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Our Mission

Editorial Note

Our Mission

More than at any other time, the discipline of history today in Nigeria, is under severe stress. Perplexed by economic crises of immense proportions and dominated by the craze for money and by the politics of the moment, we have become distorted in our orientation and deluded of any deep consciousness of history. We live as if all that matters is today. In private and in public, our citizens are routinely treated to dreary lectures on the irrelevance and insignificance of a systematic knowledge of our past. In our quest for survival, we associate modernization only with science and technology. We remain completely oblivious of the fact that modernization can never take place in a vacuum. We seemed determined to go on record as the first nation to make a meaningful progress without reference to the accumulated values, experience and culture of yesteryears. We forget that today is a product of yesterday and that a nation that has no sense of history has put its future on the lines. No wonder we make the same mistakes again and again.

The discipline of history is routinely dismissed as dispensable. History which used to be an attractive subject has dropped to the bottom of the ladder of priorities for intending undergraduates, Historians receive little or no regard in a society that is in a haste to modernize and that places emphasis solely on science and the acquisition of material wealth. The Journal of the Historical, Society of Nigeria which in the last two decades has appeared only erratically has virtually ceased publication. Even Tarikh, another publication of the Historical Society of Nigeria, meant to take advances in historical research to the level of high school students and laymen, has become a thing of the past.

It is against this background of a distorted and perverted notion of modernization and a misguided conception of the relevance of history to the nation building that the lfe Journal of History is being launched. The Journal aims at making historical research pleasurable. It is meant to fill a gap, an important gap, which has been created in the negative attitude to, and the practice of history and history education in Nigeria.

This point must be stressed because it is of universal significance. As the Russian emigre, Aleksandr Soizhenitsyn, warned. in 1972 while receiving the noble Prize for Literature, the excision of the memory of any people “is not only their personal misfortune but a calamity for the whole humanity”. Twelve years earlier, in 1960, the year of Nigerian independence, Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike, the first African Professor of African History at Ibadan, had voiced a similar opinion: the need to create in our people a deep and enduring sense of history,

if we will ever make it as a t nation because, “a study of the past illuminates the problems of our day”, Thirty-two years after Dike spoke and eight years after his death, his seminal words remain valid. They were even echoed just recently by no less a person than President lbrahim Babangida himself who, alarmed at the pervasive negative attitude to the nation’s cultural heritage, warned of the dire consequences awaiting a nation that fails to appropriate for its present and future lessons from a conscious study of its past: “We should cultivate a keen sense of history. Really we have no choice if we are to attain a respectable position in the world. We shall continue to expose ourselves to international ridicule if we have no heritage to fall back on”.

Processor Dike was indeed far-sighted. It is for his abiding commitment to the relevance of history to nation-building, his unshaken believe in the validity of African history, as well as his pioneering intellectual contributions to the Evolution of African histography that this maiden issue of the Ife Journal of History is being dedicated to the memory of Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike and all he stood for.

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