Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories

This book brings together the newest and the most innovative scholarship on Nigerian children—one of the least researched groups in African colonial history. It engages the changing conceptions of childhood, relating it to the broader themes about modernity, power, agency, and social transformation under imperial rule. Contributors detail everyday interaction of children with the socio-political and economic infrastructure of colonialism and demonstrate that they played a significant but rarely acknowledged role in molding core ideas about colonial modernity and civilization. Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories fills a major gap in African studies by presenting the historical roots of some of the main issues about children' experience in postcolonial Nigeria. It argues that colonial history of children is important for understanding the challenges of childhood in contemporary Nigeria.

Saheed Aderinto is Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University, USA.

1. I khan ta man iye uwe (I Will Report You to Your Mother): Children's Masquerades, Performance, and Creativity in Benin City; Uyilawa Usuanlele
2. Researching Colonial Childhood: Images and Representation of Children in Nigerian Newspaper Press, 1925-1950; Saheed Aderinto
3. 'A World of Good to our Boys': Boy Scouts in Southern Nigeria, 1934-1951; Adam Paddock
4. '500 Children are Missing in Lagos': Child Kidnapping and Public Anxiety in Colonial Nigeria; Saheed Aderinto and Paul Osifodunrin
5. Processing Juvenile Delinquents at The Salvation Army's Boys' Industrial Home in Lagos, 1925–1944; Simon Heap
6. Within Salvation: Child Hawkers and the Colonial State in Development Era Lagos; Abosede George
7. Childhood Memories and Contemporary Parenting in Ekiti; Elisha Renne
8. The Colonial Office and the Employment of Children in the Nigerian Tin Mines in the 1950s; Tokunbo Ayoola
9. The Colonial Child: Autobiography, Memory of Childhood, and the Representation of the Self; Saheed Aderinto