Inexplicable Irony

About the Book

Inexplicable Irony is a socio-historical rendition of life in the earliest ethnic nations and kingdoms of the territories that later evolved into the British colony and protectorate of Nigeria whose people, as pastoral farmers, skilled artisans, or craftsmen, did not necessarily live in peace with their neighboring kinsmen. This state of constant turmoil and inter-ethnic warfare provided an environment in which slavery and slave trade thrived from the latter half of the fifteenth through the nineteenth century resulting in the forceful capture and sale of over twenty million people - including men, women, and children - who were shipped overseas as slaves with at least 20 percent of those chained in the holds of slave ships dying before they arrived at their destinations for forced labor in Europe and the Americas! At the end of the official slave trade came a new phase of subjugation called “colonization” and an attempt to educate and Christianize the Africans. Yet some leaders of thought in the West, including Rudyard Kipling in 1899, lamented whether it was worthwhile “to wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild your new-caught sullen peoples half devil and half child.” Nevertheless, Nigeria made steady progress as a unified political entity. But it was not always able to have its governing affairs handled openly either for fear of offending a segment of the population or to prevent a favored group from rising up in rebellion against the colonial masters. This fear thus stifled creativity, innovation in governance, and facilitated corruption in high places resulting in perpetual conflict which has grown out of control. This is the Inexplicable Irony.

About the Author

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