The speech of Sir. Charles Chadwick, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, at the annual dinner of the Royal Colonial Institute on April 24th, 1897.
Honored guests, I now have the honor to propose the toast of “Prosperity to the Royal Colonial Institute.” I rise to my feet on this occasion as it is both a pleasure and privilege to be here tonight. With the institute’s mission to promote Commonwealth and core values of culture, I express my admiration to the founders of 1868.
For I am not a member of the Ibo clan nor culture. I am the British Secretary of State for the Colonies in which Great Britain has indulged its control. For the last fifteen years, I have settled in Igboland and documented the Igbo world, culture, and history. Throughout these expeditions, it seems to me that there is a controversial misconception regarding our colonies in Africa and Imperial history. Public opinions have drifted to the opposite extreme as our current influence on their culture is often underestimated.
On Monday, 18th of September, I flew to Igboland, Southeastern Nigeria. It is the home of one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, of which approximately 15 million members live in Nigeria. Over the last 200 years, the body of English literature that has been published on African colonies has presented Africans in extremely lurid terms. When we think of Nigeria, we are often reminded of a framework of infinite chaos and deprivation. As a matter of fact, literature from writers such as John Lok referred to black Africans as “beasts who have no houses... without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.” However, such descriptions often deviate far from reality. To your surprise, the Ibo people form an incredibly intricate complex culture, of which many values and traditions are on the verge of irreversible cultural assimilation due to our British colonies.
The Igbo identity is a compound product of the twentieth century and consists of two hundred separate groups in an aggregation of self-containing towns. Before the Christian missionaries arrived during the 1830s, the Igbo believed in the Supreme Being, also known as the Chukwu, who lives in the sky looking upon his peoples. Furthermore, folk tales, proverbs, and incantations strengthened their devotion for the existence of Chukwu. What many of us today fail to realize is that differences are what unite nations. Our ideology of civilization can simply not be a mandatory mold for other cultures. In Igbo communities, democracy was achieved with the principle of direct participation in government around the idea of cross-cutting ties. This includes the councils of elders, councils of chiefs, secret societies, age-groups and women’s associations.
Our lack of knowledge on their ideologies of “equalitarianism” is extremely visible during our colonization history. We must understand that the Igbo culture is divided into age groups, in which individual achievements are highly regarded. However, this lack of recognition lead the arrival of colonial officers to strip traditional Igbo chiefs of power such as the ozo title. We must also understand that in Igbo culture, concepts such as polygamy, secret societies, the enigma of twinship and oracles are far from British traditions. Unique systems such as autonomous villages and town which are ruled by their elder in patrilineages are vulnerable to our imposed colonization and ideologies. Voices of the Chukwu are demanded to be heard by the Obodos, they are demanded to be heard by us.
Currently, cultural assimilation of the Igbo culture is ongoing. This is also true for other British colonies such as Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, British East Africa, British Somaliland, etc. The complexity of such tangled cultures are often hidden under a coat of Eurocentrism. And it is our responsibility, to reconsider our approach of colonization, to remove the coat which hides the beauty of such human nature. Indeed, a small change in our mindset is a change forward. As a nation, I am convinced that we are not blind and that we shall rise to our obligations to construct a greater and wealthier nation. We must take this past to recognize that our approach to colonization and the assimilation of complex cultures such as Igbo is not only a destruction of our united empire but also a destruction of our mission to fulfill our national character of the British flag. Let it be our task. Let it be our will. Let us have confidence in the future. It is because I firmly believe that the Royal Colonial Institute will support to this sincere recognition, that I propose the toast of the evening.
-Sir. Charles Chandler (1843-1929)
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