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RADICAL NATIONALISM in BRITISH WEST AFRICA, 1945-60 by Nike L

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RADICAL NATIONALISM in BRITISH WEST AFRICA, 1945-60 by Nike L RADICAL NATIONALISM IN BRITISH WEST AFRICA, 1945-60 by Nike L. Edun Adebiyi A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in The University of Michigan 2008 Doctoral Committee: Professor Ali Mazrui, Co-Chair, University of Binghamton Professor Fred Cooper, Co-Chair, New York University Professor Geoff Eley Associate Professor Janet Hart @ Nike L. Edun Adebiyi All rights reserved 2008 Dedication To Father God in Christ Jesus, Lord and Savior ii Acknowledgements I wish to thank all those who have in one way or the other been helpful in the course of bringing this dissertation to successful completion. I thank members of my dissertation committee: Ali A. Mazrui, Geoff Eley, Fred Cooper, and Janet Hart for their contributions. I am grateful to Ali Mazrui for his support. I also wish to thank the following for their support and kindness in the course of my career at Michigan: Mary Jarrett, Don Perigo, Gwen Awai, Delories Sloan, Eunice Royster Harper, Valerie Eaglin, Stephanie Amaker, Robert Holmes, and Hank Heitowit. I thank my friends who are too numerous to mention. I am grateful to the loving support of my parents, brother, and above all my children. Their unreserved love, admiration, and respect for me have meant more to me than they could ever imagine. I wish them every success as they follow their own career path and passion. iii Preface My interest in the phenomenon of nationalism as an intellectual subject has been long- standing. I came to the study of nationalism and radicalism in colonial West Africa in the late 70s and early 80s during my tenure as a lecturer in the Department of History, University of Ibadan, Nigeria where I designed and taught courses in Modern African Political Thought and in other select themes. In the course of teaching this class, I became engaged with the subject of nationalism and posed the issue of rethinking the phenomenon in new ways to enrich prevailing scholarship on the subject in regard to Africa. My rethinking of this subject led to my decision to explore it further and resulted in various unpublished papers in the 80s and 90s,1 culminating in an earlier draft of my doctoral dissertation.2 The insights in this present work and its methodological framework derive most importantly from this earlier draft of my doctoral dissertation and from my earlier works and papers since the 80s. They are all based on my findings from archival research work I carried out in the British archives and from preliminary research in the Nigerian archives, from newspaper reports, Legislative Council Debates documents for the colonies, rare manuscripts, memoirs, etc., as well as select interviews carried out earlier in Nigeria with famed activists of the period under study: labor left leader Michael Imoudu, Islamic feminist, Alhaja Hajiyya Sawaba Gambo, and ex-Zikist, Nwafor Orizu.3 These are supplemented with information from secondary materials. 4 Additional material is provided in this study from the British Documents on the End of Empire (BDEE) series. This study confronts the nationalist problematic at a particular historical juncture in British West Africa from a reconstituted methodological and epistemological framework in the attempt to provide further understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism and of the process that ended empire in British West Africa. It seeks to examine perspectives on community and citizenship and how people were re-imagining the boundaries of their world and the future and seeking to reorder their lives especially iv in the period of rapid political decentralization in what turned out to be the last decades of British colonial rule. The study examines the shifting political boundaries and how people were seeking to reposition themselves vis-à-vis the community, and the coordinates that determined individual formulations of rights and belongings. In its attempt to fill a lacuna in the historiography of the nationalist phenomenon and of the end of empire in British West Africa, the study also explores the category of the “communist” which was being added to British imperialist discourse in the period under study. It seeks to reveal the effects of British officialdom’s perceptions of communism in the West African colonies and their reaction to the perceived radicalism of the left among colonial social radicals on the contestations over community and citizenship among colonial social forces, and on the social, legal, and political contexts that defined the Independence Constitutions. In attempting to explore aspects of the cultural and political contestations in the public sphere over community and notions of citizenship especially among African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and colonial social radicals in this period, the study examines how they and their organizations constructed their arguments and actions relative to each other and what they were doing with the categories of, i.e., “race,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “class,” “religion,” in their discourses and social and political practice. As Brubaker has commented, categories are for doing.5 The social radicals’ perspectives of citizenship are examined to involve an understanding of citizenship in inclusive terms and understood as the set of practices – juridical, political, economic, and cultural – which define a person and through which persons define themselves as competent members of society. They attempted to make the categories of race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, etc., into “nation” in mutually-inclusive terms. The ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ discourses and perspectives of the “nation” and of citizenship and their categories are examined to be predicated on narrower forms of cultural and political address. Their discursive practices are examined to involve the making of categories of, i.e., race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion into “nation” in mutually-exclusive terms. Their discourses are conceptualized as the master-discourse and the discourses of colonial radicals are conceptualized as the supplementary-discourse, following Homi Bhabha’s concept of the master-discourse and the supplementary-discourse.6 v The analytical concepts and categories applied in this study, including the category of social radicalism, are problematized and the study seeks to reconceptualize them in processual and relational terms and to apply them as coordinates. It is noted in this, for example, that the phenomenon of social radicalism, like that of the broader phenomenon of nationalism, was complex, contradictory, and shifting and that the radicals were not social radicals in all respects. They are problematized as also sharing some relational characteristics with other colonial social forces, including the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. The radicals’ attitude to tradition, for example, could be problematic. Thus, one finds the renowned feminist, Funlayo Ransome-Kuti (FRK) of Nigeria, whose life and energies were devoted to contesting received understanding of rights and duties and to reconstituting these, in particular, gender norms, in more equitable terms, advocating for the rights of the Ogboni male fraternity in the reconstituted Egba Central Council (ECC) in Abeokuta on the basis of their traditional rights, “rights” which conflicted with the rights of women in the same Council.7 In their suggested reforms of the Egba Native Administration, she and the women in the Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU) advocated, among other things, that “the legitimate rights of the Ogboni Chiefs should be restored to them.”8 She failed to see that those traditional rights constrained against the rights of women in the newly reconstituted ECC and other governing Councils into which the colonial government was now for the first time allowing a few women, including FRK, to enter. Ironically, the same Ogbonis were at the same time protesting against the representation of women in these Councils as “contrary to Egba customs and tradition” and requested that the colonial government remove the women from these Councils!9 Many of the colonial social radicals could be said to lack a proper appreciation of culture as a signifying system, “the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored.”10 Also, many of the radicals and their organizations had emerged from the womb of the more mainstream political organizations and/or parties whose leadership was composed of African politicians located more right of center and center on the ideological spectrum, although the social radicals’ intent was to radicalize these more mainstream political organizations and parties and leadership from within. In Nigeria, for vi example, the Zikist radicals had emerged from the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) party in 1948, and the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) radicals from the broader but cultural and conservative organization in the North, the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) in 1950, and in the Gold Coast, the labor radicals from the Convention People’s Party (CPP), etc. Even women radicals had gone into alliance with these more mainstream organizations at certain periods of their political movements and parties, though mostly short-lived. FRK allied the AWU with the NCNC and later in the 50s, her Commoner Peoples’ Party with the NPC and Cummings-John of Sierra Leone allied her Sierra Leone Women’s Movement (SLWM) with the more centrist/right of center mainstream political
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