![]() One of these was called Okpala Obinagu in Awgbu, supposedly named after the founder of the community who erected it. While the majority had long-since collapsed or been pulled down to make way for new buildings, he managed to locate a small number that had survived, even though in ruinous condition. Professor Anselem Ibeanu, currently head of the Department of Archaeology at University of Nigeria, Nsukka, did some research on these watchtowers in the 1980s. Some were rectangular in plan, such as those in the photographs above, others circular, as in the example at Awgbu (see below). They served as both a look-out tower and a refuge, particularly for women and children, when a settlement was under attack. These towers were typically two or three storeys high and were accessed through a small doorway on an upper floor, reached by a ladder. Incidentally, while Suluku died in 1906, Thomas photographed Pompoli when he visited Bumban in 1914. Pompoli duly returned bearing the gifts and the old woman gave Suluku some of her magical powers. Suluku agreed, and said he would send his brother, Pompoli, from Bumban, with the gifts. She agreed to help, but only in return for gifts. Suluku thought that she had special powers and asked her for help. ‘This is my place’, she answered, ‘I am not an invader like you’. He asked how she came to be there before them. Afterwards, he left by another route only to find the same old woman by the side of the road. ![]() She gave him her knitting and said ‘Here it is, take it’. Suluku informed the woman that they had come to collect payment from Yagala. As they climbed one of the roads to the hilltop town, they came upon an old woman knitting. In Yagala we were told the story of the famous warrior Suluku, from Bumban, who came with a war party, threatening attack. The Imah of Somorika, HRH Oba Sule Iadiye, for example, regaled us with stories of the British attack on Somorika in 1904, which, while ending in defeat, is regarded as a moral victory. Many such stories relate to the heroism of warriors or the ingenuity of the community in repelling attack. ![]() Most community members, however, have known the old sites only in their abandoned state and through the many stories that are told about them. In some cases, such as Yagala, the old towns were not abandoned until the 1950s and elderly members of the community have childhood memories of the places. When we have brought Thomas’s photographs back to places such as Somorika, Okpe, Otuo and Afokpella in north Edo, or Yagala in Sierra Leone, community members are usually very interested to see what their old hilltop towns looked like when they were inhabited. There is just one photograph, from Thomas’s 1910-11 tour, in which a uniformed police officer can be seen – we don’t know whether he was ordinarily stationed at the location, or accompanied Thomas there. Thomas did not, of course, travel alone – his entourage would have included porters and assistants, and we know from correspondence that, at least some of the time, he was accompanied by a member of the police force. Thomas worked in the towns of Somorika, in 1909, and Agulu, in 1911, both a mere five years after they had been ‘pacified’ through British military operations he travelled extensively in areas of Asaba District that, until two years previously, were centres of anti-colonial resistance in the Ekumeku wars his research in Sierra Leone took place in locations that had seen violent conflict in the Hut Tax War of 1898 and he spent months working in Benin City, just 12 years after the infamous Punitive Expedition of 1897. It is perhaps indicative of the thoroughness with which local resistance to colonialization had been quashed that Thomas was able to travel around so freely over the six years of his surveys between 19. Regardless of whether they actually achieved their governmental objectives, Thomas’s surveys were certainly intended to contribute to the consolidation of British ‘ indirect rule’ in what were then the Protectorates of Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone. As the historian Nicholas Dirks reminds us, colonial conquest was the result not only of military force but was made possible and sustained through ‘cultural technologies of rule’. Of course, it can be argued that the archive as whole is a trace of colonial violence. Working through the photographs, sound recordings, artefact collections and written accounts that constitute the archive of Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys in West Africa, the turbulence of the times in which these materials were assembled is not immediately apparent.
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