HISTORY OF NIGERIA REVIEW

Although the years since Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in 1999 have seen an increased interest in its history and politics, Nigeria remains one of the most under-researched African countries today, especially in relation to its size and its cultural, political and economic importance. Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton address this predicament with an immensely readable and up-to-date introduction to Nigerian history. Providing a chronology, the CVs of notable Nigerians and a good number of contemporary images, their book makes it easy for readers to engage with Nigerian history in a number of different ways. Selected bibliographies for each chapter include excellent references to a large number of African authors and invite the reader to explore the book’s main themes further, as well as emphasizing that the book was not produced in an ideological space limited by European and North American approaches to the study of Africa. The authors’ concern with the African experience also shapes the book’s first two chapters, which offer a discussion of states and societies in the region from 9,000 BCE to the early nineteenth century. Chapter 1 engages with the continuing influence of European and Egypt-centred interpretations of African history in scholarly debate, and while it acknowledges and validates the links of many early societies in what is now Nigeria with other parts of the world, it also emphasizes the importance of local developments. In the second chapter, the authors explore the importance of slavery and the slave trade for pre-colonial states and societies, and explain how local systems of slavery differed from those in the New World and especially America. In this way they address the focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offered in most comparable publications and introduce the reader to important debates about African history. After these introductory chapters, the book refers more directly to debates on Nigeria. The third chapter emphasizes the success of the Sokoto caliphate after 1804 before the eventual establishment of British rule from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, discussed in Chapter 4. The authors suggest that while the expansion of Islamic government created great instability in the south, it also led to a pre-colonial consolidation of much of Nigeria’s present territory under African leadership. But Falola and Heaton are not nostalgic about any form of empire or its elites, and they treat the success of the caliphate in the same way they discuss the greater and more enduring success of the British, by emphasizing the alien and transformation nature of government produced on the basis of military victory and administrative integration. As a result, the authors are not only able to offer a balanced assessment of both African and European strategies of expansion in the age of imperialism, but also provide an insight into the agency of local groups in the contradictory struggles preceding the creation of the colonial state. Chapters 5 and 6 concentrate on colonial Nigeria, and the authors divide this period by the nature of African engagement with the state. They suggest that the early decades of colonial rule were characterized by localized responses to administrative and economic innovation, and that the 1929 Women’s War in south-east Nigeria represented the beginning of strategies of protest and engagement beyond the boundaries of local communities. Their emphasis on the nature of Nigerian society allows the authors to foreground the social changes associated with colonial rule, such as the ossification and stratification of existing hierarchies through Indirect Rule, on the one hand, and the dramatic social transformation associated with urbanization and shifting gender roles on the other. In reflection of such contradictions, the 1930s saw the beginning of political activity that would lead eventually to the independence of Nigeria, but they also witnessed the rise of class differences, compounded by ethnic and regional chauvinism. As a result, Nigeria was both economically dependent and politically divided when it emerged from Britsh rule in 1960. Chapter 7 explores the political instability and the civil war which marred the first decade of Nigeria’s independence and led to the emergence of the Nigerian military as the country’s main political force. As Chapter 8 illustrates…