively transcribed Hausa oral folklore, legends, and folk histories into versified prose for popular enjoyment. Others grafted the language of religion and moral instruction onto a tradition of storytelling and poetic production and vice versa. The development of this incipient literary culture was discernible by the time of the colonial conquest, even if it was subsumed in the broader universe of Islamic literary production.

Notwithstanding this growing secular Hausa literary culture, colonial bureaucracies superintending the cultural aspects of colonization contended with persistent tropes that saw literature, literacy, writing, and reading as bound up with religious devotion and other rituals of piety. Moreover, whatever appeal the emergent colonial modernity of secular book learning may have held for Northern Nigerian youth, British officials did not capitalize on it to promote colonial culture through secular popular literature. Instead, in the first decade of colonial rule, officers in the education bureaucracy of the colonial government sought to excavate and publish a latent trove of Hausa tales, traditions, and folk histories as a way of countering and diluting the feared intellectual influence of Christian missionaries, who were disseminating religious and secular materials in defiance of and outside the official colonial system.⁶ These early investments in literacy and literature were circumscribed by the colonial conflation of literature and moral character and by excessive pandering to legends, traditions, and folklore to the exclusion of current affairs, contemporary realities, and creative storytelling. Colonial attempts to cultivate a Romanized literary culture rooted in the caliphal Ajami literary tradition foundered because the Roman script did not have the ethical and religious resonance of Ajami.

It was understandable, then, given the preceding literary muddle, that in the early 1930s, when colonial authorities began to actively try to nurture and satiate the literary sensibilities of their Northern Nigerian subjects, officials had to contend with an ambivalent intellectual culture. This literacy was secularizing in response to the ideational currents of colonialism and the instrumental imperatives of colonial learning, but it was still haunted by the notion that writing and reading had to be informed by a moral quest and a social commitment to character development and not by a secular economy of aesthetic literary pleasure. The contemporary observation of a colonial official regarding this intellectual scene and the challenge it posed to the emergence of a full-fledged intelligentsia of secular readers and writers is apt:

The first difficulty was to persuade these Malams [in this context, Western-educated teachers] that the thing was worth doing. The influence of Islam produces an extremely serious-minded type of person. The art of writing, moreover, being intimately connected in his mind with his religion, is not to be treated lightly. Since the religious revival at the beginning of the last century, nearly all the original work produced by the Northern Nigerian authors has been either purely religious or written with a strong religious motive. Most of it is written in Arabic, which . . . was considered a more worthy medium for any work of importance than the mother tongue.⁷

Given this backdrop, the evolution of a Romanized culture of secular literacy seemed improbable. The major challenge was how to engender interest in a new Romanized literature, whose linguistic medium and content were considered secular, mundane, and unmoored to piety and morality, in a conservative Muslim region. The seduction of Arabic and Ajami was their function as conduits for scripture. There was a coextensive understanding that texts written in these scripts were sacralized by the scripts themselves, even if the texts tackled mundane, quotidian, and secular matters. In colonial times, Romanized literacy enjoyed no such perceptual advantage and was, to compound its fate, associated with the epistemic violence of, and anxieties sparked by, colonization.

Considering this disadvantage vis-à-vis Ajami literature, the challenge for colonial officials seeking to promote Romanized literacy and an associated reading and writing culture was to forge interest in the production and reception of aesthetic texts. The production and circulation of materials capable of enthralling the new Western-educated men and women of Northern Nigeria were critical to overcoming this challenge. Additionally, these materials had to come wrapped in indigenous idioms and methods of narration relatable to potential readers. Colonial educators sought to promote the production of “a substantial amount of interesting material” for the lettered young people of Northern Nigeria to read.⁸ The envisaged corpus needed to be “texts that Hausa-speakers could take pleasure in reading,” not turgid colonial or Islamic manuals or instructions.⁹ Colonial officials surmised that didactic texts with no explicit moral content or sacred vernacular would not be received well. The mediatory voice of the trusted local emir, aristocrat, religious authority, or Western-educated man considered knowledgeable in colonial affairs was “particularly necessary when writing for Moslems.”¹⁰

Forging a Reading Culture

No colonial or postcolonial literary and intellectual history of Northern Nigeria would be complete without exploring two entities whose biographies and histories have become entwined. Rupert East—a British colonial educator, vernacular literature connoisseur, and publisher—and the Northern Nigerian Literature Bureau, which he headed from 1932 to 1953, were critical to the development of a colonially mediated and funded culture of writing, reading, and public intellectual life in Northern Nigeria. Rupert East transformed the bureau from an obscure bureaucratic afterthought in the colonial system to a visible organ for promoting vernacular literary expression and engendering a literary public sphere.

East joined the Northern Nigerian Colonial Service in the early 1920s and served as a colonial officer in multiple districts. His appointment as an education officer in the Colonial Service transformed the trajectory of his colonial career and brought him into contact with the emergent class of Northern Nigerian aristocratic scions being educated in the premier government-run school in Northern Nigeria, Katsina College. Established in 1921 to train sons of emirs and Muslim aristocrats to replace their parents in the Native Authority or take up careers as teachers and clerks, Katsina College was a fledgling intellectual and educational oasis where young men received the quality secondary education denied to millions of their non-aristocratic Muslim kinsmen. East, posted there in 1929, taught several subjects and built teacher-student mentorship relationships with future figures of Northern Nigerian intellectual life, such as Abubakar Imam and Nuhu Bamali.

East’s work at Katsina College activated his interest in vernacular literature. His experience at the school also alerted him to the need for a larger community of Romanized writing and reading to keep pace with the rise of secular, liberal education among the privileged aristocratic young men of the region. In 1931, East was posted to the colonial government’s Translation Bureau, a branch of the educational department that translated government pamphlets and other public documents into Hausa and helped produce manuals ...