Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa

Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa
Author: Saheed Aderinto
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0821447688

With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were colonial subjects in Africa. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa broadens the historiography of animal studies by putting a diverse array of species (dogs, horses, livestock, and wildlife) into a single analytical framework for understanding colonialism in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. From his study of animals with unequal political, economic, social, and intellectual capabilities, Aderinto establishes that the core dichotomies of human colonial subjecthood—indispensable yet disposable, good and bad, violent but peaceful, saintly and lawless—were also embedded in the identities of Nigeria’s animal inhabitants. If class, religion, ethnicity, location, and attitude toward imperialism determined the pattern of relations between human Nigerians and the colonial government, then species, habitat, material value, threat, and biological and psychological characteristics (among other traits) shaped imperial perspectives on animal Nigerians. Conceptually sophisticated and intellectually engaging, Aderinto’s thesis challenges readers to rethink what constitutes history and to recognize that human agency and narrative are not the only makers of the past.

Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History

Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History
Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: University Rochester Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2010
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1580463584

The book traces the history of writing about Nigeria since the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the rise of nationalist historiography and the leading themes. The second half of the twentieth century saw the publication of massive amounts of literature on Nigeria by Nigerian and non-Nigerian historians. This volume reflects on that literature, focusing on those works by Nigerians in thecontext of the rise and decline of African nationalist historiography. Given the diminishing share in the global output of literature on Africa by African historians, it has become crucial to reintroduce Africans into historicalwriting about Africa. As the authors attempt here to rescue older voices, they also rehabilitate a stale historiography by revisiting the issues, ideas, and moments that produced it. This revivalism also challenges Nigerian historians of the twenty-first century to study the nation in new ways, to comprehend its modernity, and to frame a new set of questions on Nigeria's future and globalization. In spite of current problems in Nigeria and its universities, that historical scholarship on Nigeria (and by extension, Africa) has come of age is indisputable. From a country that struggled for Western academic recognition in the 1950s to one that by the 1980s had emerged as one of the most studied countries in Africa, Nigeria is not only one of the early birthplaces of modern African history, but has also produced members of the first generation of African historians whose contributions to the development and expansion of modern African history is undeniable. Like their counterparts working on other parts of the world, these scholars have been sensitive to the need to explore virtually all aspects of Nigerian history. The book highlights the careers of some of Nigeria's notable historians of the first and second generation. Toyin Falola is Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Saheed Aderinto is Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University.

The Third Wave of Historical Scholarship on Nigeria

The Third Wave of Historical Scholarship on Nigeria
Author: Saheed Aderinto
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2013-02-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443847127

This festschrift in honor of Professor Ayodeji Olukoju, one of Nigeria’s brightest historians, brings together scholarship representative of the third wave of historical scholarship on Nigeria. Olukoju, a pioneering historian of Nigerian maritime history, also produced significant revisionist scholarship in the areas of economic, urban, and infrastructure history. The contributions in this volume epitomize the groundbreaking directions of his career; they are marked by a search for new explanations and venture into uncharted terrain in Nigerian history. Aside from its critical engagement of Olukoju’s impressive scholarship, this volume presents chapters on such underresearched aspects of Nigerian history as sexuality, children and youth, crime, memory, and HIV/AIDS. It offers historical explanations of a host of development challenges confronting Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, and resilient reinterpretations of the place of history in nation building. The contributors, pioneering experts in their various subfields, bring their research and teaching experience to the fore and deploy neglected data as they unfold topics that shed light on Nigeria, its peoples, and cultures. They show that history, both as a daily practice and as an academic endeavor, remains vital as Africans seek solutions to the continent’s critical development challenges.

There Used to Be Order

There Used to Be Order
Author: Patience Mususa
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2021-10-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0472054996

Privatization and social change in the Copperbelt region of Zambia

Segregated Species

Segregated Species
Author: Jules Skotnes-Brown
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2024-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421448572

A timely history of the connections between science, segregation, and species in twentieth-century South Africa. Throughout the twentieth century, rural South Africa was dominated by systems of racial segregation and apartheid that brutally oppressed its Black population. At the same time, the countryside was defined by a related settler obsession: the control of animals that farmers, scientists, and state officials considered pests. Elephants rampaged on farmlands, trampling fences, crops, and occasionally humans. Grain-eating birds flocked on plantations, devouring harvests. Bubonic plague crept across the veld in the bodies of burrowing and crop-devouring rodents. In Segregated Species, Jules Skotnes-Brown argues that racial segregation and pest control were closely connected in early twentieth-century South Africa. Strategies for the containment of pests were redeployed for the management of humans and vice versa. Settlers blamed racialized populations for the abundance of pests and mobilized metaphors of pestilence to dehumanize them. Even knowledge produced about pests was segregated into the binary categories of "native" and "scientific." Black South Africans critiqued such injustices, and some circulated revolutionary rhetoric through images and metaphors of locusts. Ultimately, pest-control practices played an important role in shaping colonial hierarchies of race and species and in mediating relationships among human groups. Skotnes-Brown demonstrates that the history of South Africa—and colonial history generally—cannot be fully understood without analyzing the treatment of both animals and humans.

Doing Conceptual History in Africa

Doing Conceptual History in Africa
Author: Axel Fleisch
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2016-05-15
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1785331639

"This volume is the product of a series of collaborative meetings and workshops between 2010 and 2014."--Acknowledgements.

When Sex Threatened the State

When Sex Threatened the State
Author: Saheed Aderinto
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2014-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252096843

Breaking new ground in the understanding of sexuality's complex relationship to colonialism, When Sex Threatened the State illuminates the attempts at regulating prostitution in colonial Nigeria. As Saheed Aderinto shows, British colonizers saw prostitution as an African form of sexual primitivity and a problem to be solved as part of imperialism's "civilizing mission". He details the Nigerian response to imported sexuality laws and the contradictory ways both African and British reformers advocated for prohibition or regulation of prostitution. Tracing the tensions within diverse groups of colonizers and the colonized, he reveals how wrangling over prostitution camouflaged the negotiating of separate issues that threatened the social, political, and sexual ideologies of Africans and Europeans alike. The first book-length project on sexuality in early twentieth century Nigeria, When Sex Threatened the State combines the study of a colonial demimonde with an urban history of Lagos and a look at government policy to reappraise the history of Nigerian public life.

Colonial Meltdown

Colonial Meltdown
Author: Moses E. Ochonu
Publisher: New African Histories
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2009-10-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Historians of colonial Africa have largely regarded the decade of the Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. In Colonial Meltdown, Moses E. Ochonu challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the determined, at times violent, yet instructive responses of Northern Nigeria’s chiefs, farmers, laborers, artisans, women, traders, and embryonic elites to the British colonial mismanagement of the Great Depression. Colonial Meltdown explores the unraveling of British colonial power at a moment of global economic crisis. Ochonu shows that the economic downturn made colonial exploitation all but impossible and that this dearth of profits and surpluses frustrated the colonial administration which then authorized a brutal regime of grassroots exactions and invasive intrusions. The outcomes were as harsh for Northern Nigerians as those of colonial exploitation in boom years. Northern Nigerians confronted colonial economic recovery measures and their agents with a variety of strategies. Colonial Meltdown analyzes how farmers, women, laborers, laid-off tin miners, and Northern Nigeria’s emergent elite challenged and rebelled against colonial economic recovery schemes with evasive trickery, defiance, strategic acts of revenge, and criminal self-help and, in the process, exposed the weak underbelly of the colonial system. Combined with the economic and political paralysis of colonial bureaucrats in the face of crisis, these African responses underlined the fundamental weakness of the colonial state, the brittleness of its economic mission, and the limits of colonial coercion and violence. This atmosphere of colonial collapse emboldened critics of colonial policies who went on to craft the rhetorical terms on which the anticolonial struggle of the post–World War II period was fought out. In the current climate of global economic anxieties, Ochonu’s analysis will enrich discussions on the transnational ramifications of economic downturns. It will also challenge the pervasive narrative of imperial economic success.

Negotiating Power and Privilege

Negotiating Power and Privilege
Author: Philomina Ezeagbor Okeke-Ihejirika
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2004
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0896802418

Negotiating Power and Privilege captures the voices of African female professionals and vividly portrays the women's continuous negotiation as wives, mothers, single women, and workers.

Acholi Intellectuals

Acholi Intellectuals
Author: Patrick William Otim
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2024-02-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0821442376

Patrick William Otim argues that the Acholi people of northern Uganda, who helped Europeans spread colonial rule and Christianity, were far more politically savvy than previously understood.