Broadly speaking, there are three facets of my identity that stand out in my mind: Christian. Researcher. African.
While the foundations of my identity as a Christian and a researcher are solid, it is only in the past two years or so that I started really resonating with my identity as an African. To get to that point, I have been more deliberate about consuming materials (books, papers, blogs and videos) related to African history.
Here’s a few highlights that stood out to me from Cheta Nwanze’s short piece from 2023 titled ‘On Colonialism’:
- “While I don’t buy the fluff that it was Mary Slessor that ended the killing of twins, after all, the practice had been banned in the Calabar area 38 years before she arrived there, the truth is that her work helped make the practice of infanticide less acceptable. The real truth is that the Obong of Calabar who banned it in the first place lacked the state capacity to implement it, so it was the colonisers who implemented the ban ultimately.”
- “Circa 1850, when the Europeans slowly began to inch into Africa, in the area now Nigeria, there were three great powers, Benin, Oyo and Sokoto. Two of these were on the decline, and one had descended into civil war. Sokoto had, at the time, the largest slave population on Earth, and there is no record of any discussion within the Caliphate about the abolition of slavery, conversations which had become heated at the time halfway around the world and would a decade after lead to the American Civil War. In short, slavery in Sokoto continued until deep into the 20th century. It was European influence that put a stop to it.”
- “Having said all of this, the biggest damage that European adventurism did to us is the damage of putting incompatible peoples together in so-called nation-states, and then proceeding to drive a wedge deep amongst us in order to solidify their rule. The second great evil they did from my perspective, was to solidify the idea of collective guilt. Those “punitive expeditions” regularly embarked upon by people like Hugh Trenchard formed the basis of what we call policing in Nigeria today.”
