Abstract
University music education is a recent phenomenon in Nigeria. The founding of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, with autonomy to grant degrees for courses in nearly all fields of study, enabled it to initiate music degree along the lines of the Euro-American university music education in 1961. This article, relying on historical analysis with historical evidence derived from primary and secondary documents, delineates some cultural, philosophical, political, social, and economic forces that have shaped the development of university music education in Nigeria before and after its establishment. It finds out that significant changes in university music education in Nigeria are being negotiated with national policies, accrediting agencies, certification requirements, and curriculum mandates. It proffers solutions to some of its ongoing problems by calling for a university music education in which music conferences and festivals are combined with creative and productive music teaching and learning, and where participants’ observation is emphasized.
Keywords
Introduction
In today’s world, higher education, which embodies all organized learning and training activities at the tertiary level, is essential to development. Many peoples and societies are organizing themselves as if there is “no salvation outside higher education” (Shils, 1971, p. 313). University has become a must-have because of the scope of higher learning and production of knowledge it encompasses. The imperatives of educating citizenship to exercise civic leadership and public service are fundamentally tied to it. Equally important is the unique focus and perspective it takes on human concerns. Barnett (2011) observes that “universities have been with us on this Earth for at least one thousand years and will surely be with us in the future; perhaps so long as there is life on this planet that has any well-being” (p. 439). Crucial to life on this planet that has any well-being is education which Walker (1998) enjoins us to see as “a quest to gain understanding of what it means to be human in all its illogicality, its unpredictability, its irrationality, and in all its uniquely varied cultural ways of doing and thinking” (p. 58). This is to argue that an intimate connection exists between education and the process of becoming fully human.
Many modern nations strive to establish and maintain universities. This is to promote world well-being, for the advancement of thought and culture, for the growth of knowledge, and because of the university’s essentiality that Barnett (2011) alludes to. By the 2000s, continental Africa had established more than 300 universities (Matos, 2000, p. 14). In 2010, the number of universities in Nigeria had risen from 1 in 1948 to 104 (Okebukola, 2010, p. 2).
Being studied in many of these universities is music which is “a living analogue of human knowing, feeling, sensibility, emotions, intellectual
University music education is seen in this article as the process of preparing dedicated individuals for positions of leadership so as to give vitality and priority to a society’s musical life. It encompasses the study of music to be in command of musical thoughts, values, tastes, practices, and wisdom not only of one’s society but also of others’ and to interpret such from one’s own perspective. In Nigeria’s bid to use the university as the finishing school for those who have to lead the creation of a vigorously musical Nigerian society, university music education started in Nigeria in 1961 with the establishment of the Department of Music at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN).
While university music education has existed in Nigeria for more than 50 years, the knowledge of its development is limited among music academics. Although there is an upsurge of interest in the history of music education generally in Nigeria (Ekwueme, 2004; Idolor, 2005; Kwami, 1994; New, 1980; Nketia, 1998; Okafor, 2005; O. Omojola, 1992, 1995; Sowande, 1967; Vidal, 1977), the history of Nigeria’s university music education is often given short shrift. In such studies, between one and three paragraphs are given to its development, and in some instances, one finds only one or two sentences about it. This shows that the development of university music education in Nigeria is recognized but seldom highlighted in music scholarship.
Such marginalization gives the impression that it is not needed. It denies stakeholders (providers and users) the knowledge of the characteristics of their enterprise and the awareness of its essentialities in national development. The history of university music education in Nigeria, therefore, deserves a detailed study, because the Nigerian society and music academics need the knowledge. They need to know Nigeria’s contributions to its growth and development.
This article therefore focuses on the origin and historical development of university music education in Nigeria. It takes a look at the historical, political, and sociological factors that have aided or impeded its development, analyses its characteristics, and examines its prospects for the future. It relies on historical analysis with historical evidence derived from primary and secondary sources, including autobiographical and biographical accounts, academic publications, organizational materials, and policy papers among others.
Origins of University Music Education in Nigeria
Given Ajayi, Goma, and Johnson’s (1996) admonition, it is apposite locating the development of university music education in its broader historical context, including the indigenous African and Islamic (HME) systems in Nigeria. As Kwami (1994) notes, “there are three major aspects of music education—indigenous/traditional African, Arabic and European—which would need to be discussed in a comprehensive survey of music education in West African countries” (p. 544). Hence, predating the founding of university music education in Nigeria were indigenous African and Islamic HME systems. Even in the 21st century, these systems, although officially marginalized and occluded, continue to have untold significance in what Nigerians and their communities do to keep alive.
Indigenous African Higher Music Education
Largely, from time immemorial, indigenous Africans conceptualize music as something communal, continual, and known by practicing it to ensure the continuity of their age-old music traditions and culture. At its hub is a long-standing tradition of “oral university” (Saether, 2003) which produces devoted master-musician-teachers who must musically educate others, and keep and protract the community’s musical standards and repertory too. Its product is the today’s “culture-bearer” which Nzewi (1997) describes as
. . . the accomplished traditional or neo-traditional (popular and contemporary musical developments) music practitioners who know and practice music without the modern training or orientation to articulate the theories and processes of his/her culturally rationalised musical experiences and products. This is the primary respondent whom the ethnomusicologist encounters and interacts with in the field, and whose often research-suggested responses or otherwise un-verbalized music-cultural facts the ethnomusicologist relies upon for analytical inferences, critical opinions and theories. (p. 16)
The indigenous African music culture-bearers, as they continue make music part of daily life and ritual, remain an invaluable and reliable source for modern scholars. While indigenous Africans have not set up academic music learning spaces similar to those in universities in the contemporary Euro-Americanized societies, their oral universities fulfill missions that are analogous in their principles. Though it has faced immense denigration in the course of Nigeria’s encounter with exogenously spawned music education systems, it is still operational. Its accommodative stance enables it to coexist with the Islamic and Western HME systems in Nigeria.
Islamic Higher Music Education
In the 14th century, Islamic traders and scholars brought Islam, which represented a distinctive worldview, epistemology, and ethics that informed practice, including matters relating to music education, to Hausaland from where it spread to other parts of Nigeria. Koranic schools exist as a distinct form of music education which facilitates the cantillation, memorization, and transmission of the divine truth of the Koran to Muslims “exactly as it had been given to Mohammed” (Omar in Boyle, 2004, p. 12). They characterize Islamized Nigerian communities as elsewhere in the Islamic world.
Islamic HME exists in
Though this form of HME has continued to meet certain music educational needs of Islamized Nigerian communities, legacies of colonial perspectives that consider it insignificant and Nigeria’s failure to fully integrate it into its modern HME system have marginalized it. There is a need to officially recognize it as an important site for Nigerian HME and improve what is done there so that it can continue to have a shared interest in and responsibility to the Nigeria’s musical health.
The Need for Modern University Music Education in Nigeria
Nzewi (1997) tasks the university music education in Nigeria with enabling
. . . the modern mind and intellect anywhere in the world to respect, and thereby know the nature of the (traditional) African creative energy; to perceive the inside of African musical thoughts and thereby to understand as well as appreciate the values, potentials and benefits of African music to the ever coalescing but increasingly un-humanising world peoples. (p. 14)
In fact, the pursuit of this mission is too important to be left to the indigenous African and Afro-Islamic HME systems and their master-musician-teachers alone.
Definitely, they will continue to exist and play their roles in attending to the health and vitality of Nigerian musical life. But they rarely have the kind of territorial border the university music education system has. They can provide but not “process” and produce crucial systematically theorized African music knowledge that reflects the basic principles that underlie African musical practices needed by the modern Nigerian and the academic world. They cannot solely meet all the music educational needs of the Nigerian society. Hence, it is crucial to embrace the idea that contemporary HME takes place in settings well beyond the sites of the indigenous African and Afro-Islamic HME systems.
It is good to know that university music education was an integral part of the colonial modernity that defined Nigeria’s musical–educational–historical context. It is essential to accept that it is now a force that defines what Nigerians will continue to put up with in the present and future musical systems. Hence, it is vital to create and capitalize on it as a space and strategy for cultivating Nigerian academic music life; for enabling Nigerians to celebrate, interrogate, and transform their music culture, identity, and society and asserting the Nigerian voice. A Nigerian university music system is needed to recognize, create, and strategize the university as a site for globalizing African musical knowledge and Africanizing global musical knowledge.
Advocacy for University Music Education and African Music Studies
In the 19th century, Nigeria witnessed the imposition of a Western education system as part of the colonial project. From then emerged the school-educated African elite. Later, some of them, who realized that they had used the privileges of Western education to distance themselves from the masses, began to crave for the establishment of universities in Nigeria. Specifically, the first person to sue for it was James Johnson, supported by Otunba Payne and J. S. Leigh. They were members of the Lagos Literary and Industrial Institute, a body aimed at promoting the intellectual life of Lagos. Also, there rose to prominence scholarship premised on the wider African cultural world associated with such names as Blyden, Horton, Casely Hayford, DuBois, Woodson, James, and Drake in such outlets as the . . . the songs of our unsophisticated brethren as they sing of their history, as they tell of their traditions, of the wonderful and mysterious events of their tribal and national life, of the achievements of what we call their superstitions; we must lend a ready ear to the ditties of the Kroomen who pull our boats, of the Pesseh and Gollah men who till our farms; we must read the compositions, rude as we may think them, of the Mandingoes and the Veys (Vai). (Blyden in Nketia, 1998, p. 17)
Though such calls by Blyden and others were ignored because colonized Africa offered little that qualified as academic music in its colonizers’ eyes, colonial governments trained some European experts on Africa whom they later deployed as their anthropologists studying indigenous Africans and African cultures. There emerged “teachers, colonial officers, and military personnel who took an interest in music, produced accounts of musical practice and, in some cases, prescribed programmes for the musical education of colonized people” (Agawu, 1992, p. 250). Africanists who laid foundations for Africanist ethnomusicology and musical discourse thus emerged.
Eventually, Europe and America created academic departments, established African studies, invented ethnomusicology, and produced some Euro-American ethnomusicologists dedicated to the study of African music. In 1947, the African Music Society was formed in South Africa. In 1955, the Society for Ethnomusicology was founded in the United States. Writings on African music appeared mainly in two journals—
With the imposition of Western education, school-educated Nigerians’ respect for indigenous African and Islamic musical systems diminished and their veneration of Western musical system increased. Yet inchoate but powerful dissenting Nigerian voices arose early enough in the late 19th century and in the 1950s. They challenged the uncritical admiration for Western musical traditions and modified the imposed European missionary cum colonial musical fare by infusing some elements of Nigerian music into it. They evolved performances with African experience and indigenous music performance values as their frame of reference (O. Omojola, 1995). Some Nigerian nationalist politicians became aware of the importance of revivifying the indigenous Nigerian musical heritage. Azikiwe (1934), for instance, while calling for educational reforms in Africa, states,
In addition to the subjects taught in elementary, secondary, and collegiate institutions, more emphasis should be placed on African anthropology, ethnology, and ethnography. African educators, be they black or white, should sift the excrescences of African culture and have a scientific attitude in order to delineate the durable and qualitative essentials of African sociology, philosophy, religion, ethics, art, music, law, and government. (p. 145)
The realization that Nigerians needed a university music education system that will aid them in inheriting their distinctive music culture made certain Nigerian cultural nationalists to develop plans in the 1950s to found UNN. It enabled them to make music studies an integral part of the university’s curricula.
Historical Development of University Music Education in Nigeria
The growing demand in the colonies for higher educational institutions on the standard and pattern of higher education in Europe and America led to the formation of the Asquith and Elliot Commissions on Higher Education in West Africa in 1943. Both Commissions reported in 1945, although the Elliot’s blueprint, the more pertinent here, did not specifically mention music as a subject of study in tertiary institutions. It, however, advocated for research into the past of West Africa, which would necessarily include music, to stimulate local interest in the ancient traditions of the people. This, it hoped, would help the indigenous West African peoples maintain a grip on their traditions and keep their society together in the face of the rapid changes taking place in West Africa.
The Commissions’ reports led to the founding of University College, Ibadan (UCI), which began university education in Nigeria in 1948. Established by the British colonialists as a University of London campus at Ibadan, with a prototype of British educational philosophy for the colonies, UCI operated in accordance with the reports’ recommendations. Until 1960, when Nigeria gained political independence, UCI was the only university in Nigeria.
UCI and University Music Education
The UCI, in line with the then colonial educational ideology, neglected the expected sociocultural functions of university education. It did not recognize the importance of creative practical profession. It excluded music from its curricula, because it considered music unworthy of serious academic study. Even at the preuniversity level of education, music occupied a lowly position because the colonialists deemed it irrelevant to their course. As Omibiyi (1983) relates, “. . . The reaction of the Europeans who were custodians of educational activities was to de-emphasize music in the school curriculum, and this led to the gradual decadence of music in Nigerian schools which became our heritage in contemporary times” (p. 124). Stifling students’ interest in school music which had been established in Nigeria around 1840s ensued. Only Robert Coker, T. K. E. Phillips, and a few other Nigerians were identified with it (O. Omojola, 1995), and they reaped the benefits of HME, which was available only abroad. This imbued many school-educated Nigerians with the belief
. . . that anybody of some intelligence should obtain higher training in the sciences, engineering, or medicine, or at least in law and the Liberal Arts of history, geography, languages, etc. The applied arts of music, drama, dance, fine arts—it was thought—were to be undertaken by people “who were not smart enough to pursue serious studies.” (Ekwueme, 2004, p. 157)
This attitude made music an unattractive university career. Also, UCI considered music studies unnecessary, because before the 1950s, music was not particularly a popular university subject in the British educational culture. As Dckinson (2001) relates,
Although British universities have granted music degrees as a professional qualification since the 15th Century (and indeed were the first in Europe to do so), it was not until after World War II that music was accepted as a subject suitable for full-time study. Undergraduate music degrees were instituted at Cambridge in 1945 and at Oxford in 1950. (p. 145)
So, UCI’s attitude to music studies purely reflected British’s contemporary opinion around the 1940s which many school-educated Nigerians considered the norm. UCI, however, pioneered organization of campus concerts in Nigeria when in the 1950s it made the performance of a musical work in the Western repertoire a major annual event on campus (Irele, 2001, p. vii).
This followed from the establishment of the Arts Theatre in 1954 and the formation by a group of expatriates, mainly university teachers and civil servants residents in Ibadan, with their Nigerian friends, of the Arts Theatre Production troupe in 1957. The group sought to awaken interest in theater, drama, and music as entertainment and serious art (Lakoju, 1992, p. 168). Also formed were musical clubs such as the Musical Society, the Music Circle, and the Operatic Society. Some of these were students’ groups. Others involved a mixture of staff and students (Irele, 2001, p. vii). Their concerts, individually and collectively, affirmed the centrality of Western classical music in UCI’s musical life.
The UCI’s concerts had some linkages to the European concert traditions the earliest British protocolonial administrations and the Church missions introduced to Nigeria in the 19th century. Then, concerts were organized to satisfy the “keen desire on the part of the small Lagos elite to demonstrate an interest in and appreciation of music and theatre in so far as these were symbols of status and culture” (Echeruo, 1981, p. 357). UCI, thus, contributed to the development of concerts and concert audiences in Nigeria.
Though UCI sponsored concerts, its consideration of music performance unworthy of academic status suggests that it viewed music as socially insignificant and impotent. That it placed emphasis on humanities but did not establish a department of music betrays a conception of the university as essentially a place for teaching and learning the dimensions of
UCI was, however, engaged in music research. It employed Anthony King, an Africanist, who, after making a penetrating study of Yoruba music as found in the Ifaki-Ekiti area of Yorubaland, published the
Cultural Shifts in the Social-Political Scene and University Music Education
In the middle 1950s, Nigeria experienced sociopolitical changes. There ensued a gradual devolution of power to Nigerians and a shift of emphasis from concern with social control to national development. Regionalism contributed to sociopolitical climate that put education at an advantage. In 1959, the Federal Government (FG) set up and mandated the Ashby Commission “to conduct an investigation into Nigeria’s manpower requirements up to 1980” (Ashby, 1960). The Commission’s report admonished UCI to offer a diversity of academic disciplines and show greater flexibility in its approach to and conception of university education. It advocated the importance of African studies and condemned the scant attention paid by the UCI to the study of local languages, cultures, history, and music. It suggested that African studies and music should be studied and taught in universities in separate departments and institutes established for them, in an independent Nigeria for the attainment of projected manpower needs and targets.
Creating Prototype University Music Education for Nigeria
In 1955, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, then the Premier of the Eastern Region, proposed the establishment of an autonomous university which challenged the existing narrow conception of the UCI. In 1960, the UNN, was officially declared opened. Through immense technical assistance from Michigan State University, the university was established along the American land grant college line with its emphasis on vocational and professional education. With its motto, “To Restore the Dignity of Man,” it made meeting modernization in Nigeria its main focus.
The UNN admitted its students with Ordinary and Advanced-level qualifications and made them take required general studies courses. The institution emphasized 4-year general degree programs and awarded its own degrees in subjects including music.
It started a department of music in 1961, under the Faculty of Technology and named it initially Fela Sowande College of Music after this foremost Nigerian literary musician. The College had Dr. Edna Edet (nee Smith), an African American lady married at that time to a Nigerian, as the first Head of Department. Edet founded the department with her wealth of experience from America and became the first music education researcher in Nigeria (Edet, 1963; Smith, 1962).
Until she left Nigeria, Edet worked tirelessly to build the College into the nation’s first center for the pursuit of musical excellence. Other expatriates who taught initially in the College were Allen Geyer, Nutting, and Eleodori Toffolon (Adeogun, 2005). They laid, for universities in Nigeria, the foundation for academic music educational programs that were naturally influenced by the British and American traditions of music education of the 1950s.
The first three Nigerian academic musicians employed by the UNN were W. W. C. Echezona, Sam Akpabot, and Laz Ekwueme. The University sent Echezona, who had then received professional music education at the Trinity College of Music, London, to the Michigan State University where he obtained M. Mus. in 1962. He completed his doctoral dissertation titled
For the study of indigenous African music, the College secured the services of O. Owonta—a traditional Igbo xylophone teacher from Udi in Eastern Nigeria. It also employed Olalekan Olaoye, a 16-year-old son of one of the Timi of Ede’s royal drummers (Edet, 1965, p. 78). Olaoye and Owonta handled African musical instrument tutorials, while Edet, Echezona, Akpabot, and Ekwueme played a role in making their students see their Nigerian music as a worthy academic subject or preoccupation. As Sam Ojukwu, a pioneer student reminisces, “Edet, Echezona, Akpabot, Ekwueme, Olaoye and Owonta individually and collectively taught us that our Nigerian music world is worthy of academia” (S. Ojukwu, personal communication, October 15, 2015). Thus, music staff and their students were pioneer “nurturers” of indigenous African music as an object of study in a Nigerian university.
In 1961, the College admitted the following four pioneering students—Meki Nzewi, Sam Ojukwu, Michael Okoye, and Bertram Osuagwu—who later changed his course of study from music to educational foundation due to his little musical background. The College founders prioritized a course of bimusicality in which students received as much experience with African instruments and African musical culture as they received with the Western equivalent (Edet, 1966, p. 144). Though the pioneering promoters of the first “Africanized” university music education were Africans themselves, their program was akin to Hood’s (1960) “bi-musicality.” It was relational to a major development in the 20th century American ethnomusicology that was formulated within specific context of ethnomusicological research and transformed into a pedagogical concept. It provided the framework for designing music curricula that combined Western and foreign musical traditions in the United States.
In the first 2 years, students were required to have a general knowledge of music and related disciplines. Policy-wise, music students obligatorily took general studies courses in the Use of English, Natural Science, and Social Science for intellectual breadth. In line with the UNN’s philosophy that all curricula should be specifically designed to meet Nigeria’s developmental aspirations, they ran a gamut of Western musical knowledge, learnt to play some Nigerian musical instruments, and had lectures in African music as well as seminars in ethnomusicology (Edet, 1965, p. 77).
In the last 2 years, a student specialized either in music composition, performance, African music, or music education. Students were made to study other ethnic groups’ music cultures in addition to those from their own ethnic background. This was to make them acquire positive attitudes to varieties of indigenous Nigerian music. As Edet (1965) notes,
In their third year, the students conducted research on various aspects of African music and education. Emeka Nzewi and Felix M(N)wuba, ethnomusicology students, did musicological surveys among the Odual in the Rivers, and the Isoko respectively. Samuel Ojukwu, a theory and composition student wrote an African suite, and Michael Okoye, a music education student collected, notated and transcribed forty songs suitable for use in the secondary schools. (p. 77)
Such researches by the UNN’s music staff and students served to reassert the significance of traditional Nigerian music. In 1965, the following were first set of music graduates produced by the UNN: Meki Nzewi, Sam Ojukwu, Michael Okoye, and Felix Nwuba, who did a 3-year course having had his Advanced-level papers. Between 1965 and 1967, the university produced four more music graduates: Adolphus Ahanotu and Gabriel Fasina in 1966 and Azubuike Ifionu and Achinivu Kanu Achinivu in 1967. However, as some Nigerians wondered gratuitously where the music graduates would find employment, considerable debate ensued when this new BA (Music) was first introduced by the UNN (Okonkwo, 1986). Music graduates have since taken their places in Nigeria’s musical life. In 1963, the College and the Faculty of Education collaboratively introduced a 3-year Diploma in Music Education program. This was aimed at meeting the nation’s need for well-qualified nongraduate music teachers. In 1966, Nwokolobia Agu graduated and became the first diploma holder in music.
The College organized workshops, short courses, conferences, and African music seminars in which many music teachers participated. It also produced music syllabi for schools and colleges. Its first conference in 1964, themed “African Music in a Changing Society,” had Dr. Echezona, Dr. Edet, Dr. T. K. E. Phillips, and Rev. Fr. B. Kelly talk on various aspects of African music (Edet, 1966, p. 147). Teachers’ participation at the College’s workshops, courses, seminars, and conferences expedited the formation of Music Association of Nigeria in 1964 (Edet, 1966, p. 147). The Association’s objectives were to promote the spirit of cooperation among music teachers and raise the standard of music teaching in Nigeria. But the Association’s impact was little because, among other things, its members were few and located very far from each other.
Between 1967 and 1970, the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War brought the university music education in Nigeria to an abrupt halt when it was still in its infancy. This was so because the UNN was the theater of war that seriously affected the College and dispersed its staff and students. The College lost its musical instruments and other supporting materials to the war (Okonkwo, 1986, p. 152). Some of the College’s staff members and students such as Okechukwu Ndubuisi and Achinivu Kanu Achinivu, who were Biafran supporters, joined the Armed Forces in providing patriotic music to support of the war effort.
Until 1967, the UNN was the only tertiary institution where music was studied in Nigeria. Because of the Civil War, some of the College’s students, like others who were not from Eastern Nigeria, had to pull out of the university. Mosunmola Omibiyi, the first Nigerian female professor of music, and Tunji Vidal were two music students who had to withdraw from the university because of the war. They completed their music studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. The war colored the paths the university music education in Nigeria had taken. Edet (1965) and Sowande (1967) specifically and independently elaborated theories of bimusicality to support music education in Nigeria. Their articles provided the guidelines for developing and designing a Nigerian university music education prototype.
Institutes of African Studies and African Music Knowledge
Although the Ashby report recommended the founding of four new universities at Enugu, Zaria, Ibadan, and Lagos, in the 1960s, Nigeria had five universities: University of Nigeria (UNN; 1960), University of Ife (UNIFE; 1961), Ahmadu Bello University (ABU; 1962), University of Lagos (UNILAG; 1962), and the UCI that became a full-fledged university, UI, in 1962. The FG owned UNILAG and UI, while UNN, ABU, and UNIFE were regional governments’ owned.
In line with Ashby Report’s recommendations, the universities institutionalized African studies. The UNN created the first Institute of African Studies that began studying various Nigerian cultures. It also established the Department of General Studies which “provided an instrumentality whereby all university students received instruction with emphasis on Africa in the humanities, the natural sciences and social sciences” (Hanson, 1968, p. 259). The humanities aspect of the General Studies program was aimed at encouraging
students to become deeply involved in the Nigerian cultural values and better appreciate the basis for social behaviours and the characteristic ways in which Nigerians have responded to Western influences and the alternatives for growth and progress provided by modern science and technology. (Nwabara, 1983, p. 64)
Music is studied as an aspect of the African humanities by all the UNN’s nonarts students. The university’s General Studies program later influenced the curricula of other universities in Nigeria.
The UI also established, in 1962, an Institute of African Studies. The Institute introduced an interdisciplinary study of African history, culture, and the arts. In the 1960s, Anthony King and Fela Sowande championed its music research (Hyslop, 1964, p. 21). At the ABU, music research, conducted under the aegis of the Centre for Nigerian Cultural Studies, was established to develop Nigerian cultural and historical studies.
The UNIFE established its Institute of African Studies in 1962 and adopted a creative approach to its African music studies. It employed established composers, Akin Euba and Samuel Akpabot, as Research Fellows engaged in generating original creative works. Their experimental works featured prominently at the university’s annual Arts Festivals that became fashionable in the late 1960s (Nketia, 1998). Altogether, the institutes have been providing facilities which are valuable to academic musicians and scholarly records to support literary music studies in Nigeria. Their journals,
Expansion and Continuities in University Music Education
After the civil war, the FG tried to rehabilitate and reconstruct the country. Nigeria experienced its oil boom which had a profound impact on every aspect of its life. Education became well-funded. The FG generalized school education and took over schools from voluntary agencies in 1970. It introduced a nation-wide Universal Primary Education (UPE) program in 1976 to promote national unity. In 1975, it took over the existing universities and established seven additional ones in Kano, Calabar, Jos, Ilorin, Port Harcourt, Sokoto, and Maiduguri to advance national development. It abolished fees for all university students in 1976, and this enabled many Nigerians to receive university education. The 1979 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (FRN) placed university education on the Concurrent Legislative list which enabled State Governments who wished, apart from the FG, to establish their own universities. In 1999, the FG began to license private universities. By 2010, “the number of universities was 104 with a pooled student enrolment of about 1.5 million. The total graduate output from the system during the 50-year period is estimated to be about 8.5 million” (Okebukola, 2010, p. 2).
After the civil war, favorable economic conditions, the reopening of the UNN and the increase in the number of its music graduates, growing demand for qualified academic musicians and quality music services, and the return of some Nigerian music graduates from abroad facilitated the expansion of university music education in Nigeria. Thus, universities offering music and music-related programs and the year departments of music or music units were established in them had included:
University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN; 1961)
University of Lagos, Lagos (UNILAG; 1975)
Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife (OAU; 1976)
University of Benin, Benin (UNIBEN; 1978)
University of Uyo, Uyo (UNIYO; 1982)
University of Ilorin, Ilorin (UNILORIN; 1982)
Delta State University, Abraka (DELSU; 1985)
Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka (NAU; 1992)
Lagos State University, Ijanikin (LASU; 2001)
Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, Port Harcourt (IAUE; 2010)
University of Port Harcourt, Port Harcourt (UNIPORT; 2010)
Kwara State University, Ilorin (KWASU) in 2010
University of Ibadan, Ibadan (UI; 2014)
Federal University (FUNAI) Ikwo (FUNAI; 2015) (Field notes, 2015).
Of these, NAU, UNIYO, OAU, UNIPORT, and FUNAI are academic music departments founded on the same principles of organization and purposes as those of the UNN. Initially, UNILAG had an independent department of music that gave students the chance to obtain a degree in music with pioneering academicians like Laz Ekwueme and Akin Euba before it unfortunately became defunct in 1986 in a rationalization exercise. In 1998, it introduced a combined degree in Creative Arts that include music.
With Zulu Sofola and Bode Omojola, UNILORIN pioneered the teaching of music as an integral part of the performing arts, in line with African definition of music as interconnected with other arts. Since then, the performing arts approach has characterized UNILAG, LASU, UNIBEN, DELSU, Ambrose Alli University (AAU), KWASU, and ILORIN’s programs. DELSU brought innovation into it when in 1996 it made Students’ Industrial Work Experience Scheme an integral part of its program (Idolor, 2002). IAUE’s explicit pursuit is the Bachelor in Music Education degree.
Up to the 1980s, Nigerian music academics’ attempts at presenting plural and diverse music educational approaches institutionalized university music education in the southern but not in the northern parts of Nigeria. Music student population became expanded and diversified as available courses were admitting students with a mixture of artistic-musical interest, talent and experience. However, university music education in Nigeria was seen by many as being out of step with the Nigerian society, music students, and changes in technology (Nzewi, 1997; Okafor, 2005). This was because of the Nigerian university music educators’ collective unwillingness to adjust it to evolving challenges. Since then, there has been an ongoing effort to adjust university music education nationally to meet the needs of a rapidly changing Nigerian society, the cultural backgrounds and needs of a changing national music student population and the inexorable advance of technology that seems to know no end.
Toward Nigerian Objectives of University Music Education
In 1975, the FG made itself the sole determinant of policy objectives for Nigerian universities. It constituted the National Universities Commission (NUC) and the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) as its agencies for implementing measures for achieving them. It put in place the
In line with the NPE, the NUC (2007) stresses that “the fundamental concern of the Arts Disciplines (Humanities) is with Man and his complex nature, especially his multifaceted relationships with the world around him and beyond.” (p. 6). It stipulates that music as one of the arts disciplines is “to investigate and explain those aspects of Man’s nature that particularly concern or challenge him” (NUC, 2007, p. 6). The objectives of university music education are to
a. prepare and produce graduate of music who will be competent to musicianship both in the international sense and also in their own African and National tradition. Graduates must have an understanding of the Arts and Science of Music as tools for the appreciation, analysis and practice of world music; b. develop creative skills and talents in students with a view to preparing them for self-employment and entrepreneurship in music industry, broadcasting, communications, entertainment, film cinematography and allied professions; c. lay a foundation for further studies at post-graduate levels leading to advanced engagements in music research laboratory studio and functional exploration of music in relevant organizations and institutions such as Museums, Arts Councils, Religious, Teaching/Pedagogy and Mass Communication Media among others; d. prepare and produce graduates of Music with an understanding of the art and science of Music and tools for the appreciation, analysis and practice of world (Western European) Music and African Music, and an ability to communicate these principles to others; and e. prepare students for professions in the practice and/or teaching of Music at various levels of education, broadcasting, media houses and other avenues of private and public music use, and in entertainment. (NUC, 2007, p. 144)
Thus, the national objectives of university music education are more geared toward producing for the labor market music workers of all kinds rather than the pursuit of excellence. This stance begs for discussion and evaluation. Moreover, Nigeria needs a sound national philosophy of music education with which the direction and commitment of the nation’s formal or academic music education can be steered.
University Music Education and Quality Assurance
Initially, each of the Nigerian universities, on academic grounds, decided who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study. Those with departments of music, up to the 1980s, established quality control checks which ensured that the quality of their programs was acceptable to music academics. Thereafter, the JAMB and the NUC became national mechanisms for university education quality assurance.
Established in 1978, JAMB has the sole responsibility to set admission standards and determine whom and when to admit as well as the number of students each university is to admit. It conducts a common examination called Joint Matriculation Examination (JME) for entry into Nigerian universities. It places suitably qualified candidates in collaboration with the universities, collects and disseminates information on all matters relating to admissions into universities (The JAMB Act, 2004, Section 5(1) & (2)). In the 2000s, some universities introduced post-JAMB examinations because a large percentage of candidates who obtained very high scores in JAMB’s JME, now Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, subjects failed to perform well in the universities. Since 1978, candidates have been taking music as one of the JAMB’s qualifying examinations. A music candidate must score above 200 out of 400 and pass four post-JAMB subjects, including music, to secure an admission. In 1984, JAMB revised its syllabi and injected a reasonable amount of African contents (Vidal, 2002) into it. Hitherto, its music syllabus was basically Western-oriented.
Created in 1962 and based on Ashby Commission’s recommendations, the NUC was reconstituted as a statutory body in 1974. With Act No. 16 of 1985, it was empowered to adopt, create, and implement accreditation systems, lay down minimum academic standards for all academic programs taught in Nigerian universities and to accredit them. In 1989, it developed, approved, and mandated
In 2001, the NUC reviewed the MAS to accommodate “new frontier of knowledge in all academic disciplines, the impact of information and communication technologies on teaching and learning and inclusion of languages and entrepreneurial studies to ensure response to current realities, global competitiveness and relevance” (NUC, 2007, p. 2). It found the content-based MAS documents wanting for its prescriptiveness. It developed outcome-based benchmark statements for all the programs in line with contemporary global practice. And because “the benchmark-style statements were too sketchy to meaningfully guide the development of curricula and were also inadequate for the purpose of accreditation” (NUC, 2007, p. 2), they were merged with the revised MAS into new documents called Benchmark Minimum Academic Standards (BMAS).
In 2007, the NUC developed BMAS for all undergraduate programs in Nigerian universities. BMAS for Music (BMASM), like those for other programs, enunciates “the learning outcomes and competences expected of music graduates without being overly prescriptive while at the same time, providing the requisite flexibility and innovativeness consistent with a milieu of increased institutional autonomy” (NUC, 2007, p. 2).
With the provision of the Basic Minimum Academic Standards for music, the NUC seems to be evolving a “Nigerian model” of university music education. This model’s emphasis is on the preparation of graduate musicians who can function in a world of musical practice that is technologically complicated yet calls for those with humanistic, culturally competent care. It seeks the preparation of graduate musicians who are relevant locally and can compete globally. Although NUC states that it is modifying BMASM from time to time to meet the changing needs of society, scant is BMASM’s scrutiny in terms of its origin, form, content, assumptions, and practicability to decide whether to accept, reject, or modify it accordingly. The establishment of JAMB and NUC has been the most important development in bringing the issue of university music education to the national stage. Moreover, the impact of the central intervention of JAMB and NUC on our university music education needs to be explored.
Contributions of the University Musically Educated Nigerians
A momentous event of the 1970s was the 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77) held in Lagos. It attracted an unprecedented elaborate musical preparation. Importantly, Akin Euba, a foremost Nigerian composer working then in UNILAG, was made the Head of Music in the International Secretariat of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in 1976-1977. He had to compose, perform, and do a recording of the FESTAC ’77 anthem which was played several times daily on radios and televisions in the days preceding and during the one-month-long festival and thus became very popular, especially through its refrain—‘FESTAC Seventy-Seven is here.” (Euba, 2001, p. 126)
There were numerous Nigerian musicotheatrical performances which also attracted the attention of international audiences and dignitaries. Many musicians, music scholars and music teachers suddenly became financially more secure and popular for the various roles they played before and during the FESTAC ’77. Glaring was the indispensable role the academic musicians could play in national life as the experiences of Ayo Bankole, Laz Ekwueme, W. W. C. Echezona, Akin Euba, Sam Akpabot, and others were gainfully employed during the FESTAC ’77 (Ekwueme, 2004; Euba, 2001). Through institutional sponsorships, some Nigerians have completed their postgraduate music studies in world-class universities: Echezona (1963), Vidal (1971), Ekwueme (1972), Omibiyi (1972), Euba (1974), Nwabuoku (1974), Akpabot (1975), Nzewi (1977), Adegbite (1978), Achinivu (1979), Ifionu (1979), J. Uzoigwe (1979), Agu (1984), Olaniyan (1984), Alaja-Browne (1985), O. Omojola (1987, 1995), and so on (see Adeogun, 2005). Upon their return to Nigeria, they brought Euro-American ethnomusicology to bear on Nigerian university music education. The outcome of British structural-functionalism is represented by Agu, Nzewi, Okafor, Olaniyan, and Uzoigwe who studied under the legendary ethnomusicologist—John Blacking at Belfast. Others have included Ifionu (University of London) and Omojola (University of Leicester).
The effect of American ethnomusicology is represented by the works of Echezona and Akpabot. They studied at Michigan State University. Bankole, Vidal, Omibiyi, Euba, Alaja-Browne, and Adegbite studied at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of Pittsburg. The influence of German musicology is exemplified by Achinivu. However, there is scant effort to weld these divergent intellectual influences together in planning and implementing relevant Nigerian university music education programs harmoniously.
The Nigerian music scholars have published in revered journals such as Another morale booster for the music industry is the image of the musicians which has changed from that of school drop-outs and never-do-wells to that of the serious minded and upwardly mobile, positive contributors to society’s improvement. Many of the country’s new crops of musicians are graduates. (p. 53)
Some Nigerian music scholars have challenged the Nigerian society with arguments regarding African music knowledge production. A trio, Akpabot, Nzewi, and Ekwueme, for instance, involved themselves in a theoretical battle over the basis for African musical knowledge production in the late 1970s (Agawu, 2003, pp. xvi-xvii). The University of Ife Press is significant for its publications of
Published books on Nigerian music include Echezona (1963), Akpabot (1986), Kofoworola and Lateef (1987), Ajirire and Alabi (1992), Nzewi (1991, 1997), O. Omojola (1995; B. Omojola, 2012), F. Uzoigwe (1998), Idolor (2002), Omibiyi-Obidike (2001), Ekwueme (2004), Okafor (2005), Onyeji (2008), and so on. Moving to consolidate their progressive image nationally and continentally are two professional associations established by Nigerian musicologists: Association of Nigerian Musicologists (ANIM) and Conference of Music Educators in Nigeria (COMEN).
ANIM stemmed from a conference Bode Omojola convened at the University of Ilorin in 1993. The conference led to the formation of an association known as Musicological Society of Nigeria (MSN). The MSN was later registered in 2015 and became ANIM to avoid a confusion of identity with a previously registered and totally different organization, Musical Society of Nigeria (MUSON; B. Omojola, 2017, p. 3). ANIM and COMEN, formed in 1993 and 2000, respectively, have provided annual meeting points for Nigerian musicologists to discuss national, regional, continental, and international issues. Their progressive orientation is reflected in the prominent role which Nigerian musicologists have played within the radical Pan-African Society for Musical Arts Education (PASMAE). Two past presidents, Meki Nzewi and Okunade Adeoluwa, and a secretary-general, Kayode Samuel, of PASMAE, are Nigerian musicologists.
Concluding Comments
This article has explored the historical, social, and cultural contexts of university music education in Nigeria. The various types of HME in Nigerian history, including those of indigenous African and Islamic roots, are presented. Noticeable is the shift from an apprenticeship model to professional music education in universities. More than 10 university departments of music had been established by 2015. While the UCI was the first university to emerge in Nigeria in 1948, coherent university music education only started in 1961 when the UNN established its Department of Music. In the 1960s, university music education in Nigeria began to develop before it was checkmated by the Nigerian Civil War from 1967 to 1970. Since the 1970s, it has expanded dramatically, serving the needs of Nigeria. The number of music students has increased significantly as a positive attitude to university music education seems emergent.
From the 1980s, university music education in Nigeria has been experiencing reforms in line with government national policies. It is centrally controlled by the FG agencies as regards quality and quality assurance through accreditations and implementation of national standards. Many Nigerians are making substantial contributions to its development and growth, and it continues to grow. It has grown, is growing, and should continue to grow. It is, however, not yet what it should be because it is constrained by a host of problems which require urgent solutions.
A major problem is the inadequate considerations of the nature and values of university music education within the Nigerian education policy-making contexts. A perusal of available literature reveals that only a few Nigerian musician-teachers have explored university music education in relation to Nigerian life systems. Many Nigerians are, thus, less aware of university music education as a factor fundamental to advancing national development. There is need for all the university music education stakeholders to work together in the creation, development, and implementation of policy and legislation that affect university education in Nigeria. Given that research is often the basis of policy, one way Nigerian musician-teachers can be involved with policy is through research. Nigerian musician-teachers can use their research to learn about policy on their own, teach their students about the issues of policy making, and influence policies affecting university music education in Nigeria. They must be party to the development of viable theories and research on Nigerian university music education policy.
University music education in Nigeria has been facing unrelenting and mounting critique, particularly of its continued reliance on the adopted Northern university music education models and marginalization of other Nigerian HME models (Nzewi, 1997; Okafor, 2005). Some scholars have argued that such adoption of models is vital to make music educationally competitive internationally and create in Nigeria centers of music learning and research with international standing. Other scholars have, however, seen the adopted models as grossly inadequate and inappropriate, because they have been transferred to the Nigerian context rather uncritically. They are not designed in accord with Nigerian sociomusical norms and are less sensitive to the Nigerian masses’ predicaments and expectations. The continued reliance on the adopted Northern models of university education has resulted more from our inability to embark on serious, profound, and sustained examination of the Nigerian musical life and experiences.
Given that it is impossible to transfer university music education models in toto to other contexts, a deep knowledge of the relevant cultures that gave birth to them is necessary for Nigerians to build the models upon Nigeria’s identities and institutions. Nigeria does not only need the Northern models to provide it a point of reference as it aspires to have university music education. It also needs to draw on the Northern music knowledge in conjunction with equally valued musical beliefs and practices that are rooted in the historical and contemporary Nigerian scene.
It is also crucial to base the adopted Northern university music education models on an indigenous framework; one that addresses the Nigerian music educational challenges; that reflects Nigerian masses’ hopes, wishes, aspirations, dilemmas, and predicaments. To internalize university music education into Nigerian life systems requires contextualizing it to the pressing music educational problems, needs, conditions, and specificities of Nigeria and Nigerians in terms of perspectives and contents. And because Nigeria needs to be party in a global music educational conversation of universities and scholars, it needs to do so on its own terms, with the music educational interests and concerns of Nigerian masses as guiding principles.
With its embrace of marketization and educational rationalization, the FG is influencing university music education deeply through strong regulatory activities of JAMB and NUC institutionalizing national music curriculum systematically. This is laudable and may, for the foreseeable future, be a permanent feature of university education in Nigeria. But it is precipitating a specter hanging over university music in Nigeria: the JAMB and NUC’s hegemony. This JAMB and NUC’s constructed specter threatens to deprive the Nigerian musicologists their hope to define the university as an autonomous space from which to develop a “Nigerian university music education” better attuned to the Nigerian needs and realities.
There is the need for Nigerian musician-teachers to create, and make themselves useful members of, a community typically committed to the musical well-being of the Nigerian society. They should demonstrate their intellectual leadership and vitality by (re)engaging and challenging Nigerians to rethink their limited, habitual, or assumed understandings of university music education. They should show that university music education can contribute substantially to the development process in Nigeria. While leading the nation in providing Nigerians with a well-rounded music education, they should envision, inspire, and guide positive change in defense of the health and vitality of Nigerian musical life.
Despite its international character, music education remains a rarity in the Northern Nigerian universities. There is the need for Nigerian music educators to address the issue of what is and what is not university music education from the modernization of Nigeria angle. It is crucial to convince Nigerian Muslims that, no matter how it is conceptualized, university music education is not inimical to Islam. It is meant to enable them collaborate with fellow Nigerians in creating a vigorous musical Nigerian society, one where music is a fundamental part of national identity and the fabric of everyday life, to paraphrase Bowman (2001, p. 16).
It is very obvious that a gap exists, in a general sense, between departments of music and their surrounding communities. Restrictive conception of music education seems to cause this. Thus, it is crucial to see music education as that “concerned with teaching and learning music, wherever and whenever they occur” (Bowman, 2001, p. 13). Moreover, Chinweizu (1988) provides us with a revisionist university music education when he explains,
Imagine that the gates of Africa’s universities are thrown open, and that master singers, story-tellers, poets, orators and theatre groups from Africa’s villages and towns take over the lecture halls, auditoriums and open fields of African campuses and begin to recite, read and perform in the languages spoken by Africans. Imagine that they are joined by the handful of African story-tellers, poets, and drama troupes from within the universities, who carry on in the languages imposed on Africans by foreign conquerors. Imagine that, in a drawn-out literary festival, they present works commemorating national and continental events . . . and that every evening, they entertain and instruct their audiences with plays, fables, epics, adventure stories and tales of all sorts. Imagine that their audiences are drawn from the entire society, including villagers, townsfolk, and campus intellectuals. Imagine also that the best of the works presented are chosen by the votes of the assembled populace, and are then put together into a book. (p. xxxii)
What Chinweizu (1988) asks for is the evolution of a Nigerian university music education in which music is seen as humanity, treated as a necessary part of Nigerian life, and taught as well as learnt as a Nigerian way of life. He bids us to regard it as an enterprise in which music’s functional cum formal aspects are valued as the basis for living Nigerian musical life, coming to know music in various ways, educating Nigerian masses musically, nurturing communities of Nigerian musician-teacher-learners and creating a community commonly committed to the musical well-being of Nigerian society. University music education is a task in which all knowledgeable Nigerian musician-teachers and their musical public have a huge stake in sharing what they know and value musically, in enlivening and reenergizing themselves musically and otherwise. This article advocates for a university music education in which music conferences and festivals are combined with creative and productive music teaching and learning, and where participants’ observation is emphasized. It calls for a university music regime in which academic and popular “study” of Nigerian music traditions, with popular evaluations given at least as much weight as academic evaluations of music performed, is integrated.
Chinweizu’s (1988) perspective expects that products of Nigerian university, musician-teacher-learners, are imbued with the knowledge and skills necessary to musically educate various Nigerian public in a variety of settings with efficiency and effectiveness. This is for the larger cultural purpose of recovering, discovering, developing, and sharing the musical wisdom that the Nigerians have learned to treasure individually and collectively from one generation to another. Hence, the future of university music education in Nigeria is radiant if only this can pass through a creative process of indigenization with the co-operation of all those who drive forward creative thought and frame debate in university music educational thought within and outside Nigeria.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.