The Birth of a New Journal

Abstract

Growing up in eastern Nigeria, there was a sense, all around me, of our enduring engagement with our collective history. I vividly recall the words and dance steps of two children’s play songs—one in the English language, and the other in my mother tongue, Igbo—that outlined the assassination ofNigeria’s secondmilitary head of state, General Murtala Ramat Muhammed. The English melody was a clapping song; the Igbo, a clapping, foot and dance song of sorts called oga. Both lyrics captured in graphic detail the events of the morning of February 13, 1976, “when thewicked devilDimka killed our head of state.” The oga song and dance even reenacted the execution of the coup leader, Lieutenant Colonel Buka Suka Dimka by firing squad; the reenactment saw its young players channel all of their contrived aggression into loud applause, followed by high pitched screaming in echoed unison: “FIRE nu Dimka! Ticham kpom! kpom! kpom! kpom! kpom! ticham kpom!” At ages six and seven, I doubt that any of us understood the true meaning of what we were singing, nor the contested history behind the lyrics. For us, the catchy tunes were simply play songs that had the ability to work us up into lighthearted, and at the same time, exhilarating frenzies. Memories of those children’s play and dance songs remain some of the most intense childhood recollections for me; capturing seamlessly, albeit unintentionally, interactions; interplays, really, betweenWest African history and everyday children’s realities. That I would become the founding editor-in-chief of a journal ofWest African history almost forty years later is something that I could not have contemplated at the time. That young child would first grow up to become a West Africanist gender and oral historian. Shewould publish scholarly work that documented the lived experience of a people she knew intimately: a reality that she lived. Her expressed aim was to see herself in that history. Then in 2012, James Pritchett, at the time director of African Studies at Michigan State University, and present EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION