by Toyin Falola
The culture of the Nok people of Jos has been truly magical in its imagery and words. Just like the set of herbalised incisions made by our parents on many of our bodies in childhood, the magical realm translates into Jos itself. This is not because this blessed land is called Jasad (“the body”), as one mythology is credited with labeling it, but merely because the Nok, located in the land of Jos, remain embodied in this geographical area as part of our collective foundation in multiple disciplines of history, archaeology, ethnology, and, indeed, many more.
I may not remember precisely, but I still recall what one textbook reported in 1973: that the Nok, as fellow human beings, were a mysterious people who practically disappeared from the face of the earth and thus could not be found. Perhaps they were strangers who came and left! This is one clear instance of epistemological genocide, an illustration of how foreigners destroy our people and our inventions with impunity.
Utilising the imposed Julian and Gregorian dating system, the Nok people had been living in the Jos area before the first century AD. They did not simply vanish, and they were also not strangers per se. Instead, they are you, my people, who are the indigenes of a great continent. We all know how powerful DNA evidence can be. Therefore, in the instance of the Nok, DNA evidence will later say more, possibly linking Nok imagery with the farms and tools, objects with ideas, the content of ideas with mentalities and worldviews, and all those with the artefacts. Furthermore, the Nok terracotta artefacts, dating back to between 500 BC and AD 200, have affirmed our long history, the genealogy of our science and technology as well as our art, in short our entire being. This is a reality so powerful that it has also become magical.
Early this year, I was in Jos to revisit the collections in the great museum, which are part of our country’s treasured totems. In glee, I literally enrobed my body with the Nok all over, and some pieces collected there, both modern creations and replications, traveled great distances with me. After all, Nok and its culture were never local. Instead, their ideas and creations have travelled widely, even across the great Atlantic to implant themselves into our global civilisation, a collective humanity of greatness, uniqueness, and glory.
In mystical terms, maybe in my previous life in the collective meta-history of our souls, I was a Nok, a member of that civilisation itself. But in my current life, my history, I know I am part of this creative family, in its affirmation of the contributions of Africa to the global civilisation of humanity. For we cannot talk about our collective humanity without invoking the Nok ideal reflected in its inventions and moral philosophy. Therefore, dear Jos—rather, Jasad—we thank you effusively!
Moreover, Nok’s ingenuity has never been disconnected from contemporary history: Instead, it gives us bragging rights, as it also enhances our pride. In the end, it strengthens our humanity, while bequeathing us one of the best museums in the country as a major learning and tourist resource. Archaeology, early history, and early civilisation cannot thrive without Nok’s contributions.
And “J-Town,” as I was introduced to the place in 1975, at the time that I took the journey from Makurdi as a youth corper (“bloody youth corper,” as someone once reminded me of what I was then), was an attractive place. It was love at first sight. J-Town sat elegantly in the middle of our great and oil-rich country. Geographically, it is today just a three-hour drive to the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja. J-Town was different from Ibadan, the land of my birth. It was cooler, less humid. J-Town spread out its wings like the bald eagle that is our national symbol. Most certainly, as it kept occurring to me then, Jos is unlike Ibadan, whose density and expansiveness displaced the green scenes of vegetation and open natural spaces. I still recall that as a historian I entered Central Nigeria, which some of our people also called the Middle Belt, for the first time, indeed away from history books into reality. There were no massive concentrations of people in one spot as I saw at Ojuelegba in Lagos or Dugbe in Ibadan.
That reality of my encounter with J-Town was to be repeated time and again in other visitations, boosted and renewed by friendships, academic collaborations, the hosting of a meeting of the Historical Society of Nigeria, and my appointment as an External Examiner for the History Department in 1988. My heart is still hurt by the harsh truth that, back in Jos, I lost two great friends of that era: the indomitable historian Dr. Don Ohadike, and the ever-charming linguist Dr. Frank Arasanyin. One can underscore that, maybe, both of them are in a better place!
In that very first visit, I was overtaken by sheer naiveté! I am not ashamed to reveal it. Jos had entered the Marxist literature by then, thanks to the works of Eskor Toyo, Bill Freund, and later Professor Monday Mangvwat, as the city to use when teaching class analyses, using the data of the peasantry and the working class. Yes, I had read those and also imbibed the same ethos with all of its intoxicating consciousness fueling a desire to combat the West and its capitalist features. That bright mind, Monday Mangvwat, later the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Jos, developed an entire career around class consciousness, the peasantry, and migrant workers in the Jos region, with his cumulative data presented in his recently released fine book, A History of Class Formation in the Plateau Province of Nigeria, 1902-1960: The Genesis of a Ruling Class. My first visit, however, was before his time in Jos.
But that pre-historic visitation, that is before the scholars that I now know found their destinies at the University of Jos, was in search of sites of tin, columbite, miners, and the exploited labour force that I had read about in books. Like coal in Enugu, tin mining in Jos enabled the leftists to articulate ideas of exploitation and peasant consciousness. The evidence is true, or even more than true, for the fortunes of extensive deposits of tin and columbite invited fortune seekers from the time they knew the resources were there till our country’s 1960 Independence. Valuable were those resources, sent on to the coast in Lagos and Port-Harcourt to find their new homes in Europe. J-Town acquired yet another name: “Tin City!” Jasad, the body of Jos, became a thing made of tin.
Either “A visitor has no eyes!” or, as the Akan say in Ghana, it is “only a stranger that eats the meal cooked with a cursed chicken with one eye!” Yes, blind, but this visitor could see, but being able to see does not translate into being able to know. My ignorance came from searching in the wrong directions. Not that those Marxist ideologies of extractive economies and extraction politics were wrong, but that only remnants of the mining remain in what can be described as a ruined land: exploited, expropriated, and cannibalised. I left the tin and columbite alone, but all the hollows, dug dirt, and lakes remain to this day.
I headed in other directions and saw new things: in the recognition of coolness, congeniality, and hospitality, I discovered the warmth of the people, their friendliness to strangers, and the beauty of the environment. Sure, geographical determinists will point to its elevation, something they put at around 4,000 feet above sea level, making it livable all year round. As important as this geography is, the people are what, to me, count as the greatest asset: the open mindedness and generosity that invites and welcomes.
This livability has grounded J-Town in cosmopolitanism for so long. I saw Yoruba, Kanuri, Igbo, Hausa, Urhobo as well as others whose languages I could not decipher, all living peacefully, amiably. Fun stories, great stories were told everywhere, and they were never tired of them. Stories about great people who passed through Jos or lived in Jos or visited Jos—missionaries and evangelists, teachers and professors, soccer players like the legendary Segun Odegbami, singers and actors, politicians and businessmen and women. It was as if they all came and discovered some hidden treasure, some unforgettable values, while leaving their own traces. I am sure there are many more such treasures in Jos awaiting discoveries.
J-Town survived the outcome of its tin plunderers. Its humanity is indestructible and unconquerable. Its womb expanded to swallow people from various places. I could hear people speak in such languages as Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Tiv, “broken English” (or Pidgin), Afizere, Anaguta, Berom, and many more Nigerian languages. Here was a magnet city of intense heterogeneity, a mini Nigeria already made, with all the tools to manage the conglomerate of people and the agglomeration of voices, sweet voices, not cacophonies of angst. Their tongues and sounds brought more people, and so many more sites of cultures—the nightclubs located here, the pito and burukutu joints located there. Fun lovers had their laughter and comfort, and God lovers received their messages of redemption. People made their homes, praising their destinies for having chosen Jos. “Who wants to live in Lagos?” someone once asked me, not because he was seeking an answer or an affirmation. Instead, it was because he was proud, so proud of Jos. To those who wanted to build houses, they cut the land for them so big that they could have the size of a soccer field as their front yard.
I saw cosmopolitanism first hand, just as I had seen in Lagos or in Ibadan. Emerging fusions of cultures and beings were in display to announce a successful junction where they merged the junctures of lives. Cultures were flourishing, melding in some parts, as in the night clubs, and disaggregating in others: you go to your church while I go to my mosque, and she goes to her shrine, but all of us stayed happy and together. The University of Jos was in its first year when I first visited Jos. Three years earlier, it was the Jos campus of the University of Ibadan, headed by a self-confident and enigmatic historian, Professor Emmanuel Ayandele. The aroma of his tales was still there to smell, in veritable quotes that attested to the elegance of his phrases, and in descriptions that spoke to his combustible persona in quotidian proportions. None of these were an exaggeration, for Ayandele’s prose matched his real demeanour, and the Pedersen index of his style was not at variance with his stochastic volatility.
Cosmopolitanism donates to our happiness, and that happiness leads us to invite others to enjoy our comfort and visions. Stories abound about Jos, and they are stories about happiness: the newly wed and the newly born. I listened to many of the tales as I visited. What does Jos mean? Someone says “the valley,” as there were people who lived on the hilltops, and white people began to mispronounce the Jas hill as Jos. Other enduring stories were told, as in how Gwash, an ancient name for the place, became mispronounced as Jos by white foreigners. Whether you call it hill or valley, richness everywhere was unmistakable.
J-Town’s consolidated attractions gave it no choice but one: when Benue-Plateau State was created in 1967, as part of correcting past domination and injustices, J-Town became the capital, and when Benue was amicably divorced from Plateau to become two states, the Tin City also retained its status. Once a capital, always a capital! Its cosmopolitanism became the source of its endurance, its selling point, with the motto “home of peace and tourism!” It is definitely a place that one could go to live, but also go to see. And thousands of people did both. It was even as if no one could ever die in Jos, as if there were no mortuary to put corpses.
To me, Jos was a way of seeing, an expansion beyond the world of my Southwestern-ness. National in focus, and international in framing, Jos did not see itself in localised idioms. Its borders and boundaries of identity were accommodating and unrigidified. Jos did not set borders among and between people, as if borders were moveable, as if boundaries were negotiable. Jos became a space to transform people, while the people too were transforming Jos, as I could see in those years.
I am tempted to skip a recent history that has also entered into my consciousness—the clashes between immigrants and indigenes, Christians and Muslims. Since 2001, many a great deal of disturbing news has terrified us: lives have been lost, bombs have been detonated, and a governor was even suspended in 2004 for being unable to control the scale of violence. Let me stop on this unhappy aspect of our valley: a happy occasion should not be soiled with tales of sadness. But one suggestion may be allowed in one sentence: Societies must deal with older historical relationships of overlapping imperialism, of “sub-imperialism,” and it must grapple with ideas of indigeneity and citizenship.
The zone of disturbances actually lies within a recognisable area, tucked here and there in Jos North and Jos South. But it is a zone of good work. Move towards Jos North, and you will see the Governor and his retinue; it is here that the University of Jos reveals its glory. Move to Jos South, you pass through industries. You may end up at the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies to receive more education. If you seek additional knowledge, it awaits you in the Police Academy and the Nigerian Film Corporation. Formerly distinctive villages and towns, notably Bukuru and Jos, are now part of an ever-expanding metropolis. When you are in Jos itself, you will be hard pressed to connect it to the disturbing news.
Please, do not entertain fears about this great city and its great people. There is no fear or sadness. Well-meaning people will always keep coming to Jos: its stature will remain. For that inheritance of Jos itself is grounded in nationalism, one so powerful as to resist dominant imperialist hegemonies in all directions. I am not sure who is far more restless: Jos or I. In that restlessness are anti-hegemonic impulses. Whenever I read or write about resistance, Jos is always on my mind. If my people at Ilorin fell and got incorporated into an emirate, and if their great empire of Oyo collapsed, I know that Jos and its people around the Plateau province figured out how to survive the encroaching imperialist powers of the nineteenth century. Encroaching streams of interlopers could not conquer and handcuff them.
And survive it did, laying the solid foundation of autonomy that is now solidified by a new kind of cosmopolitanism: Pentecostalism. Jos is the headquarters of the ECWA and COCIN denominations, and other Protestant denominations like the Anglicans are also strong here. Furthermore, many people have migrated here from Yobe and Borno states to settle. Some of them are Muslim but many are Christian. A successful prayer economy has developed, with some dynamics based on assumed singularity of identity, and others on pan-ethnic networks.
But even before now, Jos and the Middle Belt cannot be disconnected from the radical restructuring of the Nigerian federation. Remember General Yakubu Gowon and other high-ranking military officers? The recruitment into the army for a different set of reasons led to a different set of outcomes. What the elections and party systems could not do, sons in the army were able to achieve, generating states that produced semi-autonomy, creating vistas of liberty and freedom that expanded the space and scope of opportunities. From a branch of the University of Ibadan emerged the autonomous University of Jos. Jos taught us the values of change and reform, of demands anchored to the principles of rights. Indeed, the entire Middle Belt not only refuses to play the politics of the middle, if this is interpreted as taking a little from the right and a little from the left, but rather, asserts the politics of autonomous centralisation, constructed ideologies of insertion into the nation state, and demands to be part of the comfort zone of belonging.
I was back again in Jos in January of 2015, and now again in September. I can attest to the fact that Jos flourishes, with its peace still on display and the remarkable generosity of its people still visible. The markets are still thriving, the openness of its spaces is grandiose, and the combination of hills and houses of different shapes and sizes located on slopes, in valleys, and even along streams, supplies a remarkable cumulative solidity. Everything that defines a great culture remains: thriving industries producing an assortment of commodities from beer to cement; scenic views remain abundant with waterfalls, rocks and hills, and an extensive Wildlife Park. The Museum of Traditional Nigerian Architecture; outstanding schools and the university provide quality education; all adding greater clarity to the charm of its landscape.
As a newly-minted citizen of Jos and its University, my positive contributions must lack boundaries. They know no boundaries. We are on elevated ground, well above the sea level. Therefore, let us stay on top, keep rising, for the sky is our limit. We cannot sink. Never! We can only flourish together.
We need education to flourish and live together, to solve our problems, low and mighty, and to transform our society. I am permanently linked to Jos through education, and in particular through the University of Jos. There will be many moments to say more, but let me offer a little now. Our habits and experience, as part of learning, must continue to be grounded in the cosmopolitanism that defines Jos. The autodidactic process of enculturing hate and violence leads to mutual destruction, and we cannot but continue to offer appeals to evil-minded people to stop and for the state to deploy its force to stop them. In our formal system, the University of Jos will continue to promote learning, transfer skills, and build a new generation of Nigerians with habits, values, and a spirit of inclusive positive nationalism. The structured environment must continue to grow in the production of great research. Universities are not luxuries, but connected to politics and the economy, the source for producing the human capital needed to run a country.
Our challenges include continuing to seek the means of providing first-rate quality education; linking our formal system with vocational education in order to generate more jobs; supporting indigenous education and cultures; and providing spaces for our graduates to learn for the rest of their lives. The University of Jos will continue to serve the nation in capacity building and inventions. As it continues to internationalise, it will serve as a centre of regional educational power. It will expand our scientific and technological power. The University of Jos will continue to assist us to overcome our handicaps, empowering our citizens to acquire the training and skills to become transformational agents in the twenty-first century, leading our country to become prosperous, and sharing that prosperity with greater equality and without bias based on religion and ethnicity.
Jos and We, as well as Jos and I, will forever be united: in aspirations that seek the best for our people; in service that honours our people; in the promotion of merit that moves us from below the sea level to higher plains; in joy and peace that create our unity; in intellect and research that ground our ideas; and in creativity that will connect the mysteries of Nok of the old days with the magic of Jos of recent times and with our own bodies and dreams. Jos will remain “a city set on the hill” that “can never be hidden,” to borrow the words of Jesus Christ. Its enigmas are the beauties that set it aside—a sub-temperate city within a tropical landscape, a magnet to the world right in the middle of a landlocked terrain.
The present will speak to the past, although I dare underscore that he who quarrels with the past loses the present and intimidates the future: for the present will be energised as it recalls past glories; it will not allow current headaches to paralyse its body; it will develop obdurate efforts to defend worthy things; its people will always rise up and incarnate the long-established spirit of freedom; its leaders will push the ethical gravity and moral weight of conscience; and its spokespersons will reveal collective aspirations and constantly announce visions of progress. For us, the past will not only be a prologue but a legacy that must be saved for posterity. The great University of Jos will be at the centre of all these achievements and new beginnings. Since its founding way back in 1975, it has attained several key components of its mission and vision, and as it consolidates these, it will continue to push achievements and merit to new horizons.
My gratitude knows no bounds—it is timeless, uncontainable in space, unreachable in height, unfathomable in depth. I am, in unbounded magnitude, indebted to Jos. This lifetime gratitude celebrates Jos for magnifying talents; indeed for saying and affirming that without talent and merit, we are unworthy, and failing to recognize these when we see them diminishes us.
Thank you for your cumulative success.
Thank you for your vision and mission.
Thank you for celebrating merit, the enshrined legacy and nobility of this great University.
I humbly bow.
Toyin Falola is University Distinguished Teaching Professor Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin, and president of the African Studies Association. This is the text of a paper presented at a Honorary Doctorate Conferment Ceremony at the University of Jos, on Saturday September 26, 2015.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
