I have realized that people know more than they think they know, especially when it comes to history. I have interviewed a few people who premised the interview by telling me, “I don’t know much of the history” or “I can’t tell you much but I will tell you what I have been told” or a similar disclaimer. I think a lot of people who do not study history, AKA muggles of the history world (just kidding…lame joke), are self-conscious about their knowledge of history. From talking with my non-historian friends over the years and from my first several interviews in Ogidi, I have observed that most people who are not historians think that 1) they know very little about history, and 2) history is boring, or 3) history is too large of a subject and therefore overwhelming. Correct me if I am being reductive, friends.
History is not just for the historians. History is change over time. History is what has happened in the past. History encompasses everything that has ever happened. Yes, in that respect, history can seem daunting. However, my goal as a historian is not to look at everything that has ever happened. That is impossible. What I’m studying for my dissertation is specific to time and place: less than one hundred years in one town in southeastern Nigeria. Is that still daunting? Let’s make it more specific: the intersection of legal and gender history during this seventy year period in this one particular town in southeastern Nigeria. Still daunting? Maybe to someone unfamiliar with the themes of my topic. Maybe to someone who does not study history.
This project that I am writing for my dissertation is not political history, not economic history, not military history. It is social history. It is all about the people – ranging from well-known political figures such as Ogidi’s Warrant Chiefs to individuals that the written records of Ogidi history have not deemed important enough to name. These allegedly unimportant people – the obscure characters in the narrative of Ogidi’s written history of the transition from autonomous society to colonial territory – are the people I am most interested in. I want to know how laws affected the lives of ordinary Ogidi citizens (and how these citizens affected legal change), before and after the arrival of the Anglican Church and British colonial officials.
I start each interview by offering a brief synopsis of my research project and telling the oral history collaborator (the person I am interviewing) the categories of questions I will ask, so that the person has some expectation for the interview. Most of the people I interview tell me that they may not be of much help, because they are not historians or because they did not live during the colonial period (or were very young at the end of the colonial period), or that they are Christians and therefore do not know much about indigenous Igbo religion and the associated traditions, ceremonies, and laws. I tell my oral history collaborators (OHCs) that any information they can give me is appreciated. The next thing I know, I look at the time stamp on my audio recorder to see that the interview with the OHC that said s/he knew little about history took nearly 3 hours. How can someone who knows little or nothing about history speak about history for 3 hours (or even 1 hour)? People know history – even if they think they don’t.
These men and women that I have interviewed in Ogidi have proven to me that you do not need to study history in a classroom or read historical monographs to know history. This is especially true in Ogidi, because until the early twentieth century, the history was not written. Do not misunderstand me – I am not saying there was no history. It is ignorant to think that a human society that did not write somehow did not have another way of recording its history. Writing is not the only way to record the past. Sometimes it’s not even the best way to record the past. In Ogidi, as in much of Igboland and many other parts of Africa prior to European colonialism, societies recorded their histories orally – through stories, proverbs, laws, folk tales, songs, spoken poetry, and oral traditions that were told and retold, passed down to younger generations. These oral records are as valid and as valuable as written records.
The bottom line: people know more than they think they do. History is everywhere and history is everything. I have learned much historical information and many historical narratives and perspectives by listening to historians and non-historians from Ogidi tell me what they experienced or what their parents told them about history, culture, customs, religion, law, and more. Oral histories matter. Of course, written histories matter too, but I don’t think anyone ever questioned that written histories mattered. That is why I am spending almost one year interviewing Igbo men and women in and from Ogidi, southeastern Nigeria. Oral histories matter.
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