PETER CUNLIFFE-JONES, Ibadan, Nigeria | Sunday
THE borders of modern-day Africa were drawn up in Europe, creating states that were politically illegitimate from the start, political scientists here say.
The history of the slave trade and the negative impact of colonialism — issues which Washington wants kept off the agenda of the UN racism conference in South Africa this week — are blindingly obvious in Africa, and perhaps in few countries more than in Nigeria.
Africa’s most populous country, home to more than 122-million people, was ravaged by the slave trade, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians being taken from its shores, mostly to work in plantations in the Americas.
And when the slave trade was abolished colonial powers arrived, dividing up Africa into artificial states drawn up on maps in Berlin in 1885.
Britain, which claimed control of the area that makes up modern-day Nigeria, amalgamated its northern and southern protectorates in 1914, bringing together more than 250 disparate language and cultural groups and the two major imported religions, Christianity and Islam.
The Oyo Empire, the Empire of Benin, the Sokoto Caliphate and other kingdoms, fiefdoms and religious realms were effectively set aside.
After British rule ended in October 1960, it took under six years for the first military coup, precipitating the 1967 slide into a disastrous civil war.
Since 1966, Nigeria has known almost three decades of military misrule and only brief experiments in largely dysfunctional civilian government.
“The 1950s was not a time of decolonisation,” said Emeritus Professor of History J.F. Ade Ajayi, perhaps the most eminent Nigerian historian.
“It was during the 1950s that the colonial political structures were entrenched at the demand of the so-called nationalists,” he said.
The British had “administered” Nigeria, they did not try to govern it.
When the British wanted to leave they realised someone would need to govern the country but handed over not to traditional rulers but to a new class of leader, professionals and the educated elite, elected in dubious elections rather than selected as by tradition, Ajayi said.
There was, therefore, no link, or political legitimacy, between the ruler and the ruled, he said.
“People here still largely accept their traditional rulers, who are selected, as legitimate in a way they do not for their so-called elected leaders,” Ajayi said.
“There is no long history of the electoral method of selecting leaders,” he added.
Since the wave of independence movements around the 1960s, some African countries have experienced political stability, but not many, because of the lack of political legitimacy of the leaders, political scientists here say.
Ajayi, for one, thinks legitimacy could come, but only over time.
Having been created, it is not now possible, peacefully, to break up states such as Nigeria, though colonial-era borders will over time be gradually eroded through the actions of sub-regional organisations and the imperatives of economic integration.
But there also has to be “a nurturing of patriotic sentiment among the ruled and rulers,” Ajayi said.
“The Nigerian state has not been something people identify with, except at particular times of celebration, like during football matches, or times of attack from the outside, like if Nigeria is criticised.”
The development of “a real sense of patriotism”, among rulers and ruled, “would be a real decolonisation,” he said.
The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance opens August 31 in Durban, South Africa. – AFP