For a Department which offered a radically contingent statement privileging knowledge and (global) power in the study of History, the story of the Department of History at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in Nigeria is a story worth telling. Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria’s definition of History in terms of comprehending the forces shaping national and continental dynamics made the department a site of struggle for emancipation in which History is part of a toolkit for decentering hegemony and domination wherever such is the case.
A handwork of a pioneer of the ‘Ibadan School of History’ who just departed
The question now is how did it go, 60 years down the road. Interestingly, an insider’s insider in the Department of History in the university – Prof Alkassum Abba – is to tell the story, a significant epistemological move in the politics of the story of the institutional context of the production of historical knowledge in a remarkable site as ABU, Zaria turned out to be. There can probably be no better resource person than a Prof Abba who moved from a student to being one of the combatants in the tendency politics of the department to professorial cadre, with experience of university administration outside Zaria.
What became the Zaria School of History provides an earliest signal of what has now become standpoint epistemology in the same way that the Ibadan School of History – the other School of History in Nigeria – signalled what has become decoloniality. In other words, standpoint epistemology and decoloniality proves that immediate post-independence Nigerian universities were moving in the right direction, well ahead of their times. And that what happened that these universities stagnated and then degenerated into what they are today must constitute central sections of the story – telling expedition that ABU, Zaria is inaugurating and which other departments will surely emulate.
Although by a departing staff, it is still possible that the problematising that produced this topic is a sign that ABU, Zaria is, gradually recovering from its descent from the Olympian height it attained between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. That would be great to hear by all those who had anything to do with that accomplishment as well as the Nigerian State. Now, in its seeming return to intellectual flowering as opposed to actual flowers which it detoured to in the emptiness of its recent past, ABU, Zaria might consider it crucial to insert the Nigerian State into this process by, for instance, dragging the sitting or in-coming president to the occasion.
It is time to insist that whoever is the president of Nigeria must begin to go beyond deodorised executive summaries to directly absorbing the fireworks at the sites of knowledge where Nigerian scholars are minting the frames of intelligibility by which the idea of a ‘New Nigeria’ can even be contemplated. Any president who cannot do that but finds it easier running from Washington to Geneva to Beijing ‘Consensus’ for frame games, concepts and practices might as well have lost it already.
But, as the late Prof Eskor Toyo was used to saying, the honeymoon is over for presidents and prime ministers in Africa. The anger from below is no longer a figment of radical trouble makers. President-elect, Asiwaju Tinubu has said something interesting before at a memorial of Bala Usman, a key figure in the site whose story is to be told. This is an opportunity for him to elaborate on whatever he said then. He doesn’t need an invitation to show up there and insist on speaking.
