Nigeria's cultural history

Nigeria has a fascinatingly rich, old and intricate cultural history. However, like many cultures across Africa, Nigeria's contribution to the development of human civilization, philosophy and culture is not widely known, and certainly not part of my knowledge. This is why the museums of Nigeria were fascinating, even though they hardly compare to the fabulous British Museum, with its many stolen goods.

When travelling, however, I am not normally one for museums, preferring to see history in the buildings and sites that are still standing. But this is Nigeria.

First, many of its centres of civilization were destroyed by former colonial rulers, for example the British burning and looting of Benin City in the late 1800's, or the expanse of slavery (some 40% of all slaves were captured, bought and exported from the Nigeria), which broke the back of societies across West Africa. Second, Nigerians have not spent much of their meagre public resources on preserving their historical and cultural landscape.

The museums detail, in often under-funded, poorly lit and poorly presented environments, a fascinating history that I knew little or nothing about. In this post, I detail the highlights of what I learnt and use the internet to create a trail for those interested to find out more.

The Yoruba People

The Yoruba people, one of the big-three ethnic groups of Nigeria, have a language that is incredibly complex. It is peppered with proverbs ("proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten") and its everyday speech is littered with irony. The man who told about the wonders of traditional Yoruba was a self-confessed metropolitan Yoruba speaker. He spoke a “pidgin” Yoruba corrupted by its Latinisation and the modern state and business institutions that has traded in mysticism and subtleness for clarity and “outcomes”.

The Yoruba religion reveres the earth, the body and ancestors culminating in a dizzying array of Gods. There is a God, and a range of correlating ceremonies, rituals and music, for all important aspects of the human body (hands, head, blood etc.) and for the main elements of the planet (water, life, earth, fire etc.). Elaborate masquerades are still performed, even with the dominance of monotheistic Christianity, as part of a preservation of traditional practices and, it seems, for people to have a good laugh!

The impact of Yoruba culture internationally is immense and can been seen most obviously in the impact of Yoruba music. Yoruba music shares similarities with other West African musical heritages and is the precursor to modern Cuban and Latin-American music. The Yoruba people are also an internationally successful people - Nigerian immigrants to the UK and the USA are an economically and educationally successful group, as recently noted by research undertaken by the British think tank IPPR.

Traditional and modern Yoruba art is also internationally celebrated and was spurred on by a group of European artists inspired by Yoruba art and nurtured, through the creation of a school in Oshogbo, some internationally successful artists.

Yoruba is also one of the Nigerian ethnic groups with elaborate clothes and headdresses, which are not a rare sight in Hackney.

The Nok civilisation

The Museum of Jos houses information about the oldest recorded civilisation in Nigeria: the Nok civilisation. The Noks lived in Jos region around 2,500 years ago. Evidence of the civilisation in Nigeria is fairly limited, but there are detailed terracotta sculptures displayed in the Jos Museum.

I didn't learn that much about the Nok civilisation, partly because the guide and museum were a bit crap, but also because there remains considerable archaeological work to be done about this civilisation. Little is known about their presumed complex way of life or about their predecessors.

Pre-ancients

The third oldest boat in the world, and the oldest in Africa, is located in Nigeria. Called the Dufuna canoe, it was discovered by Fulani herdsmen in 1987 and there has been a slow and intricate process to extract the canoe with the help of German archaeologists. Like the Nok artefacts, this boat promises to provide, at first, new questions, and later, answers about pre-ancient civilisations in Nigeria.

The Slave Trade

The museum in the small port-city of Calabar is housed in the old British governor's place of residence. Calabar was Britain’s primary site of power in Nigeria during the height of the slave trade and the palm oil trade (the latter became prominent after the British Parliament's abolition of slavery).

The guide of the museum had limited knowledge, and mainly read out to me the text next to the artefacts. However, she made up by, first, being perfectly gorgeous and, second, singing both the old and new Nigerian national anthems to me in this echoey, dusty museum – a delight.

The museum's main focus was the Slave Trade.

The port of Calabar was one of the busiest slave ports during the height of the slave industry. About a third of slaves bought, sold and brutally shipped to the "new world" passed through Calabar.

The Calabar Museum argued that the abolition of all forms of slavery by the British government in 1807 was due to lack of cost effectiveness, due to rising insurance costs as a result of resistance from slaves. The museum did not give much credence to the argument that abolition was down to an enlightened self-realisation of the genocidal nature of the slave industry.

There is, rightly, a large pool of knowledge on the web about the slave trade. However, it is fair to say that it remains in the recesses of the common British conscience and remains largely a focus point for black liberation and black justice movements. I am reminded of words by a great contemporary Nigerian, Ben Okri:

“If nations and peoples tell themselves stories that face their own truths they will free their histories for future flowerings.”

The Efik people

At the same Calabar museum, there was an interesting ethnography of the Efik ethnic group, who are local to the Cross River State of Nigeria. The museum focused on the Efik's role in the slave trade.

The Efik's become major middlemen in the slave trade, exchanging slaves for a range of Western goods. These goods included, predictably, guns and ammunition to expand and protect their control over the inland slave market, but less predictably, a range of Western artistic accessories and most notably the English bowler hat, which now part of the Efik national costume!

The Kingdom of Benin

Perhaps one of the most well-known civilisations from Nigeria is Kingdom of Benin. The Kingdom stretched across what is now Southern Nigerian to the states of Togo and Benin. Led by the Edo speaking people they were famous for their expert bronze casting and ivory carving. I saw examples of both at the National Museum in Lagos, however many of the best examples of old Benin art is not held within Nigeria having been stolen by the British as they expanded their control over Southern Nigeria in the late 19th century.

The Hausa-Fulani

Perhaps the most fascinating ethnic group in Nigeria are the Hausa-Fulani, once two ethnic groups, but now-merged as their faith dominates their common identity. The Hausa-Fulani dominate the North of Nigeria.

This group speak the Hausa language, although it was the imperial Fulani that built an extensive empire across West Africa seeking to build a Caliphate in its territories. The Fulani Empire stretched far into land held by the Yoruba in the 18th and 19th centuries, forcing the Yoruba Obas (Kings) to find safety in the caves of the sacred Olumo Rock.

In the area lived by the Hausa-Fulani is West Africa's oldest city, Kano – see an earlier post relating to this city, which is about 1000 years old.

The Hausa-Fulani currently live under Sharia law, which, applicable only to Muslims, sits alongside state and federal law. Prior to getting to Nigeria, I was a bit nervous of the Sharia North – armed only with knowledge of the recent Miss World riots and the last minute reprieve from death by stoning of an adulterous woman. However, the Muslim North of Nigeria, was in my experience the most welcoming and friendly part of Nigeria. Petty crime was virtually non-existent and warm welcoming smiles abound. Also, the Hausa-Fulani that I met casually remarked, whilst sipping "abominations of Satan's handiwork" (alcohol), “Sharia hasn’t changed anything, except it’s just safer round here”.

We in Britain and the West are unlikely to learn, one-to-one, a lot about this group (most Nigerian's in the UK are Yoruba or Ibo) for two reasons. First, the North is poor compared to its oil- and business-rich South – limiting their chances to emigrate. And, second, as a Hausa-Fulani hotelier told me that "we stay in Nigeria struggling to make this country work" – a not so veiled comment to the high emigration rates of the Yoruba and Ibo. This comment was revealing of the continuous and prominent ethnic tensions that place Nigeria’s national unity on tenterhooks.

The Ibo

Whilst I met many Ibo, I never, through a good museum or other historical monuments, learnt about the history of the Ibo people, despite the fact that they are the third largest ethnic group in Nigeria.

The most significant, recent and widely told history (relating primarily to the Ibo, although impacting all Nigerians) is the tragic and costly Nigerian civil war, the Biafran war – turned into such a vivid novel by Ken Saro-Wiwa called Sozaboy.

Over 30 years ago, Ibo (also known as the Igbo) leaders created a separate state, the Baifran state, citing marginalisation and poverty in independent Nigeria, despite residing in oil-rich areas. However, the complex ethnic power-games that were being played in these early post-independence years had more impact on the decision on the creation of this independent state, which gained little, if any, international sympathy.

Upon secession the Nigerian government declared war and in 1970, after three brutal years, which saw about 1 million Ibo killed and many more displaced, Nigeria was reunited.

The Ibo remain, 30 years on, at darker edges of the memory of the Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani, being described by one Yoruba, who lived in Kano (Hausa-Fulani territory), as "the people who give Nigeria a bad name". Some Ibo also continue to make, largely unheard, claims of war crimes against the Nigerian government.

On a brighter note, the traditional Ibo history is vast and rich and has been successfully exported around the world, primarily through music and literature. The Ibo, like the Yoruba, widely successful internationally in science, politics, art and culture. One of the most famous Ibo is Chinua Achebe.

---

In this post I have managed to detail some of Nigeria’s complex history, but considering that I have touched on only about 6 of the 300-plus ethnic groups of Nigeria, there is much to explore. And Nigeria is likely to enthral the historian further with both its vibrant contemporary politics and its mysterious pre-ancient history as indicated by the Dufuna Canoe and Nok civilisation.