Towards decolonising university music education in Nigeria

This article argues that coloniality is an ongoing feature of university music education in Nigeria. It uses a multiple colonialisms framework in exploring Nigerian higher music education systems as historical and contemporary sites of colonialism within which Nigerian universities engage in music knowledge generation to reach this conclusion. It relies on information gleaned from scholarly sources. It shows that the dominance of Euro-American classical musical practice in bicultural university music education in Nigeria since 1961 has received little questioning. It identifies decolonisation as indigenisation, Africanisation, Islamisation, Nigerianisation and globalisation of university music education discourses as competing with this dominant paradigm. From the anti-colonial perspective, it argues that these six Nigerian music knowledge systems should not be simply celebrated, valorised and utilised. They should be critically engaged, interrogated, transformed, altered if necessary, and studied relationally, contextually and comparatively. Decolonising university music education in any society, it posits, involves centring music knowledge creation, understanding and sharing on multiplicity and entanglements. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.