The Political Economy of Colonial Knowledge Production and Its Legacies for Nigerian Historical Consciousness: An Original Framework

This dissertation provides an original theoretical and empirical framework for analysing how colonial knowledge production, including cartography, ethnography, census-taking, and administrative historiography, shaped the terms of Nigerian historical consciousness and continues to influence how Nigerians understand their own past, governance, and national identity. Colonial knowledge production was not a neutral documentation exercise but an ideological project that classified, ranked, and essentialised African peoples in ways that served administrative and extractive purposes. The dissertation employs a multi-method approach combining systematic discourse analysis of 400 colonial knowledge documents produced between 1900 and 1960, with comparative analysis of their incorporation into post-independence Nigerian educational and governance frameworks and a primary qualitative study involving 65 interviews with historians, educators, and civil society leaders across all six geopolitical zones. Critical Discourse Analysis, the Coloniality of Power Framework by Quijano and Mignolo, and the Epistemology of the South by Santos jointly provide the theoretical anchors. The dissertation proposes the Colonial Knowledge Legacy Model, which traces how colonial classificatory systems including tribe categories, regional intelligence assessments, and historical periodisations were institutionalised in post-independence curricula, census instruments, and constitutional designs. The original contribution lies in an empirically grounded theory of how colonial epistemology operates as a governance technology in the post-colonial state. Keywords: colonial knowledge production, historical consciousness, decoloniality, Nigeria, post-colonial epistemology.