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The Cowboys: A Nigerian Acculturative Institution (ca. 1950)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

P.E.H. Hair
P.E.H. Hair*
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Extract

From 1952 to 1955 I carried out field research in eastern Nigeria, centered at Enugu, and I wrote the paper below, with the present title, before leaving Nigeria, which to my regret I have never revisited. It is reproduced with a very slightly edited text (but added explanatory footnotes), since it now supplies a twofold historical testimony, first, to an African situation, and second, to the discourse interests (and terminology) of an expatriate “colonialist,” a British academic historian, half a century ago. In the paper I commented on the first. I now let the second speak for itself. The article should incite Nigerian scholars—or ex-Cowboys—to question, correct, enlarge, and update my account.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 28 , 2001 , pp. 83 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2001

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References

1 I am indebted to Carolyn Brown of Rutgers University for contacting me in 1998 in the course of her own research into the history of Enugu (announced to be published in 2001 as We Were All Slaves: African Miners, Culture and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery, 1914-50), which led me to disinter this paper, in order to show it to her. I am unaware of any fuller notice of the Cowboys. My information in the early 1950s came mainly from a youth, Mark Nnamene of Ebe, formerly Music Master of the Cowboys there; from a student of University College, Ibadan, Mr Nwofor, who was in Enugu in the early 1940s; and from an older man, Mr. Okogu, Assistant Labour Officer, Enugu, who was in Kano in the early 1930s. Professor Brown tells me (personal communication, 1 August 2000) that Cowboys groups also came into being in the Congo and East Africa during World War II, as “an expression of youth/masculine/urban popular culture,” and that she will discuss the phenomenon in a forthcoming article.

2 In the early 1950s the spelling ‘Igbo’ was not yet standard.

3 Subsequent statements about Ebe and Enugu, both factual and interpretative, were based on my field research, of which the only part to be published was a preliminary assessment: “Enugu, an Industrial and Urban Community in Eastern Nigeria, 1914-53” in Proceedings of the Annual Conference (Sociology Section), West African Institute of Economic and Social Research, Ibadan, 1953, 145-69. However, an extensive but incomplete final report, in typescript, was given to Enugu public library in about 1970, of which I retain a copy.

4 After writing the above paper, I watched, at Ikoyi in Lagos, a pack of young children on the edge of a parade ground imitating with gusto the drilling of a section of Nigerian soldiers, and realized that the Cowboys marching was in part a tribute to genuine soldiering. In colonial Nigeria this influence can only have operated at the handful of towns where the tiny army had barracks.