Interrogating the 1968/69 Class Conflict in South-western Nigeria

Abstract

Although some literature on post-colonial conflict in Africa have demonstrated that the crises in Western Nigeria were caused by taxation and tax-related considerations, scholarship on inter-class relations and class formation in Africa is far from being complete. The 1968/69 resource poor peasant struggles was not only between unfledged classes with very little political self awareness, this study is also an example of class conflict or more appropriately, class clashes between representatives of an urban-oriented policy of development and what a scholar refers to as 'agrarian population'. Using primary and secondary sources, the study explores the various ways through which the bureaucrats, politicians and the military rulers shortchanged the peasants who were derogatorily designated as 'static', ‘timeless', 'changeless' individuals and groups inhabiting a backward society and deploying anachronistic agricultural techniques in a rapidly changing modern world. This research exposes the weaknesses of early post-independent rulers’ tax policies by looking at how the peasant farmers in Western Nigeria contested the imposition of high taxes on their personal incomes and vigorously asserted themselves. The uniqueness of this study resides not only in its adding to recent scholarship that is trying to bring the historiography of peasants of South-western Nigeria to the standard that obtains in other places around the world, it also recognizes the need for further research to preserve the social memory of the 1968/69 Agbekoya Riots through the collection, preservation and dissemination of literature on the major stakeholders in the tax riots.