By Toyin Falola

 Paul Lovejoy has approached African history by studying commodities: kola nuts, salt, tobacco, and cowries, among others. My dialogue with him will reveal the crucial importance of these objects that interface with such issues as trade, trade routes, trading colonies, and short- and long-distance commerce. When you cumulate his studies on these objects—peculiar products—you can understand why no scholar compares with him in his enduring contributions to African Economic History. As objects connect with our desires and habits, Lovejoy becomes a pre-eminent social historian. He followed the trans-Saharan trade routes from one end to the other, diverted to the Sudan, to the Swahili city-states and crossed the Indian Ocean to Gujarat. Is a Zaki allowed to drink? If so, we must add the study of alcohol to the items of trade and habits.

Critical attention that Lovejoy accorded to the exploration, examination and interrogation of slavery would almost make one assume that outside of that intellectual discourse, he barely picks other interests. This is not so. His available contributions to other related but different tropes of knowledge signal that, like all other prolific scholars, he has made an incredible addition to numerous areas of knowledge. One may not have the idea that Lovejoy dedicated much of his intellectual energy to studying objects and commodities. 

In the spirit of fairness, the common attitude to recognizing objects is harsh, taken for granted, based on the misleading assumption that we need not study them. Why natron, why bitter kola? Meanwhile, that orientation towards all these objects and commodities is ill-motivated and misinformed, given the magnitude of ideas that the works of Lovejoy have opened our minds to. The meeting point between people and objects is understanding the cultural ideologies of groups of people. In essence, all human activities are somewhat connected.

Professor Paul Lovejoy

Paul Lovejoy, alongside some other scholars, undertakes the responsibility to understand some aspects of human cultures that are considered good and bad, respectively, concerning how they use them to drive or advance their civilization forward, beyond the imagination of anyone. They look into drugs in human society, their consumption and cultural attitude to their proliferation. Drugs have different levels that they operate within the human body. That they have superficial effects in some cultures or people and have deeper psychological outcomes on others reveals how some groups have decided to immerse themselves in the habit for certain reasons. In Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, the tripod of Lovejoy, Sherratt and Goodman perform anthropological operations on some cultures to bring to the fore the cultural reasons for the consumption of some hard drugs ranging from opium, cocaine, coffee, tobacco, kola, and betelnut among other substances. One thing they reveal is that these consuming habits help  to characterize people and define how they understand drugs from time to time. Drugs are objects, but they are consumable ones with definite results on the human psychological domain and, in some cases, their socioeconomic conditions eventually. 

The central message of their examination in Consuming Habits is that behind the success of countries in their endeavors is an untold story of their deepened involvement in the patronage of some substances as they employ them to perform engagements that dramatically affect the human world. Perhaps, the knowledge that the consumption of drugs has increased crimes and encouraged morally condemnable engagements, the world, through policies, has emphatically opposed the patronage of these substances. The irony of this moral quandary is that hard substances patronage is increasing daily in many countries. This raises important questions about the seriousness of combating consumers of hard substances and their very intentions about others they have successfully de-marketed. The endgame is that when they label some items “legal” or “illegal,” they have disallowed scholars from understanding the cultural context of their patronage and the reason for their continued appropriation. Lovejoy has helped us understand the overlapping beauty of culture and moral principles and how the desire to separate them has always generated unimaginable results with negative consequences. To that extent, they let us understand why humans keep using and abusing these substances. 

In Salt of the Desert Sun: A History of Salt Production and Trade in Central Sudan, Lovejoy uses his scholarly work to understudy production and exchange systems. Before then and after, it has often become the subject that pre-capitalist African cultures were unaware of market forces, a point that Tony Hopkins also demolished in An Economic History of West Africa. Both Lovejoy and Hopkins did not tie the idea of a subsistence economy to the template of racial ideology that drove it. In that ideological template, Africans were unfit to talk about advancement in ways we have observed in Asia, Europe and the Americas. The foundation of that assumption was faulty, given that it was recorded that salt, as an object, was sufficiently distributed across different areas in the Sudan in an advanced economy. Lovejoy saw increased salt production as a testament to the ability to produce mass commodities that they used for various purposes.   

Of course, the hallmark of the economic success of the period was the ability to sustain such a high level of performance to meet the demands of people in different places, especially in contiguous areas. Production quantity would be affected because the major means of conveyance and transportation were animals (camels and, in some cases, horses). However, the salt trade promoted interstate economic affairs of the time. 

Lovejoy opened our minds to equally significant information usually masked in popular narratives. More than the distribution of salt in Western, Central and Eastern Sudan, there was an extensive exchange of cultural ideologies. The more economic engagement they had, the deeper they penetrated the culture of one another through intermarriages, migrations and resettlements. Therefore, these aspects of history reveal the complex nature of local and international politics, as it hinges on impressive economic transactions. The interlink of economy and culture is constantly strengthened by the fact that one would have to absorb the ideas and values of others, using whatever means, before taking advantage of economic strength and activities. 

Commodities, as Lovejoy analyzed, aided the transfer of cultures. He mentioned, for instance, how the Wangara became initiators of economic ideas in the old Songhai empire during the 15th and 16th centuries. The Wangara became exceptional in their economic investments by adding commodities and new products such as kola nuts, and they became actively involved in the spread of the Songhai monetary system based on cowries and gold. Meanwhile, they also produced quality textiles spread across the vast areas of the Hausa territory and Borno. In other words, the vast involvement in the sale of these commodities became the reason for their continued economic growth and what brought them to the limelight in the period, thereby becoming strong reasons for the unity of cultures. Objects facilitated the empowerment of the Wangara, transforming cultural and political institutions. In essence, the onus of Lovejoy’s argument is that there were strong economic institutions in the period constructed on the forms of substances they produced and how they managed to sustain and establish an economic system. 

By Toyin Falola

Presently, there is heightened tension in some parts of Nigeria. In some other parts, there is assurance and calm anticipation. The former is the case with Nigerians who believe — no matter how little — that the Election Tribunal will shake up the announced results of the presidential election. In the latter camp are Nigerians who have peace of mind and confidence that the Tribunal will — whether due to the legitimacy of the Tinubu-Shettima ticket’s win or the expectation that it will be business as usual with the Nigerian Judiciary — uphold the results of the election as announced by INEC.

On either end of this divide are Nigerians whose expectations from the Tribunal reflect their choices during the election, giving credence yet again to how personal choices influence our expectations, perceptions, and interpretation of results. “Let the law run its course.” Yet, those in the Atiku-Okowa camp expect that the law will reverse the election results and declare their candidate as the rightful winner. In the same vein, the Obi-Datti camp believes that justice would only have prevailed when their candidate and his running mate are declared as the rightful winner of the elections. This proves that in a democratic system, there will always be aggrieved people.

Recent elections in the country — starting from the Osun gubernatorial election that preceded the overall national elections in 2023 — have witnessed several vote cancellations. Ayisha Osori drew participants’ attention to this particular concern at the last edition of the Toyin Falola Interviews. Results cancellation has successfully registered as an avenue for manipulating election results, buying time for anointed candidates, and making candidates not so sure of winning the election eventually emerge as winners. It played out in the Adamawa and Kebbi states — where 20 of the 21 local government areas in Kebbi State had cancelled votes, all totaling about 90,000 cancelled votes. There is, therefore, the need to understand what these cancelled votes are, what they mean exactly, and how they have continually served as machinery in the hands of election manipulators. We must also ask ourselves: Why does the election-organizing body cancel votes to the tune of hundreds and tens of thousands in each state? Why do we have so many cancelled votes? 

Vote cancellation often leads to supplementary elections in the affected local government areas. What these supplementary elections mean is that they help aspirants strategize how to gain vote share in the affected areas. It is an avenue to go out and have a do-or-die fight-to-the-finish run. Therefore, it is always in favour of the candidate who was not leading — most likely the one in the second position — during the live counting of election results, as supplementary elections are an avenue to close up the gap and eventually win. 

There is a need to explore the lacunae in the Electoral Act, which has supported widespread vote cancellation, especially the empowerment of electoral officers to cancel election results in a polling unit. Although this empowerment by the Electoral Act is to help mitigate rampant instances of over-voting, it is not worded in a way to help arrive at optimal outcomes, as it leaves vote cancellation at the discretion of each electoral officer — so much so that even an instance of over-voting caused by just one vote is an acceptable condition for vote cancellation.

The ability of just one vote to determine the outcomes of every other vote cast at a particular polling unit on a given election day makes the Electoral Act porous, as the subjectivity of the electoral officers can be leveraged by power-hungry political parties to spur vote cancellation in their opponents’ stronghold, thereby buying themselves more time to deploy more machinery for electoral malpractices — whether it be more thugs, complicit law-enforcement officers, more funding for vote-buying, or any other form of result-manipulating machinery.

Given the sheer amount of power the Electoral Act grants to the INEC body and its officers, it is pertinent that electoral officers, resident electoral commissioners, and returning officers are people of high moral standing that are largely insulated against corruption, bias, and bribery. However, this is rarely the case in Nigeria. The quality of the people who hold these positions — being the ones that control the fairness or otherwise of the electoral body — is what Ayisha Osori finds highly questionable and which we all, as concerned Nigerians, should also find questionable.

Electoral officers, resident commissioners, and returning officers must be independent and non-partisan. However, the reverse is the case in most instances in Nigeria. Over and over again, there have been filmed instances where electoral officers and returning officers showed bias and were partisan outright in discharging their duties. We have also witnessed cases where card-carrying members of political parties end up in these electoral positions. Ayisha Osori believes that Nigeria’s electoral problems will never be resolved if we do not arrive at that point where we thoroughly screen members of the electoral body to check their antecedents, affiliations, political leanings, friends, and associates and ensure that they are as non-partisan as expected. We should hold returning officers, electoral officers, and resident electoral commissioners to a similarly rigorous standard and routine by which we hold our judges.

However, the question remains: even if we were to successfully get enough Nigerians that fit the moral and non-partisan characteristics required for the positions of returning officers and resident electoral commissioners, can we get as many Nigerians to function as electoral officers and presiding officers across all polling units? Knowing the peculiarity of Nigeria as a corrupt country, it is difficult to ascertain the feasibility of a sustainable selection of high-quality and skilled people for the important roles of electoral officers, resident electoral commissioners, and returning officers.

This need stems from the fact that irregularities in the Nigerian electoral process have — from time immemorial — always been through the collaborative efforts of stakeholders in the elections (political parties, electoral officers, resident electoral commissioners, and law enforcement agencies, among others). Take the debacle and shenanigans of the Adamawa gubernatorial election, for instance. The announcements of fake election results were fully backed by the state’s police commissioner and the Department of State Security, and one of these announcements was made by the Resident Electoral Commissioner for Adamawa State. This said, the announcement was made without the breakdown of results or any proof — all the REC had to declare the APC candidate as the election winner. But for the intervention of the national body of INEC, the announcement would have held water, leaving the eventual true winner Ahmadu Finitri to challenge the election results through the rigorous and sometimes unrewarding path of election tribunals and courts of justice.

Therefore, it is insufficient to call for adjustments to the Electoral Act or increased funding for Nigerian elections. The more compelling questions need to be asked, there has to be a full mapping out of the root problems of the Nigerian electoral system and process, and there is also the need to combat these problems collaboratively, the same way stakeholders have been collaborating to cause irregularities or engage in electoral malpractices.

If anything, one of Nigeria’s biggest problems is that corruption and crime are enticing and promising in the country — enticing because Nigeria is a largely poor country where one’s engagement in crime or corruption could be their easy pass to a future of generational wealth, and promising because the consequences of corruption in Nigeria are ridiculously low, even if the perpetrators are accosted. 

Since crime pays off and being a criminal is not dangerous, there is less motivation to desist from criminal or illegal acts in the country. To fully combat electoral malpractices, engaging in electoral crime has to be made unenticing, and the easiest way to make it unenticing to other Nigerians is to ensure that perpetrators of any form of electoral crime are severely and appropriately punished. 

When some are made scapegoats, and there is an active and heightened search for electoral offenders, the people would understand that there is no more laxity or laissez-faire to electoral processes in the country. Anything short of this would mean that our elections would continue to be as they have always been — which would, in turn, give some people the audacity to claim that some others can never emerge as the winner because they do not have the structure to win, of which structure here is nothing but the structure of electoral manipulation.

Another point to ponder from Ayisha Osori’s commentaries on the 2023 elections is the possibility of us all burrowing down an endless rabbit hole if we solely banked on the results from the elections — especially the presidential election — as our point of reference for claiming that the 2023 elections were free, fair, and credible. According to her, the competitiveness in the presidential results does not automatically translate to a strengthened democracy. In her words, “…there is a thing like competitive authoritarianism. You can have competitive results without the country being more democratic.” Osori believes that solely focusing on the results as a way of proving the credibility of the 2023 elections is a distraction from the other pockets of issues aggregated by agitators in their claim that the elections were neither free, fair, nor credible.

If competitive authoritarianism or any of its variants was truly the case in the 2023 elections — that is, if the results are rather a subtle way of rigging to evade detection or make it difficult to prove irregularity — then the perpetrators would have successfully set Nigeria back by many years. This is because while we would have gone back to something akin to the crude years of massive and widespread electoral malpractice, the subtlety in the perpetrators’ actions would make it much more difficult to prove, and to be difficult to prove is equivalent to it being difficult to identify. Difficulty in identifying the problems and their characteristics means there will be a corresponding difficulty in battling the problem. And there, thus, the puzzle of the Nigerian 2023 elections lies.

In the coming years, Nigerians and their newly elected leaders will not only need to drag the country out of the mire of economic calamity and insecurity but will also need to answer fundamental questions that will shape the approach to elections and electoral processes and choices in the country — some of these questions are what Ayisha Osori asked and commented on during the discourse.

 This is the final part of my reflections on the Panel Discussion on Nigeria’s 2023 elections by Ayisha Osori, Jibrin Ibrahim, Cynthia Mbamalu, and Chido Onumah. The session, which has received millions of views across different platforms, discussed the various aspects of the elections. My views  are not necessarily those of the four panelists. For the transcripts, see:

YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mDGGO7ffzuw

Facebook: https://fb.watch/jX_ecFA_ZE/

By Toyin Falola

The history of slavery has always attracted nuances from those who examine its attendant consequences, implications and significance or lack thereof, in the world of the perpetrators and the victims. Incidentally, the activities of history are not exclusive for any party to relay. No matter the gravity of destruction undertaken by one person to another, each has the latitude but not necessarily the moral right to relay history. This opportunity has been over-flogged by everyone who immediately rushes to inscribe issues on the black and white paper, even when they are quite aware of the overbearing problems they constituted for the issues they raise or discuss.

                                      Prof. Paul Lovejoy

For slavery as an epochal event in the history of Africans, numerous writers have struggled to put their sides of the story down for the consumption of the public. Thus, objective works on slavery are understandably inadequate for obvious reasons. Those with a resource to objectively evaluate the experiences are already compromised by commission or collaboration. Commission because they are beneficiaries of the morally reprehensible actions of slavery, and collaboration because they have a history of playing an integral role in the process mentioned.

The cumulative work of Paul Lovejoy is constantly reminiscent of a generous engagement of a committed intellectual who makes painstaking and laudable efforts to resist the partisan temptation to mischaracterize the events of slavery, especially as seen from the angle of the exploited: Africans.

The intellectual works he has produced on slavery are massive, and from them, we have gained insight as to how the experience of slavery was not only wreaking emotional havoc on the victims and their offspring but was also the source of psychological, economic, moral and ideological trauma which they face today. For instance, Lovejoy x-rays the underlying challenges enslaved Africans face in an excruciatingly traumatic way. In Slavery, Abolition, and the Transition into Colonialism in Sierra Leone, the scholar educated us about the deep-seated racism that motivated and also characterized the business of slavery in Africa. It seems very apparent, for example, that the underrepresentation of figures of Africans who were the victims of slavery was aimed at undermining the outrageous roles played by Europeans in the event of history. The book tells us, among other things, that contrary to the belief that slavery tuned down in Sierra Leone, numerous events of history reveal the patterns of enslavement that were consistent there. In all fairness, these patterns were not devoid of the brutally dangerous styles by which the people were subjected to ridicule. Apart from denying them the decency of human dignity, the Sierra Leoneans of the slavery period were forced to undergo torturous processes of naked and blatant destruction. 

In 2011, Lovejoy made another seminal academic exploration of reevaluating the aftermath effects of the experience. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa is a landmark, unfolding in understanding otherwise misconstrued information that earlier works have made. Several materials available on transatlantic slavery underplayed the figures and gravity of the experience in ways that one would believe was passive historical event that did not deserve attention. The implications of this orientation are numerous. Among other things, reducing the figures taken into slavery intends to achieve a purpose for which luxury the victims of slavery cannot afford. That the number of enslaved Africans was reduced, among other things, paints the European perpetrators as passive actors in the problems of Africans. And more than this, it obscures the underlying problems that the people would face in contemporary times, among which is the descaling of intellectual and economic power. Enslaved Africans carted away from their bosom in Africa were individuals of intellectual and economic importance. They were the architects of their people, doctors of their people, craftswomen and men and creatives who were drawn away forcefully, which had outrageous consequences on the continent. Invariably, Lovejoy offers a wide range of interpretations and conclusions. 

Lovejoy has dedicated much of his intellectual energy to examining these historical events so that the scholarly efforts to appropriately register the contributions of every party to the problems of Africans and others who once experienced slavery would be understood and put into the right context. If anyone offers us data about the challenges associated with slavery and colonialism, scholars have the moral responsibility to interrogate the data so that they would understand the hidden messages kept in the documents. Such is the energy dissipated by Lovejoy when he wrote an exemplary work on The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature. What he does in the book is to interrogate the problems keenly connected to the history of the enslavement of Africans and the economic opportunities that perpetrators enjoyed during the time. In his review of relevant literature, he understood that the accuracy of the figures given is contestable. And more than this, his examination of the events reveals that slavery was systematically encouraged and morally supported by Europeans who offered everything to make such an experience a success for the perpetrators. For instance, locals involved themselves more in internecine wars, conflicts and hostilities that led to the enslavement of others for sale. The expectation that these Europeans would do their bidding contributed to why they fought their types, which worked for them for a long time. Nevertheless, they were left to suffer the consequences themselves. 

With the same interest and energy, this scholar of stellar academic contributions has considered the troubles and terrible experiences enslaved Africans faced in the New World. The work titled Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora helps us to contextualize the challenges of people displaced by Europeans for economic reasons. The victims were first exposed to an unfriendly atmosphere where they could not enjoy the dignity of being humans. They faced unprecedented racial abuses, were confronted with a deepened identity crisis, and were overwhelmed by social challenges that immersed them in the problems mentioned. Therefore, the accumulation of these bad experiences triggered them to think about their very background in Africa. While consumed by the challenges they faced there, they were relieved by their experiences of their indigenous life. They found assistance in nearly all the things done in the past before they crossed their borders, either deliberately or forcefully. They have, therefore, weathered all conceivable challenges directed towards them, and they now become very important in the diaspora as external wings of Africans who now contribute in different dimensions to the uplift of the African nation. The work’s central message is that enslaved Africans could not but experience divided and unstable consciousness. They are already helpless in determining what happens to them from when they were taken to the New World, but they can create a better experience in New World.

It is, therefore, understandable why his intellectual mates have consistently revered Paul Lovejoy. His dedication to studying recent African challenges has yielded substantial outcomes for the people. For one, his research involvements have taught us that the experience of slavery sets the history of Africa and Africans back but does not necessarily define it. This is underscored by the awareness that numerous great things are associated with the continent in the distance and proximal past, so they cannot be defined by it. He made very revealing comments about achieving specifics about captives forced to the periphery in a strange land. He understands that there is the coloration of ethnic identity associated with slavery, which means individuals either in the Americas or Europe as enslaved Africans can have their origin looked into so that appropriate information about them can be sourced. It is a relief that he mentioned, among other things, that capitalist ambition was the primary driver of the slavery business in England and other European countries. And for them to continue to have necessary powers over others, they needed access to human and natural resources that would be used to their advantage. 

All the works he has authored serve as incredible sources of rigorous knowledge on slavery. Without the various books and essays by Paul Lovejoy, our understanding of slavery in general and the trans-Atlantic slave trade would have been considerably diminished.

(This is Part 1 of the Prelude of the Interviews with Professor Paul Lovejoy on his long career, to be conducted in multiple locations, including Toronto and Costa Rica)