Ibadan School and the Africanists in Britain and the US. The Africanists felt that the Nigerian scholars should be more objective and less involved in current politics. However, the quality of the methodology and scholarship of the Ibadan scholars was never questioned. Conversely, the African scholars of the Ibadan School saw the American and British universities as bastions of imperialism. As a result, nationalists shunned the western based Journal of African History in favour of the domestic Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria. The Ibadan School began to decline in importance in the 1970s. The Nigerian Civil War led some to question whether Nigeria was in fact a unified nation with a national history. At the same time, rival schools developed. At Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria, the Islamic Legitimist school arose that rejected Western models in favour of the scholarly tradition of the Sokoto Caliphate and the Islamic world. From other parts of Africa, the Neo-Marxist school arrived and gained a number of supporters. Social, economic, and cultural history also began to grow in prominence. In the 1980s Nigerian scholarship in general began to decline, and the Ibadan School was much affected. The military rulers looked upon the universities with deep suspicion and they were poorly funded as a result. Many top minds were co-opted with plum jobs in the administration and left academia. Others left the country entirely for jobs at universities in the West. The economic collapse of the 1980s also greatly hurt the scholarly community, especially the sharp devaluation of the Nigerian currency. This made inviting foreign scholars, subscribing to journals, and attending overseas conferences vastly more expensive. Many of the domestic journals, including the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, faltered and were only published rarely, if at all. See also Cambridge School of historiography Historiography of the British Empire References Adesina, Olutayo C. "Teaching History in Twentieth Century Nigeria: the Challenges of Change," History In Africa (2006) vol, 33. pp 17+ online Adesina, Olutayo C. "The Crisis in Research and Academic Publishing in Nigerian Universities" - 2002 Lovejoy, Paul E. "Nigeria: The Ibadan School and Its Critics," in Bogumil Jewsiewicki and David S. Newbury, eds. African Historiographies (1986) Falola, Toyin "Nigeria History, Politics and Affairs: Collected Essays of Adiele Afigbo, Africa World Press, 2005 Notes History of Nigeria Historiography of Nigeria Ibadan University of Ibadan Nigerian nationalism