Rethinking the Nexus between History & Scientific Knowledge: Speaking Truth to ‘Power’ and the People of Nigeria

Abstract

It is evident that the global village is highly characterized with scientific innovations such as breakthroughs in automobile, space travels, medicine, nuclear weapons, inter-ballistic missiles, television, ipads, ipods, palm tops, proliferation of the Social Media network (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and a host of others. Arguably, this innovativeness seems not to have direct interconnectedness with history. To put it more aptly, these scientific products are invariably not the products of the practitioners of history. Consequently, in Nigeria, this had affected the way the generality of the people view history as a discipline. Not surprisingly, admission into the departments of history had been nose-diving, despite concerted efforts to make the discipline more attractive to proposed undergraduates. Evidently, calculated apathy and inferior complex have been built around the discipline. Thus, the fortune of history as a discipline is declining and its survival is being endangered. Reportedly, some educational policy makers in Nigeria have suggested scraping history as a subject in the Nigerian secondary schools and subsequently, this had watered down historical scholarship at the tertiary level. The argument is that, Nigeria as a developing nation, must embrace technical and technological courses if it must attain development. Plausibly, this argument is not tenable.

Fundamentally, this paper attempts a censorious look into the interconnectedness between History and Science. The position of this paper is that history is scientific in nature; hence it contributes to scientific knowledge. Therefore, history, as well as other courses in humanities must not be neglected. In fact, if Nigeria, and other African countries want to trace their paths to technological breakthroughs and innovation, history is one of the disciplines that must be taken critically both by the people and the governments.