Banquet lecture for the 37th annual conference of the Sudans Studies Association in conjunction with the 70th anniversary of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, May 12, 2018
This paper examines conflictual relationships among British members of the Gold Coast administration. It adds to the literature that problematizes earlier notions of colonialism by highlighting tensions and contradictions inherent in colonial governance structures. This paper argues that at its inception, the Gold Coast colonial administration had deep cracks as...
This working paper focuses on the themes, authors, and changing modes of production of 152 booklets published (or purchased) in Nigeria relating to marriage. The author obtained them from bookshops mainly in Ibadan and Lagos, from church bookstores in Ado-Ekiti and Kabba, but also from motor parks in Lokoja, Kaduna,...
The apparent interest today in Nigerian visual culture has necessitated this paper. Therefore, its
primary focus shall be on the status of visual data from the burgeoning ephemera as a source of
historical knowledge. Using selected visual illustrations in the posters, cartoons and photographs
that were at the core of...
As the result of centuries of transregional commerce by Muslim merchants and the attendant networks developed by Muslim scholarly families, Islam was well established in the Sahel and Upper Guinea Coast by the seventeenth century. Commercial markets, Muslim states and Islamic institutions developed during a long, generally peaceful process of...
This working paper surveys Islamic organizations, movements, and ideologies in Nigeria, roughly identifying them along the lines of Islamic traditionalism, Sufi orders (turuq lit. pathways), Salafi/Wahhabi revivalism2 modernist and insurgent Islam(ism), trado-Islamic and Christo-Islamic syncretism and deviant “Islamic” cultism. Previous academic studies of Nigerian Islam were often limited to the...
How could so many students of one scholar, one who is not immediately
remembered for his work on the arts, have produced so much major research on African
and African-American arts and artists in virtually all media? This question became the
genesis of this panel; but before turning to our...