History is memory.
It is the record of who we were before we became who we are. It carries our triumphs and failures, the things we built and the things we destroyed, the people we celebrate and those we would rather forget. It explains why borders sit where they do, why certain institutions exist, why some wounds remain open and why people separated by oceans can still recognise pieces of themselves in one another.
History is not supposed to be comfortable. It does not exist simply to make us proud, nor should it exist only to make us ashamed. If something happened, then it belongs to the story whether the present finds it convenient or not. The victories must be told, but so must the defeats. We should remember those who resisted oppression and those who collaborated with it, the societies that created extraordinary things and the injustices that existed within them.
History simply has to be told because the present needs to know what came before it.
Every generation inherits a world shaped by decisions it did not make. We inherit borders we did not draw, wars we did not fight, institutions we did not build and prejudices we did not create. We inherit victories too, although sometimes we are so disconnected from them that we no longer recognise them as ours.
Without history, we inherit the consequences without understanding the causes.
Chinua Achebe once said, “It is the storyteller, in fact, that makes us what we are, that creates history.”
Perhaps that is why history matters so much when we speak about independence.
Independence naturally asks us to think about the future of Nigeria: what kind of country we are building, what has gone wrong, what has worked and what responsibility our generation carries for whatever comes next.
But understanding where we are going also requires looking backwards.
Not merely to 1960. Much further than that.
Nigeria is 66 years independent, but the history of the people who inhabit this country is far older than Nigeria itself.
Before Nigeria
Long before the borders of modern Nigeria were drawn, people were building societies across this land.
The Nok produced remarkable terracotta figures and worked iron more than two thousand years ago. Igbo-Ukwu produced intricate metalwork centuries before colonial rule. Ife became an important political and spiritual centre whose naturalistic sculptures still astonish people today. Oyo became a major political power. Kanem-Bornu connected parts of what is now northern Nigeria to wider African and trans-Saharan worlds.
Then there was Benin.
Under rulers such as Oba Ewuare in the fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Benin expanded politically and transformed its capital. European visitors would later describe an organised city with broad streets, a vast royal complex and sophisticated artistic traditions. Later accounts even described large palm-oil lamps illuminating parts of the city around the palace at night.
That image matters because most of us encounter Benin backwards.
We meet the Bronzes in museums. We hear that they were looted. We learn about the British invasion of 1897 and perhaps about Oba Ovonramwen, who ruled during the destruction of Benin City.
Only afterwards, if at all, do we ask the more interesting question: what kind of society produced those objects in the first place?
Those bronzes did not appear from nowhere. Neither did the walls, palace, guilds, trade networks or political institutions behind them. They were products of generations of human organisation.
None of this requires pretending that precolonial Africa was perfect. These societies fought wars, conquered neighbours and maintained hierarchies. People were enslaved. Rulers abused power. Africans participated in systems that harmed other Africans, including the Atlantic slave trade.
Our ancestors were human beings. They created extraordinary beauty and committed terrible acts, sometimes within the same societies.
Tell that history too.
Because if the first chapter an African child learns about Africa is slavery, followed by colonialism, followed by independence and poverty, an idea has already been planted. Africa becomes a place where history happened to people rather than a place where people made history.
That is not the full story.
We Were There
Consider Jaja of Opobo.
Born in the nineteenth century and enslaved as a child, Jaja rose through the trading house system of Bonny before establishing Opobo and becoming one of the most powerful commercial and political figures in the Niger Delta. His attempts to control his kingdom’s trade eventually brought him into conflict with British commercial interests. In 1887, he was removed from power and exiled.
A little over forty years later, thousands of women across southeastern Nigeria confronted colonial authorities during what became known as the Women’s War of 1929.
These histories complicate the idea that colonialism simply arrived and Africans quietly accepted it.
But Nigerian history does not stop at Nigeria’s borders.
During the Second World War, Nigerian soldiers served in the East African campaign against Fascist Italy. Units of the Nigeria Regiment moved through East Africa, Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia as part of the wider Allied campaign.
Nigerian soldiers later fought thousands of miles away in Burma as part of West African formations fighting Japan, operating through jungle, mountains and monsoon conditions.
I knew about the Second World War long before I knew much about any of this.
I knew Hitler. I knew Churchill. I knew Germany, Japan and D-Day. But where were the Nigerians in the version of the war I understood?
They were there.
That is one of the few places where the personal matters because the experience is probably not unique. We are often taught world history without being shown where we stood inside it.
Then independence changed the meaning of Nigerian service abroad.
In the early 1960s, Nigeria contributed troops to the United Nations operation in the Congo. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi would later serve as commander of the UN force there.
Within a generation, Nigerians had gone from fighting abroad as soldiers of the British Empire to serving internationally under the flag of an independent Nigerian state.
That transition deserves to be remembered.
A History Larger Than Africa
The same widening happens when we look beyond the continent.
The Atlantic slave trade violently scattered millions of Africans across the world, but their descendants did not disappear from history.
In Haiti, enslaved people overthrew one of the world’s most profitable slave colonies and created an independent Black republic. Across the Americas, African people and their descendants shaped language, religion, food, music, warfare, politics and resistance.
The connections appear in places many of us were never taught to look.
Vicente Guerrero, one of the leaders of Mexican independence and later president of Mexico, was of African and Indigenous ancestry and issued a decree abolishing slavery in 1829.
Abram Petrovich Gannibal, born in Africa and taken to Europe as a child, became a military engineer and general in imperial Russia. Generations later, his great-grandson Alexander Pushkin became one of the most important figures in Russian literature.
These people lived radically different lives in different societies. They do not need to be forced into one neat story.
Their existence simply reminds us of something important.
Black history is not a specialist subject sitting politely beside world history. It is part of world history.
The answer is not to know less about everybody else. Nigerian children should learn about Rome, China, Britain, India, the Americas and the great conflicts that shaped the modern world.
But they should also know Jaja.
They should know Benin before 1897, not only after it was destroyed. They should know that Nigerians fought in East Africa and Burma. They should understand that the histories of the continent and diaspora stretch far beyond slavery.
Do not make the world smaller for African children.
Make Africa bigger within their understanding of it.
The Things We Learned to Leave Behind
Historical loss does not only happen when soldiers remove an artefact from a palace or when documents disappear into an archive thousands of miles away.
Sometimes forgetting happens much more quietly, through the things a society gradually learns to become embarrassed by.
Look at photographs of Africans from generations ago and you see hairstyles, clothing, jewellery and forms of body marking worn without apology. Across different societies, markings could communicate family, community, beauty, status, belonging or identity.
Today, many of those practices have disappeared or become associated with backwardness.
Not every practice needed to survive. Cultures change. Some traditions disappear because people decide they no longer serve them, and some practices deserve to disappear entirely.
The more difficult question is what happens when change becomes shame.
Colonialism, religion, formal education, class and globalisation all influenced ideas about what looked modern and what looked primitive. Africans themselves also made choices about what to retain, adapt or abandon.
Religion deserves particular nuance here. Christianity and Islam are deeply woven into Nigerian life, and both now belong to Nigeria’s history too. Millions practise their faith sincerely while remaining deeply connected to their cultures.
The problem is not faith.
The problem begins when accepting something new requires embarrassment about everything that came before it.
We know Jerusalem. We know Mecca. We know London and Washington. Some of us can recite histories written thousands of miles from where we were born yet struggle to name the kingdoms, rebellions, thinkers and women who walked the soil beneath our own feet.
There is nothing wrong with knowing Jerusalem or Mecca.
There is something wrong with knowing everywhere except home.
History is not asking us to go backwards. It is asking us to know what we are moving forward from.
Who Keeps Our Memory?
That question becomes even more uncomfortable when we consider where so much African history physically lives.
Thousands of objects taken from Benin in 1897 were dispersed through museums and private collections around the world. Their return has become part of a much larger conversation about restitution and colonial collections.
Those objects should not only make us ask when they are coming home.
They should make us ask what happens when they do.
What museums are we building? Who is funding the historians, archaeologists, archivists and conservators who will study and protect them? How are oral histories being recorded before the people carrying them disappear? How much of this knowledge is being digitised and made accessible to ordinary Africans?
Returning our history cannot only mean returning objects.
We have to return the knowledge too.
Nigeria already has museums, universities, archives and institutions responsible for preserving cultural heritage. The challenge is turning preservation into widespread historical consciousness.
A bronze sitting in a Nigerian museum but disconnected from the people whose history produced it has only travelled geographically.
The deeper return happens when people understand what they are looking at.
That means books, films, documentaries, games, music, exhibitions and classrooms. It means historians speaking beyond universities. It means African institutions becoming confident custodians and interpreters of African history.
Our history should be capable of speaking to us again.
What Happened to Us, and What We Do With It
Remembering history also means confronting what was done to African and Black people without allowing that history to become the only explanation for the present.
The record is already extensive.
The Atlantic slave trade turned human beings into commodities on an enormous scale. Colonial governments conquered territories, extracted resources and reorganised political systems around imperial interests. Racial theories were constructed to justify domination. Cultural objects were removed, institutions were displaced and generations were taught versions of history that placed Europe at the centre of human development.
Those things happened.
They should not be minimised because discussing them makes people uncomfortable.
But history also tells us about Africans who collaborated with exploitative systems, rulers who harmed their own people and decisions made after independence that cannot honestly be blamed on somebody sitting in London, Paris or Washington.
If history is going to tell the truth, it has to tell it in every direction.
Nigeria has now governed itself for more than six decades. Decisions made by Nigerian leaders have shaped the institutions we inherited today. Corruption, patronage, ethnic division, weak institutions and the repeated prioritisation of private interests over the public good are part of our history too.
Acknowledging colonialism does not absolve us of responsibility for what came afterwards.
At some point, decolonisation has to become more than identifying what was done to us. It also has to become what we decide to do for ourselves.
Kwame Nkrumah wrote that “Freedom brings responsibilities.”
That part is easy to forget.
Political independence gave African states sovereignty. It did not guarantee wise leadership, functioning institutions, economic development or cultural confidence. Those things still have to be built.
Foreign states will pursue their interests. Powerful countries will use economic, diplomatic and political influence where they can. That is not uniquely African history. It is how states have behaved for centuries.
The question is whether Africans understand our own interests well enough to pursue them too.
That is where Pan-Africanism begins to make sense.
Not as a belief in African superiority, nor as hostility towards anybody else, but as historical consciousness and shared responsibility. African people should know our history, preserve our cultures, understand our interests, build our institutions and cooperate where cooperation makes us stronger.
I do not need to hate another people to love my own.
Africa deserves to be taken seriously by Africans.
Before We Forget Who We Are
Independence is usually spoken about as the moment a country begins.
In Nigeria’s case, it should also remind us of everything that came before the country.
1960 matters. It marks the moment Nigeria became responsible for determining its own political future. But it was never the beginning of our story. The people who inherited that independence carried histories stretching back centuries, and the generations inheriting Nigeria today carry them still, whether we know those histories or not.
That is what independence increasingly means: not only freedom, but inheritance.
And inheritance comes with responsibility.
Responsibility to tell the truth about what came before us. Responsibility to preserve what deserves preserving and question what deserves questioning. Responsibility to understand what others did to us without using it to excuse what we continue to do to ourselves.
Perhaps seeing an old photograph of an ancestor with markings on their face or a hairstyle we would never wear today should not make us embarrassed.
We do not have to become them.
We should at least know who they were.
That is the history worth recovering. Not a sanitised history designed only to make us proud, and not one that begins with what was done to us. The kingdoms and the wars belong there. So do the artists and traders, the enslaved and the resistance, the collaboration and the courage. What colonialism changed belongs there, alongside what independence failed to repair.
The achievements and the atrocities are both part of the inheritance.
A people cannot consciously choose their future if somebody else has to explain their past to them first.
History is memory. Memory gives us context, and context carries responsibility.
The people before us have already made their choices. Some built, some destroyed, some resisted, some collaborated, and most probably lived somewhere within the complicated space in between.
Their chapters cannot be rewritten, but they can be remembered honestly.
Ours is still being written.
Before we forget who we are, perhaps it is time we remembered who we have been.
