Anthony Ijaola Ayinla Asiwaju was unaware when he delivered his inaugural lecture on December 12, 1984 that it would change his life forever. More importantly, that with that step, he was transforming our consciousness of the seemingly inanimate colonial boundaries of Africa into the living things that they are in reality. The lecture had also earned him immediate summons by the State House, Dodan Barracks, to meet the feared Generals Muhammadu Buhari and his unsmiling Deputy Head of State Tunde Idiagbon. Coincidentally, Nigeria’s borders at the time of the Inaugural were closed. So, for a professor to give a well-advertised lecture about ‘artificial boundaries’ was quite unsettling for the dictatorship. The military regime demanded an advance copy of the lecture which Asiwaju could not produce.
In those days, 40 years ago, as he was being driven by security men to the State House for an uncertain reception, he was unaware that his lecture would lead to the country taking its borders serious by establishing the Nigerian National Boundary Commission. The Inaugural also internationalised his belief that humanity needs a ‘United Nations of Border Peoples’.
Asiwaju is a product of fortuitous circumstances. First, he was not meant to go to school. In the agrarian and Catholic society he grew up in Imeko, the culture was educating the first child, while others were retained in the farm to produce food and some income for the family. So, his elder brother was sent to school, while he remained in the farm. However, his father later moved to the Ado-Odo Area where he became a migrant farmer with no land of his own. He reasoned that if his younger son were trained as a farmer, what farm would he inherit? Therefore, he decided that the latter should also go to school. So the young Asiwaju at 10, began school at St Joseph’s Catholic School in 1949, and St Leo’s Teachers College in 1956. He then taught in many schools until 1963 when he got admission into the University of Ibadan.
Ironically, Asiwaju did not want to become an academic. His ambition was to rise to the post of a secondary school principal. So, despite a scholarship offer, he tried to dodge going for his Masters/Ph.D Programme. When finally he was cornered to do so, he did not like the suggestion by Professor Jacob Ade Ajayi that he should focus on Nigeria-Benin border rather than just on Nigeria. The latter offered Asiwaju a car to take him on a trip through the border, after which he could decide either to reject or accept the proposal. Ajayi’s proposal was a like a divine one as Asiwaju had all the prerequisites for such a novel study. Aside from a strong first degree, he grew up and lived in Imeko, a border town with Benin Republic. Secondly, his parents were from both sides of the border; his father was from Ketu and his mother from Imeko. Both towns are situated in the same geographical, cultural and historical area. Their inhabitants are inter-related and speak the same dialect of Yoruba. In pre-colonial times, both were part of the ancient kingdom of Ketu with capital in Ketu, in today’s Benin Republic. The Ketu Kingdom was destroyed in the 1880s by Dahomey; Imeko in 1982 and Ketu in 1886. When the European colonialists took over the old kingdom, they split it into two: Ketu was in French Dahomey (now, Benin) and Imeko in British Nigeria. Who better to study the boundary and effects of French and British colonial systems on the same people, but a ‘son of the soil’ like Asiwaju. Besides, the research was like Asiwaju reliving the history of his family and their experiences.
His maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Aduke-Afin, was 15 when she was captured along with many others in Ketu when it fell to the Dahomians in 1886. She was enslaved from then until February 1894 when King Behanzin was captured by the French occupation army. Rather than head back to Ketu, she headed towards the more secured areas of Cotonou, Porto Novo (Ajase) and finally, based on reliable information that her mother and some other relatives were in and around Ado-Odo, she headed for that town. There in about 1896, she reconnected with her mother, Ayoka and other relatives from whom she had been separated for a decade.
So, Asiwaju ended doing his doctorate on the impact of the French and British administrations on the same Yoruba people who fall on both sides of the border. It was the study of the experiences of a single people under two European powers with different languages, currencies, cultures and colonial styles: one ‘Direct Rule’ and the other ‘Indirect Rule’. It was a systematic study of a given problematic across two systems. Asiwaju went thematic in his study. For instance, he studied the background of the different administrators, including the schools that produced them, their practices, personnel and training within the context of the French being republicans and the British being monarchists.
The monarchical background of the British in a sense explains why it appealed to them to use pre-colonial monarchical institutions and, where these did not exist, to create them such as the Warrant Chiefs in Igboland.
After publishing his thesis, Asiwaju discovered that there were no comparative studies; so he embarked on studies such as the split of the Akan people between French Cote d’Ivoire and English Ghana and, the Mossi People between French Burkina Faso and English Ghana. He then moved to an African-wide survey. This is the origin of the book “Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations Across Africa’s International Boundaries, 1884-1984″ which he edited.
Forty years after his Inaugural Lecture, I sat across the table from the Emeritus Professor for his analysis on the fundamental changes that have taken place. He noted with sadness that Nigeria’s borders are once again closed with government apparently not learning from the past. He said: “ I live on the route (Nigeria-Benin Border); fuel tanks roll out and rice flows in. It is when you close the border officially, that it begins to boom. Adam Smith praised the so-called smugglers as people who break the law of the state in order to comply with the law of economics. The trader takes his goods to where he can make more profit. Even if you build walls separating countries, they cannot be more solid than the Wall of Berlin, even that broke under socio-economic pressure.”
He said his encounter with the military regime, on his inaugural, gave him the impression that the military listens more: “They admit that they don’t know, and in their heart of hearts, they know they don’t know. If they think an issue is not abrasive, they listen.”