Anthony I. Asiwaju, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Lagos, President, African Regional Institute, Imeko, Nigeria Email: [email protected]
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Cross-Border Protest Migrations and Settlements in Colonial West Africa: The Example of the Western Yoruba Astride the Nigeria-Dahomey (Benin) Border by Anthony I. Asiwaju, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Lagos, President, African Regional Institute, Imeko, Nigeria email: [email protected] 1 | P a g e Cross-Border Protest Migrations and Settlements in Colonial West Africa: The Example of the Western Yoruba Astride the Nigeria-Dahomey (Benin) Border1 Anthony I. Asiwaju* One erroneous image emanating from earlier periods of thinking by outsiders about Africa was that the peoples were stationary: tightly bound to local polities and regarding their neighbours with parochial suspicion. Later reconsideration, apparently inspired by decolonised African historical scholarship and revisionist anthropology, has reversed the old trend and asserted, in the words of Igor Kopytoff (a leading protagonist of the new school), that "contrary to the previously widespread stereotype of sub-Saharan Africa as a continent mired in timeless immobility, its history has emerged to be one of ceaseless flux among {its} population..." and that "population movements, now as in the past, have been brought about by famine, civil wars, ethnic rivalries, despotic regimes and conflicts between polities" (Kopytoff, 1987), Mobility has been especially emphasised in demographic literature as the heart of strategies for responding to drought. It has, for example, been argued statistically (Hill, 1988) that such ecological disaster have resulted in less losses of life and livestock in the pre-colonial than the colonial and post-colonial period, precisely because of the enormous potentials for mobility in the earlier rather than later phases of history when both human and stock movements became restricted by modern state territories and boundaries. 2 | P a g e In the last two decades or so, the theme of mobility in African history has come so much alive and has been brought under a much sharper focus and a world-wide attention by what has been presented as unprecedented mass of refugees and refugee movements, thanks to the ever increasing hiddcnis uf armed conflicts within and across many an African state frontier and the Panasonic coverage provided by modern electronic media, particularly the television. However, these modern developments have tended to becloud antecedents, thus underscoring the need to put the events in proper historical perspective. This presentation, on cross-boundary protest migrations and settlements in the era of European colonial rule, is aimed at drawing attention to the colonial antecedents of the refugee category of migrations. In Africa, during the colonial period, this form of migration was quite widespread, especially from the French to the British sides of the mostly Anglo-French colonial boundaries in West Africa. The essay is hooked on and draws heavily from the writer's older works, notably the case study of the Western Yoruba in French Dahomey and similar examples in the Ivory Coast and Upper Volta (Asiwaju 1976a and 1976b). The paper revisits the experience of the Yoruba-speaking peoples astride the former Anglo-French (now international) boundary between Nigeria and former French colony of Dahomey (now Republic of Benin), in light of a research update based on recently recorded eye-witness accounts of the origin and growth of Oke- Agbede/Moriwi2 one of the major settlements that resulted from the events of the colonial period and now a rapidly growing border-boom rural community with a 3 | P a g e strategic location in present-day Imeko-Afon Local Government Area of Ogun State in the Federal Republic of Nigeria3. The essay is in five sections. Section 1, consisting of this Summary Introduction, is immediately followed by Section II, Theoretical Perspective and Wider Regional Contexts, aimed at indicating the conceptual framework and wider geographical contexts in which to situate the Yoruba case study briefly outlined in Section III. In Section. IV, Evolution of Oke-Agbede/Moriwi, the history of a specific settlement is sketched to illustrate the mode of insertion of refugees, who moved from the French side of Western Yorubaland to the British side in the colonial period, and their growth and development as a typical Nigerian border region community. Section V, Conclusion, comprises some general remarks and reflections which not only emphasise the need for today's managers of African refugees to be aware of the historical antecedents of the problems they are handling; the mode of insertion of the refugees and the evolution of their community ever since also provide us with one of the most telling illustrations of the continuous nature of what Kopytoff, our theoretical guide, has called "the reproduction of traditional African societies." THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE AND WIDER REGIONAL CONTEXTS In presenting the Yoruba case, it is important to bear in mind both the wider geographical contexts and deeper historical roots of the phenomenon of cross- boundary protest migrations. With regards to history, it is, for example, important to remember that the protest migrations of the era of European rule in Africa were, 4 | P a g e essentially, a continuation of the tradition of politically motivated migrations of the preceding epochs. From time immemorial, as Kopytoff has authoritatively and convincingly detailed (Kopytoff, 1987), politically motivated migrations from areas of jurisdiction of established states, in protest against establishment, constitute the focus of the traditions of origin of several pre-colonial state societies. Having brilliantly critiqued Jackson Turner's original formulation (as has been applied first to the history of the United States and, subsequently, such other White Settler state societies as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America and Apartheid South Africa), Kopytoff has successfully argued for an adaptation and application of the "frontier" theory as an appropriate tool for analysing African culture history. While we cannot go into all the details, which interested renders can easily find in the book-length "Introduction" to Kopytoff’s classic, The African Frontier, it is essential to draw attention to two features of Kopytoff’s reformulation and adaptation of Jackson Turner's original formulation. One is that the scale be reduced, from the level of macro-size immigrations of peoples from one continent or sub- continent forcefully moving in to 'colonize1 lands and peoples of another continent or sub-continent, to relatively local movements attracted by "frontiers" within regions and sub-regions. The second feature, arising from the essentially local nature of the colonisation movement or process in African indigenous culture and culture history, is the relative absence of 'moral' questions which arise from Jackson Turner's category where the colonisations were undertakings by racially and culturally different peoples. The fact of the identity of culture, as between the "colonizer" and the "colonized" or the 5 | P a g e displacing and the displaced, so much the feature of African culture history, are known to have facilitated the process or mode of insertion of immigrants and mediated or mitigated the pains on the 'host' communities. Western Yorubaland, partitioned between the French and the British by reason of the Anglo-French Agreement of 10 August 1889, has been described appropriately as a typical "African frontier." (Asiwaju, 1999). Featuring mostly small- scale and loosely organised chiefdoms of relatively recent formations at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the area, stretching from the Ogun to Opara rivers in the east and west respectively and with the Yewa river roughly running through the middle in a general north-south direction, became a 'frontier' for the competitive expansion of neighbouring "mature" state societies, notably ancient Dahome, moving in from the west; and Abeokuta moving in from the east. So sandwiched between their more powerful and hostile neighbours, the Western Yoruba groups could only welcome the European colonialists as their "Liberators": the French who conquered Dahomey in 1892, banished the king in 1894 and signed a series of protectorate treaties with the groups situated west of the boundary delineated by the 1889 Anglo-French Agreement; and the British who not only declared their protectorates over the various communities in their portion of Western Yorubaland in 1891-1894 but also, conscious of the peoples' desire to be free from their Egba imperialist oppressors based in Abeokuta, arranged for an internal boundary, (the so-called Egba-Egbado boundary) that separated the British 6 | P a g e part of Western Yorubaland from the Egba. As would be seen in Section V, this 'frontier' situation could not have disappeared with the onset of European colonialism, the French in Dahomey and the British in Nigeria. Indeed, on the Nigeria side of the inter-colonial, later international, boundary, the 'frontier' situation may be said to have been accentuated. As has been argued more elaborately elsewhere (Asiwaju, 1970, 1976a and 1999), the Nigerian side of Western Yorubaland was so much a type of political vacuum that, unlike neighbouring parts of Yorubaland in Ogun State, especially the Egba and the Ijebu, the area lacked a centralised chieftaincy or paramount ruler to which other head-chiefs could defer. Moreover, the localities in the proximity of the border were so sparsely populated to justify the creation of forest reserves and border wildernesses north and south of Imeko in the 1920s. It is significant that one of the choice locations for the colonial refugees fleeing from French Dahomey was the western edge of the Oha Forest Reserve, north of Imeko. The fact, so typical of other cross-border protest migrations and refugee movements, that the Yoruba crossing from French Dahomey share exactly the same culture and even kinship ties with host communities on the British side has also facilitated the refugees' initial insertion and subsequent growth and development as borderland communities. Apart from the context of deeper and wider historical roots, the other larger canvass in which to situate the Yoruba case is geographical.