Questionnaire to Professor John Edward Philips for an interview on paper
1. Welcome back to Japan from Nigeria. Please describe your own profile for the commonreaders of the ‘e-meeting’ column.
Thank you. It was good to get back. I’m a professor emeritus 「名誉教授」 of Hirosaki
University. I did my undergraduate work at the Pennsylvania State University where I got aBachelor’s Degree in History with certificates in Folklore Studies and African Studies. I did
my graduate work at UCLA where I met a visiting Japanese student of African languages,
Ritsuko Miyamoto 「宮本律子」, we fell in love, got married, and I took her to Nigeria withme on my Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Sokoto (now Usmanu Danfodiyo
University Sokoto). After she wrote up her MA thesis at Tohoku University and I spent an
academic year as Teaching Assistant in US history I came to Japan to write up my dissertation.
Her career took off and we’re still here together.
2. What prompted your interest to Nigerian people and culture as a signal in your academiclife?
I should probably mention what got me into African history first: my first exposure wasreading in the Encyclopedia Brittanica about the medieval west African Islamic Empires of
Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. I wanted to know why I hadn’t learned about them before. Why
had Africa seemingly been written out of world history? Finding out was a long story itself.
As for Nigeria, the first time I went to Africa I visited four countries in west Africa. They werefour different military dictatorships with four different kinds of dictatorship. Nigeria was theonly one which had an obviously free press and free speech and was in transition to an electedgovernment. Additionally this was in the mid 1970s when Nigeria was booming with oilwealth. The potential for development was obvious to me and I wanted to know more about
this country. That’s why I made Hausa my language for my African Area Studies MA degree
at UCLA, and why I studied Nigerian history and politics there, eventually choosing a
Nigerian historian for my Ph.D. supervisor.
3. So far as we are informed, your partner Prof. Ritsuko Miyamoto, a cultural anthropologistof Akita University, is of Ohmachi’s origin, and you’ve been sometimes in Nagano-ken.
What are your impressions on Ohmacji City and Nagano-ken?
Although my wife is from Ohmachi and grew up there, she wasn’t born there but in Miyazaki.

Her family moved to Ohmachi when she was 2 years old. As for my impressions, I love nature
and wilderness, so when I met her parents after coming into Japan through Tokyo I told her I
was so happy that she was from a place like this instead of Tokyo or Osaka. I like to be able toget away from crowds and noise and just enjoy quiet alone in the woods. I should also mention
that Ritsuko is a linguist, not a cultural anthropologist.
4. Have you been finding any characteristic merit for making research and teaching on
African history in Tohoku region of Japan?
Not really. There is a Tohoku regional African studies meeting and I enjoyed time with someof my Africanist colleagues, but Japan does not have the area studies infrastructure I think itneeds. I’ve watched 地域研究 go from meaning “area studies” to meaning “local studies”, froma kind of 国際研究 to 国内研究 or 国学. I know area studies took a hit in the US with the endof the Cold War, and I was surprised that Islamic Area Studies didn’t really expand after 9/11,
but I was disappointed that it didn’t expand more in Japan than it did.
5. What was your scheme of the latest visit to Nigeria? And, could you fulfil your purpose
this time even under COVID-19 conditions? Your travelling back to Akita must be very
difficult under the pandemic situation. Could you disclose some of your experiences?
I went to Nigeria shortly after retiring to research Boko Haram, which I had been invited todo by Abubakar Garba, the late director of the Centre for Trans-Saharan Studies at theUniversity of Maiduguri, who came to my farewell lecture at Hirosaki University. I got a lotof information and insights while I was there, in addition to attending two conferences on thetopic, in Kano and Adamawa. Then I came back to Japan to write up what I had gathered.
After briefly visiting Hawaii for the annual American Studies Association conference, whereI talked about American studies in Africa, I touched base in Japan and headed back to Nigeria.
I was supposed to present my research to the university in Maiduguri and attend another BokoHaram conference there. I did give a guest lecture about colonial language policy at theUniversity of Abuja which was covered on television, but then the pandemic hit, all flights,
domestic and foreign, were cancelled and I was stuck in the country, unable to travel toMaiduguri. I spent the next few months trying to stay safe and get back to Japan. There wasan evacuation flight to the States but I didn’t take it and I’m glad. You know about the situation
there I think. Eventually I found out about an evacuation flight to France and I was able tomake a connection at the same terminal so that I didn’t need to go through French customs
and immigration. My wife came down to meet me at Narita, I got tested and went intoquarantine for 14 days. I’m waiting for the vaccinations to roll out and then I have to renew

my yellow fever vaccination and get another visa and I hope to be off before too much longer
to get back to Nigeria. In the meantime I’m trying to work on my writing while putting myfinancial affairs in order. I had no idea retirement was so much work!
6. Please give us some concrete ideas on the significance of staying at Kaduna in order tounderstand Islamic heritages and status quo in Nigeria and in West Africa as well. If weobserve the Nigerian society of federal republic with a pluralist eyes, how should weapproach to its cultural, ethnic, societal, and historical structures? What is the position ofKaduna in the current political trends in Nigeria?
That’s a lot of questions in one. Kaduna was the final capital of the former Northern Regionof Nigeria. The house of the premier of the Northern Region became Arewa House Centrefor Historical Research and Documentation after his death, and holds a large collection ofdocuments and other materials relating to the region, not only pertaining to Islam but also tothe large Christian minority in the area. I often stay there and use the collections for research.
I even got a grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Program to preserve anddigitize their holdings of the first Hausa newspaper, Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo. It’s a good base forresearch, and much safer than Maiduguri, which is constantly threatened by Boko Haram.
Kaduna is also in the Nigerian “middle belt” which is an important region. Most of the military
have been recruited from there traditionally, and it is very ethnically diverse, often a criticalarea in national elections. The current governor, Nasiru El-Rufai, is very ambitious and will
be a person to watch in the next presidential elections in 2023. Southern Kaduna ispredominantly Christian and is very much a swing district in a swing state, so has influence
beyond its size. It is also a very volatile place in a very volatile country. See my chapter“Domestic Aliens: the Zangon Kataf Crisis and the African Concept of Stranger” in Êtreétranger et migrant en Afrique au XXème siècle v. 1 pp. 375-401 (edited by Catherine CoqueryVidrovitch, Odile Goerg, Issiaka Mandé, and Faranirina Rajaonah) (Paris, 2003). My chapter waslater republished in Nigeria. As for the Islamic heritage of Nigeria it began in Bornu in the11th century , where Maiduguri is now the capital, but it later shifted to Sokoto as a result ofthe Jihad of Usuman Danfodiyo and the creation of the Sokoto Caliphate.
The configuration of the Nigerian federation has always been contentious. The British left anunstable, loose federation of three regions, each dominated by one ethnic group. The firstmilitary government imposed a unitary state but that was explosive. The next military regime
created a federation of 12 states, moving many powers to the center. This caused the Biafra
War in which the Eastern, oil producing region tried to secede. Successive military
governments have continued to divide the country into 36 states in all, also moving more andmore powers to the central government. Nigerian politics is a very fascinating topic. Many ofus who start to study other aspects of Nigeria find ourselves increasingly drawn to study of its
politics as well.
7. Could you kindly brief the origin, social basis, and actual influence of Boko Haram in
Nigerian society? Do you notice any linkage among Islamist groups in West Africa orMuslim World as a whole? Was there any sign of menace for Westerners during your stayin Nigeria? If you can point out any remarkable tendencies on the other side, let thereaders share the hint of information about the development of positive movements
among Muslims over there.
Again, this is a lot of questions at once. Try reading Boko Haram: Context, Ideology andActors

whichyoucangetfrommyacademia.edu

page:

https://hirosaki-u.academia.edu/JohnPhilipsHirosaki Yes, there are linkages. To put BH in context, mostMuslims think jihadis are crazy. At least before 9/11 most jihadis thought Al-Qa’ida was crazy.
The Islamic State (ISIS) are people who got thrown out of Al-Qa’ida because Al-Qa’ida
thought they were crazy. Boko Haram joined the Islamic State but got thrown out for using
little girls as suicide bombers (among other things) that made ISIS think they were crazy. That
led to a split in the group with a major faction going back to ISIS and agreeing to take orders
from them. There are still two Boko Haram groups terrorizing Nigeria. As for threat towesterners I didn’t see much. There is a general lawlessness from Fulani herders in rural areas
but in the cities I felt pretty safe. Even in Maiduguri, where I could hear gunshots andhelicopters from the edge of town at night, it reminded me of police helicopters and gangshootings when I lived in ghettos in the United States. On campus I could hear the noise of
the conflict but I felt relatively safe.
8. Have you specifically noticed peculiar ways of management, if any, to confront with
COVID-19 during your stay in Nigeria? How did you observe the situation in the USA
from Nigeria?
I was stuck in Nigeria at first because all overseas and domestic flights were shut down, as
were the trains, and interstate travel. There was total lockdown which hurt the economy andpeople at the bottom were really suffering. Relief emergency supplies were distributed, but I
had no cooking facilities where I was staying and had to send out for food. Masks became
commonplace.That said, the pandemic was handled differently in different states. Since thevirus came in from overseas it was worst in Lagos and Abuja, the major cities with theinternational airports. In addition there was an outbreak in Kano which was only noticed
because a large increase in deaths caused someone to investigate. In Kaduna, where I stayed,the governor travelled to Abuja for a meeting and became the index case in the state. He took
stern measures, closing markets, mosques and churches, and was able to contain the virus.
The weddings and other functions that Arewa House often holds were cancelled, and its
became difficult for me to get food, although I could still order from a few places. Nonethelessthings may still get out of control. I don’t think anyone really knows why Africa hasn’t been
hit harder than it has, much less whether it will be hit harder in the future. As I mentioned I
was not interested in evacuation to the States and if I hadn’t been able to come to Japan I
would have stayed in Nigeria. A close friend of mine from UCLA has already died in the US.
It’s a very disturbing situation there now.
9. How did common Nigerians hear about the news of BLM movement in the US? Did you
have chances to observe reactive echoes to it in Nigerian society?
I haven’t been to Nigeria since BLM broke out, but there has been a similar movement against
police brutality in Nigeria, the “End SARS” movement. There is also the issue of state policethat was big in the presidential elections five years ago but which seems to have been all but
forgotten in the presidential elections last year. In Nigeria there are no state or local police,
only federal, despite the country being a federation of states. Of course in the United States
there are no federal police, only state and local, although there are specialized federal law
enforcement agencies such as the FBI, ATF, ICE, etc. In Japan, as you know, there is nofederation, but there are no national police either, rather a separate police department in eachprefecture. In Nigeria the issue of state police became important in the context of the struggle
against Boko Haram.
10. Generally speaking, how do common Nigerians foresee the future of decarbonized world
as citizens of the largest oil-exporting country in sub-Saharan Africa? Are they preparedwith the global environmental policy trends worldwide?
I fear that Nigerians are not ready for the post petroleum world. Many of them don’t evenrealize that they are going to have to make that transition, or even that their own oil will runout. Recently I have begun to see solar panels begin to appear, but for a long time the popular
struggles in Nigeria were to keep domestic petroleum prices low through subsidies. Thismeant that there was little incentive for people to replace diesel generators or even electricwater heaters. In addition, as one Nigerian explained it to me, the long term cost of solar water
heating is less than that of electric heaters, but the initial outlay is greater. Nigerians are notused to thinking in terms of long term investments so it is difficult to sell solar powerequipment to them. I like to explain to them that Japan has so much water that people thinkit is a problem to get rid of it all. Perhaps I should explain to Japanese that Africa has so muchsolar energy that people think it is a problem to get rid of it, and they haven’t thought so muchabout how to harvest it and exploit it yet.
11. When Nigerians came to know that you were an American scholar from Japan, how were
their attitudes? What are Japan’s images among common Nigerians in your estimation?
It’s very mixed. There is not much knowledge of Japan in Nigeria, or Africa in general. Somepeople think it is a country in Europe. The Europeans tell them only Europeans canmanufacture autos or electronics, so when they see these things from Japan they assume Japan
must be in Europe. This is changing as Chinese manufactures become more common. A few
years ago someone explained to me that they thought Chinese things were cheap but low
quality, while Japanese things were expensive but high quality. There are people who areinterested in martial arts, and I’ve met others who are interested in manga and anime, but ingeneral there are far fewer Japanese cultural influences than I am used to from California. On
the other hand, there are also Nigerians who are fluent in Japanese and who have studied inJapan. While there is not as much Japanese studies as I think there should be, there are somepeople who are quite familiar with Japan and who are even experts on the country.
12. Please tell us some interesting episode or topics for the Japanese, even if essences, in thecourse of your field works in Nigeria as an important corner of the Islamic World.
Oh, wow. I have so many. I have a lot of thoughts about that and maybe I should just get backto writing the book I’m supposed to be working on and let you buy that when it comes out.
I’m trying to put the Boko Haram phenomenon in historical perspective, especially that of theLake Chad basin and the Bornu Caliphate that emerged there in medieval times. I wrote anarticle about it some time back that Rezrazi al-Mustapha published in Morocco (see above).
I had my wife translate it into Japanese because he said he was going to publish a book inJapanese but nothing ever came of that. I have some personal interest in it, especially fromtheir bombing of the Kano Central Mosque. I knew the Imam of the mosque when he was an
academic at Bayero University Kano and consider him a personal friend. I had Ramadan
breakfast in his living room many times. When people say these Islamic terrorists kill more
Muslims than others that’s not propaganda, it’s just a statistical fact. I’m glad to say he’s still
alive, though.
By the way, you might be interested in the review I wrote of Handbook of Islamic
Manuscripts: Nigeria, Section 1: the Nigerian National Archives, (volume 1) Prepared by Baba
Yunus Muhammad. Edited and annotated by John Hunwick. (London, Al Furqan Islamic Heritage

Foundation, 1995). in The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies v. 23 no. 2 (1996) pp. 243245 I also have some publications about Japanese studies of Africa that I could share with you
if you are interested.