Thread by @RemiAdekoya1

So, brothers and sisters, after 4 years of research and writing, I've successfully completed a PhD degree😃!

My thesis investigated how Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Ahmadu Bello constructed sub-national identities in Nigeria in years 1945-1967.

Let me walk you through.

When I decided to do this PhD, I knew I wanted it to be about one of the absolute driving factors of politics. I also knew I wanted to research Nigerian political history.

So, I asked myself, 'what drives politics in Nigeria?'

'Money and identity', myself replied myself.

Ok, so the money issue is pretty straightforward. But when did identity start becoming a major factor in Nigerian Politics? Well, only in the late 1940s when national-level politics took off. Fine. So ok, quite a bit has been written about the social processes that fostered that.

Academics have written about how colonialism and its system of political regionalism encouraged that kind of politics. Some scholars have also focussed on a key leader at the time, most commonly Awolowo, and explained his role in popularizing and politicizing a 'Yoruba' identity.

However, what nobody had done yet was to compare and contrast in systematic fashion how all the 3 Founding Fathers discussed identity and constructed the idea of 'Yorubas', 'Igbos, 'Northerners', 'people of the East' etc.

How did they discursively construct such groups?

Were there common themes in their narrations of the existence of such groups? How do you convince millions of people who have never met each other that they are all part of one community? What do you say to them to convince them of this? And how do you then link that to politics?

So I started gathering all the available material, digital or paper, on every single utterance made by Awolowo, Azikiwe or Bello in the years 1945-1967; books, speeches, interviews, press conferences, radio talks, TV interviews (very rare then), written articles etc.

Visited Nigeria's national archives, scattered in 3 former regions, visited Arewa House foundation which is located in the late Ahmadu Bello's home, I was also kindly granted access to Awolowo's personal library in his former home at Ikenne. Also visited Tribune HQ in Ibadan.

There were also some very useful UK sources though; British Library, British National Archives, they have a lot on colonial-era Nigeria. Newspaper digital archives were very useful UK and US; Guardian, The Times, FT, Economist, Washington Post, NYT. Oyinbo dey keep record o!

So, after gathering everything I could, which amounted to thousands of pages of material, started sorting utterances addressing issue of identity implicitly or explicitly using a theoretical framework devised for the study. After de-selection process, started discourse analysis.

As for my findings, discussing with my supervising professor how best to disseminate these. However, I wrote a chapter summarizing Nigeria's socio-political history 1945-1967. Plan 2 series-tweet much of it here so young Nigerians interested can learn Nigeria's political history!