A Perilous Voyage to (Oral) History

By Adinoyi Ojo Onukaba

I would like to express my sincere appreciation to all members of Ihima Re-Union Group for inviting me to speak at this occasion. My special thanks goes to my brother, Razaq Obosi, for making sure that I honoured this invitation.
I commend the spirit behind the establishment of this group which is meant to promote peace, mutual understanding and the development of our community. Any platform that allows us to talk about how to advance our common interests as well as how to manage our differences is always preferable to the one in which we fight ourselves.
Therefore, we must keep this group alive and transform it into a formidable platform for the unity, progress and development of Ihima. Throughout history, the harbingers of change are usually no more than a small group of committed and dedicated individuals. So let us never under-estimate the power that this group wields in the age of instant communication which makes it possible for millions of people to share information, knowledge and ideas without the limitations of place, space, and time.
I have been given the latitude to speak on any subject I like. I have therefore chosen to interrogate the danger of relying on unwritten history.
History is an aggregate of past events which are usually documented. But history can be unwritten (oral history) and it is by no means unimportant. History, whether documented or not, is someone's account of past events. It is, therefore, subjective. It reflects the views, values, and biases of the writer. It can be challenged or contested.
Undocumented history, however, is worse. It is often unreliable, careless with details and imprecise. It is more prone to distortion, misinterpretation and manipulation than documented history. Unwritten history is a bomb in the hands of demagogues and hate mongers.
I have titled my remarks, "A Perilous Voyage to (Oral) History.". In it, I have argued that we should be careful in citing oral history as an authority on any matter because the narrators have many limitations and that it serves us better to be looking forward rather looking back.
Let me begin with an anecdote. My brother, Lawal Sani, told me about his experience during the 1991 national population census in which he participated as an enumerator. An old unlettered woman in her late sixties showed up to be counted and Lawal asked her, among other questions, what her age was. "Two hundred", she answered with all the seriousness she could muster. Lawal was flabbergasted. He wanted to know if the woman had counted months. "Two hundred years", she said.
Lawal told her it was not possible to be that old and still be alive. The woman said it was possible and added to Lawal's shock that she had even reduced her age. She said she was sure she was more than two hundred years old. She then spoke about her life, the migrations from one farming settlement to another, contemporaries that were no more and children who had themselves become adults.
That incredulous woman is one of the usual sources of oral history. Many of us might have heard such fabulous tales from old illiterate people in their hundreds. It is not that such narrators set out deliberately to lie or misinform their listeners. No, they say what they know and what they know is a function of their learning, exposure and cognitive ability.
In telling the story of the 200 years old woman, I am not saying that we cannot learn about the past from the mouths of elders. I am just saying that we need to be careful sometimes not to over-rely on their accounts because of the many limitations of such tale bearers.
My second anecdote is that of a retired British colonial staff who had returned to a city in northern Nigeria and was presented with a tourist brochure that listed a building that was constructed under his supervision 30 years earlier as "a 200-year-old monument".
This was an example of written history being distorted due to, I suspect, the carelessness of some indolent civil servants that prepared the tourist brochure. It buttresses the point that history, written or unwritten, cannot always be very reliable. There ought to be a warning attached to all historical accounts: read with caution.
Just as no normal human being is free from self doubt, history too is not free of doubts. One man's history is another man's "histo-lies." Every historical account is contestable. Someone who disagrees with such an account can always label it "a tissue of lies, inaccuracies and fabrications". So, let us be careful in the way we frequently cite oral history as an authority on many issues. They are not always reliable or helpful.
As witnesses to the digital revolution and the momentous changes taking place every day in our world, we should be looking forward rather than looking back. Let us stop dissipating our energies and wasting our time on primordial issues that will take us nowhere. We risk being left behind by the rest of the world if all that occupies our minds is clan rivalry and clan power struggle. Young people are making billions of US Dollars every day through Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
Our world is changing fast. Wars are being fought virtually. Unmanned aircraft are being sent daily to wreak havoc on targets that are thousands of kilometers away. Outer space has become the playground of curious astronauts. Great things are happening in many places, the frontiers of knowledge are expanded daily and we are not part of these great human strides. We are preoccupied with things that are not important. We fight and kill ourselves over primordial issues.
We - I mean all of us here - will have to provide the needed leadership. As enlightened people, it is our duty to lead the way. Let us not surrender this sacred responsibility to our less endowed brothers and sisters who delight in and profit from clan feuds and clan violence. The buttocks cannot avoid rubbing each other because they live together. Disagreements among us are inevitable but we must never allow them to generate into violence.
I spent a year between 1994 and 1995 as a humanitarian staff of the United Nations in Somalia along our current Vice President Professor Yemi Osinbajo. The Horn of African nation chased out its long time dictator, Siad Barre, and quickly descended into chaos. Till today, Somalia does not have a strong central government and its towns and villages are ruled by murderous gangs and militia. The deployment of African Union troops has not stopped the killings in Somalia. It is a failed state, a classic case of the Hobbesian state where life is harsh, brutish and short.
Somalia happens to be one of the few countries in Africa with one ethnic group, one language and one religion. But Somalia's misfortune is her numerous and ever warring clans, sub-clans and sub-sub-clans. Clan wars have brought Somalia to its sorry state today. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis have either died or were in these wars, and many were forced out of the country and have become refugees all over the world. The cost is huge.
I have lived there. I have witnessed war and I have seen human suffering at close range. I know what it is for a state to fail apart and descend into chaos. While we were there, one could buy Somali diplomatic passport for one dollar. There was nobody in charge. Hunger drove many of her beautiful women into prostitution. These are just a few of the horrible effects of (clan) wars.
When I see hate mongers and clan champions at work in Ihima and other places in Ebira land, I think of Somalia and I tremble with fear. Our most recent bout of madness left scores of people dead, many were injured, several houses were burnt and thousands were displaced. The fire next time could be worse.
Therefore, let us do the best we can as individuals and as groups never to let our homeland go the way of Somalia. Because we will all pay dearly for it.
I would like to end these remarks by quoting two African proverbs. The first says that if you want to go fast in life, go alone. But if you want to go far in life, go together.
The second proverb says that if snakes form the habit of moving together, it will be difficult for people or other animals to easily kill them. Snakes have made themselves vulnerable to predators because they move around individually.
We must go together if we want Ihima to go far.
I thank you.