Premium Times Books publishes "The Sokoto Caliphate", first PhD thesis by University of Ibadan

Cover Page of The Sokoto Caliphate

Murray Last, author of The Sokoto Caliphate, was a graduate student at the prestigious Yale University when he first heard about the ‘Fulani Empire’ in northern Nigeria.

That was in 1959, the year Northern Region – the jurisdiction that succeeded the ‘Empire’ – became self-governing under the rules created by colonial British government.

The young Mr Last’s African History professor, Harry Rudin, a Cameroonian, also introduced him to the Qadiriyya movement in West Africa.

But as much as he appreciated Mr Rudin’s scholarly leadership, Yale did not ignite Murray Last’s interest in the in the ‘Empire’, that happened at the University College, Ibadan (UCI).

In 1960 when Nigeria was newly independent, African History was getting more interest as a discipline in Europe and America, but it was still plagued by the pre-WWII mindset that showcased the written accounts of European traders, missionaries, mercenaries and conquerors as the totality of African History.

The “European scholar”, Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike later wrote in the introduction to The Sokoto Caliphate, that some historians “tended to equate written documents with history, and to take the absence of documents to mean the absence of events worthy of historical study”.

Mr Dike was the first African to complete training in western historical scholarship at King’s College, London. He was also the first African appointed as Professor of History at UCI and Vice-Chancellor from 1962 to 1967 after UCI became a full-fledged university. He died in 1983.

“As a result, in the nineteenth century, when Europe occupied Africa, her scholars did not attempt to understand or to build on the historical traditions in existence there,” the late Prof Dike said.

It was not only historical traditions that 19th Century European scholars ignored, there were also documentary evidence, written by Africans in real time, that they bypassed either because of the forestated lackadaisical approach to the history of sub-Saharan Africans or out of genuine ignorance of the documents’ existence.

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