By Yusuf Bangura, PhD
I’ve finished watching the seven part series ‘Journey of an African Colony’. Olasupo Shasore, the producer and narrator, did a great job considering that he’s a lawyer, not a historian, by training.
I like his bottom-up approach in telling the story of Nigeria’s formation. I think, though, that he should have provided more details on how the regional politicians hijacked the independence movement from the commoners and the political divisions within the three regions. Those regions were not homogeneous and had contending political forces.
His narrative on the section dealing with the transatlantic slave trade would have benefited from an interview with Joseph Inikori, who is widely regarded as one of the leading scholars of the transatlantic slave trade. Inikori was a colleague and friend at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in the 1980s and later moved to the History Department at Rochester University in the United States.
Anyway, this series made me to reflect again on the Aba and Abeokuta women’s strikes, the Enugu coal miners’ strike and the general workers’ strike of 1945, all of which have been well researched.
Thanks, Claire, for drawing our attention to the series.
