Affiliation:
Institute of Didactics of History and Public History
Prof. Dr. Bernd-Stefan Grewe
Research Project:
Neighbourhood Encounters in Anglo-German Colonial Frontiers in West Africa, 1884-1914
The important defining components of neighbourhood are the physical and the social, while its basic elements are people, place, interaction system, shared identification and public symbols. These components and elements of neighbourhood are not fixed and static but undergo continuous organic evolution, constantly responding to the changing conditions in its central core. Studies have been carried out on the mechanisms and processes by which neighbourhoods are formed, changed and decline, with little attention paid to the West African experience. Similarly, extant studies on colonial encounters in Africa have paid scant attention to the effects of the Anglo-German imperial rivalry on West African neighbourhood. This study is, therefore, designed to examine the effects of the Anglo-German colonial encounters on neighborhoods in West Africa, from 1884 when Germany joined the colonial race to 1914 when the First World War broke out, leading to the loss of German colonial territories. This is with a view to analyzing how the forces of colonialism and migration transformed not only the neighborhoods, but ways of doing and thinking neighbourhood in West Africa, as well as how the local communities responded to the tension of the imperial conflicts and the necessities of local cooperation. The significance of this study is not only in its contribution to the literature on the neighbourhood encounters, but in extending the conversation on the dimensions of the impact of Anglo-German relations in Africa. The study draws on original archival research and oral interviews in Togo (former German colonial territory) as well as Nigeria and Ghana, the British colonial territories with significant contiguity with German colonial territories in West Africa. These will be augmented with sources to be generated from the German national and company archives as well as secondary sources from the library of Universität Tubingen. The analytical frame of the study is historical, intersectional, and transdisciplinary. It argues that the partition and delimitation of the colonial boundaries of the Neutral Zones of Togoland and Gold Coast as well as the Hinterlands by Germany and Britain led to the transformation of neighbourhood as points of overlap and intersection. This bifurcation and territorial contiguity had numerous implications for doing and thinking neighbourhood in West Africa in the period under discussion.
Stay in Tübingen:
from 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025
Research Areas:
Global History, Colonial History, International Political Economy, Intellectual History
Publications:
- Olisa Muojama.‘Victims of Nationality: German Civilian Internment in British West Africa during the Second World War.’ Journal of World History Vol. 37. No. 3 (Sept. 2024)
- Mattin Biglari and Olisa Muojama, ‘Global Histories of Environment and Labour in Asia and Africa.’ In Emily O’Gorman, William San Martin, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart. The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History (Oxon and New York: Routledge 2024), 247-260
- Gertschen, A. and Olisa Muojama, ‘Multinational Enterprises.’ In Unger, C. R.; Borowy, I. and Pernet, C. A. The Routledge Handbook on the History of Development (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2022). 278-296.
- Olisa Muojama, ‘Cocoa Marketing Board and Sustainable Cocoa Economy in Colonial Nigeria. African Economic History Vol.47. No.1 (2019): 1-31
Contact:
olisamuo@gmail.com
About:
Dr. Olisa Godson MUOJAMA is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. His research cuts across African History, global history, economic history, and colonial history. He is a fellow of Global Encounters, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany (2024-2025). He was a Fellow in Global History at the Munich Centre for Global History, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany (2022). He was a Laurette of the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Dakar, Senegal (2016). He was also a Fellow of the African Humanities Program (AHP) of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) from 2011 to 2012. He is the Principal Investigator/Principal Faculty in Nigeria of the Global History Lab (GHL), University of Cambridge, formerly of Princeton University, New Jersey, USA. He is the author of The Nigerian Cocoa Industry and the International Economy in the 1930s: A World-Systems Approach. He has also published in specialist journals such as African Economic History 47, no.1 (2019): 1-31 (Wisconsin) and Journal of World History 35, no. 3 (2024, upcoming). His current post-doctoral research is on Deutsch-Westafricanisches Begenungen, 1840-1990.