Beyond Representation: Generational Memories and A Contemporary Making of Nigerian Middle Belt Conciousness

Abstract

Much of the history of minority groups in post-colonial societies is tailored within dominant official narratives geared towards a hegemonized national consciousness. In Nigeria, colonial processes of erasure are often reproduced in sub-nationalism, leading to counter attempts by minorities to produce dissident accounts that seek to articulate themselves in the national project. This study articulates the generational transitions of ethno-religious minority groups in Middle Belt Nigeria and the contestations of creating political meaning against existing representations. The major contribution of the thesis is the development of a decolonial memory web as a conceptual framework grounded in archive, narrative, space, and performance metaphors to demonstrate decolonial memory work as a necessary tool of assessing the nature of consciousness as a network in post-colonial societies. This research maps ideological and cultural mobility in Nigeria’s Middle Belt through remembering from a contemporary generation as they re-imagine themselves in political transitions from the sub-colonial imaginary of the 1920s, to the struggle for the creation of states in the 1950s, and the cyclical bouts of violence and conflict from the 2000s to the present. I argue that the contemporary collective self of the Middle Belt mediates its identity through cultural production in digital content, music, festivals, and literature to form a collective Middle Belt culture and consciousness that acts as a critique of national consciousness. The study offers new insights into post-colonial subjects and their evolving, volatile political environment, which is often lost in studies that privilege elite historical accounts of conflicts as superior to ordinary memory accounts. Finally, I argue through my analysis that the Middle Belt consciousness in generative moments of ‘post-conflict’ delinks from the coloniality of memory that centers the erasure and disavowal of the post-colonial Middle Belt, and reconfigures memory into mnemonic resources as an aspirational tool of legitimacy for minorities through the collective self-imagination of the Middle Belt.