Description:

Abstract

My paper analyzes the itineraries, contexts, and symbolic meanings of travel by Northern Nigeria’s Hausa-Fulani aristocrats to Britain on sightseeing adventures between the 1920s and 1970s. Specifically, the paper focuses on one of such trips embarked upon by three influential emirs and allies of the British colonial administration as well a travelogue they published in a local Hausa language newspaper. Although mostly funded and chaperoned by colonial authorities, these trips provided the travelers with an opportunity to partake in and translate metropolitan imperial cultures to idioms intelligible to local clients and subjects in Nigeria. The travel narratives provided this bridge of translatability. Guided imperial tours through the sights, sounds, landscapes, and cultures of Britain and the narratives they spawned represent a neglected theme of Northern Nigerian colonial historiography: the painstaking cultivation and lubrication of an Anglo-Fulani colonial relationship through lavish imperial patronage in the form of sponsored adventures and sightseeing trips to London. These trips were designed to awe the Muslim imperial loyalists with the signs and grandeur of Britain and to thus reassure them of the technological and aesthetic modernity of British imperial protection. I contend, however, that the imperial ties that made the trips possible stemmed from a complicated colonial kinship that transcends the discourse of loyalism and disturbs the dichotomous analytical frame which posits a consistently acrimonious relationship between colonizer and colonized.

Bio

Moses Ochonu is Professor of African History at Vanderbilt University. He holds a PhD in African History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Graduate Certificate in Conflict Management from Lipscomb University, Nashville. He is the author of three books: Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2014); Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2014); and Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (Ohio University Press, 2009). Ochonu’s articles have been published in several scholarly journals and as book chapters. His op-eds, commentaries, and essays have been published in TIME Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, GlobalPost, The Tennessean, History News Network, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Pambazuka, and several Nigerian and African newspapers and magazines. He has provided commentaries on African affairs on National Public Radio (NPR), Voice of America (VOA) TV, and Sahara TV. He has also featured on Share Radio’s “Booms, Busts, and Bubbles” show, which broadcasts from London. Ochonu is a two-time recipient of the research fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). He has also received research grants and fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the British Library, among others.