JUSTICIA on The Southerner Newspaper
Sunday, August 24, 2025

It must come from within, drawn mainly from images and semiotic symbols familiar to the people. The infinity of cultural, environmental, and other factors that influence and shape national identities and mould societies cannot be traced to the invaders alone.

It is eternally within the people. One cannot rule out the involvement or influence of foreign invaders and colonizers who come with their agenda and culture, but this does not invalidate the feelings of oneness of the people or the nation’s evolution in whatever shape or form of its historical antecedents and identities.

The role of the invader cannot be discounted, but how the people adapt to foreign influences and their capacity to sustain their culture gives them their unique identity and exceptional profile as one nation.

However, because history was written for and on behalf of the colonized people, the narrative told by the conqueror often becomes the official history.

South African singer and civil rights activist Mariam Makeba (1932–1978)⁶ put it succinctly in a 1969 interview with a Swedish television station:

The conqueror writes history; they came and they wrote. Now you don’t expect people who invaded us to write the truth about us. They would only write negative things about us, and they would do that because they have to justify their invasion of the countries. It is like saying that when the Europeans went to the Americans, there were no Indians; it is ridiculous because they were there.

“We don’t write our history because it has been passed to us by our elders, and when the white men came, they would say we don’t have history, we don’t have culture, and that until they came, nothing lived. It is only when they came, they would say ‘Boom! I have discovered you, and now you can live. I mean, that is ridiculous. The truth can never be covered by lies*.

By the time Nigeria gained its independence in 1960, half the states, entities, and territories that constituted the British Empire had been lost. Britain had to relinquish its empire because it was exhausted, drained by the Second World War, which it could not have fought and won without the military might of the United States and the massive contribution of the British Empire and Commonwealth countries.

West and East African colonies contributed two hundred thousand soldiers to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with British troops in that conflict. While America’s support was voluntary and in the enlightened self-interest of the United States, British Empire subjects were conscripted and used more or less as cannon fodder.

Only recently have their contributions started to receive due recognition; for the most part, they had been hardly acknowledged, recognized, or appreciated by Britain when it celebrates the victories that define what Jeremy Black called a ‘once-great conflicted nation.’

It could not have refused to return Hong Kong to China when the lease on the new territories expired because it no longer had the reach to maintain Hong Kong Island and Kowloon in the face of the determination of China – by then a world power – to reverse the unequal treaties into which it had been forced by a ‘century of humiliation.’

Britain may have lost the Empire, but the fruits of that adventurous past redefined and enriched her history. The year 2022 is the year the chicken came home to roost. Conservative Member of Parliament, MP Rishi Sunak, a Hindu born to Indian parents who migrated from East Africa, became Britain’s first non-white Prime Minister.

Sitting with the Prime Minister on the cabinet are children of immigrants from former colonies – Nigeria, the Caribbean, and other countries; while the Mayor of London, and many other major cities, who are of the English or Anglo-Saxon Britons, have been elected to key positions.

As many Britons reflect on the future of their country with foreboding – an unpleasant exercise for a once-mighty empire – it is also clear to Nigerians that the history of their country, a country that has hardly known peace since independence and which at present is buffeted by insurgents and centrifugal forces (problems created by Britain), should be revisited and properly understood to enable us know where we came from and how we got to where we are.

The most outstanding fiction about the history of Nigeria is that it was “created” by Britain as if it were a piece of metal cast and fashioned into shape by the celebrated Benin bronze casters.
Many Nigerian historians who were educated as British-protected scholars accepted their protectors’ version of history, recycling it in every academic journal or book written to satisfy their British teachers without properly interrogating the information handed to them or making serious independent efforts to investigate the facts.

Even where it was clear from the oral tradition and common sense that the British versions were fraudulent, self-serving, or wildly exaggerated, they stuck with the British version. In secondary school, we were taught that Mungo Park discovered the River Niger and that Lord Lugard founded Nigeria.

In this British version of our history, we were taught that we are an artificial creation and because we were a mere geographical expression, we were a people without any antecedents, who did not know each other but were brought together and introduced by the British in their benevolence, to save us from our fetish-strewn past.

They claimed that as pagans, we were cruel, barbaric and crude people who needed Britain’s missionaries to civilize us and (according to their religion) to pave the way for us to enter paradise.

When British ‘experts’ talk about Nigeria, they see and project an image that justifies their meddling in the affairs of country; they project the religious diversity as a North versus South affair and throw in other derogatory characterizations that are supposed to explain why Nigeria is an ‘unstable’ country or whose people are so different that they are not capable of living together in common humanity.

Yet, at the time, Britain was being patched together, Benin was a multi-ethnic state with citizens drawn from Benin, Igbo, Esan, Afemai, Isoko, Urhobo, Itsekiri, Ijaw, and Yoruba.

More than two hundred years before the arrival of Britons, the Benin Empire had expanded to areas as far away as the Benin Republic and had established military garrisons in Lagos to the South-West and Agenebode on the Northern bank of the River Niger, and had trading and diplomatic relations with Portugal.

The Oyo Empire had been constituted of multi-ethnic citizens comprising Yorubas, Ebriras, and Nupes. The Kanem Bornu Empire was already thriving with Kanembus, Shuwa, and Kanuris cohabiting, with the majority worshipping the same Allah.

Also, the Sokoto caliphate had brought together the seven Hausa states, the Yoruba city of Ilorin, and the Tuaregs, and its influence extended to Cameroon. The Sokoto caliphate, one of the largest pre-colonial states in Africa, was consolidating its conquest of Northern Nigeria and territories in the central part of Nigeria, with its march into Benin territory halted only by Benin soldiers at Afemai.

I also believe Britain should not only admit the historic crime of colonial conquests, but also pay reparations to the peoples of their former colonies.

I am not under any illusion that Britain, which has never imagined that it might have cause to worry about the judgment of history, will start now. That is what makes the task of exposing and highlighting these historical wrongs a critical challenge for the moment and at all times because these are at the root of the problems afflicting Nigeria today.

However, like other colonized people, Nigerians should be proud of who and what they are now, boldly embrace their nation, build a country that will be free forever, and which could never again be colonized or have its people enslaved.