Andrew E. Barnes . Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria . (Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora.) Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press. 2009. Pp. xii, 330. $95.00.

Abstract

There is an elegant symmetry to this book's argument. Andrew E. Barnes suggests that British colonial administrators (“aristocrats” he calls them, rhetorically) trained northern Nigerian elites to be an autocratic aristocracy in their own image while Protestant missionaries (largely British, but also Canadian, American, and Danish) taught Nigerians to be “yeomen Christians” (p. 108). The colonial administrators are characterized by Barnes as wicked careerists and pro‐Muslim; the missionaries, by contrast, are portrayed as good (if not as good as the later Irish Catholics). According to the author, Protestant efforts to develop key areas were stymied by the scarcely Christian British administrators who banned them from proselytizing the Muslims of the far northern emirates (p. 65). Despite the conflict between two groups of Britons, “northerners” (i.e., Nigerians), Barnes argues, took what they wanted of “Western civilization” and made it their own. The trouble with such an elegantly structured, almost Levi‐Straussian analysis is that it does not really reflect the facts on the ground: a historian would be troubled by neglected variations over place, time, and personality; an ethnographer might find the characterizations of both Britons and Muslim elites as overdetermined by the author's alignment with Christian missionaries. Although the chapters about missionaries are a pleasure to read, there is a sometimes tiring animosity in the chapters that analyze the missionaries' foes, black or white.