The University of Ibadan, last week, celebrated its 68th Founders Day. As part of the programmes lined up, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, the President and Chief Executive, Dangote Group; Professor of English and international poet, Professor Niyi Osundare and a business mogul, Chief Jacob Olabode Amao were conferred with honorary doctorate degrees.

In fact, that day, Dangote, donated N250 million to the university on 17 November 2016. The origins of the university are in Yaba College, founded in 1932 in Yaba, Lagos, as the first tertiary educational institute in Nigeria. Yaba College was transferred to Ibadan, becoming the University College of Ibadan, in 1948. The university was founded on its own site on 17 November 1948.

In late 1963, on the university playing-fields, with a celebration marked by talking drums, the Rt. Hon. Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, first Prime Minister of independent Nigeria, as Wikipedia puts it, became the first Chancellor of its independent university. The first Nigerian vice-chancellor of the university was Kenneth Dike, after whom the University of Ibadan’s library is named.

In the interview with TheNEWS, Keneth Dike’s son, Emeka, narrated the pioneering roles of his father as the first VC and in the area of African historiography

Emeka Dike is the son of Kenneth Dike, first Vice Chancellor University of Ibadan. His father, apart from this, pioneered African Historiography. In the past, Europeans believed that since African history was not written down until they came, then Africans did not have history. He changed all that. In this interview with Ademola Adegbamigbe (Idowu Ogunleye snapped the photos); Emeka Dike narrated how his father challenged that notion, his tenure as VC and national issues.

Q: Your dad was the first indigenous vice chancellor of the University of Ibadan, formerly called University College Ibadan and he pioneered African Historiography, can you talk about his pioneering role and challenges he faced…

A: Actually I used to come back from Staff School Ibadan and ask my father, if it is true that you did this and you did that? He was a man that hardly spoke about his own achievements. He was very humble and simple. So I actually found out things about my father first from outside and then I would come home and ask him, rather than him sitting me down and telling me. But having said that, his PhD thesis at the University of London was actually what became the pioneering work that changed the whole world outlook on African History. That is ‘Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1832 -1885’. His first degree was also in African History at Aberdeen University in Scotland and his PhD in London University. When he was doing his PhD, the prevailing notion at the time was that since African history was not written down it was not history and that African history only started when the ‘white man discovered Africa and started recording the story of Africans on paper, so therefore because our history was not recorded physically until then that our history did not start until they came. My father challenged this notion that even though our history was not written down, that in our society we had people who maintain the oral tradition, old men who passed on our tradition from generation to generation. If you want to know where your village came from or what happened, there are people you go and ask and they will tell you the history of your community and my father argued that this is how our history has been passed on so even though it is not written down it is still our history.

How then do you prove that it is your history, as it is not written down? My father then used other disciplines to verify what the oral tradition said, for example, the use of linguistics, for example, if you say that the Igala tribe came from the North, and migrated to the River Niger and settled around Onitsha, how do you prove that? If you trace that the elements of Igala language are still being spoken by that community then you realize that it is the same people that have migrated down, so he used linguistics, then he used archaeology to also verify what the oral history said. And then of course British written records.

So using these other disciplines, he used it to prove whether the oral history was correct or not. This now became known as multi disciplinary approach to African history – by using different disciplines – Linguistics, Archaeology and written material to reconstruct African history. So he was the first person in the world to pioneer that approach which is quite interesting.

People often think that the most important thing my dad did was being the first VC of University of Ibadan. He is referred to as being the father of modern African history and that is worldwide, not just in Nigeria. That is his history in a nutshell.

So this book, the thesis, apart from being the first researched economic history of Nigeria, used this method I discussed to write it. So it became a pioneering work in this field. It was originally published by Oxford University Press and some years ago I got the publishing rights back from them to republish it because one of the problems we have in modern day Africa is that we don’t know our history. That is the problem that existed when my father was alive and the problem is even worse now. If the book is not around, how will people read it to know what is in it?

For me, my main reason for publishing it is that Africans and Nigerians will continue to have access to this material which is a very important book for us to know where we came from and know where we are going.

Q: Do we take it as part of immortalizing your dad?

A: Yes, it is a part of his immortalisation definitely, but so is his work in Ibadan University as an administrator, and as a founder of ‘historical scheme’ in Nigeria. In short his biography (when I republished the book, I put on a chronology of my dad’s achievements at the back of the book) is shocking! When you start reading it, you start asking yourself how did one man achieve so much in a short space of time? He died relatively young, so it is all contained there. His legacy goes beyond the book, his legacy is the history scheme, people like Prof. Ade Ajayi, and his other colleagues who he inspired to do important research work in African history. He inspired them all and they all worked together to produce what we call Nigerian and indeed African history today. The sad thing is, the young generation, where are they? Are they taking off from where these people left off? And the answer is that nowadays, we have more non-Africans who are experts in African history than Africans!