Wale Adebanwi

• University of Oxford

Achille Mbembe’s ground-breaking essay ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’ (1992a) (hereafter ‘Provisional notes’) is the most cited article published by the journal Africa. Three decades later, the article continues to influence the ways in which scholars account for the contradictions of socio-economic and political formations not only in Afric...

In ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’, Achille Mbembe argues that obscenity and grotesquery are essential characteristics of postcolonial regimes of domination and subordination. This article attempts to extend this insight for the study of contemporary African social formations. Drawing on examples from Central, Southern and West Africa, the ar...

Accountability defines a specific set of interests, intentions, and responsibilities that bind one set of actors to another. This introductory chapter to the book ‘Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa ‘ discusses some of the registers within which the social bases of African elites are important to the ways that African elites repres...

Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa examines the ways that accountability offers an effective interpretive lens to the social, cultural, and institutional struggles of both the elites and ordinary citizens in Africa. Each chapter investigates questions of power, its public deliberation, and its negotiation in Africa by studying elit...

This article uses the death and burial of one of the most important political leaders in twentieth-century Africa, and Nigeria's first and only ceremonial president, Rt. Hon. (Dr.) Nnamdi Azikiwe, to reflect on how and why the deaths and burials of significant persons in Africa represent occasions for the (re)production and management of cultural c...

Nation as Grand Narrative offers a methodical analysis of how relations of domination and subordination are conveyed through media narratives of nationhood. Using the typical postcolonial state of Nigeria as a template and engaging with disciplines ranging from media studies, political science, and social theory to historical sociology and hermeneu...

The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa - edited by Wale Adebanwi

Is multiculturalism the best way to deal with diversity in an emerging but divided (African) nation-state? Is multiculturalism antithetical to nation-building and mutual recognition of equal value among different ethnic-nationalities within African polities? These were some of the most fundamental questions that Nigeria’s ethno-regional political p...

In this article, I explore a possible ‘conversation’ between a leading African political sociologist, Peter P. Ekeh, in his theory of ‘two publics’, and the late French philosopher, historian and social theorist, Michel Foucault, in his theory of governmentality. I examine the ‘lingering effects of colonialism’ and point to how Ekeh’s insight and i...

Streets are sites of hegemony and counter-hegemony, of inclusion and exclusion, of incorporation and expulsion, and of cooperation or conflict. Thus, in the cultural geography of cities, commemorative street names are critical sites of social reproduction. Recent literature on toponymy calls attention to such practices as important cultural and pol...

Jean and John Comaroff enthusiastically claim that Africa constitutes a rich site ‘of new knowledges and ways of knowing-and-being … that have the capacity to inform and transform theory in the north, to subvert its universalisms in order to rewrite them in a different, less provincial register’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011). What role, then, can th...

In December 2013, after news broke that Nelson Mandela, the former South African president and African National Congress (ANC) leader had passed on, something interesting, though not entirely unfamiliar, happened. Within the continent, major commentators and politicians eulogized the departed statesman, emphasized the fortitude he displayed through...

This volume advances the discussions of leadership in Africa's specific history, culture, economy, and politics. The book promotes an understanding of leadership and its paradoxes and illuminates the conditions under which political leadership has been produced, and how those conditions have shaped leaders.

Social theory in, and social theorising about, Africa has largely ignored African literature. Yet, the works of African writers constitute potential sources for the analysis of social thought and for constructing social theory in the continent. Indeed, African writers offer the kinds of abstractions, comparisons, frameworks and critical reflections...

Jacob Olupona's City of 201 Gods critically engages the question of interpretation and understanding in the analysis of specific African lifeworlds (re)defined by religious culture. Olupona's interpretation invites further interpretation of how emergent symbolic forms in a context of plural religious practices provoke both consensus and dissensus w...

In this chapter, I suggest that in the absence of a conceptual integration of communication and citizenship, we cannot adequately explore the transformation from subject status (under colonial and nondemocratic systems) to citizenship1 (under democratic systems), the ongoing negotiations of democratic citizenship rights, and the manner in which the...

In the very first week of January 2012, with the New Year’s air still redolent of the odor of the previous year, major towns and cities across Nigeria exploded in spontaneous civic rage. The immediate provocation was President Goodluck Jonathan’s announcement of the federal government’s resolve to remove the "remaining" subsidy on petroleum product...

Streets are sites of hegemony and counter-hegemony, of inclusion and exclusion, of incorporation and expulsion, and of cooperation or conflict. Thus, in the cultural geography of cities, commemorative street names are critical sites of social reproduction. Commemorative street naming is both an historical referent as well as a spatial designation....

KORIEHCHIMA J., The Land Has Changed: history, society and gender in colonial eastern Nigeria. Calgary: University of Calgary Press (pb £33.50 – 978 1 55238 268 4). 2010, 370 pp. - Volume 82 Issue 3 - WALE ADEBANWI

Sifting through the complexities of political encounters based on particular forms of agrarian relations between Africans and colonialists, this book maps socio-economic and cultural changes and continuities in a specific historical period by focusing on a people’s relationships with the land and its proceeds. The centrality of land, not only in th...

The dominant trend in the literature on civil society in Africa, particularly in the context of undemocratic regimes, assumes that civil society activists (including progressive, radical, or guerrilla journalists) are committed only to counteracting the preeminence of a repressive state. Within such a paradigm, evidence of collaborations between ag...

This essay analyses the construction of the anti-corruption war under the civilian government in Nigeria between 1999 and 2008. We consolidate existing insights in the literature in three key ways. First, we show that in democratising contexts like Nigeria, the gravest threats to anti-corruption campaigns often emanate from a combination of intra-e...

This paper captures an emerging African phenomenon in which the form of democracy is brazenly used to invalidate its very substance. Drawing on particulars from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, we articulate the re-ascendance and re-invigoration of anti-democratic forces across Africa, and weigh up the challenge that violent erasure of the electoral s...

The heroism of a critical section of the Nigerian press under Nigeria’s military regimes in the 1980s and 1990s is hardly in doubt. This has been noted and celebrated both in academic and lay literature (Adebanwi, 2004, 2007; Ajibade, 2003; Dare, 2007; Diamond, 1991; Director, 2007; Olukotun, 2000, 2002, 2004; Ojo, 2003). From the early to the late...

This article explores contemporary manifestations of the politicization of culture by the Christian clergy in the determination and resolution of political conflicts in Nigeria in general and Yonibaland in particular—against die backdrop of what has been called “the civilizational hegemony of Christianity.” The article approaches religion and the p...

Nigeria, Africa's most populous democracy, celebrates her 50th year as an independent nation in October 2010. As the cliché states, ‘As Nigeria goes, so goes Africa’. This volume frames the socio-historical and political trajectory of Nigeria while examining the many dimensions of the critical choices that she has made as an independent nation. How...

Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo: the local politics of a Nigerian nationalist by NolteInsaEdinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Pp. 321, £60.00 (hbk). - Volume 48 Issue 3 - WALE ADEBANWI

Yorùbá Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria investigates the dynamics and challenges of ethnicity and elite politics in Nigeria, Africa's largest democracy. Wale Adebanwi demonstrates how the corporate agency of the elite transformed the modern history and politics of one of Africa's largest ethnic groups, the Yorùbá. The argument is organized aro...

In his excellent introduction to the volume Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship Dialogues and Perceptions, which he coedited with Helmut Reifeld, Rajeev Bhargava underlined the need to query what analytical purchase the state and other fundamental political and sociological concepts may have (for a non-Western society) by posing the follow...

The rise in the volume of known global foreign worker remittances to countries of origin has sparked considerable academic and policy interest. Much attention has been paid to the assumed ‘development’ potential of these financial remittances, an approach which encapsulates the tendency to envisage the consequences of remittance flows in overwhelmi...

The struggle of the minority ethnic groups against the majority Hausa-Fulani ethnic-amalgam in the north of Nigeria has persisted. As a result of the twentieth-century jihad and politico-cultural and economic factors, Fulani (Muslims) are found in many parts of the minority areas of the geographical north. Many of the minority ethnic groups often c...

The mystique of eliteness is a quality that is cultivated or constructed overtime. Here, I examine agency– a culturally-specific, consolidated stream of composite actions and interactions that are geared towards specific social endeavours, and structure -representing conventions and social parameters through which agency and social practices are pe...

Ancestors occupy a central place in African cosmologies and social practices. The death and the remembrance of Lt-Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, the Military Governor of Western Nigeria who was killed during a military coup in 1966, is used in this essay to critique the assumptions in the literature about ancestors, by linking the recent dead with the long...

This essay examines the ‘posthumous career’ of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the late leader of the Yoruba of Nigeria. It focuses on why he has been unusually effective as a symbol in the politics of Yorubaland and Nigeria. Regarding Awolowo as a recent ancestor, the essay elaborates why death, burial and statue are useful in the analysis of the social hi...

There are several competing explanations for the rise in ethnic nationalisms in Nigeria, but there is an agreement that identity politics and conflicts tend to incubate and thrive best in underdeveloped settings. To this can be added the crises produced by prolonged military rule, during which the intensity of contestations for power translated the...

Conflictual relations at the level of political and civil society are usually replicated, represented and re-presented in the media. Where such relations concern territoriality, the media through a discursive strategy, re-fold space into—or re-bind space with—power, producing a territoriality, which not only reflects the political economy of ethno-...

This paper examines the cultural repertoires of the youthful, ‘militant’ faction of the Oodua People's Congress (OPC) in Nigeria, pointing to ways in which violence and ritual can be interpreted both as an instrumentally rational strategy of power struggle and as a form of symbolic action with cultural meanings. The OPC case strongly challenges the...

Given its place in the vortex of power relations in Nigeria, the Nigerian press has nurtured and/or subverted, promoted and/or combated the legitimacy of hegemonic power-blocs and state in their relationship with minority (marginal) ethnic groups. The role of the press in this context has become more crucial since the struggle of the minority ethni...

Hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics are inherent in most human groupings, particularly where such politics are geared toward the appropriation of space. Against this backdrop, the paper attempts to explain how an elite and counter-elite dichotomy in a social formation arose in the struggle for power. Contentious micro-politics in Lagos, the ca...

The centrality and assumed primacy of Lagos, Nigeria, explained why it was important in the (ethnic) hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics of colonial Nigeria, particularly in the context of how this politics was geared toward the appropriation of space—within that particular socio-political formation, over-determined by ethnicity—as explicated...

Identity Transformation and Identity Politics Under Adjustment in Nigeria edited by ATTAHIRU JEGA Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2000. Pp. 235. SEK 220 (pbk.). - - Volume 39 Issue 3 - WALE ADEBANWI

This work examines the political intrumentalization of culture and history as embodied in a 'Big Man', an Ur-agent that over-represents the cultural whole. It examines how the elites within a specific ethnocultural group - the Yoruba of Nigeria - represent and re-present themselves as agents, using the specific instance of the 'Cult of Awo' (Obafem...