Congratulations for this award. It comes as no surprise to many of us
who have followed your scholarship.
Sincerely,
Elias Bongmba
toyin adepoju said the following on 11/24/2010 10:13 PM:
> Congratulations to Professor Falola on another exemplary achievement
>
> Toyin Adepoju
>
> On 25 November 2010 02:17, Gloria Chuku <gcladygc4@gmail.com
> <mailto:gcladygc4@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> *Statement on the Book that won the 2010 Nigerian Studies
> Association (NSA) Book Prize*
>
> By the NSA Book Prize Committee
>
> San Francisco, November 20, 2010
>
> Falola, Toyin. /Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria/. Bloomington,
> IN: Indiana University Press, 2009. pp. xxii, 231.
>
> In this 231-page, peer-reviewed book, published by Indiana
> University Press in 2009, Professor Toyin Falola offers historical
> answers to a major problem of contemporary Nigeria: the
> entrenchment of violent political culture. Drawing on a wide array
> of sources and on his prodigious research into virtually all
> aspects of Nigerian history, he presents a revisionist tour de
> force of the dynamics of violence during two phases of the
> country's history – the last quarter of the nineteenth century and
> the first half of the twentieth. The result is a nuanced narrative
> of the causes and patterns of the endemic violence that has
> plagued post-independence Nigeria.
>
> Although the focal point of his book is the colonial period,
> Falola broadens his searchlight to precolonial and postcolonial
> processes as well as internal and external agencies in search of
> answers. He locates the immediate cause of contemporary Nigerian
> violence in endogenous sources – virtually all violence in
> post-independence Nigeria has emanated from Nigerians – as well as
> fundamental causes that are historical and more complex. Falola
> does recognize that unresolved precolonial-era intra- and
> intergroup conflicts have a bearing upon present-day violence, but
> he insists that this does not represent a resurgence of the
> so-called "primitive barbarism" of the past. For him, the
> legitimization of violence as a political strategy under British
> colonial rule is the key factor.
>
> The author's basic message is that "violence begets violence," a
> culture which was perpetuated by British colonialism and has
> remained one of its troubling unresolved legacies in postcolonial
> Nigeria. To elaborate this argument, Professor Falola
> characterizes a vicious cycle of violence unleashed by brutal
> British invasions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
> centuries. Nigerians responded to this imposition with resistance
> that was often violent, and the British in turn employed more
> violence. This violence in turn created further resentment and
> resistance on the part of the Nigerian people, ad infinitum.
> Nigerians saw violence as a legitimate tool for resisting British
> conquest and rule, no less than the British used it to achieve
> conquest and domination.
>
> By seeing two sides to violence, Falola dissociates himself from
> formulations which impose a normative order on acts of violence
> that ultimately favors the status quo. Instead of ordering
> violence on the basis of ascribed values, he sees inequality in
> the capacity to perpetrate violence on the part of the various
> protagonists. In comparison to Nigerian resisters, the agents of
> the colonial state had far superior weapons at their disposal. At
> the same time, the colonial state leveraged its institutions in
> treating as legitimate the violence perpetrated by its agents
> while treating as illegitimate and irrational the counter-violence
> by indigenous groups.
>
> Having inherited these institutions, the postcolonial state,
> unfortunately, has used violence in largely the same way. The
> political and military elites have employed violence as a useful
> political tool to maintain their control of the state power and
> its resources. Thus, the police and the army, which are part of
> the colonial legacy, have remained instruments of state terrorism
> rather than agents of development. In response, various civil
> society groups have resorted to acts of violence. This pattern of
> the institutionalization of violence is certainly detrimental to
> Nigeria's development.
>
> Falola's approach in this book eschews the tendency to create
> villains and saints in analyzing patterns, motives and methods of
> violence in society. Instead, it sees both the weaker mass of
> Nigerians as the resisters on one hand and the stronger British
> and Nigerian perpetrators on the other hand as protagonists of
> violence.
>
> /Colonialism and Violence/ is no doubt a product of painstaking
> and thoughtful scholarship that makes a major contribution to
> Nigerian studies. This book is a worthy winner of the 2010 NSA
> Book Award.
>
> Gloria Chuku, Ph.D.
>
> Chair, NSA Book Prize Committee
>
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