What do you get when dare-devil Jihadists, mad English missionaries and
proud, stubborn, warring natives meet in a clash?
Nigeria.
Formation: From Jihad to Amalgamation tracks the unlikely series
of events and characters that turned a collection of disparate nations
into a British colony in 1914. But the story of Nigeria's formation
begins much earlier, in 1804 when the jihadists launched their attack on
countries along the Niger river. What unfolds is a story of conquests
and slavery, betrayals and bravery, rivers and riots, victors and
vanquished, all of which are central to understanding modern Black
struggles.
Formation runs, like the rivers Niger and Benue, through the rise and
fall of empires. It explores Dan Fodio's revolutionary jihad and the
spread of Islam, the fall of the Oyo Empire, the influence of the
returnee freed slaves, the growing influence of Christianity, and the
palm oil politics in the Niger Delta in the territory that would come to
be known as Nigeria. Inextricably linked to this is the story of the
ascendency of the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution.
Influential figures of Nigeria's historic past, like the founder of the
Sokoto Caliphate, Usman Dan Fodio; Yoruba linguist Samuel Ajayi
Crowther; powerful slave trader, Madam Tinubu; British colonial
administrator, Fred Lugard; and Suffragette and mother to Fela Kuti,
Funmilayo Ransom-Kuti are re-examined, moving them from myth to reality.
Fagbule and Fawehinmi challenge the orthodox understanding of Nigeria's
past as merely a product of colonial interference, revealing an
incredibly complicated portrait of a nation with a tangled history and
self-determination.
