Abstract
This chapter examines the memory of childhood in the autobiographies of 30 Nigerians born between 1900 and 1950.1 The identities of the autobiographers cut across multiple ethnic as well as gender lines, and are drawn from both the southern and northern parts of the country. My primary concern is how colonial children as autobiographers remember their childhood, with emphasis on their encounter with colonial modernity and how location and sociocultural transformation influenced child-rearing practices as they were growing up. Unlike in North America and Europe where a distinct subgenre of childhood autobiographical writing has emerged, in Nigeria, with the exception of Wole Soyinka’s Ake, Tanure Ojaide’s Great Boys, Olu Bajowa’s Spring of a Life, and Adelola Adeloye’s My Salad Days, among others, self-narration of childhood is usually a portion of a general life history spanning from birth to adulthood.2 Be that as it may, the memory of childhood in autobiographies represents one of the largest repositories of documentation about children’s life under colonialism. They reveal children’s everyday encounters with “traditional” order and colonial modernity, and render a textual window into the realities of colonial domination and its enduring legacies.
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Notes
Mbonu Ojike, Portrait of a Boy in Africa (New York: East and West Association, 1945);
Obafemi Awolowo, Awo: The Autobiography of Chief Obafemi Awolowo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960);
Ahmadu Bello, My Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962);
Obafemi Awolowo, My Early Life (Lagos: J. West Publications, 1968);
Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey: An Autobiography (New York: Praeger, 1970);
Ahmed Beita Yusuf, A Freedom Fighter: Annotated Memoirs of Mallam Illah Ringim (Sokoto, Nigeria: Sidi Umaru Press, 1978);
Wole Soyinka, Ake: The Years of Childhood (New York: Random House, 1981);
Fatayi Williams, Faces, Cases and Places: Memoirs (London: Butterworths, 1983);
Buchi Emecheta, Head above Water (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1986);
Olu Bajowa, Spring of a Life: An Autobiography (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1992);
Saburi O. Biobaku, When We Were Young (Ibadan: University Press, 1992);
Jolly Tanko Yusuf, That We May Be One: The Autobiography of Nigerian Ambassador Jolly Tanko Yusuf, as told to Lillian V. Grissen (Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995);
Onyemanze Ejiogu, A Nigerian Life: An Autobiography (Ibadan: Kraft Books, 1997);
Yahaya Kwande, The Making of a Northern Nigerian: An Autobiography of Yahaya Kwande (Jos, Nigeria: Quarhess, 1998);
Tanure Ojaide, Great Boys: An African Childhood (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998);
Abdurahman Mora, ed., The Abubakar Imam Memoirs (Zaria: NNPC, 1999);
Twins Seven-Seven, A Dreaming Life: An Autobiography of Chief Twins Seven-Seven, ed. Ulli Beier (Bayreuth, Germany: Eckhard Breitinger, 1999);
Wole Soyinka, Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years — a Memoir, 1945–1967 (London: Methuen, 2000);
Gabriel O. Olusanya, Memoirs of a Disillusioned Patriot (Ibadan: Safer, 2003);
Omo N’Oba Erediauwa, I Remain, Sir, Your Obedient Servant (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 2004);
Biyi Afonja, In His Hands: The Autobiography of a Nigerian Village Boy (Ibadan: Statco Publishers, 2005);
Babatunde Olatunji, The Beat of My Drum: An Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005);
T. E. A. Salubi, T.E.A. Salubi: Witness to British Colonial Rule in Urhoboland and Nigeria, ed. Peter P. Ekeh (Ikeja, Nigeria: Urhobo Historical Society, 2008);
Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009);
Adelola Adeloye, My Salad Days: The Primary School Years (Ibadan: Book Builder, 2009);
Onyemachukwu Okorie, The Audacity of Destiny: An Autobiography of His Royal Highness Eze Onyemachukwu Okorie (Orlu, Nigeria: N-Trinity Press, 2010);
Austine S. O. Okwu, In Truth for Justice and Honor: A Memoir of a Nigerian-Biafran Ambassador (Princeton, NJ: Sungai Books, 2010);
Phebean Ajibola Ogundipe, Up-Country Girl: A Personal Journey and Truthful Portrayal of African Culture (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2013);
Kalu Ogbaa, Carrying My Father’s Torch: A Memoir (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2014).
See, among others, Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh, “Angela’s Ashes: An American Memoir of an Irish Childhood,” Irish Journal of American Studies 13, nos. 12–14 (2004–5): 81–92;
Richard N. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984);
Heather Scutter, “Writing the Childhood Self: Australian Aboriginal Autobiographies, Memoirs, and Testimonies,” The Lion and the Unicorn 25, no. 2 (2001): 226–41;
Loius Irving Horowitz, “Autobiography as the Presentation of Self for Social Immortality,” New Literary History 9 (1977): 173–9.
Colin Heywood, History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 6.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (London, 1789). Other examples of self-narrative of slavery and abolition include, Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave Written by Himself (New York: New American Library, 1845, 1968);
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001, 1861);
William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (London: Penguin Books, 1982, 1847).
S. E. Ogude, Genius in Bondage: A Study of the Origins of American Literature in English (Ile-Ife, Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo University, 1983), 131;
Paul E. Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 3 (2006), 317.
I. B. Thomas, Itan Igbesi Aiye Emi Segilola, Eleyinju Ege, Elegberun Oko L’aiye (Lagos: CSM, 1930).
Kolawole Balogun, Mission to Ghana: Memoir of a Diplomat (New York: Vantage Press, 1963);
Aliu Babatunde Fafunwa, Memoirs of a Nigerian Minister of Education: Professor Aliu Babatunde Fafunwa (Ibadan: Macmillan, 1998);
Isaac Fadoyebo, A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck, ed. David Killingray (Madison: University of Wisconsin, African Studies Program, 1999).
Wole Soyinka, Isara: A Voyage around “Essay” (New York: Random House, 1989), v.
J. S. Coleman, Nigeria: A Background to Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 113.
Alison Izzett, “The Fears and Anxieties of Delinquent Yoruba Children,” Odu 1 (1955), 33.
Nathaniel A. Fadipe, The Sociology of the Yoruba, ed. and with an introduction by F. O. Okediji and O. O. Okediji (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1970), 103.
Claudia Jarzebowski and Thomas Max Safley, eds., Childhood and Emotion: Across Cultures, 1450–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2014);
Peter N. Stearns, “Childhood Emotions in Modern Western History,” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Paula S. Fass (New York: Routledge, 2013), 158–73;
Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994);
Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Claudia Ulbrich, “Self-Narratives as a Source of the History of Emotions,” in Childhood and Emotion, 59–71.
The press decried some of these activities as inhumane. See from the Eastern Nigeria Guardian: “School Children are Buried in the Pit: They are Employed to Dig for School,” January 31, 1945; Moore A. Chukudi, “Autocracy in Schools Deplored,” June, 24, 1948.
The literature on schoolchildren’s experience of Empire Day in Nigeria is underdeveloped. For more about Empire Day in other British colonies, see Anne Spry Rush, Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 1.
Ibid., 15. For more on Stuart see Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).
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Aderinto, S. (2015). Framing the Colonial Child: Childhood Memory and Self-Representation in Autobiographical Writings. In: Aderinto, S. (eds) Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137492937_8
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