The Growth and Development of Nigerian Historiography: The History of Historians and Historical Writing in Nigeria

Abstract

Articulating and writing what constitutes Nigerian historiography had been quite challenging and tautuous. In a bid to achieve coherent structure and better understanding of the paper, the work is divided into three parts, respectively addressing the ‘past’, the present and the future of Nigerian historiography. The past, reinforces the argument that there existed cultural repertories from the Nigerian history before the advent of colonialism. Other key themes discussed here are to wit: the vitality of oral history and pre[1]colonial Nigerian history. The section on the ‘present’ completely recapitulates the Nigerian historiography since independence, the first historians trained abroad, the first doctorates and the first books published; conceptual debates-politicization, secularization and interdisciplinary, the Study institutionalization and training of leading Nigerian historians, Islamic Centres shaping Nigerian historiography, the emergence of Nigerian historians in the diaspora and the crisis of Modern Nigerian Historiography. In the last segment, the ‘future’, strengthens the argument on the changing trend in Nigerian historiography which reflected in the overall success of Nigerian universities to rebranding themselves by adding International Studies in order to attract more students. Involve surveying the scene in the last five to ten years; what are the major books that have been delivered and what has the major themes been? It will determine themes that will remain dorminant and ones that will dominate in the future. We argued that with the introduction of International Studies, other themes that were emerging and remained dorminant were: diplomacy, international law, Refuges Studies, Politics of Development and Underdevelopment, Gender Studies, Border and Security Studies just to mention but a few; and that all these issues are determined by changing Nigerian historiography overtime. We therefore concluded that as developed by the professional historians, modern Nigerian historiography has come a long way with unprecedented breakthroughs and challenges.