Framing the Colonial Child

Childhood Memory and Self-Representation in Autobiographical Writings

Bibliographic Data

ID20085201
AuthorsSaheed Aderinto (corresponding author)
Year2015
Pages169-199
Publication date2015-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueChildren and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9781137492937_8
OpenAlexW2492069372
ISBN9781137492937
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited16

This chapter examines the memory of childhood in the autobiographies of 30 Nigerians born between 1900 and 1950.1 The identities of the autobiographers cut across multiple ethnic as well as gender lines, and are drawn from both the southern and northern parts of the country. My primary concern is how colonial children as autobiographers remember their childhood, with emphasis on their encounter with colonial modernity and how location and sociocultural transformation influenced child-rearing practices as they were growing up. Unlike in North America and Europe where a distinct subgenre of childhood autobiographical writing has emerged, in Nigeria, with the exception of Wole Soyinka's Ake, Tanure Ojaide's Great Boys, Olu Bajowa's Spring of a Life, and Adelola Adeloye's My Salad Days, among others, self-narration of childhood is usually a portion of a general life history spanning from birth to adulthood.2 Be that as it may, the memory of childhood in autobiographies represents one of the largest repositories of documentation about children's life under colonialism. They reveal children's everyday encounters with "traditional" order and colonial modernity, and render a textual window into the realities of colonial domination and its enduring legacies.KeywordsChild LaborCorporal PunishmentLiterary CultureElephant GrassLiterate FamilyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves

Art · Childhood memory · Colonialism · Ethnic group · Framing (construction) · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Political science · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology

Tools

Open DOILibgen