Ordinarily, I would not have written on this ‘perceived’ debate. Still, because of some misconceptions advanced by Dr. Samaila Suleiman of the Department of History, Bayero University, Kano, and to put the records straight, I decided to clarify these misconceptions that even regarded the Yusufu Bala Usman/Ibrahim Bello Kano’s (henceforth IBK as he is popularly known) ‘intellectual’ correspondences as an academic debate.
Suleiman claims that IBK had an intellectual discussion with Yusufu Bala Usman, explaining its nature and intricacies.
However, looking at the available primary sources, which Suleiman might have missed, one will come to terms with the fact that instead of calling the Usman/IBK ‘intellectual’ correspondence as a debate, at best, it should be described as a mere intellectual correspondence between a teacher and his recalcitrant student.
In a letter dated 22nd February 1998, IBK wrote to Usman asking for his incisive intellectual comments on PhD proposal entitled ‘Narrativity and Representation in Exploration Writing: A Case Study of Heinrich Barth’s Travels and Discoveries’. Concerning this proposal and his intention to undertake the research, IBK admits that he does ‘not, however, have a systematic idea of the issues’ and thus pleads with Usman, saying, ‘Do please, help me with advice. Professor Mustapha Muhammad Gwadabe, IBK’s childhood friend and one of Usman’s students, was the one who linked him up to Usman. In his letter, IBK informs Usman that he could collect his comments ‘through Gwadabe’ or frequently check on him ‘as the case may be’.
After reading IBK’s proposal, Usman wrote his five-page report raising eight important queries: (1) being a text-based study of Barth’s three-volume publication, the proposal fails to provide details on the historical process of the conception, writing, editing, correction, financing, publishing and review of the text under study (2) There is no mention of the need to inquire into the institutional structures and process in which Barth’s Travels and Discoveries took place and one cannot comprehend its meanings and penetrate its various levels of thought and representation without examining the specific historical process of its production (3) Also missing in the proposal is the relation between what Barth narrates and represents, or misrepresents, to the body of writing by other European travellers in North and Central Africa, particularly in the 19th century so as not to treat the text in an intellectual, political, historical and stylistic vacuum (4) There is the need to review the proposal’s perspective on German historical, particularly cultural and intellectual developments in the 18th and 19th centuries (5) The lumping together of Linneaus (1707-1778), Hume (1711-1776), Kant (1724-1804), Herder (1744-1803), Geothe (1749-1832), Hegel (1770-1831), Cuvier (1769-1832) and Thomas Jefferson as ‘the key figures of European enlightenment’ is surely not correct (6) The treatment of the German intellectual history in the 19th century is much too simplistic not to mention the neglect of the 1848 Revolution, which shook everything in Germany and how Barth relates to it (7) There is a strong need to bring up the travellers, traders, scholars and warriors, the officials of Borno and Sokoto who Barth relied on for his ‘Travels and Discoveries’ and (8) there is also the need to extend the proposal’s literature review and revise the chapter outline to cover crucial dimensions of the subject of the study, which are not adequately addressed.
Based on Usman’s valid comments, which might have improved the quality of IBK’s research, the latter, instead of showing his gratitude to the former, resorted to vituperation. The pejorative words used by IBK as a student to address Usman, a great scholar respected by many, transcend the boundaries of intellectual correspondence to what I considered gross academic disrespect. In his second response, however, Usman states:
I have read your response to my comments on your research proposal for the study of Heinrich Barth’s Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, and I am surprised that you are angry with me because I did not praise you, as you claim Anthony Kirk-Greene, Murry Last and others, have done. If they have actually praised you, and you are not misunderstanding their comments, I do not think they have been fair to you as a postgraduate student. What you need at this stage of your work, is, detailed, constructive criticism to enable you to sharpen your perspective, premises, concepts and method…not merely dancing around what others have written. This is not the time for praise…As it is, you are, sadly, embarking on this study, with your head filled with the false notion that, by merely writing this research proposal, you have done something outstanding and original.’
From the above quotation, it is obvious that Usman wanted IBK to be original, diligent and hardworking in documenting his thesis.
Unfortunately, instead of addressing the intrinsic weaknesses of his proposal, he was busy showing his dissatisfaction with Usman’s comments in the first place. Knowing the nature and impact of the Yusufu Bala Usman/Bangura debate in 1984, probably, IBK wanted a cheap academic fame by riding the shoulders of a giant, which he thought might come out from his baseless arguments, quest for pleasantries, sycophancy and gross academic disrespect that have dotted different parts of his reply to Usman on the 10th of October, 1999. Apart from addressing Usman as a ‘fetish’, he claims that Usman was ‘not competent to supervise any doctoral research of the sort I am attempting’. He also admits that ‘I know, for a fact, that you had, in the past, lost your most sincere admirers on account of your propensity to dismiss even the most promising proposal’.
If IBK knows about this, why did he give his proposal to him? Is this not justifying my argument that he was just camouflaging to engage in a debate so that he would be known? As it appears, IBK was just a figurehead as he was acting based on the whimsical interests of Usman’s arch-rivals who could not come out openly to challenge him intellectually and chose to hide under a gullible PhD student.
Nadir A. Nasidi wrote from the
Department of History
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria
nanasidi@abu.edu.ng
