Emirs in London: Subaltern Travel and Nigeria’s Modernity By Moses Ochonu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Emirs in London: Subaltern Travel and Nigeria's Modernity by Moses Ochonu Oliver Coates Emirs in London: Subaltern Travel and Nigeria's Modernity BY MOSES OCHONU Indiana UP, 2022. 390 pp. ISBN 9780253059154 paper. Emirs in London: Subaltern Travel and Nigeria's Modernity explores the history of traveling northern Nigerian aristocrats within the British Empire. Although Ochonu's major study is focused on Nigerian visitors to the United Kingdom, its focus is far [End Page 194] broader. Ochonu is concerned with the ways in which northern travelers interpreted and appropriated British culture for Nigerian audiences and the degree in which some Emirs were able to use British patronage to undertake parallel visits, typically performing the hajj during their "official" visit to England. The result is a geographically and textually complex study focusing on African understandings of Britain. Ochonu recounts the "imperial adventures of African tourists and sightseers in Britain" (5), but his analysis reveals how these are inseparable from the crafted texts in which they are transmitted. These promote the teller as much as they rejoice in imparting their tale. Within the texts, one can find "the magical appeal of wonder" (8), yet this too presents more than meets the eye, as travelers adopted longer-term Hausa cultural understandings of the magical and the unseen to represent not only novel metropolitan experiences, but also their own status and exceptionality as purveyors of otherwise unavailable facts and experiences. Northern Nigerian travelers were engaging in cross-cultural translation. Ochonu locates his study at the meeting-point of literatures on colonial travel (47) as well as "imperial courtship," or British colonial officials' patronage of African aristocrats whom they deemed to be "loyal" and conservative influences within northern Nigerian society (11). These northern aristocrats and their entourage belong, Ochonu argues, to a category of "subaltern travel" (12), which was reliant on colonial power to schedule tours and grant diplomatic passage but able to critique and challenge aspects of this asymmetrical world. While Ochonu's travelers had the ability to pen captivating tales about their travels, they were not immune from censure within northern Nigeria, for all their social status. Revealingly, Ochonu quotes Abubakar Gumi's criticism of traveling Emirs as betraying those ordinary Muslims who looked to such aristocrats for religious leadership (47). Ochonu draws on a rich and largely unexplored Hausa language sourcebase. Emirs in London unfolds at a time when the written language was undergoing major changes; particularly, the transition from use of the ajami script using Arabic letters to its Roman counterpart. During the 1930s and 1940s, the British promoted the dissemination of printed Romanized Hausa via several institutions and publications, including the Northern Nigerian Literature Bureau based in Tukur Tukur outside of Zaria (55), subsequently the Gaskiya Corporation (61), as well as the development of a pioneering Roman Hausa newspaper Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo ("Truth Is Worth More Than A Penny") during World War Two (60). A war on Roman illiteracy was declared, including a Yaki da Jahilci ("war against ignorance") (66), which turned literacy into a "commodity desirable for everyone" but above all as a marker of education and social status (67). Some northerners remained unenthusiastic about Romanized Hausa "boko" or book-learning and instead chose to turn to "learned men" when they wished to engage with colonial ideas (67). Nonetheless, the corporation subsequently published several key Hausa travelogues, such as Abubakar Imam's Tafiya Mabudin Ilimi and Muhammadu Ndayako's Tafiyan Etsu Nupe Ingila (64). Imam's Tafiya Mabudin Ilimi, an account of his visit to London as part of a key West African journalistic delegation in 1943, was based on a diary he kept. It includes episodes recounting his survival of a Nazi aerial raid on the maritime [End Page 195] convoy between West Africa and London and Imam's interactions with his fellow journalists, including prominent Nigerian nationalist and newspaperman Nnamdi Azikiwe (70, 74). Ochonu reads Tafiya Mabudin Ilimi as a "cultural project designed to satisfy the growing aesthetic and cultural appetites" of northern Nigeria's Hausa readerships (70). The narrative presents a "casual, folksy . . . style," which draws on "folkloric template[s]" found in Hausa oral culture (70) and uses "several rhetorical devices," "imagery...