Changing Social Realities

Expatriates spent the first thirty years of the colonial era seeking to avoid granting Nigerians access to Western intellectual skills. During the period 1930–45, however, expatriates reversed course and committed themselves to providing their targeted populations with as much exposure to Western knowledge as the latter could handle. Separate revolutions occurred in the approach taken to Western education by missions and the colonial government. The import of these revolutions was to make Western-style schooling a regular part of the lives of young Christians and young Muslim elites. Facilitating the revolutions was a sea change in European consciousness about Africans and the impact of colonization on their lives. This growing awareness occurred on many fronts. It was developments in the social sphere, however, that smoothed the acceptance of schools.

The Arcadian dreams the first generations of expatriates brought with them to the North built on assumptions of discrete self-contained populations reproducing themselves. A tribe was a tribe and would always remain a tribe. Tribalism, as understood by Europeans, was a lesser variant of nationalism, which is to say that it took for granted that every individual possessed an ethnic identity and that there was and/or should be a territorial context for the expression of that ethnic identity. Every African belonged somewhere, to some group of people. The expatriates who went to Northern Nigeria were of the opinion that what Africans had to contribute they should contribute within the context of their tribe. Thus, the culture expatriates hoped to pass on to Africans they hoped to pass on within the context of and through the agency of the tribe. Keeping in mind that for the government the Fulani and the Kanuri were ruling races or tribes, the point applies to colonial administrators as well as missionaries.

These assumptions helped shape the initial approaches to cultural transfer taken by both missionaries and administrators. Indirect rule as practiced under Lugard's inspiration aspired to turn ethnic institutions toward political applications—to have tribal leaders, whatever their ilk, serve the needs of the colonial state.