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COLONIAL ITINERARIES: MUHAMMADU DIKKO'S METROPOLITAN ADVENTURES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2020

Moses Ochonu Open the ORCID record for Moses Ochonu [Opens in a new window]
Moses Ochonu*
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Vanderbilt University
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Abstract

In 1921 and 1924 Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina, traveled to Britain on a sightseeing trip, becoming the first emir or chief from Northern Nigeria to visit the British imperial metropole. This article analyzes the colonial relationship that put Dikko in the colonizers’ orbit and favor and paved the way for him to embark on the trips, the colonial logistics and networks that facilitated the journeys, Dikko's experiences and adventures in Britain, and, most importantly, his perspectives on British society, institutions, goods, and forms of leisure. I argue that Dikko, though constrained by serving as a prop in a colonial performance of power, used travel to Britain as a platform to advance metropolitan modernity as an aspirational if distant model of socioeconomic advancement and to give his peers and subjects in Northern Nigeria a textual reference for navigating colonial culture in relation to their own natal Islamo-Hausa cultural norms.

Keywords

West AfricaNigeriaaccommodation to colonialismAfrican modernitiescolonial intermediariesAfrican diaspora
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 179 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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3 By ‘reverse’ ethnography I do not mean that Dikko's narrative challenged or discursively reversed the racist, demeaning representations in European travel narratives on Africa. Rather, I am merely signaling that Dikko's travel to Britain, even though done under the auspices of colonial domination, and his commentary on Britain flipped the paradigmatic trajectory of imperial travel and thus amounted to a returning or reversal of the European imperial travel gaze on Africa.

4 For scholarly analysis of British travel writing on Britain's early empire in the Americas and the Caribbean, see Clark, S. (ed.), Travel Writing and Empire: Post Colonial Theory in Transit (London, 1999)Google Scholar. Several chapters in this volume look at the British colonial gaze on the so-called old empire and dominions. See also Hadfield, A., Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Rennaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a postcolonial critical commentary on Britain's modern empire, see Crowley, P., ‘Introduction: travel, colonialism and encounters with the Maghreb: Algeria’, Studies in Travel Writing, 21:3 (2017), 231–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Franey, L., Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing on Africa, 1855–1902 (London, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffiths, G., ‘Postcolonialism and travel and travel writing’, in Quayson, A. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, Volume I (Cambridge, 2012), 58–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edwards, J. and Graulund, R. (eds.), Postcolonial Travel Writings: Critical Explorations (London, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pratt, M. L, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gualtieri, C., Representations of West Africa as Exotic in British Colonial Travel Writing (Lewiston, NY, 2002)Google Scholar.

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11 See Kagara, B., Sarkin Katsina Muhammadu Dikko, C.B.E., 1865–1944 (Zaria, Nigeria, 1951), 1–3Google Scholar. In the preface the author, Malam Bello Kagara, states that Emir Dikko dictated the context of the book to him over several sessions. He was a diligent scribe, at times inhabiting the authorial voice of the third-person narrator and at other times allowing Dikko's own voice as a first-person self-narrator. Moreover, the idea of writing the biography had been Dikko's, who had probably been convinced to do it by his British interlocutors. It was Dikko who persuaded a reluctant Kagara to write down the emir's narrative of his own life story.

12 The National Archives, London, United Kingdom (TNA) Colonial Office (CO) 583/187/11, Nigeria Original Correspondence, ‘Proposed pilgrimage to Mecca and visit to England by emir of Katsina’.

13 Ibid. 15.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid. 17.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

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26 Ibid. 376.

27 Kagara, Sarkin Katsina, 19.

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31 Kagara, Sarkin Katsina, 26.

32 Ibid. 28.

33 TNA FO 141/699/5, H. E. the Governor of the Sudan, despatch no. 69, 18 Mar. 1933, ‘Pilgrimage of the Emir of Katsina (of Nigeria) via Sudan’; extract from the diary of the emir of Katsina's visit to England and Mecca, 1921.

34 Ibid.

35 National Archives, Kaduna (NAK) KatProf 1951, diary of journey to England and Mecca 1921, hereafter Dikko's Journal, entry for 2 July 1921.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid. Entry for July 4.

38 Kagara, Sarkin Katsina, 28–9.

39 Ibid.

40 TNA FO 141/699/5, extract from the diary of the emir of Katsina's visit to England and Mecca, 1921.

41 NAK KatProf 1951, Dikko's Journal, entry for 4 July.

42 ‘The emir at King Arthur's Court’, The Diss Express and Norfolk and Suffolk Journal, 12 Aug. 1921. See also TNA FO 141/699/5, extract from the diary of the emir of Katsina's visit to England and Mecca, 1921.

43 Northurp, D., Africa's Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850 (Oxford, 2002), 11–13Google Scholar; Tymowski, M., ‘African perceptions of Europeans in the early period of Portuguese expeditions to West Africa’, Itinerario, 39:2 (2015), 221–46, 227CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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46 NAK KatProf 1951, Dikko's Journal, entry for 4 July.

47 Ibid.

48 TNA FO 141/699/5, extract from the diary of the emir of Katsina's visit to England and Mecca, 1921.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid. Entry for 6 July.

51 ‘Wives not to be allowed to go shopping; however, he may take them to the zoo’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 7 July 1921.

52 Ibid.

53 TNA FO 141/699/5, extract from the diary of the emir of Katsina's visit to England and Mecca, 1921.

54 Ibid.

55 NAK KatProf 1951, Dikko's Journal, entry for 7 July.

56 ‘The emir's tour round London’, Dundee Courier, 9 July 1921.

57 Kagara, Muhammadu Dikko, 16.

58 NAK KatProf 1951, Dikko's Journal, entry for 7 July.

59 Ibid.

60 TNA FO 141/699/5, extract from the diary of the emir of Katsina's visit to England and Mecca, 1921.

61 NAK KatProf 1951, Dikko's Journal, entry for 8 July.

62 TNA FO 141/699/5, extract from the diary of the emir of Katsina's visit to England and Mecca, 1921.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.

66 ‘Emir's talk with the King: Nigerian ruler's racing successes, wonderful Buckingham Palace’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 11 July 1921.

67 Ibid.

68 NAK KatProf 1951, Dikko's Journal, entry for 9 July.

69 Ibid.

70 ‘Emir at the palace, amazed at the King's ‘house of houses’, The Leeds Mercury, 11 July 1921.

71 See Cannadine, D., Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar.

72 TNA FO 141/699/5, extract from the diary of the emir of Katsina's visit to England and Mecca, 1921.

73 Ibid.

74 NAK KatProf 1951, Dikko's Journal, entry for 13 July.

75 ‘Emir's flying ‘sensation’, The Leeds Mercury, 4 July 1921.

76 ‘Distinguished visitors’, The Lancashire Daily Post, 15 July 1921.

77 ‘Emir's impression of London’, The Scottsman, 16 July 1921.

78 Umar, Islam and Colonialism, 146–52.

79 ‘Emir down a coal mine’, The Lancashire Daily Post, 28 Oct. 1921.

80 ‘The most terrible weapon’, Lancashire Evening Post, 29 Oct. 1921.

81 Kagara, Sarkin Katsina, 55.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid. 57.

84 ‘Ancient visitors to Plymouth’, The Western Morning News and Mercury, 22 Dec. 1924.

85 ‘Personalities of the week: people in the public eye’, The Illustrated London News, 20 Sept. 1924, 27.

86 Kagara, Sarkin Katsina, 57.

87 ‘Shy Wembley visitors’, The Leeds Mercury, 17 Sept. 1924. The quoted commentary is from the photo caption.

88 ‘Personalities of the week’.

89 Special Collections Research Center, Henry Madden Library, California State University, Fresno, The British Empire Exhibition, Official Guide, 1924, 76.

90 Ibid.

91 A. Clendinning, ‘On the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–25’, (http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anne-clendinning-on-the-british-empire-exhibition-1924-25), accessed 15 Oct. 2016.

92 Ibid.

93 Kagara, Sarkin Katsina, 55.

94 Ibid.

95 Mitchell, T., ‘Orientalism and the exhibitionary order’, in Dirks, N. B. (ed.), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), 289–318, 290Google Scholar.

96 Ibid. 292–3.

97 Ibid.

98 Ibid. 294.

99 Ibid. 293. TNA FO 141/699/5, from the Residency in Cairo, ‘Visit of the emir of Katsina’.

100 Ibid.