Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria

Aderinto takes Nigeria's colonial history in a fresh direction, inspired by studies in animal history in Africa and elsewhere. The principal aim is to create more inclusive historical knowledge by seeing animals as agents of history, continuing the enrichment of a historical inquiry that followed the transformative incorporation of such concerns as gender, geography, or material culture. Ambitiously including multiple animal species, he promises “the first detailed account of the world animals made for Nigeria” (21) because “African history was not made by humans alone” (5). The first half of the book focuses on animals themselves as colonial subjects and as instruments of imperial culture and power. The second engages human–animal relations, concentrating on the culture and politics arising from the control, fear, and exploitation of animals. The book succeeds in its principal aim, most directly in the first half. The idea that colonial regulation and exploitation of animals remade them as both “colonial subjects” and “modern,” alongside human Nigerians, expands our sense of what the colonial era entailed. The expansion of the north–south cattle trade, rendered possible by among other things colonial veterinary medicine, raised beef to a staple of the Nigerian diet but in so doing sustained the colonial order. The British administrative presence and commodity exports, in the early colonial era especially, relied on donkeys and horses roped into colonial service. Horses also expressed the power of colonial authority, as the durbars of northern Nigeria reinvented a longstanding practice into a festival of indirect rule, and polo and horse race clubs allowed expatriates and notable Nigerians to display their sense of superiority. The clear answer to Aderinto's guiding question—“Would this event have happened without animals?” (25)—is that, indeed, animals conveyed political power and shaped aspects of the colonial order, while themselves being changed.Unavoidably woven into this, and I suspect of at least equal interest to most readers, is the problem animating the second half—that “we may not fully comprehend the extent of imperial domination until we bring animals into our understanding of colonialism” (3). What do animal stories add to our understanding of humans’ colonial subjecthood, or the history of colonial Nigeria? A rather stand-alone chapter placed in Part I explores animal characters in Akinola Lasekan's political cartoons. It argues insightfully that studies of Nigerian political discourse mistakenly neglect visual images, not least because they reveal the interplay of concepts commonly associated with political elites with a rich trove of more popular Nigerian ideas of the animal world. A study of colonial campaigns to control rabies relates these to colonial constructions of racism and ethnicity, not least through their shared anxiety about colonial vulnerability. The distinction viewing European dogs as pets and African dogs as rabid adds a dynamic dimension to the workings of colonial racism. Likewise, a rich chapter on wildlife and zoos relates the construction of the natural world in Nigeria as variously a place for European adventure and control, an exotic landscape confirming empire's natural bounty, and the site of African backwardness in need of remedy. It also pushes readers to think about how the colonial order reached beyond cities and farms, and strengthened itself in the process. Another study traces policies and legal disputes about cruelty to animals, revealing how distinctions between cruel and humane treatment became markers of moral and class distinctions separating Europeans and the rising Nigerian middle class from the “unenlightened” masses. The last substantive chapter investigates campaigns in which Europeans in Britain and Nigeria alleged that harsh mistreatment of donkeys and horses for diverse purposes raised questions about Nigerians’ capacity to be truly “civilized,” a concern which intensified as Nigerians marched down the road to self-government in the 1950s.But Aderinto makes claims for this book which it cannot fully sustain, for example that this combination of case studies and “metanarratives” will “weave strands of ideas into a coherent, analytical, and consumable format” (21), which in turn will “reshape the landscape of knowledge” (4). It is not framed to do more than compel us to take a wider vision, and to seek new stories to weave into our tapestry. His does pay due attention to the paradoxes, nuances, and negotiations of colonial life that have sharpened our appreciation of colonial situations. But this is done less to explore new openings than to illustrate that the colonial subjecthood of animals fits known patterns. For example, after emplacing the premise that “the idea of imperial modernity in African historical scholarship is clear to scholars” (10), the task Aderinto takes on is to locate animals in the construction of imperial modernity rather than explore, complicate, or revise it. His periodization is not only standard (foundations to World War I, elaboration between the wars, imperial decline after World War II), but treated as a common arc for all the dynamics of the colonial period, not asking how animal stories might need different timelines. This is unfortunate because the diverse studies here provoke more probing enquiry. Aderinto presents the Nigerian middle classes as taking on attitudes towards animals that reinforce the colonial order, for example by joining polo and horse racing clubs, treating this unproblematically as self-interested participation in the colonial order. But how and why Nigerians appropriated or accepted such ideas, creating a modernizing culture while accruing the power to wield it is surely a process not yet fully clear to scholars. Asking more about why the middle class acquired dogs as pets, thereby redefining their domestic space in important ways, or campaigned for animal rights as a mark of “civilization,” or worked to conserve Nigeria's “wild spaces” as a symbol of Africa's special character, all have potential to enrich our sense of how the middle classes build something new. Aderinto often reveals the limits and failures of colonial policies. But for the most part, these do not disturb the characterization of colonial rule as effectively seeking to maximize resource exploitation or subordinate both human and animal Nigerians. If the colonial order sought to encompass the immensity of the animal world, thereby meeting animal as well as human resistance, there is all the more reason to be interested in what the imperialists could not achieve. This expanded sphere of colonial subjecthood seems likely to have more paracolonial stories than we now see, but Aderinto tends to draw all animal lives into an already familiar colonial realm.

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