From: "House-Soremekun, Bessie" <beshouse@iupui.edu>
To: "usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thu, November 25, 2010 10:41:23 AM
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Statement on the Winner of the Nigerian Studies Association 2010 Book Prize
Dear Professor Falola:
Many, many congratulations to you on being the recipient of this very prestigous award! You have received more awards, honors, and accolades of any scholar that I am aware of in the history of the modern academy. Thank you for continuing to produce your prodigious cutting-edge scholarship and for continuing to make us proud.
Cordially,
Bessie House-Soremekun
________________________________________
From:
usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [
usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Elias Bongmba [
bongmba@rice.edu]
Sent: Thursday, November 25, 2010 8:47 AM
To:
usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.comSubject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Statement on the Winner of the Nigerian Studies Association 2010 Book Prize
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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