Nigeria’s University Age by Tim Livsey

Author:Tim Livsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Student Culture and Independence

The fence incident coincided with broader changes in Ibadan student culture. In the early 1950s, students were subjects of a colonial government that looked set to endure for many years, but towards the end of the decade this was no longer the case. The imminent transfer of power encouraged students’ criticisms of imperial frames for development, and the university they attended changed too. There were more students, room sharing was introduced, and staff-to-student ratios increased.139 A new generation of students with different priorities from their predecessors could be critical of them, often not fully appreciating the challenges they had faced.

Earlier students’ engagement with imperial frames could seem ridiculous to students like Latifat Okunnu, who joined Ibadan in 1959. ‘We were called rebels because we revolutionised the accepted standard of female behaviour in our time’, she remembered. ‘Previous female students had behaved like people in the Victorian age.’ For Okunnu, earlier women students ‘were very, very restrained and cold which was not African’ while her generation ‘were used to greeting ourselves very warmly and even loudly and noisily … we wore our informal clothes and shouted across the room to each other’.140 Okunnu’s sense of an African frame of reference was echoed in Ibadan students’ protests about the 1960 Sharpeville massacre and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, which asserted their membership of a pan-African community.141

Students were delighted by Nigerian independence, which was accompanied by new affirmations of a national frame of reference. Ballroom dance, for example, could now be ridiculed. The alumni Femi Osofisan and Bode Lucas remembered that: FO:‘We were very conscious of creating an identity for a new nation, yes. And Nigerian music was very popular, so we made fun of those who were dancing…’

BL: ‘The foxtrot, or rumba or tango [laughs].’142

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.