Music, Power, and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Nigeria: A Historical Musicological Reconstruction

This research undertakes a comprehensive historical musicological reconstruction of the entangled relationships between music, colonial power, and postcolonial political formations in Nigeria from 1900 to 1999. Music has consistently functioned as both an instrument of colonial cultural domination and a site of African resistance, adaptation, and identity assertion across Nigeria's diverse ethnic landscape. This study applies a multi-archival, trans-disciplinary methodology drawing on colonial administrative records, missionary music education reports, ethnomusicological field recordings from the mid-twentieth century, newspaper archives, oral histories, and existing musicological scholarship to reconstruct music's political dimensions across four thematic eras: colonial imposition and missionary education, nationalist music and independence agitation, military rule and music censorship, and the Afrobeat resistance tradition of Fela Kuti. The theoretical framework integrates postcolonial theory, Gramscian cultural hegemony analysis, and recent decolonial musicology scholarship. Original archival fieldwork is conducted at the National Archives in Ibadan, Enugu, Kaduna, and the British National Archives. The study produces an original, synthetic historical narrative of Nigerian music's political dimensions, filling a substantial gap in Nigerian historiography and African musicology. Findings challenge existing accounts that underestimate music's role as a political force in Nigeria's colonial and postcolonial formations. Keywords: Historical musicology, colonial Nigeria, postcolonial music, political resistance, decolonial scholarship.