Colonial Hausa Idioms: Toward a West African Ethno-Ethnohistory

Abstract

Understanding how Westerners have been perceived by the African cultures they are ostensibly studying constitutes an instructive reversal of the classical subject-object relationship in Africanist research. By examining the perception of the White Man as embodied in Hausa folklore pertaining to the colonial era we gain a firmer grasp of the indigenous perspective on this period of Nigerien and Nigerian history and better appreciate the significance of clientship as a factor in the colonial relationship. We also find confirmation for the contrast school of colonial historiography which argues that the differences between French and British modes of administration were substantively important for the Africans directly affected by them. While specifically related to African-European relations during the colonial era, the lessons gleaned from an investigation of Hausa ethno-ethnohistory may be generally applicable to the even more ambivalent relationship between social scientist and host community in contemporary Africa. Western treatment of African history has evolved through several distinct phases. The first phase can be characterized as outright denial: Bereft of textual references to, or other corroborative documents from, the dark continent , the West generally denied that Africa had a history. This myth of a static, timeless, ahistorical Africa eventually gave way to the second, more substantive phase in which precolonial empire formation and dissolution was documented and archaeologically verified. African scholars, such as Diop, were instrumental in this renaissance of African historicism in the West.