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The Nigerian Records Survey Remembered*

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

Since all of today's trained African historians took up their burden in the 1960s or later decades, it is gratifying to be an untrained African historian who began in the 1950s, inasmuch as my early career can now be immodestly presented to younger researchers as historical documentation. This thought has arisen when reading in HA 18 a contribution by Simon Heap on the Nigerian National Archives at Ibadan. The archive's inspired founder, Kenneth Onwuka Dike, being long dead, a note on the history of the archives, or rather on its prehistory, can be offered from probably the Only Survivor.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 20 , 1993 , pp. 391 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1993

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Footnotes

*

An Article by J. C. Enwere (“Conservation of Nigerian Archives,” African Research and Documentation 51 (1991):5-13) refers to the foundation of the archives, but makes no mention of the mission records. In respect of those mission records that survive in local churches, Enwere quotes a statement to the effect that “no systematic effort has been made to collect them.” A significant proportion of the surviving local church records of eastern Nigeria were systematically collected in the 1960s to form an archive at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, but were destroyed during the subsequent civil war.

References

Notes

1. Although located at the University, strictly speaking, WAISER was not part of the university but an independent institution financed directly from a London fund called Colonial Development and Welfare. This modifies Heap's statement that from 1954 the Archives operated from “two rooms of the university.”

2. The cutoff dates supplied by Heap are, however, later than I remember them, so presumably since my day the missions have handed over more recent records.

3. Chadwick, the hero of the notable semi-documentary film “Daybreak in Udi,” a visual historical record later sliced up by the Nigerian authorities to remove the shots of bare-breasted women. I subsequently took Ulli Beier, the art expert, to see the collection at Udi and he embarrassed me not a little by flying into a rage and tearing off the labels stuck on the artefacts. He believed they should have been left in situ, a rather indulgently high-minded view.

4. Report on the Preservation and Administration of Historical Records and the Establishment of a Public Record Office in Nigeria, by Dike, K.O. (Lagos, 1954).Google Scholar Dike did the important bits, particularly the recommendations; I supplied half the historical introduction (pp. 5-10) and one-third of the description of records (pp. 19-23).

5. Ibadan 28 (July 1970): 102Google Scholar, a letter on Frobenius and the Ife heads. I had seen the Ibadan administration file on the Frobenius expedition (a file whose intriguing contents still shout out for published study) in the Survey office at Ibadan, but when the file was sought in the Nigerian Archives twenty years later, by a former pupil of mine, it could not be located. I can only hope that it has resurfaced.