ken harrow
On 11/25/10 8:47 AM, Elias Bongmba wrote:
> Dear Professor Falola
>
> 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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