Old debts paid
C. C. WRIGLEY
Since the ending of the slave trade, English- men have paid very little attention to West Africa, even during the period when they fonnd it marginally expedient to govern large parts of it, and the study df its history. his long remained a somewhat esoteric activity. Michael Crowder's admirably thorough, 'Well-Ordered era and readable survey of the colonial era is therefore very welcome; especially as he has the rare ability to treat the whole region as the unit that it is, moving with ease (despite his belief that vulgarisation means 'vulgarisation') between the French and British spheres.
He writes out of a strong sympathy with African nationalism, and his account will not make comfortable reading to Englishmen, or to Frenchmen. If, however, he sometimes seems a little too determined that the white dogs should get the worst of it, this is no more than a proper corrective to the insufferable smug- ness of the colonial histories which he has superseded, and his critique is in fact a formid- able one. The subjugation of one people by another is undeniably an evil, and - though one might quarrel with some of his emphases it is hard to dispute the general contention that the net benefits accruing to West Africans from colonial rule were unimpressive. If he is open , to oriticism, it is because he remains fixed in the posture of the 1950s, echoing the argument of the then emergent African elites, which ran: • ., 'Contrary to what the colonial writers haie led people to believe, there-were well-organised states in pre-colonial West Africa; ergo,. we are competent to uOvern such states Professor Crowder credits Jaja, the merchant- king of the Niger Delta just before the British Parties and Politics in Northern Nigeria B. J. Dudley (Frank Cass 63s) conquest with-4 policy.of 'selective modernisa- tion,' a term whose classic reference is to Japan, and says of the contemporary Guinean warlord Samory that be had the Will and the ability, if left undisturbed by the French, 'to •have created .a state responsive to. the needs of the approaching Twentieth tentuly—so thit colonialism was not even historically necessary.
-Not only is. the hyPothesis implausibleHthe resemblance between -Samory. and Prince Ito of Japan was not really very close—but the debate_ is largely obsolete. Now that the elites have become ruling classes, they will be judged (in so far as-it is anyone's buiiness to judge_ them), not by what SamOry or Jaja did in the nineteenth century, or by what Afab travellers said about Mali. in the fourteenth, but by the way they conduct their affairs now. And when Professor Crowder, in 1968, tells us indignantly that at the end of the colonial era there were still areas in which 'many of the people . . . were unsure where their next meal was coming from,' it is tempting to point out that- at least they were not being bombed as well.
Racial patriotism, in fact, is no longer enough. If it does not acquire a huinane_ and social content, it could become the ideology of a ruling class more militarist and exploitative than the colonial clasi which it has supplanted. Thus there is room for some uneasiness about the values being imparted by African scholars and their bien-pensant foreign 'colleagues. In its idmiration_ of warriors and conquerors, in its suggestion that almost anything is jtistified in the name of 'state-building,' some of the history now being written in West Africa is surely tainted with the worst vices of old-fashioned European history. The taint is not very marked in this book, but it is perceptible all the same. A juster pride might 'be derived from the anthropologists' studies of the subtle methods by which harmony was maintained in African village societies, but, is Professor CroWder remarks, anthropoloiy is now a suspect discipline; to suggest that most West Africans lived in villages is, of course, colonial propaganda.
Crowder rather oddly chooses to end his story in 1945, on the ground that the next fifteen years belong to the PeriOd of `Decolonisation.' The general history of the transition front French or British colony to neo-African king- dom thus remains to be written, but for one of the successor-states, the kingdom of the late Sir Ahmadu Bello, the process has been docu- mented with acute and meticuloui scholarsiiip by Dr Dudley. To the author (a Mid-Western Nigerian), Northern Nigeria appears as a special, and obnoxious case, and certainly it had a very distinctive style and structure. From a greater distance, however (and in retrospect) the resemblances between it and other contem- porary African states, including the other Nigerian Regions, seem perhaps more signifi- cant than the differences. Its ruling group, despite their traditionalist trappings, contained the usual mixture of schoolteachers and haulage contractors, who consolidated their power by the usual combination of patronage and intimi- dation; and its 'king' was the usual type of skilled political operator, who, however, made the disastrous error of trying to convert other regions into vassal states.
The book is a doctoral thesis in political science, and makes few concessions to the general reader. In Africa, however, the link between the seminar-room and the battlefield can be a very close one It is necessary .to re- member, as one picks one's way through the impeccable footnotes and the ritual invocations of Weber and Duverger, that one is in the presence of highly combustible materials, and that Dr Dudley is a deeply engaged writer, one of those political scientists who must prescribe as well as analyse. The main immediate interest of his book lies in its final pages (written twenty months ago or more) which advocate the pro- gramme later adopted by General Gowon : the dismemberment of both the Northern and the Eastern Regions. Since this proposal, pressed in circumstances very different from those Which gave birth to it, was one of the causes of the present war, it is startling to find it pre- sented here as the alternative to violence. 'The problem with violence, however,' Dr Dudley continues, 'is that it breeds on itself. Once started, the result could easily be political and social chaos.' It could indeed.
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