Moses Ochonu
Biographic Data
| ID | 3792559 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Moses Ochonu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Moses |
| FAMILY NAME | Ochonu |
| SIGNATURE | OCHONU M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1934-9336 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The New Instrumental Turn in Nigerian Historical Scholarship
This essay discusses the contours of what I call a new instrumental turn in Nigerian historical scholarship. It argues that the historical discipline in Nigeria is experiencing a new instrumental turn, which finds expression in several new features of academic history writing, teaching, and programming. Some aspects of this trend hearken back to the original instrumental history of the pioneers of Nigerian and African nationalist history; others …
Interrogating the postcolonial Nigerian university
Nigerian public universities stand at a crossroads.They are confronted by a multidimensional crisis that challenges their self-curated image as bastions of learning, thought and instrumental research.The universities are also increasingly imbricated in global epistemological politics and trends.These entwinements both weaken them and offer them new ways of imagining their missions, and new imperatives for reinventing themselves as distinctly Afri…
Colonial Itineraries
In 1921 and 1924 Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina, traveled to Britain on a sightseeing trip, becoming the first emir or chief from Northern Nigeria to visit the British imperial metropole. This article analyzes the colonial relationship that put Dikko in the colonizers’ orbit and favor and paved the way for him to embark on the trips, the colonial logistics and networks that facilitated the journeys, Dikko's experiences and adventures in Bri…
South African Afrophobia in local and continental contexts
South Africa is the intellectual epicentre of the ideology of African renaissance and of the growing scholarly attention to decoloniality as an epistemological and aesthetic agenda of decolonisation. Paradoxically, the country is also a xenophobic crime scene: the continental state associated with endemic Afrophobic violence. This is a contradiction with both contemporary and historical significance. Positing this framing of a contradictory impul…
Looking for Race
Africans and the Colonial Economy
This chapter maps the general economic policy trajectories of colonial regimes as well as the active agency of Africans in engaging with these policies. Africans tried to cope and thrive in an economy calibrated to serve metropolitan interests. How did Africans, as individuals and groups, react to the strictures and unintended opportunities of colonial policies on land, agriculture, and labor? The chapter demonstrates the ways in which farmers, l…
Nation on board
Contributing to literatures as seemingly disparate as labour history, nationalism, diaspora studies, transportation history and entrepreneurship studies, Lyn Schler’s Nation on board is a rare scho
The Wangara Trading Network in Precolonial West Africa
The Wangara Trading Network in Precolonial West Africa
This study focuses on the extensive business and trading empire that Mande-speaking merchants, trade brokers, and financiers built and ran across West Africa between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Wangara feature prominently in the economic and mercantile history of West Africa because they pioneered intra-regional long distance trading and investments. They faced and overcame obstacles to trade and investments in diverse cultural a…
Elusive History
Inspired by my experiences in archives and research fields in Northern Nigeria, this essay analyzes four overlapping phenomena: archival fragmentation, the politicization of data and research transactions, the proliferation of memoirs and other texts of self-representation, and the question of sensing the African past beyond the recognized oral, written, and ethnographic corpus. At once familiar and novel, these trends present both problems and p…
African Colonial Economies
A supreme goal of colonizers' economic policies was to transform African subsistent and semi‐subsistent farmers into export oriented peasants‐‐peasantization in the jargon of African economic history. This was a difficult, complex, and long‐drawn process, requiring multiple mechanisms, some coercive, others persuasive.This essay begins with a survey of the messy unfolding of this process in diverse regions of Africa, highlighting its problems and…
African Colonial Economies
In what ways and through what mechanisms and policy instruments did colonial regimes seek to draw Africans into the colonial economy as laborers, wage earners, taxpayers, and consumers of foreign manufactured goods? How successful were colonial efforts to reform access to agricultural land as a way of establishing a foundation for colonial agriculture, undermining preexisting but disfavored African land tenure practices, compelling taxation, and …
Masculine Anxieties, Cultural Politics, and Debates Over Independent Womanhood Among Idoma Male Migrants in Late Colonial Northern Nigeria
As the population of independent Idoma women in northern Nigerian cities like Kaduna, Zaria, Kafanchan and Kano grew in the late colonial period of the 1950s, their Idoma kinsmen in these urban centres agonized about the implications of their presence for their status and for notions of Idoma cultural propriety. Expressed through the associational platform of the Idoma Hope Rising Union (IHRU), an ethnonationalist association of western-educated …
Making Headway
Colonial Meltdown
Critical Convergence
This article explores the salient, often ignored, convergences between the discourses of colonizers and the colonized in Africa. Using Nigerian criticisms of British colonial handling of the Great Depression, and a similar critique of British colonial economic recovery measures penned by the British colonial statistician in Nigeria, S.M Jacob, the article contends that, in spite of stylistic and motivational differences, both sets of critics desi…
Philip J. Shea
March 01 2007 Philip J. Shea Moses Ebe Ochonu, Moses Ebe Ochonu Moses Ochonu is assistant professor in the Department of History, Vanderbilt University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Elisha P. Renne Elisha P. Renne Elisha P. Renne is associate professor in the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and the Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan. [email protected] Search for other works by this …
Conjoined to Empire
The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939, has been largely treated as a period of stagnancy in African history. It was a period in which nothing happened due to the bankruptcy that befell colonial powers and their subsequent preoccupation with economic recovery to the detriment of public works and social projects.1 Many scholars argue that the depression's only remarkable feature is that it was a period of unprecedented exploitation o…
Democracy and the Performance of Power
No abstract
Native Habits are Difficult to Change
Colonial Meltdown
Elusive History
Inspired by my experiences in archives and research fields in Northern Nigeria, this essay analyzes four overlapping phenomena: archival fragmentation, the politicization of data and research transactions, the proliferation of memoirs and other texts of self-representation, and the question of sensing the African past beyond the recognized oral, written, and ethnographic corpus. At once familiar and novel, these trends present both problems and p…
Conjoined to Empire
The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939, has been largely treated as a period of stagnancy in African history. It was a period in which nothing happened due to the bankruptcy that befell colonial powers and their subsequent preoccupation with economic recovery to the detriment of public works and social projects.1 Many scholars argue that the depression's only remarkable feature is that it was a period of unprecedented exploitation o…
South African Afrophobia in local and continental contexts
South Africa is the intellectual epicentre of the ideology of African renaissance and of the growing scholarly attention to decoloniality as an epistemological and aesthetic agenda of decolonisation. Paradoxically, the country is also a xenophobic crime scene: the continental state associated with endemic Afrophobic violence. This is a contradiction with both contemporary and historical significance. Positing this framing of a contradictory impul…
African Colonial Economies
In what ways and through what mechanisms and policy instruments did colonial regimes seek to draw Africans into the colonial economy as laborers, wage earners, taxpayers, and consumers of foreign manufactured goods? How successful were colonial efforts to reform access to agricultural land as a way of establishing a foundation for colonial agriculture, undermining preexisting but disfavored African land tenure practices, compelling taxation, and …
Colonial Itineraries
In 1921 and 1924 Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina, traveled to Britain on a sightseeing trip, becoming the first emir or chief from Northern Nigeria to visit the British imperial metropole. This article analyzes the colonial relationship that put Dikko in the colonizers’ orbit and favor and paved the way for him to embark on the trips, the colonial logistics and networks that facilitated the journeys, Dikko's experiences and adventures in Bri…
Critical Convergence
This article explores the salient, often ignored, convergences between the discourses of colonizers and the colonized in Africa. Using Nigerian criticisms of British colonial handling of the Great Depression, and a similar critique of British colonial economic recovery measures penned by the British colonial statistician in Nigeria, S.M Jacob, the article contends that, in spite of stylistic and motivational differences, both sets of critics desi…
Native Habits are Difficult to Change
Democracy and the Performance of Power
No abstract
Conjoined to Empire
The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939, has been largely treated as a period of stagnancy in African history. It was a period in which nothing happened due to the bankruptcy that befell colonial powers and their subsequent preoccupation with economic recovery to the detriment of public works and social projects.1 Many scholars argue that the depression's only remarkable feature is that it was a period of unprecedented exploitation o…
Philip J. Shea
March 01 2007 Philip J. Shea Moses Ebe Ochonu, Moses Ebe Ochonu Moses Ochonu is assistant professor in the Department of History, Vanderbilt University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Elisha P. Renne Elisha P. Renne Elisha P. Renne is associate professor in the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and the Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan. [email protected] Search for other works by this …
Colonial Meltdown
Critical Convergence
This article explores the salient, often ignored, convergences between the discourses of colonizers and the colonized in Africa. Using Nigerian criticisms of British colonial handling of the Great Depression, and a similar critique of British colonial economic recovery measures penned by the British colonial statistician in Nigeria, S.M Jacob, the article contends that, in spite of stylistic and motivational differences, both sets of critics desi…
Masculine Anxieties, Cultural Politics, and Debates Over Independent Womanhood Among Idoma Male Migrants in Late Colonial Northern Nigeria
As the population of independent Idoma women in northern Nigerian cities like Kaduna, Zaria, Kafanchan and Kano grew in the late colonial period of the 1950s, their Idoma kinsmen in these urban centres agonized about the implications of their presence for their status and for notions of Idoma cultural propriety. Expressed through the associational platform of the Idoma Hope Rising Union (IHRU), an ethnonationalist association of western-educated …
Making Headway
African Colonial Economies
A supreme goal of colonizers' economic policies was to transform African subsistent and semi‐subsistent farmers into export oriented peasants‐‐peasantization in the jargon of African economic history. This was a difficult, complex, and long‐drawn process, requiring multiple mechanisms, some coercive, others persuasive.This essay begins with a survey of the messy unfolding of this process in diverse regions of Africa, highlighting its problems and…
African Colonial Economies
In what ways and through what mechanisms and policy instruments did colonial regimes seek to draw Africans into the colonial economy as laborers, wage earners, taxpayers, and consumers of foreign manufactured goods? How successful were colonial efforts to reform access to agricultural land as a way of establishing a foundation for colonial agriculture, undermining preexisting but disfavored African land tenure practices, compelling taxation, and …
The Wangara Trading Network in Precolonial West Africa
The Wangara Trading Network in Precolonial West Africa
This study focuses on the extensive business and trading empire that Mande-speaking merchants, trade brokers, and financiers built and ran across West Africa between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Wangara feature prominently in the economic and mercantile history of West Africa because they pioneered intra-regional long distance trading and investments. They faced and overcame obstacles to trade and investments in diverse cultural a…
Elusive History
Inspired by my experiences in archives and research fields in Northern Nigeria, this essay analyzes four overlapping phenomena: archival fragmentation, the politicization of data and research transactions, the proliferation of memoirs and other texts of self-representation, and the question of sensing the African past beyond the recognized oral, written, and ethnographic corpus. At once familiar and novel, these trends present both problems and p…
Nation on board
Contributing to literatures as seemingly disparate as labour history, nationalism, diaspora studies, transportation history and entrepreneurship studies, Lyn Schler’s Nation on board is a rare scho
Africans and the Colonial Economy
This chapter maps the general economic policy trajectories of colonial regimes as well as the active agency of Africans in engaging with these policies. Africans tried to cope and thrive in an economy calibrated to serve metropolitan interests. How did Africans, as individuals and groups, react to the strictures and unintended opportunities of colonial policies on land, agriculture, and labor? The chapter demonstrates the ways in which farmers, l…
Looking for Race
Colonial Itineraries
In 1921 and 1924 Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina, traveled to Britain on a sightseeing trip, becoming the first emir or chief from Northern Nigeria to visit the British imperial metropole. This article analyzes the colonial relationship that put Dikko in the colonizers’ orbit and favor and paved the way for him to embark on the trips, the colonial logistics and networks that facilitated the journeys, Dikko's experiences and adventures in Bri…
South African Afrophobia in local and continental contexts
South Africa is the intellectual epicentre of the ideology of African renaissance and of the growing scholarly attention to decoloniality as an epistemological and aesthetic agenda of decolonisation. Paradoxically, the country is also a xenophobic crime scene: the continental state associated with endemic Afrophobic violence. This is a contradiction with both contemporary and historical significance. Positing this framing of a contradictory impul…
The New Instrumental Turn in Nigerian Historical Scholarship
This essay discusses the contours of what I call a new instrumental turn in Nigerian historical scholarship. It argues that the historical discipline in Nigeria is experiencing a new instrumental turn, which finds expression in several new features of academic history writing, teaching, and programming. Some aspects of this trend hearken back to the original instrumental history of the pioneers of Nigerian and African nationalist history; others …
Interrogating the postcolonial Nigerian university
Nigerian public universities stand at a crossroads.They are confronted by a multidimensional crisis that challenges their self-curated image as bastions of learning, thought and instrumental research.The universities are also increasingly imbricated in global epistemological politics and trends.These entwinements both weaken them and offer them new ways of imagining their missions, and new imperatives for reinventing themselves as distinctly Afri…
Political science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · African history and culture studies (13 works) · History (13 works) · Colonialism (12 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Geography (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (7 works)