My take is that the African Union should take the unprecedented step of imposing sanctions on the US. The US needs Africa more than it would publicly acknowledge. Africa has the resources the West needs, it should use those resources as leverage to assert its power.

Human rights are global rights, and everyone is entitled to them irrespective of their own country. No country has the right to violate these rights. Historically, the US has consistently violated human rights without any consequences. The violence our country was built on, the slavery that led to its economic prosperity, the Jim Crow, and the New Jim Crow laws and practices, are all a part of the historical exploitation and dehumanization of Black and Brown bodies.

America cannot continue to bomb and sanction other parts of the world under the disguise that it is spreading liberty and freedom. In his speech before the invasion of Iraq, President Georgetown Bush said, “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world but God’s gift to humanity.” The idea was that America was doing God’s work invading Iraq. A new mission civilisatrice! How can America offer the world what it doesn’t give its Black and Brown citizens? How long can we as Black bodies continue to live and accept this trauma that we call America?

The police are supposed to protect us, but each time I see them, I cringe. Each time I see a police car behind me or beside me, I have panic attacks. I’ve had my fair share of traumatic experiences with American cops: a cop has pulled a gun on me; I’ve had cops pulled me over and yelled through loudspeakers that I should put my hands on the dash; my car has been subjected to illegal searches by cops; Cops have questioned me if I am carrying drugs in my car; this past January, I had a police officer interrogate me on why I was flying out of Newark airport and not an airport closer to my home as if I do not have the right to fly from whatever airport I want. These incidents happened in Blue states, Purple states, and Red states.

The starting point is for us to acknowledge that America is a racist state – its institutions are racist. The George Floyd case isn’t one bad cop misbehaving, it is a revelation that the whole American system is structured to perpetuate the genocide of Black and Brown bodies. When we accept this fact, we can treat America as a rogue nation that needs to be sanctioned.

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I extend my sincere condolences to the Govt and people of Benue State, the Mbalom community, and especially the Bishop, priests and members of the St Ignatius’ Catholic Church, whose premises was the unfortunate venue of the heinous killings of worshippers and two priests by gunmen.This latest assault on innocent persons is particularly despicable. Violating a place of worship, killing priests and worshippers is not only vile, evil and satanic, it is clearly calculated to stoke up religious conflict and plunge our communities into endless bloodletting.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s statement

The killing of two Catholic priests and over 15 parishioners in Benue State by the so-called herdsmen is a sober reminder of the failure of the President Buhari’s administration to govern a united Nigeria. Buhari calls these murderous acts “vile” and “satanic.” What’s actually vile and satanic is President Buhari’s failure to deal with this menace plaguing our nation.

These devilish and barbarous acts further a right-wing Islamist Northern agenda that Buhari and his evil cohorts have for a long time planned for Nigeria. Not too long ago, when a group of restless and marginalized young men and women in the south-eastern part of Nigeria went on the streets protesting their marginalization, Buhari’s civilian dictatorship unleashed the full apparatus of the state military/security agencies on them. People who were exercising their universal freedom to assembly and speak were dehumanized, arrested, tortured, and killed. Yet, each passing day, Nigerians are killed or sacked from their homes by Islamist terrorists, bought and paid for by Northern oligarchs, and the government seems helpless in the face of this mass violence perpetrated on the citizenry.

We should stop calling these bloodthirsty killers “herdsmen.” We should call them by their true name, “Islamist terrorists.” It’s obvious that Buhari’s government is incapable of protecting the Nigerian people. The people must take their destiny into their own hands.

The post On the Killing of Two Catholic Priests by Islamist Terrorists in Nigeria appeared first on Africa First.

The changes that have happened in the digital media world have connected the world in ways that one couldn’t have imagined just three decades ago. These technologies are moving at a fast pace revolutionizing how we store, retrieve and present information. One change that has come with this is the amount of data that we create on a daily basis. The International Data Corp (IDC) reported that by 2013, about 4.4 Zettabytes (4.4 trillion gigabytes) of data had been created and we are on track to create about 44 Zettabytes of data by 2020.[i] The availability of affordable cloud storage platforms from companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. have enabled us to store more and more data. This data will provide historians a window through which to look at the past.

Data that cannot be easily accessed or retrieved can pose a challenge. Even physical archives are taking steps to make sure that what they have in boxes is easily located through discovery tools on the computers. This means the creation of better metadata for their collections. The development of powerful search engines or tools is making data discovery easier. The continuous improvement and integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with search engines means that our search is becoming smarter and more contextualized.

The historian or archivist has a privileged role to take all of this data and make sense of it. This data needs to be presented to an audience in ways that it is meaningful. Some of the digital media technologies or tools that have emerged in the last decades would help us with the interpretation and presentation of this data. These include tools such as Google N-Gram Viewer, Palladio, Carto Db, Voyant, Youtube, OCR softwares and in fact, the internet itself. These tools can be used for visualization or different forms of presentation of data. For example, Carto DB can be used to map and visualize historical events and activities in ways that text cannot fully capture. Google N-Gram Viewer and Voyant allow us to distant read and interpret a large corpus and to decipher things like word frequency trends and knowledge graphs.

The advancement in photo and video technologies has made digital scanning, recording and storage possible. Yahoo’s flickr commons is a robust medium for storing unlimited photos for free and people can comment on them. Many archives and libraries have made photos from their own collections available through flickr commons. This has become an important resource for learning and doing history. Many archives and museums are digitizing their documents and one can easily access them through computers connected to the internet. Artifacts from museums are now being brought online through some 3D modeling tools. These kinds of electronic presentation help to bring archives and museums to our classrooms. The internet itself is very revolutionary. It has placed this vast amount of data only a few clicks away.

The question is, how can we as historians use all of these technologies and resources that are available to us to effectively teach about the past? I offer four examples on how we can harness some of these technologies. The first is on the use of Youtube. This online video sharing platform has more than 1 billion users. Each day, millions of users consume millions of hours of content. This can become a place where we teach the past. We do that not by presenting video clips from the past but using the video editing technologies available to us to recreate short, attention grabbing compelling historical accounts. Historians must be aware that their videos would be competing with viral cat videos. If done properly, they would attract millions of eyeballs, numbers we would never see in our classrooms throughout our teaching careers.

Another online video resource that historians can integrate into their teaching is Netflix. This streaming service has over 6000 movies and 1500 TV shows in its catalog. Films can be picked from this catalogue to aid in the teaching of historical events. We can challenge our students to question these films as they would other historical sources and let these films become ways in which they can learn the procedures of doing history. Why not a special “Netflix for Education” subscriptions? The libraries of many colleges do not have a database of films this large and many of our students today have no dvd players (I actually do not remember the last time I used one!) Studying historical movies alongside with textual documents will expose the students to the variety of ways that we can attempt to make sense of the past.

Virtual Reality (VR) is one of the up and coming technologies today. How about being transported to the 16th Century and making the Middle Passage with the African slaves? Thanks to VR, this can be done and it has the potential to open up a new level of understanding to our students or visitors to museums. As with most of these digital technologies, it has to be done well and the goal should be to deepen the knowledge on the historical event and not technological gimmicks. The New York Times is already doing VR videos on some of its reporting. Historians can and should embrace this new technology and use it as a tool to teach about the past. This should be as much a priority to historians as it is to Silicon Valley.

Wikipedia is a valuable resource for teaching about the past. Historians need to be actively involved in editing and submitting new entries. If propagating knowledge is the mission we have as academics, we should not be afraid of sharing that knowledge in forums like Wikipedia. My entries have probably been read by many more people than any book or article I have published or would ever publish. Wikipedia ranks highly on google search results and for many people, it is their source for information on all things. In many parts of the world where there is no access to public or private libraries, Wikipedia is like the people’s library. I have my issues about Wikipedia’s restriction on the publication of original research. Perhaps, organizations such as the AHA can partner with Wikipedia to allow the publishing of original research with the articles clearly marked as such and with proper attribution. Wikipedia could still insist on its writing style in such occasions to allow for articles that could be intelligible to non-experts. As academics, we have the tendency to write for each other and not for the public. This could change and make the knowledge we produce more widely accessible to the general public.

The bottomline is that, historians and archivists must embrace these new technologies and resources and work on effectively using them to present the past. We cannot miss these opportunities to make the knowledge of the past relevant at a time when people seek for more knowledge, and yet ask, what is a history degree good for?

[i] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/are-we-running-out-of-data-storage-space/

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All of history is a malleable instrument in my hands. Ohhh, I have accumulated all of these pasts and I possess every fact – yet the facts are mine to use as I will and, even using them truthfully, I change them.
– Frank Herbert

How do we understand the past? The past is not fixed and rigid. It exists outside of us and our understanding of it is constantly evolving. Narratives of the past get changed in light of new evidence. We approach the past from different perspectives and these inform what we make of it. Facts from the past have to be contextualized and interpreted. No matter the level of objectivity that we seek, our interpretations are clouded by our worldviews. Sometimes this is done consciously and at other times, it is unconscious. What may have been a canonical interpretation at one time may even become questionable or rejected at another time period.

The challenge is teaching students to understand the malleability of history. Often, textbooks provide a single narrative devoid of the complexities of historical events. Students are not exposed to the different interpretations and how those have changed over time. Wikipedia offers a lens through which we can see the changes and shifts in a historical account. Unlike printed encyclopedias which might take years to update entries, the entries on Wikipedia are constantly changing as people make edits to them. Sometimes the edits are minor and other times, major. Though Wikipedia prides its entries as being neutral, this does not mean that the narratives are devoid of perspectives.

One way in which the malleability of Wikipedia can become an effective teaching strategy is its pages histories. Many people who visit Wikipedia do not bother to look at the changes that have been done to the entry. They read the account and then move on. As scholars and students, we should probe more these pages. We should look at them as we would any piece of historical evidence or account. Wikipedia has a valuable tool that enables us do that and  that is the page history. You can see who created the page, when it was created, the first entry made and all the edits and additions thereafter. Having students look at the history of the page and analyze the changes that have been done to the page will go a long way to helping them understand that historical accounts are not static. There are often changes in the narratives and shifts in the analysis as we continue to question the historical evidence available to us. It is in this historical questioning that we begin to make sense of the malleable past.

The post Teaching the Malleable Past appeared first on Africa First.

I got this image from Flick Commons. It is posted by a man named Tony Murphy. It has the description:

This is one of the Bedford lorries we worked on one weekend to convert into water tankers. An African driver turned it over 3 times and got out without a scratch. Cost the British taxpayer £650!

Tony Murphy has several images like this posted on Flickr Commons and I have used some of these images for illustration purposes in my classes. I am going to be using this image not simply for illustration but also to uncover the history. Most of his images are titled “Kongwa” and some of them have interesting and revealing comments from people who were in Kongwa in the 1940s and 1950s. Let me digress for a moment to share a comment posted by someone in one of the images picturing Tony Murphy’s African houseboy. She commented:

I do wish I had photos of my ex- houseboys and girls. We did not own a camera until the 70’s but still, it shames me that I never thought of taking their pictures. A couple of them were such good men, and even the odd rogue who had to be sacked is still remembered fondly with one exception: he threatened me,saying “he wanted to leave and leave now and be paid now.” He was new, and an absolute treasure of competence. I couldn’t believe it! We had not had words, so far as I knew I had not been rude to him… My reaction was to grab the broom that was handy nearby, beat it over his head until he retreated from the kitchen and out into the back garden, then locked all the doors, counted out what he was owed to date plus a month’s notice, put it into his hand and said, “Kwaheri”, feeling very tearful but no longer afraid. His head was down, he did not look up at me and turned and walked away. My hubby came home several hours later to find me still very shocked. We could not understand the man’s behaviour until two days later when Astorre went to his cupboard where he had hidden his salary which he had not yet paid into the bank. He was paid cash at that time. Later, we found out from another houseboy of a neighbour that ours was in a hurry to return to Kenya, from where he had had bad news. I wish he had told us. We would have helped him willingly.

When one reads in between the lines in these descriptions and comments, you can discern the way Africans were treated by these colonial officials. Simply looking at the image above and the short description does not tell us much about the history. However, based on his description and the image itself, we can ask certain questions: About what time period was that Bedford Lorry made? Where was it manufactured? Where was this photograph taken? Who took this photograph? Why did he take it? He mentions that they had to convert the Lorry to a water tanker, why? Why was he specific that it was an African driver that had an accident with it? He provides what it costs the British Tax Payer, why is this little fact important? Without digging deep into the history, by telling us that it was driven by an African driver and looking at the scenery, we can make an educated guess that the photo was taken in Africa during colonial rule.

By just looking at the photograph by itself, it would be difficult for the students to even discern where it was taken. They could even say it was taken several decades ago in an unpaved road in North America or Europe. With the students, we would explore the history behind this photo. Tony Murphy does not say much by way of description, but I know enough of the history  to guide my students along paths where like good investigators, they would find revealing answers about this photo and the history of development in colonial Africa.

The post Using Historical Images as Primary Sources appeared first on Africa First.

Understanding the historical inaccuracies that are in film or images is important to making better use of these important historical sources. It was often said that ‘Photos don’t lie!” Is that actually the case? Today, we have abundant softwares and apps that can manipulate photos. A photo can be edited to show President Obama and I shaking each other’s hands. Ever used any of the Instagram filters? You can even transpose one face to another body or marsh two faces to create one. ‘Okay, that is today,’ you may say, ‘they couldn’t do that a century ago.” Perhaps they did not have the sophisticated technologies we have today but they still manipulated photos. Some of the photos we find in historical archives today were staged by photographers. The person taking the photo wanted to tell a story. It is still the case today. Do you see some of those photographs taken by charities working in Africa? They always have children or women looking poor, barely with any clothes on their bodies. As a kid, the Europeans were never interested in having photos of me or any of my neighbors. They went to the remote villages to take photos of the most vulnerable. Those photos were used to tell a story, that every black person living in Nigeria was poor. So, understanding the context of the photo is important. This is not to say that photos and films are not important sources for doing history, we have to be aware that these are not uncontroverted evidences and we can ask these sources questions “that are parallel to those we ask of historical books.”

Knowing this, how can I use images and films more effectively in class? I have to change the approach of using images simply for illustration purposes. Together with the class, we can question these images. Who took the photograph? why was it taken? what kind of camera was used? What editing was done to the photo? Is it a staged photo and why? What are some of the elements in the photo? Is there any reason why the photographer included certain elements and not others? Together with the students, we try to uncover the history behind the image. I can have them identify certain things that are unique with the image. I can also take the image, make some editing to it and have them try to spot the differences and to tell me why certain things are emphasized in one image and not in the other and what the image teaches us?
The same approach can be applied to film as well. I can assign the students a film and make them uncover the historical differences between what is portrayed in the film and what is in other historical sources. I will have them spot the differences, what is emphasized in the film that helped them have a better appreciation of the event. I will ask them, If they were expert historians asked to consult on the making of the film, how would they approach the historical facts? I will also have them focus on the technical aspects of the film, as well as the context of the film. Who are those in charge of the film? What other films have they done? Is there a relationship between this film and their other work? How does the original script compares to the final project? What was cut out of the film? Why?

In this way, the students are trained to be historical detectives who are trying to uncover the evidence that is depicted in the image or film. With this approach, I am not doing a one-way lecture on the film, but together with them, I am helping them have a better grasp of the historical event by following the same procedures historians use when doing history.

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On a flight from Beijing to Chicago last week, the man sitting by my right asked me what kind of history that I do? I told him I do development history. His next question was, “what is that? I have never heard of it!”His response is one I have heard fairly often. This is because the field of development history is relatively new. So, in this blog post I want to share what I do in my research or when I teach development history.

Development is an area that has received a lot of attention from social scientists. A whole new discipline, “Development Studies” has originated as a result of this. As a historian, I approach development from a different perspective than social scientists. Most of the work social scientists have done focuses on economic development as a spontaneous process that they can study and measure statically. My approach is to look at development as an intentional practice that states try to make happen, and these interventions have a history that we can study, analyze and learn from.

Why is the state intervening? This is an important question to keep in mind when assessing interventions. For every scheme or project, we have to ask this question. This is because development is not simply an immanent process. It is intentional. To answer this question, we have to understand context. We have to explore the direction of things and why the state wants to order that direction. It’s history!

For sources, we do not rely solely on the final documents that are produced. These documents tell us very little about the history. While they may be analyzed, the primary focus is on the process. An important to ask here is, how did they get to the final decisions reflected in these documents? I call this, ‘the sausage-making of development!’ What we do here is to try to get hold of the minutes of meetings, private and official letters, personal diaries, etc. What you find out in these documents are the different ideologies of those involved, the intentions (yes, the outcomes do not always reflect the intentions), the agreements and disagreements between them. The ‘human side’ of development! Care has to be taken to reflect the non-elite voices also. This is always the challenge because their voices are scarcely reflected in archives or newspapers. So, there is some need to supplement with oral interviews. It is this challenge that made me develop the crowdsourcing project, developmentschemes.com to provide a platform for everyone affected by development to tell their stories.

We also study the process during and after the intervention. Not by measuring statically as social scientists do but the day to day impact of the intervention. The question we try to answer is, how did this project shape the lives of the people and how have their lives shaped the project?

In teaching, I get the students involved with these documents. I get them to probe the documents and to find answers to the questions. By getting working with these documents all semester long, they can understand how complex development is and have a better grasp of the pitfalls that often end up hurting the people that the intervention was supposed to help in the first place. .

The post Doing and Teaching Development History appeared first on Africa First.

One such area is how we deal with sources. Even in survey level history classes, students are taught the difference between a primary source and a secondary source. Some even require students to write a paper that at least incorporate some primary sources. Primary sources are important because they are the evidence from the past that help us in our quest to make sense of it.

These sources from the past were created and preserved by someone. The authority behind these sources is important. In British imperial history, we use a lot of the dispatches and reports sent back and forth between the colonies and the metropole. Using solely these sources to tell a story of the past will not paint an accurate picture of what happened. A case in point is Mau Mau in Kenya. Most of the sources that were preserved in archives were those that did not incriminate the colonial government for its brutality. Many of such incriminating documents were incinerated and others locked up away from the archives. It took the painstaking work of other historians who carried out oral interviews, read private diaries and nationalists papers to reveal the atrocities and torture that was unleashed by the colonial government on the people. In history teaching, students are taught to question the sources that they have.

In history teaching, students are also taught how to use the variety of sources that they have accumulated to construct a chronological narrative about the past. They cannot have full knowledge about the past because it is removed from them. They are only taking a peak. This is because their knowledge of the past is limited by the sources from the past. It is impossible to have all the sources from the past. They become aware that history is dynamic. They might be new evidence that may show up that could change what they already know about the past.

In the face of new technologies, the way we think about the past will continue to change. These technological tools afford us the opportunity to look at sources from the past in ways that we could not have forty years ago. For example, we can use CartoDB to visualize WPA slave interviews or reconstruct everyday life in a small town 100 years ago. Tools such as this can transform the way our students learn and practice history.

The post Elements of Historical Thinking appeared first on Africa First.

You can only imagine how shock some of the students are when I challenge their notion and argue that some of the aid might actually be hurting Africa rather than ‘saving’ Africa. We spend the semester exploring the impact of development aid. So, the question is, ‘Is development aid helping or hurting Africa?’ It is often hard for them to grasp how a $300 million donation of caterpillar equipments with a counterpart funding clause may actually hurt a country in the long run or how free Mosanto seeds might end up leaving many hungry and poor! It is free gifts, why should it hurt? That is the challenge!

I am hoping that I can build a project that will better teach the complexities involved in development aid and its longterm impact.

The post Questions on Development in Africa appeared first on Africa First.

So, lets step back and ask a few questions! What is history? How do we do history? What may we learn from history? The answers to these questions may seem so obvious, but perhaps they are not. To my nervous students, I always assure them that they do not have to memorize any dates, names, events, etc. in my classes. That usually gives them some relief and prepares them to journey with me on this exploration of the past. I call it exploration because we do not have definitive answers. History is not simply a recalling of facts from the past. It is more than that. It is complex. We may stumble upon a piece of document that challenges or questions the prevailing narrative. So, in understanding what  history is, we have to learn to ask questions of the past. Querying the past not in ways that would reveal canned answers as a google search bot may. Perhaps, questions that are more complex and nuanced. Such questions allow you to dig deeper. For example, in a class on British Colonial Rule in Nigeria, I am not going to simply ask if the Irish missionaries in Nigeria and the British colonial officials got along? I rather may ask, ‘to what extent did the Irish missionaries in Nigeria collaborated or resisted the British colonial officials in Nigeria?” We probe such complex questions as we look at each of the major events throughout the semester.

How do we find answers to these complex questions? The answers lie in the way we do history. Often, students are provided with textbooks that they are required to read throughout the semester. Answers that textbooks provide are as ‘good’ as those google search may return. Perhaps a bit of exaggeration here! Textbooks ‘might’ be better. It is almost impossible for textbooks to capture the complexity of events. They offer an interpreted historical narrative. Given that history is complex, why not let the students be engaged in the act of doing history so that they can fully appreciate these complexities? Thus, it is important to expose them to the primary sources. Care has to be taken on the selection of sources so that these do not reflect a biased historical narrative.

Why go through the trouble of studying the past if it does not have anything to teach us? The past must always be connected to the present. What lessons can we learn from the past to help our present? This aspect has to be explored as different events are being taught. Let the students come up with ‘lessons learned!’ This makes the past relevant and enables them to see value in what they learn.

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