9 - Reconceptualizing Community: Local Histories

Summary

Since the 1950s, and increasingly since the late 1970s, a voluminous body of local historical writing has emerged in Igboland.¹ The genre consists of books and pamphlets focusing on the history and culture of a particular community—a village, “town,” or “clan.” Many of these books carry a title or subtitle indicating that the work is a “history” or a “short history” of a particular place. But more baroque versions exist as well, such as the Rise and Fall of the Arochukwu Empire 1400–1902: Perspective for the 21st Century (Onwukwe 1995). Most authors are not academics working in the history departments of Nigeria's numerous universities, but non-professional historians of various origins and occupations, usually well educated. Their books are printed and published locally, but rarely reach the few regular channels of book distribution available in Nigeria today.

This lively genre of local historical writing is not unique to Nigeria or even Africa. But it has developed with a particular strength and character in Igboland during recent decades. This chapter analyzes Igbo local history-writing as a genre with typical content and lines of argument, looking at the authors, contexts, and audience of local histories, at the methods and narrative strategies employed, and at the sometimes ambivalent relationship between local historical writing and the academic discipline of history. Igbo local historians (re)define and (re)construct the local community. They employ certain key concepts—“history,” “culture,” and “modern development”—which originated in the world of Western education. But they use and “localize” these concepts for their own purposes, giving them both a unique identity and “a place in the world” (Harneit-Sievers 2002). This (re)definition of the Igbo local community, it is argued further, takes place within the context of, but also at a distinctive distance from, Igbo ethnic identity.

Igbo local histories form a genre primarily written by and for the indigenes of a particular community. With very few exceptions, authors write about their owncommunities of origin—mostly a “town,” sometimes a smaller unit such as the village. Consequently, the few histories focusing on Igboland's “cosmopolitan” cities such as Onitsha (Bosah n.d.; Akosa 1987), Umuahia (Asiegbu 1987), or Enugu (Agu 1986) largely deal with the history and culture of the indigenes and have little to say about cities’ twentieth-century urbanization process. This confirms, once more, the common view that modern cities are not perceived as communities.