"Your Boys in Nigeria": The unlikely role of King’s imperial historians in the development of Nigerian and Canadian national schools of history.

Sarah Stockwell is a Professor of the History of Empire and Decolonization in the Department of History

In the mid-20th century, the development of area studies, especially African, was a crucial decolonizing step. As the ‘wind of change’ swept away European colonial empires, a new generation of scholars sought to create new national histories of colonies and former colonies rather than writing about these as part of the history of European empires: the lens through which many Western historians had previously explored the history of the world beyond Europe.¹

King’s Department of History, one of the earliest and foremost centres for the study of the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth, played an unlikely and little-known part in the evolution of area studies. Written using King’s archives and other evidence, this article shows how from the 1950s Nigerian and Canadian research students (then the most numerous of all colonial and Commonwealth history students at King’s) working under the supervision of King’s imperial historians went onto pioneer new national histories. King’s historians of empire consequently played a role in the emergence of new area studies even as the latter came to pose as significant challenge to the kind of imperial history that they themselves practiced. Yet as King’s archival records reveal, close and enduring friendships were formed between King’s imperial historians and these research students. Personal connections forged at King’s proved consequential for both King’s historians and in the development of area studies, especially in Nigeria.

Colonial and Commonwealth students at King’s in the mid-20th century

Imperial history had been taught at King’s since at least the early twentieth century. Its importance in the Department of History was cemented with the creation of the Rhodes chair in imperial history in 1919.² Colonial and Commonwealth postgraduate students were among those arriving to work with the first incumbent of the Rhodes chair, Arthur Percival Newton (1873–1942).³ One was Cornelis de Kiewiet (1902–1986), born in the Netherlands and raised in South Africa. De Kiewiet’s thesis was subsequently published as British colonial policy and the South African republics, 1848–1872 (1929). Later as president of Rochester University and of the American Association of Universities, and chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies, de Kiewiet made a significant impact upon mid-twentieth century academic policy, nationally and internationally.⁴ Another Commonwealth student was the Canadian, William Stewart MacNutt. The award of the Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire scholarship enabled him to study for a MA with Newton. In the 1950s he became an important figure in the Canadian historical profession, producing influential accounts of Loyalists in the Canadian Maritime Provinces.⁵ The first postgraduate student of colour to work with Newton may have been the Ceylonese / Sri Lankan, G. P. Tambayah. Educated at the Catholic St Joseph’s College, Colombo, Tambayah commenced a MA dissertation with Newton in January 1936. Thereafter, Tambayah appears to have entered Ceylonese public administration and received an MBE for his services as government agent in Ceylon’s Western Province in the Queen’s birthday honours in 1954.⁶

However, it was under Newton’s successors as Rhodes professor that larger numbers of colonial and Commonwealth students arrived, particularly Nigerian and Canadian. In what would become a trend, some began following intellectual trajectories very different to their King’s research supervisors. First and foremost was the Nigerian Kenneth Dike (1917–1983) later heralded by Chieka Ifemesia as ‘father of modern African historiography’.⁷ Dike began work under Vincent Harlow (1898–1961), author of the enduringly influential two-volume work The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1783 (2 vols, 1952–64), who had succeeded Newton as Rhodes professor from 1938.⁸ When Harlow moved to Oxford in 1949, the new incumbent of the Rhodes chair, the Canadian Gerald (Gerry) Sandford Graham (1903–88), assumed responsibility for Dike’s supervision. While Dike would subsequently recall that Harlow was perceived by his colonial students as close to the Colonial Office and inclined to hold it ‘against them’ if they were critical of British colonial rule,⁹ he developed a strong relationship with Graham. Many years later Dike wrote to Graham that he was among the ‘three best friends I have in Britain’.¹⁰ Graham would make a less enduring mark than Harlow on the scholarship of empire.¹¹ Instead, Graham’s scholarship corresponded to an established form of imperial history characteristic of the pre-war period but increasingly out of touch with newer approaches being pioneered elsewhere.¹² But Graham remained in post at King’s until 1970 and it was during his long tenure as Rhodes professor that King’s came to play a key role in the establishment of area studies. John Flint, the historian of colonial Africa and Graham’s former research student and subsequently King’s colleague, judged that on Graham’s watch Graham’s research seminar at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research in ‘British Imperial History’ became ‘an engine for the decolonization of imperial history’, influencing the profession in every country of the Commonwealth’, with Graham the unlikely ‘midwife to major nationalist revisionism’.¹³

Graham’s importance lay in his extraordinarily large number of postgraduates: Flint put this at 200, although only around half that number can be readily verified, and some may well not have completed their studies.¹⁴ As well as from the United States, these came from across the old Commonwealth and the new, a trend likely assisted in the 1960s by the introduction of Commonwealth studentships.¹⁵ Most numerous were Canadians. In the 1960s they included Phillip Buckner, Marilyn Barber, Barry Gough, and Hugh Johnston. There were several reasons for this strong Canadian presence. Only some Canadian universities offered doctoral programmes, and where they did, these took longer to complete than British, an important consideration for Canadians seeking tenure track positions as quickly as possible. Canadian Council fellowships provided funding for some and from the early 1960s Canadians also had access to the new Commonwealth scholarships. The Commonwealth connection probably also acted as a draw, notably for Anglophone Canadians. Once decided upon postgraduate study in Britain, Graham’s own Canadian nationality and contacts among what was still a small Canadian historical community, ensured many of them applied to work with him, as Buckner recalls. When he was awarded a scholarship, Buckner thought initially of applying to Cambridge. But his advisers at the University of Toronto urged him to work with Graham, after Graham, a member of the scholarship committee, contacted one of his referees for the scholarship to propose he (Graham) supervise Buckner.¹⁶ At least six of Graham’s students came from the University of New Brunswick, where Newton’s former student, MacNutt, was now working, illustration of the value for postgraduate recruitment of ‘old boy’ networks.

Graham and his colleagues also attracted a significant number of African postgraduates. These included Dike, described by Graham as ‘for two years the outstanding student in my seminar’ and on another occasion as ‘the best man in my seminar regardless of colour’. ‘I should place him’, he wrote, ‘first among native historians of West Africa, probably the whole of Africa’.¹⁷ On completion, Dike took up a post at the University College of Ibadan (est. 1948), becoming likely the first Black African scholar who had completed a PhD in History to be appointed to a lectureship in an African university. His thesis was later published as Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885 (1956). He rose quickly soon becoming head of the Ibadan history department, coincidentally generating for Graham another association that proved fruitful for recruitment. Jacob F. Ade Ajayi (1929–2014), another ‘first-rate’ young Nigerian scholar whom Graham hoped ‘may be a second Dike’, applied to work with Graham because he had been Dike’s supervisor, commencing work in London in the 1950s.¹⁸ Other notable Nigerian students at King’s included Emmanuel A. Ayandele, supervised by Flint.

“Your boys in Nigeria”

As these international students returned home a growing diaspora of former King’s research students developed. They went on to occupy posts in Commonwealth countries, old and new. Others took up posts in the USA and Britain. By Graham’s retirement, one, Buckner, estimated that at least sixteen former members of Graham’s IHR research seminar were at Canadian universities, notably at Dalhousie University, where Flint had taken up a position. Equally striking were the number of those whom one former Nigerian student, I. A. Akinjogbin, recently appointed Head of History at the University of Ife, referred to in a letter to Graham in 1971 as ‘your boys in Nigeria’.¹⁹ Many were at Ibadan, especially before civil war caused — as Graham lamented — ‘division between my old, and cherished seminar students’.²⁰ Graham was a source of practical support to these African graduates. He not only revived an Imperial Studies book series established by Newton, but also, at a time when African history was not perceived as a commercial proposition, he inaugurated a West African History Series. Published by Oxford University Press, this was supported financially by West African Newspapers Ltd.²¹ By 1963–4 seven lecturers at Ibadan were ‘G. S. G.’s former students’, as annotated by Graham on an Ibadan History prospectus.²²

This record was no coincidence. Ibadan, opened in 1948, was one of several new African university colleges founded in the late 1940s. The others were in Ghana, and those formed from existing colleges in Khartoum (Sudan) and Makerere (Kampala, Uganda). These institutions initially operated as colleges of the University of London, whose staff oversaw the creation and accreditation of the new universities’ syllabuses and examinations under London’s external degree programme. In undertaking this task London academics worked in collaboration with a new body, the Inter-University Council for Higher Education in the Colonies (IUC), formed to facilitate the development of new colonial universities and to assist with their staffing and management.²³ Through these institutional structures British academic staff had significant influence over appointments and promotion in the new African university colleges.

Power did not all lie one way, however. King’s records show how Dike for one proved adept at leveraging his connection to Graham to help circumvent the University of London and the IUC when these proved an obstacle to his own ambitions. For example, in 1956 Dike asked Graham to ‘use whatever discreet influence you can’ with the IUC to secure his promotion to chair. Graham at once acceded, replying ‘the Chair is in the bag, and nothing can prevent you now from ascending the Golden Stool’; a reference to the traditional throne of the Ashanti kingdom.²⁴ Later in the year Dike again sought Graham’s assistance, this time to persuade the IUC and London historians, notably Lilian Penson, a member of the IUC as well as chair of the committee on London’s relations with new universities, to agree to reforms to the curriculum at Ibadan intended to embed the teaching of African history.²⁵ Dike subsequently enjoyed rapid promotion, becoming in 1960, the first Nigerian Principal at Ibadan. When Ibadan became a full university in 1962, Dike became its first Vice Chancellor, a position he held until, at the start of the civil war he, as an Igbo, was forced out, moving instead to Harvard. Ade Ajayi had a similarly impressive career, fulfilling Graham’s early expectations of him. Like Dike he not only became one of the world’s leading historians of Africa, but also had a distinguished record of academic leadership. He was appointed to a lectureship at Ibadan in 1958, becoming professor there in 1963. He served as vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos between 1972 and 1978.²⁶

The promotion of former students to leadership roles opened new patronage opportunities for Graham. By 1972 another former King’s student, Emmanuel Ayandele, had become the founding principal of Ibadan’s new Jos campus. Three years later he thanked Graham ‘for the steps you have begun to take in locating for us suitable scholars willing to give services to the Jos campus’, and informed Graham that following Graham’s introduction he had already initiated contact with one individual in Canada, who in turn had reminded Ayandele that they had been contemporaries in Graham’s seminar. More broadly Ayandele acknowledged Graham’s ‘paternal advice’ at different stages of his own career, and, employing a biblical reference, observed that as ‘you know only too well you are to many of us in different parts of the world our Gamaliel (teacher or master)’.²⁷ Ayandele had his own particular reason to be grateful to Graham. In 1964, shortly after he had taken up a lectureship at Ibadan, his doctoral examiner, Roland Oliver, declined to pass his thesis until revisions were made. Oliver (1923–2014) had been appointed in 1946 as the first lecturer in African history at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies; from 1963-86 he was first incumbent of the London University Chair in African History (1963–86).²⁸ This set back looked likely to undermine Ayandele’s position at Ibadan, but a letter from Graham to Dike smoothed things over: ‘the effects of your letter’, Ayandele told Graham ‘are far-reaching’ and ‘I must ever thank you for your fatherly love and kindness’. The Principal, Dike, ‘consoled me, said he understood my difficulties and asked me not to worry at all’.²⁹

King’s students and the creation of new schools of Canadian and African history

At the crux of Flint’s claim about ‘decolonization’ was that Graham’s seminar alumni played a crucial part in developing area studies and founding new ‘national’ schools of history that got away from Eurocentric perspectives. There is some evidence that this was the case. Canadian history was already established in Canadian universities in the 1950s. Nevertheless, King’s alumni alongside those from the Université Laval and University of Toronto were numerically significant among university professors teaching Canadian history in Canadian universities. Three seminar alumni served as presidents of the Canadian Historical Society: Buckner (1992–3), John Kendle (1981–2) and Judy Fingard (1997–8).

In Nigeria, Graham’s students were instrumental in the development of what is identified as an Ibadan school of history, a distinct nationalistic Nigerian history.³⁰ This school was of seminal importance in the development of African studies generally, that put the colonial era in its place as (to employ Ajayi’s memorable turn of phrase) merely an ‘episode’ in the long durée of African history.³¹ Another feature of some of the scholarship was a focus on religion and the history of Christian mission, perhaps reflecting King’s religious foundation as well as the importance of Christianity in Nigeria.

While Graham himself remained wedded to imperial history, Ajayi recalled how Graham’s IHR research seminar, ‘increasingly dealt more with the history of the countries of the Commonwealth than with imperial history as such’.³² Similarly Buckner remembers that whereas in the 1950s Canadian members of the seminar were primarily interested in British imperial history, by the 1960s only one of the Canadians ‘thought of himself as an Imperial historian’, although most (but not all) were working on topics which had an imperial dimension’.³³

Turf war: the competition between imperial and area studies

Paradoxically while his research students played leading roles in the creation of new national and regional schools of history, and Dike had appealed to Graham for help with his curriculum reforms, the development of area studies was not only at odds with Graham’s own imperially focused scholarship but his scepticism about the readiness of African states for independence.³⁴ In one double-edged comment, Graham worried about this ‘generation of African intellectuals’ whose lives may be ‘shortened by the enormous weight of responsibilities which self-government is slowly bringing to bear upon them’.³⁵ Graham had other, more ideological, concerns too, worrying that learning African history without knowledge of the broader colonial context was insufficient. So exercised was he that around 1957 he raised the issue in correspondence with other historians teaching imperial history in Britain, including E. E. Rich, Jack Fisher, and Harlow, about the necessity for those doing area studies of developing a knowledge of the broader colonial context. In comments revealing of his own imperial mindset, he feared that without this knowledge those in new African states might fail to see their independence as the result of a ‘progressive’ imperial policy dating back to the grant of self-government to Canada over a century before.³⁶

This defence of imperial history was apparently prompted by developments at Makerere, where in 1957 the introduction of single honours degrees enabled the institution’s historians to be ‘more adventurous’ in their teaching of African history.³⁷ Robert Latham, Reader in History at Royal Holloway College and, under London’s external degree programme, examiner for Makerere, responded that it was ‘dangerous for Makerere etc to be allowed their heads’, explaining ‘as you know this new syllabus scares me’.³⁸ In line with his own worries, Graham also asked Dike to ensure that despite the transition to teaching African history that the latter had led at Ibadan in 1956 imperial history continued to be taught as part of the Ibadan history degree. In response, Dike was non-committal. But whether because of Graham’s intervention or not, students there continued to be offered a course on ‘Evolution of the British Commonwealth since c. 1880’. This resembled Graham’s own preferred approach, tracing a trajectory of constitutional development within the empire from the granting of self-government to Canada and the white settlement colonies in the 19th century through to the development of a multiracial Commonwealth after 1945. Since imperial history was optional, whereas African and Nigerian history were compulsory, its inclusion did not, however, undermine Dike’s curriculum reforms.³⁹

The challenge posed by regional studies was felt close to home and for many years led to a turf war between Graham’s seminar and a new African History Seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and presided over by Roland Oliver. Oliver was determined to foster an African history that was about more than colonialism and untainted by association with those working in Imperial history. His African History Seminar, originating in a 1953 conference, was the first of its kind in the world.⁴⁰ Oliver, whose tenure in London overlapped with Graham’s for twenty-one years, was instrumental in the launch of The Journal of African History, and determined to hold his own in the face of growing ‘competition’ from a new generation of American Africanists.⁴¹ Like Graham, Oliver expected his graduate students to attend his seminar, while participation in the Imperial Seminar was discouraged — although in a memoir Oliver acknowledged considerable ‘interchange’ with Graham’s seminar. His former student and, from 1969, colleague, Richard Rathbone remembers that for Africanists the IHR was ‘enemy territory, one of the nests of those who questioned whether African history was “proper history”’. This position reflected too the struggle Africanists experienced to attain their rightful place within the Academy generally and within the local context of the University of London History Board of Studies.⁴² Intriguingly, the Imperial Seminar may have been influential in shaping the African seminar at least initially. In 1953 Oliver took responsibility for what he refers to as ‘Graham’s seminar’ while Graham was in Ghana. By bringing him into touch with Graham’s Nigerian students Oliver recalled he was able to reorganise his own seminar so that, instead of being a discussion group for colleagues with a marginal interest in African history’ it became a ‘place of training for future teachers in the subject’.⁴³

Epilogue: the decline, revival and transformation of imperial history from the 1980s

By the time Graham retired in 1970 the dynamics which had formerly brought large numbers to Britain were for a period also no longer as favourable. Whereas previously there had been under provision at higher education level in many Commonwealth countries, more overseas universities now had their own doctoral programmes: developments that ironically the University of London though its external degree programme had played a part in fostering. Simultaneously postgraduate study in Britain became more expensive for foreign students. Differential fees for home and overseas students, first introduced in 1967, rose steeply in the 1970s. For a while the changes suppressed overseas recruitment, and imperial history was likely among the subjects most affected by measures which changed the situation of students from Commonwealth countries.⁴⁴ . Douglas Peers, bucking the broader downward trend, arrived from Canada in 1984 to do doctoral research with Graham’s successor, Peter James Marshall (1933-). Attendance at the IHR imperial history seminar, he recalls, was ‘often quite sparse’.⁴⁵

Moreover, while area studies, and especially African, had become well established. Imperial history experienced a downturn, not least because of the existential threat posed to it by area studies. In 1984, David Fieldhouse, newly appointed to the Vere Harmsworth chair in imperial history at Cambridge, observing the fragmentation of the field was led to ask if ‘Humpty Dumpty’ could be put back together again.⁴⁶ Imperial history nevertheless continued to be a key element of the Department of History’s teaching portfolio. Graham’s retirement in 1970 had constituted something of a hiatus, since he was not replaced as Rhodes chair for ten years until, in 1981, Marshall already a reader at King’s and a specialist in 18th century South Asia was promoted to the position. In 1993 Marshall was succeeded as Rhodes chair by his King’s colleague, Andrew Porter (1945-2021), who had taken up a lectureship at King’s in 1971. Both men were central to many institutional and publishing projects in imperial history, including acting as respectively editors of volumes 2 and 3 in the new five volume of the new Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 2001).

By the mid-1980s imperial history began to experience something of a revival, invigorated by a fresh generation of scholarship — subaltern, postcolonialism, and the ‘new imperial history’, and by other approaches that emphasized connectivity in different ‘worlds’, imagined and geographical, including the Atlantic and ‘British’. The latter saw the academic pendulum swing full circle as scholars of Britain’s ‘old’ dominions like Canada and Australia sought once again to reinsert British imperial connections into their national histories but in ways that emphasized networks rather than a ‘centre-periphery’ axis common to older scholarship. The development of ‘British world’ studies also saw historians of empire once again pay attention to the old white settlement colonies after several decades in which scholarship had focused more on Asia and Africa. The Australian, Carl Bridge (1950- ), who moved to King’s with the transfer to the College in 1999 of the Menzies Australia Institute from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, was among those playing a key role in conceptualising this ‘British World’.⁴⁷

At King’s these developments in the field were reflected in changes to undergraduate and postgraduate courses. In the 21st-century Jon Wilson, historian of south Asia, and I reconfigured our longstanding undergraduate course on the British empire as the ‘Worlds of the British Empire’, reflecting a more de-centred approach to the subject. With the transfer of the Africanist, Patrick Chabal (1951-2014), to the Department of History from King’s Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies King’s History also now had specialist expertise in African history. Other appointments in African as well as world history followed. The arrival at King’s of the Guyanese/Barbadian historian, Richard Drayton (1964–), appointed to the Rhodes chair in 2008, was followed by the creation of a new MA in World History and Cultures and the refashioning of the IHR seminar as the Imperial and World History Seminar. Imperial history had undergone its own decolonizing processes. But, as this article highlights, decades before, King’s imperial history had played a significant, if unlikely, role in the development of area studies, notably African and Canadian. As Dike wrote, the ‘new attitudes to the history of the non-white Commonwealth and to the cultures of Black Africa (…) owes more than is realized to GSG(raham)’s encouragement of young scholars from these areas’.⁴⁸

Sources

Primary Sources

Institute of Historical Research, London, Wohl Library: IHR/3/3/6.

King’s College London Archives, Papers of Gerald Sandford Graham; Registry Slip Books.

Secondary Sources

Ade Ajayi, J.F., ‘African History at Ibadan’ in The Emergence of African History at British Universities, ed. A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (Oxford, 1995), 91–109.

Ade Ajayi, J.F., ‘Colonialism: An Episode in African History’ in Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960: Volume 1: The History and Politics of Colonialism 1870–1914, ed. L. H. Gann and P. Duignan (Cambridge, 1969), 497–509.

Bridge, Carl, and Kent Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, The Journal of Imperial and Commowealth History, 31:2 (2003), 1-15.

Dike, Kenneth, ‘Gerald S. Graham: Teacher and Historian’ in Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham, ed. G. Williams and J. Flint (London, 1973), 1–8.

Drayton, Richard, ‘Imperial History and the Human Future’, History Workshop Journal, lxxiv (2012), 156–72.

Fieldhouse, D.K., ‘Can Humpty Dumpty be put together again? Imperial History in the 1980s’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xii (1984), 9–23.

Flint, J., ‘Graham, Gerald Sandford (1903–1988)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Flint, J., ‘Professor Gerald Sandford Graham, 1903–1988’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xvii (1989), 297–300.

Flint, J. and G. Williams eds. Perspectives of Empire. Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham (1973), ‘Preface’.

Glotzer, R., ‘C. W. de Kiewiet, Historian of Africa: African Studies and the American Post-War Research University’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, x (2009), 419–47.

Ingham, K., ‘Makerere and After’, in The Emergence of African History at British Universities, ed. A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (Oxford, 1995), 113-133.

Livsey, Tim, Nigeria’s University Age. Reframing Decolonisation and Development (Cambridge, 2017).

Lovejoy, Paul, ‘The Ibadan School of Historiography and Its Critics’ in African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi, ed. T. Falola (Harlow, 1993), 195-202.

Maxwell, I.C.M., Universities in Partnership. The Inter-University Council and the growth of higher education in developing countries, 1946-70 (Edinburgh, 1980).

Oliver, Roland, ‘African History: SOAS and Beyond’ in The Emergence of African History at British Universities, ed. A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (Oxford, 1995), 13–38.

Oliver, Roland, In the Realms of Gold. Pioneering in African History (London, 1997).

Perraton, H., A History of Foreign Students in Britain (Basingstoke, 2014).

Shin, Dongkyung, ‘“Partnership in Universities”, British Strategies for New Universities at the End of Empire’ (PhD., King’s College London, 2022).

Stockwell, Sarah, ‘The Imperial and World History Seminar’ in David Manning ed., _Talking History. Seminar Culture and the Institute of Historical Research, (1921-2021) (University of London Press, 2024), 175-200.

Sarah Stockwell is Professor of the History of Empire and Decolonization in the Department of History at King’s College London. She is the author of The Business of Decolonization. British Business Strategies in the Gold Coast, 1945-1957 (2000) and The British End of the British Empire (2018), editor of The British Empire. Themes and Perpsectives (2008), and co-editor of The Wind of Change. Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (2013), and The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa (2020).