Toyin Falola is Africa’s eminent Professor of History, a University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and the Jacob and Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, the University of Texas at Austin. He is an Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town, and President of Pan-African University Press. He has received three Yoruba chieftaincy titles, over thirty life-time career awards, and more than fourteen honorary doctorates. In this interview Professor Falola touches on issues surrounding questions of identity, nationhood, and the place of history in Nigeria’s quest for development.

As guest speaker at the Second Distinguished Lecture series organised by the Department of History and International Studies of the Lagos State University, Ojo, your choice of topic: ‘History and the Nation’? How appropriate was that at this time?

When I was invited to give their Second Distinguished Lecture, it came at a time when political parties were doing their primaries, when many people were complaining about their country, issues around development and it occurred to me that I could address two issues: one, the contemporary realities of Nigeria, or second the historical foundations to understand these contemporary problems. So I chose to blend the two of them, consolidate them and arrive at ‘History and the Nation’. By blending them, I would be able to speak to these contemporary challenges, while at the same time tracking their roots, and giving me the opportunity to conclude the argument that whatever people complain or they are angry about, there is a history to it, and that anger, that history become necessary to map out a future with solutions.

One of the fundamental problems that the country is faced with today is the issue of cultural identity. This is causing some clashes in Nigeria’s struggle for togetherness. It appears that Nigeria is fragmented along that area. How is Nigeria getting this wrong?

Bear in mind that when we chose a federal system, what accounted for that choice was the issue of the ethnic divide. When they chose that federal system, the divide was so strong that it led to three main regions. Before the sixties, they created the Mid-West to add to that divide. Bear in mind the political strategy in creating the Mid-West. There were combined elements of alliances of northern politicians with others to further fragment the Western Region. That fragmentation and the wide range of crises led to the first coup and countercoup of the sixties: the attempt by Ironsi for a unitary system of government to displace the federal with the argument that with the unitary system, it would reduce some of the conflicts associated with the ethnic divides. That was rejected; the civil war began. That civil war, with the loss of many lives calculated around 1970 at one million, did not solve the problem. In other words, all the conditions that created the civil war (1967-1970) remained and they are getting worse.

One could argue that the ethnic divides and tensions have escalated in recent times on issues around terrorism, banditry, leading to the demand for state police (in the case of Amotekun), attacks between farmers and pastoralists, the encroachment of herdsmen into other parts of the country, the way the Buhari government structured its administration with the impression that all the agencies, principal actions of government are controlled by his own tribe, people in the South are looking at the cabinet and other key areas and the impression is that the Fulani are consolidating themselves in power. This is also further accentuated by the current struggle for presidential power in terms of how the nominations were conducted.

This ethnic divide has gotten far worse. This is called the mismanagement of diversity. Diversity has a lot of advantage: in your food, in your clothes, in the languages, in performance, in literature, in Nollywood. The advantages are so many. But once you mismanage it, the disadvantages would escalate, leading to fears by various people; if you are Ibo, you are afraid when you got outside Ibo land; if you are Yoruba, if you go to Maiduguri, you are afraid. Everybody becomes afraid of one another just because that diversity has been mismanaged. Without de-escalating that mismanagement, things may get out of control. We have seen this in IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu, Sunday Igboho calling for a Yoruba nation, and other secessionist statements not just by ordinary Nigerians but by those who claim to represent them.

When we talk about Nigeria’s evolution particularly towards independence, one would say that the nationalist tendencies that we witnessed then were altruistic. But today, particularly as we head towards the 2023 general election, the presidential candidates of the major political parties are those that we can refer to as pushing ethnic identities. In the South-West, we have Bola Tinubu; in the North we have Atiku Abubakar; and in the South-East, we have Peter Obi. Why does it appear that nationalism is lacking, post-independence?

Thank you for making references to politicians who are enjoying the spotlight now because they want to be president. When you create political conditions, political parties, the aim of doing that is that those who collect power will use it for national development and in the transformation of the lives of the citizens. Unfortunately that is not what is happening.

You cannot deny human beings their ambitions. Some want to become religious leaders; some want to become politicians. Whenever you have politicians, you cannot deny them the ambition which is to look for the ultimate which is power. The question then is what do you do with that condition? Sadly, they use that power to create an access to the treasury of the nation. So the current political parties have created their structures through treachery. They keep boasting they have structures, they have offices. I call them treachery-structure. Such structures are created through corruption in which stolen money is being paid (such as 100 million for nomination forms by the APC or 50 million naira by the PDP) to run. This money is not coming from their good investment but some of the money that they have stolen.

If this is the goal of politics, that politics will not generate development. It would accentuate divisions in society; it will let those who are corrupt get away because people will defend their own. You will hear things such as ‘My own thief who is Yoruba has not stolen so much as your own thief who is either Ibo or Hausa.’ And therefore they let them get away with that theft. So, everybody suffers. The majority of the citizens will suffer. As we say, the majority of Nigerian youths have ‘checked out’, with other slogans like ‘education is a scam’, ‘japaa’. They don’t want to live in Nigeria anymore. If you have millions of your citizens who have checked out of your political space, they are just Nigerians in name, they are not Nigerians in identity. Nigeria appears on their passport but they want to use that passport, not to advance the interest of Nigeria, but to speak to their own legs to run away from the country.

Nigeria constantly downplays the role of history in national development. When we look at the interface between history and national development, we see this play out thoroughly in countries that are making progress. Unfortunately, Nigeria is not one of those countries. How do we get out of this?

Let me start with current developments. To Putin and Russia, Ukraine is part of Russia given the history of the Old Soviet Union. During the Soviet Union, they called it the West. It was one of the developed parts of the Soviet Union given the concentration of nuclear buildings and engineering, nuclear stations, universities which Africans also attend. All these were created as part of that process. You can see in that Russian invasion of Ukraine the reading of history, and behind those who are trying to help Ukraine is the reading of history, the geopolitics. The geopolitics is based on the construction of power and imperialism, both of which are based on the experience of history, that if you construct imperialism, you will be able to exploit other people. Those who follow the events in Ukraine may not know that history, that 30 per cent of arable land in Ukraine belongs to US companies. What they try to say is very shallow in understanding that war. Some may not understand the basic historical elements that I have just narrated.

If you look at how school systems are cultivated in other places, it is from childhood that you begin to implant the consciousness of the nation, the consciousness of race, the consciousness of identity in children. School systems are infused with lessons.

Take the American state for instance. I teach in Texas. You cannot get a degree without taking history. It is mandatory at all levels. Not only is that history important, they also try to sanitise the history. You say ‘their founding fathers’. That is a sanitisation of history. Those founding fathers are not women; they are not black; they are only white. Even the good ones among the founding fathers are telling you how history is being manipulated. If you look at the names of cities, you see this. I live in the capital of Texas called Austin; majority of Nigerians are in Houston. If I ask them, do you know the meaning of Austin and Houston, they don’t know. Austin and Houston were war generals who took away parts of Mexico and Mexicans which now became part of Texas and the US. They were the generals who fought the wars of conquest and imperialism. That is the power of history.

If you are an African American, if you have an African American identity and you talk about race and racism without understanding the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, not only are you not going to understand the emergence of that identity that you belong to, you will not appreciate what you are enjoying today. This is because you don’t understand the struggles that people have gone through to make your life possible and to empower you. You don’t tend to remember that people were chained down; you don’t tend to remember that people’s origins were erased. Without that history, you won’t know that the names they bear are strange. This is because when they took Africans as slaves to the United States, one of the first things they did was to say you are nameless; forget whom you are, you are black; forget where you come from, you are black; forget your gender, you are black; forget your language, you are black. So someone who was originally bearing Falola would be called Coffin or Wood because part of the process of that enslavement, domination and control was to erase that name and that memory. If you are a young African American in your twenties and you don’t know that history, you will think society has always been like that. This is not true. You will not know about the Civil Rights Movement which is a recent history that allows you to be able to vote, that allows you to have jobs without discrimination.

So for many reasons, history and the knowledge of history are very crucial. It is part of the building of citizenship, civic responsibilities, the consolidation of institutions, what those institutions represent and an appreciation that previous people struggled for us to live a better life and to enjoy peace.

Recent happenings in Nigeria clearly indicate that the nation is tearing at its seams. How do history and the application of it facilitate national development, unity, and cohesion?

They do in various ways. First, they serve as reminders of conflicts. You have gone through a civil war. Do you want to have another civil war? Second is that the consequences of the civil war are still with us, especially among the Ibo who insist that this whole plan of development and politics is not inclusive. That is what history does. It does that when you read Chimamada Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country. These are constant reminders. Still on that Biafran side, you find that at home and abroad, Ibo people encourage their children to speak Igbo language and develop strong Ibo identity, the constant reminder of what they suffered and endured through the civil war. That is on the negative side, if you want to describe it like that.

On the positive side, you can say that we have history of intergroup relations: the Yoruba people trading in the North, Ibo people in Sokoto and Maiduguri, intermarriages, cultural borrowings, the spread of languages and globalising Nigeria. Why don’t you use those to strengthen the Nigerian identity? We have at the moment so many things that people are not paying attention to. If you go to the North today, you will see how contemporary Muslim marriages look like those of the South-West, in terms of the dresses, the temperament of the bride and bridegroom, in terms of the ‘Owanbe’ parties; amala is becoming a national meal. There is no Nigerian city where you won’t find an amala joint. You have all those dimensions that you can convert. You can convert these diversities into advantages, to build the nation, to strengthen the nation.

Nigeria has a history of abuses: abuses by previous leaders, abuses via corruption, violence. You teach those in school just to expose young people to developments that we do not pray to be repeated, and to produce a new set of leaders who will not only have great leadership values, coming from the history they know, deriving from the desire to transform the country, and who will also say that in our past there were no strong institutions to curtail corruption but let us build strong institutions. That is what history does. When you say let us build strong institutions, the takeaway from that history is that we should correct our weak institutions.(Nigerian Tribune: Text, excludes headline)

Update news