THREAD
117yrs ago on 29 October 1902, Frederick John Dealtry Lugard in consultation with Walter Richard Samuel Miller replaced Arabic & Arabic script Hausa (Ajami) with English & Romanized Hausa as the official language of Northern Nigeria. What were the effects of this change?
117yrs ago on 29 October 1902, Frederick John Dealtry Lugard in consultation with Walter Richard Samuel Miller replaced Arabic & Arabic script Hausa (Ajami) with English & Romanized Hausa as the official language of Northern Nigeria. What were the effects of this change?
A. The structural dislocation of education in Northern Nigeria. Prior to the change, century-old scholarships were developed in humanistic, scientific and social-scientific disciplines in Arabic & Ajami. But all of those scholarships henceforth were rendered moribund & obsolete.
B. The language change also rendered those who had their education in Arabic & Ajami as "uneducated". To be termed "literate" is to speak & write in English. Northern Nigeria is still grappling with this transition to neo-colonial modernity & BH is connected to this grievance.
C. The linguistic displacement also created a generational detachment where young people from Northern Nigeria learn their history from the colonial archives and are told of the wars, slavery, & barbarism of their forefathers, not their contribution to knowledge and scholarship.
D. In addition to the language change, colonial theft & intentional purging of texts by the Emirs who collaborated with the colonialists deprived us of rich historical sources. Is it not weird today that people rely on Herbert Richmond Palmer&Heinrich Barth to know their history?
E. The language change was also backed by financial incentives. In 1904, colonial missionaries started teaching previously literate Islamic scholars in the Roman Hausa script for one shilling per month. Lugard spoke about this incentive: "Some progress has been made both in..
the teaching of English and of the substitution of the Roman character for the vernacular manuscript. I look at this experiment with great interest, and I am personally anxious to introduce the Roman instead of the Arabic characters for the writing of Hausa, as being more..
adapted to express its sounds and readable by every political officer" Lugard (Annual Report, Northern Nigeria number 476, 1903, 332-3.)
It is important to know this history to understand where we are coming from and how we got to where we are.
It is important to know this history to understand where we are coming from and how we got to where we are.
