Folusho’s research explores the processes of history-making that exclude rather than include, using a case study of the women’s movement in Colonial Nigeria to analyze how, in excluding the contribution of the non-elite the scope of activism is reduced, mirroring the processes in wider society that reinforce hero-making through a system of class hierarchy.
Join us at Holocaust Centre North to find out more about this current research and how it challenges the historical silencing of underprivileged voices.
Folusho argues that this mode of writing history introduces a caste system which obscures the contribution and agency of those who may be described as uneducated, technology challenged and subaltern*. In the example of Colonial Nigeria these subverted women’s support and collaboration are instrumental in the account of women’s activism. In other words, the conventional “historicalization” of the women’s movement can be said to be limiting, parochial and ordering. This research therefore aims to recover the lost and marginalized accounts of women that are silenced by conventional protocols of history.
*colonial populations who are outside the hierarchy of power.
