Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Professor Moses Ochonu: A Historical March into the Future

Wao, what a tribute! This tribute, like the endowed chair, is well deserved. I heartily congratulate Professor Moses for his noble accomplishments.

Though I have not been privileged to meet Prof Moses in person, I fell in love with him for his outstanding scholarship. I read some parts of his Colonialism by Proxy and was deeply impressed by the amount of work and originality invested in the book. It really opened up fresh ways of thinking about colonialism in Nigeria/African beyond the well-established perspectives encapsulated in the debate between the (then) Ibadan School of History and P.P.Ekeh's Two Publics,though in a way that indirectly reinforces Ekeh's epochal interpretation of colonialism

I have had reasons to recommend that book to some friends in Nigeria who are historians to challenge them on what historical scholarship should look like. Many historians in Nigeria today, especially those that I am close to, invest very little into combing the archives and instead focus on more contemporary issues. I know as a political scientist I am not competent to pronounce on this matter, but I have my worries about noticeable trends in historical scholarship in Nigeria, most especially with respect to the historical methods.

I wouldn't know if the deepening crisis of the Nigerian academy, about which Prof Moses has been forcefully unrelenting (and unsparing too) on this platform with respect to source of the problem is to be blamed. But for sure something is missing somewhere.

We must therefore congratulate Prof Moses for his tenacious commitment to real historical scholarship and the originality he brings to his penetrating analyses.

I thank Prof Falola too for the scintillating tribute.

May you both live long in good health to reap and enjoy the fruits of your labour.

Congratulations once again Prof Moses.
Shola Omotola
--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 9/6/17, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Professor Moses Ochonu: A Historical March into the Future
To: "dialogue" <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday, September 6, 2017, 10:31 AM


















Professor Moses Ochonu: A
Historical March into the Future

Celebrating his Endowment as

Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in African
History

 

Toyin Falola

 

September
6, 2017





Of all the snarky and humorous
comments about historians, one of my favorite ones is still
the one by Samuel Butler:
God cannot alter the past, only historians. The joke
here, of course, is on the jester who deliberately
misconstrues the role of historians in the society. I leave
you all to wonder why I am on the defensive at all when the
quote is, in fact, a compliment.
Indeed, if historians can do what God cannot do, then
historians should be given due reverence and treated as
deities! But since I am a bit of an historian myself, I can
authoritatively say that historians do not alter the past to
prove that they wield God-like
powers; nor do they transcend the shortcomings of God
himself. Instead, historians have a far more noble task:
they are the adventurers who light a path through darkened
caves of the human past so that others may chart their
futures and never stumble. Today,
September 6, 2017, I present before you all a historian and
scholar who has distinguished himself by not only
interpreting the past as historians do, but also by
committing himself to the worthy goal of mapping the future.
Ladies and gentlemen, that historian
is Professor Moses Ochonu.

Everyone who
knows Moses also knows I am a great admirer of him and his
work. I have worked with him in various capacities over the
years, and I can say that
he is a highly skilled researcher, scholar, and teacher, as
well as an exceptional thinker and writer. He is an
historian par excellence, the one who has the incredible
ability to forge through troves of documents from the past
to gain insight into how the
present will shape the future. I cannot stop talking about
him any and everywhere I go. I am fascinated by his
brilliance and his conscientiousness with regard to his
scholarly and moral duty to history. I have had endless
stimulating conversations with him,
and sometimes I in fact like to disagree with him simply to
tease out the vast oceans of knowledge and wisdom that
constitute his mind, including the walking encyclopedic
volume his head carries! I trouble him with questions, even
if his answers do not always
satisfy me. He is an engaging intellectual, a deep thinker,
and an incisive critic whose contributions to African
history are both seeds and a harvest at the same time. Most
certainly, Moses' work has planted large plantations of
intellectual ideas, scholarly
contributions, and pedagogical initiatives that will
continue to reproduce bountifully for generations to
come.

Indeed, Moses,
as I know him, has come a long way on the path of scholarly
excellence. He did not just become the
Professor Moses
Ochonu whom we have congregated to celebrate overnight.
There is an African proverb that says that a chick, which
will become a rooster,
can be spotted from the day it is hatched. That tells us
that potential is always obvious in promising young people
such as when Moses displayed his potential for great success
right from his days at Bayero University, Kano, where he
obtained his undergraduate
B.A. degree in History. Throughout his stay at Bayero, he
held the Bayero University Scholarship for Outstanding
Academic Performance. He eventually earned the Michael
Crowder Prize for the Best Student in Modern African History
and the Best Graduating Student
in the Department of History of the class of 1997. His
department was so enamored with his achievements that they
immediately offered him a graduate assistantship the same
year. Moses, known for his relentless pursuit of his dream
of scholarly merit and achievement,
travelled to the United States, where he obtained
additional academic degrees from the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor. In 2004, he was appointed an Assistant
Professor at Vanderbilt University.

Never one to rest on his oars or
achievements, Moses continued to tread the path of hard work
and research to build an illustrious career. At Vanderbilt,
he established
himself as an authority on the history of colonial and
post-colonial Nigeria and as a distinguished scholar of
Modern African History. Moses steadily rose through the
academic ranks, to the position of Associate Professor in
2011 and, then, to a full Professorial
position in history in 2015. At this point, he would have
been forgiven by critics if he simply decided to sit back
and never did another thing. After all, he had managed to
build a star-studded career in a relatively short span. But
no, not Moses! He continued
to write, to publish, to teach, to give lectures, and to
push the boundaries of his own achievements. Within this
period, Moses received grants and fellowships from
prestigious organizations that respect excellent scholarly
vision and output. All through this
time, Moses never once hid that he wanted the professorial
Chair. That had always been his goal since he stepped into
the academic profession, and Moses never wavered in the
belief that he could achieve this dream. Today, he holds the
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Chair in African History. Moses, we are all very proud of
you!!

The endowed professorial Chair is in
recognition of his prodigious scholarship and contribution
to the growing literature on African History. At this point,
let me
"barbel" about his books. Moses' first book,
Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great
Depression, was published in 2009. He wrote this work to
counter the existing historical accounts that have
characterized the period of the Great Depression
as one of non-existent colonial activity in Africa. Okay,
so at this point, I think Moses has indeed proved Butler
right. Historians, truly, alter the past, but they do so to
show how accurate or inaccurate our assumptions and
assertions about the past might
have been. In this profound work of academic merit, Moses
demonstrates the economic impact of the Great Depression on
northern Nigeria, and also shows the resilience of the
colonized people of northern Nigeria against the
exploitation of the British colonial
government.

His
second book,
Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle
Belt Consciousness, published in 2014, also explores
aspects of British colonial history where the colonial
government created "subcolonialism" in northern Nigeria
as a proxy system of government
to rule over the people they considered too incorrigible to
merit their system of indirect rule. His
research shows how the legacy of that period,
especially the manipulation of religious history for power,
created a mechanism of dominance that continues to define
modern Nigerian
political culture. The book, very well done, was a finalist
for the prestigious ASA Herskovits Prize for the Best
Scholarly Book in African Studies in any Discipline in 2015.
His third book,
Africa in Fragments: Essays in Nigeria, Africa, and
Global Africanity, also published in 2014, is a
compendium of essays that explores Nigeria and Africa as it
currently is, in
a state of ebullition. His forthcoming book – and I
encourage everyone to get a copy of it when it is released
next year –
Emirs in London: Nigerian Aristocrats, Metropolitan
Travel, and Imperial Modernity, dwells on the travel
narratives of the Emirs of northern Nigeria who travelled to
the seat of colonial government in Britain in the early
colonial and postcolonial period.
This book is a fascinating account of how travel produced a
class of citizens who demystified the white man and then
turned around to establish themselves as brokers of a new
regime of modernity in their local conclaves.


In addition to these books, Moses
has produced dozens of scholarly or peer-reviewed journal
articles as well as book chapter publications in edited
volumes. Despite
the prodigiousness of his scholarship, he has not sealed
himself within the ivory tower. Moses' feet remain firmly
planted on the shores of the local communities with which he
works, and as a testimony to his passion for Nigeria, he
continues zealously to
produce numerous commentaries about Nigerian affairs. He
analyses contemporary issues with the skills only a
historian has mastered. Having diagnosed the problems, Moses
proposes solutions for the country's progress. His essays
have appeared in major Nigerian
newspapers in print and online. His provocative article
"The Shattering of the Buhari Mythology" in
African Arguments was voted by readers as the 2016
Best Article of the Year. On the USA Africa Dialogue Series
forum, where I act as the moderator, he is that deep voice
of Moses, whose refreshing and combative contributions show
him as highly principled
and humane, and that he is being seen as an intellectual
driven by the goal of forging a better path for his
society. 


Today, I congratulate Moses for his
hard work, his zeal, his contributions, and even his faith
in his own dreams. Certainly, historians can do a lot to
alter the
past as we have been taught to imagine it, but that is not
even where their abilities end. What they also do best is
help us to navigate the future by providing us with tools to
understand the present. Moses is one of those eminent
historians, who have empowered
us by writing the past and present, while showing us the
promises of the future of northern Nigeria, Nigeria as a
whole, and modern Africa. His personal life and the
scholarly paths he has taken are, in themselves, a scroll of
history. His life – as he has
lived it so far – is a unique account he is writing by
continuously striving for what is better than the best. With
his story, he is also shaping the future of others – in
and out of the academia – who will rely on the path this
historian forged through the
dark and murky caves of the past to behold the promises the
future holds for us.


More grease to your elbow, Moses!
You deserve the honor of an Endowed Chair bestowed by the
honor's name sake: Vanderbilt!

Toyin Falola






Toyin
Falola
Department
of History
The
University of Texas at
Austin
104
Inner Campus Drive
Austin,
TX 78712-0220
USA
512
475 7224
512
475 7222 (fax)
http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/
http://www.toyinfalola.com 
http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa  
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs 
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue 
 










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