But it is only the most dangerous conflict in a nation assembled for the convenience of the colonizer out of peoples from hundreds of different cultures and thousands of different polities. More than a century later, this remains a profound division. It is a mere geographic expression.” 3 The name “Nigeria” was invented by the girlfriend of the British colonial governor general Frederick Lugard, who amalgamated two colonial holdings: a predominantly Muslim north and a south that would become predominantly Christian. Obafemi Awolowo, a leading nationalist architect of independent Nigeria, famously remarked, “Nigeria is not a nation. African elites rushed to fill positions vacated by the colonizers, but the structures remained basically the same, as did the problem of political legitimacy. The tragedy of postcolonial Africa is that Africa could not do without the structures of the modern nation-state, and as a practical matter, undoing the absurd borders the Europeans had drawn was impossibly difficult. The morality produced by Africa’s myriad indigenous political cultures did not apply. The colonized naturally regarded this government with cynicism. Powerful new political formations-“secondary empires” such as the kingdoms of Oyo and Benin and the “canoe houses” of the Niger Delta and Cross River-arose on this basis, often displacing more consensual forms of governance.Īt the end of the nineteenth century, the European “scramble” to impose direct colonization on Africa created what the historian Basil Davidson called “the Black Man’s Burden”: a state imposed by colonial masters on societies that did not want it, a state utterly foreign in language, culture, historical evolution, and ideology, and clearly exploitative in intention. It was difficult or impossible to opt out of trading. Firearms, available only through the Europeans, enabled the acquisition of enslaved people and were indispensable for defense against aggressive slave traders. During the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, Europeans called what became Nigeria “the Slave Coast.” The huge demand for African bodies created a political and moral race to the bottom that reached far inland. Generations of political leaders, and indeed Nigerian society itself, must be held responsible for this situation, but Nigeria’s historical insertion into the world system is also a very important factor. Spectacular levels of corruption underlie all these failures. Kidnapping for ransom afflicts most of the country, and armed insurgencies, banditry, and warlordism affect five of the nation’s six geopolitical zones-all but the southwest, home of Lagos, the commercial capital and center of Nollywood. Electricity and running water are unreliable where they exist at all. 1 The whole educational system, once ambitious and still vast, is in abysmal shape-a looming catastrophe in a nation where the median age is eighteen and an economy dependent on oil exports approaches a foreseeable dead end. Nigeria has surpassed India as the country with the largest population of the desperately poor, and a fifth of the world’s out-of-school children are in Nigeria. Life expectancy is only fifty-four years. But the government of Nigeria has failed in conspicuous ways. Nigeria is certainly not a failed state, as the term is applied to places like Somalia. In this context, Nigerian Pidgin is more important than ever as a linguistic medium of communication and as a symbol of national, regional, and Pan-African unity and communicability. Still, through its storytelling, Nollywood remains a powerful unifying cultural force on the national and Pan-African levels. Twenty-five years on, governmental failures continue to structure the industry, even as new distribution technologies and the transnational corporations that have entered with them have created a whole new sector of production alongside the original one and have fractured the audience along class lines, adding to original linguistic and cultural divisions. This mission was reinterpreted in the context of a low-budget feature-film industry grounded in the informal sector of the economy. The Nigerian film industry known as “Nollywood” was shaped (and even created) by profound weaknesses of the Nigerian state, but it inherited and carried forward one of the state’s major accomplishments: the creation of a national culture on and through television.
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