By John Amoda
THE  contemporary Situation:
Reference to the colonial by Continental Africans as a constraining development condition is now dismissed as an excuse just as reference to legacies of slavery by New World Africans is judged to be escapist. The refrain is “The colonial is long gone, 50 years gone- what have you done since October 1st 1960? What have you done since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation?”

The import of these questions is theoretical for the history of the encounter with the white man is peridoized in these questions. The Black man had his pre-slavery/pre-colonial past; has had his slavery/colonial past; and is now living in his post slavery/post colonial present.

The question is what is the Black/the African doing with his present? The implied judgment? “you have yourself to blame for the future you are presently building. You are the captain of your ship”. There is a seeming corroborative 50 years history of post colonial Leadership that seemed to have produced corrupt ridden elites who have instituted a system of government for which there is no name; a politics of democracy without democrats; a society of new Africans with no distinguishing exculpating ethos.

The international community is at home with such notions of history. But reformist intelligentsias like Professor Adebayo Adedeji have challenged this construct of responsibility while not exonerating the African post colonial leaderships.

In the Lagos Plan of Action, they put up an argument that apportioned responsibility for the present state of affairs in Africa. They asserted that external factors are the determining factors; while the internal factors like elite corruption, despotism, etc are contributive factors.

Elliot Berg of Brookings Institution led the policy campaign to reverse the roles of the external and the internal; predictably the internal factors were judged to be the determining factors and the external factors the residual. Elliot Berg’s position has become the dominant consensus of the international community reflected in the Transparency International classification of societies along the scale of corruptibility.

The Lagos Plan of Action and the Elliot Berg’s Counter clearly show the ideological uses of history. Similar ideological contestations had been waged to determine how the history of slavery in White Settler Societies of the Americas and Southern Africa should be read. Are slavery as well as colonialism to be read as episodes in the lives of the New World Africans and the Continental Africans? The dominant consensus reads slavery and colonialism as episodes, as circumstances that are time specific.

These circumstances are situations which though challenging are deemed to have only impaired not destroyed the ability of the African, whether enslaved or colonised, to attain the heights of progress reached by Europeans. Slavery, it is argued has been a hindrance, but now circumstances have changed; the Enslaved has now no excuse not to match the accomplishments of their Enslavers. Ditto for the colonised. “Now that you are free, what are you doing with your freedom? Now that you are independent from colonial rule what have you done with your independence ?

Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Oba Adetona have each seen the need to appraise the colonial experience. What was colonisation of Nigeria to each of them?

-Was it only a catastrophic episode in the life of the societies in Africa? Was it an episode that left the society unchanged in its potentials for greatness?

-Was it a change of society making the colonial society a new society characterised by a new ethos?

-Was it only a hindrance in the way of life, a hindrance which became irrelevant with the change of government at independence? Kole Omotoso in his book Achebe or Soyinka; a Study in Contrast identifies the positions of Achebe and Soyinka on the colonial experience.

Omotoso quotes from Achebe’s The Trouble With Nigeria portraying Achebe’s reading of the Igbo Colonial Experience.

“The bankrupt state of Igbo leadership is best illustrated in the alacrity with which they have jettisoned their traditional republicanism in favour of mushroom kingships. From having no kings in their recent past, the Igbo swing around to set an all time record of four hundred kings in Imo and four hundred kings in Anambra (states).

And most of them are traders in their stall by day and monarchs by night; city dwellers five days a week and traditional village rulers on Saturdays and Sundays!

They adopt traditional robes from every land, including I am told, the ceremonial regalia of the Lord Mayors of London. The degree of travesty to which the Igbo man is apparently ready to reduce his institutions in his eagerness “to get up” can be truly amazing. On the one hand,Achebe is unique here as perhaps the only Nigerian writer who has been so harsh in his comments on some of his own people…

He is also unique for not accepting the totality of their history, past and present. Rather we can see in Achebe’s choice of which characters in his novels and short stories he gives dignity and which characters he chooses to ridicule. In contrast with characters such as Chief Nnaga in Man of the People and Obi Okonkwo in No Longer At Ease we have the dignified favourites such as Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart and Ezeulu in Arrow of God who prefer to live and die by the old tenets of the Igbo community.

These men are dignified and they are tragic in their downfall” (Omotoso Pp. 17-18). Achebe rejects the colonial and valorises the pre-colonial.

Omotoso on the other hand shows that Soyinka views the colonial experience as only a hindrance in the history of the Yorubas.
“The Yoruba people had seen and accepted the presence of the white man as another episode in their history, but they could not predict the end result of this encounter.

All they could hope for was some positive pay-off to the Yoruba country. To this end, Wole Soyinka insists that the colonial encounter is a mere episode, a catalytic episode only. The Catalytic effect of the colonial encounter within the Yoruba society becomes the area of his creative inquiry. This acceptance of the colonial episode as inevitable and perhaps not all evil led to Yoruba’s involvement in western education.

Western education has led to a new class, a new elite in the Yoruba society whose position is not confirmed by traditional institutions such as chieftaincy or by wealth”.