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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | The Cowboys: A Nigerian Acculturative Institution (ca. 1950) |
| Author: | Hair, Paul E.H. |
| Year: | 2001 |
| Periodical: | History in Africa |
| Volume: | 28 |
| Pages: | 83-93 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Nigeria |
| Subjects: | acculturation youth organizations History and Exploration Military, Defense and Arms Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3172209 |
| Abstract: | This article, which was written during the author's field research in eastern Nigeria from 1952 to 1955, explores the phenomenon of the Cowboys society in Nigeria on the basis of the example of the 'Courageous Company of Cowboys', formed in 1948 in the Ibo village of Ebe, 15 miles west of Enugu, the administrative capital of Eastern Nigeria. The earliest history of the Cowboys society is somewhat obscure, but the phenomenon reached the town of Kano in the 1930s, and the town of Enugu in the early 1940s. It came to Kano from the Yoruba town of Lagos which, in the 1930s, was the El Dorado of Nigerian youth. The author argues that Cowboys societies were significant as acculturative institutions in modern Nigeria. The activities of the Cowboys - soldiering, rehearsing for battle, making music - have been on the whole frivolous but harmless. Those aspects of European culture which they have imitated are neither very profound nor strikingly beneficial, or harmful, to the future of Nigeria. Traditional influences include the institution of bands of singers attending social functions and village age grades. One of the most striking features of the Cowboys society was its capacity to develop activities in different circumstances without changing its salient features. Notes. |
