In the summer of 1968, audiences around the globe were shocked when newspapers and television stations confronted them with photographs of starving children in the secessionist Republic of Biafra. ...This global concern fundamentally changed how the Nigerian Civil War was perceived: an African civil war that had been fought for one year without fostering any substantial interest from international publics became 'Biafra' - the epitome of humanitarian crisis. Based on archival research from North America, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, this book is the first comprehensive study of the global history of the conflict. A major addition to the flourishing history of human rights and humanitarianism, it argues that the global moment 'Biafra' is closely linked to the ascendance of human rights, humanitarianism, and Holocaust memory in a postcolonial world. The conflict was a key episode for the re-structuring of the relations between the West and the Third World.
This social and intellectual history of women’s political activism in postwar Nigeria reveals the importance of gender to the study of nationalism and poses new questions about Nigeria’s colonial ...past and independent future.
In the years following World War II, the women of Abeokuta, Nigeria, staged a successful tax revolt that led to the formation first of the Abeokuta Women’s Union and then of Nigeria’s first national women’s organization, the Nigerian Women’s Union, in 1949. These organizations became central to a new political vision, a way for women across Nigeria to define their interests, desires, and needs while fulfilling the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship. In The Great Upheaval , Judith A. Byfield has crafted a finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation making that not only tells a story of women’s postwar activism but also grounds it in a nuanced account of the complex tax system that generated the “upheaval.”
Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political engagement in Nigeria’s postwar period and illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism. She thus offers new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state. Ultimately, she challenges readers to problematize the collapse of her female subjects' greatest aspiration, universal franchise, when the country achieved independence in 1960.
In a global context of widespread fears over Islamic radicalisation and militancy, poor Muslim youth, especially those socialised in religious seminaries, have attracted overwhelmingly negative ...attention. In northern Nigeria, male Qur'anic students have garnered a reputation of resorting to violence in order to claim their share of highly unequally distributed resources. Drawing on material from long-term ethnographic and participatory fieldwork among Qur'anic students and their communities, this book offers an alternative perspective on youth, faith, and poverty. Mobilising insights from scholarship on education, poverty research and childhood and youth studies, Hannah Hoechner describes how religious discourses can moderate feelings of inadequacy triggered by experiences of exclusion, and how Qur'anic school enrolment offers a way forward in constrained circumstances, even though it likely reproduces poverty in the long run. A pioneering study of religious school students conducted through participatory methods, this book presents vital insights into the concerns of this much-vilified group.
Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria looks closely at the conditions that
created a legacy of violence in Nigeria. Toyin Falola examines violence as a tool of
domination and resistance, however ...unequally applied, to get to the heart of why
Nigeria has not built a successful democracy. Falola's analysis centers on two
phases of Nigerian history: the last quarter of the 19th century, when linkages
between violence and domination were part of the British conquest; and the first
half of the 20th century, which was characterized by violent rebellion and the
development of a national political consciousness. This important book emphasizes
the patterns that have been formed and focuses on how violence and instability have
influenced Nigeria today.
This book is an account of murder and politics in Africa, and an historical ethnography of southern Annang communities during the colonial period. Its narrative leads to events between 1945 and 1948 ...when the imperial gaze of police, press and politicians was focused on a series of mysterious deaths in south-eastern Nigeria attributed to the 'man-leopard society'. These murder mysteries, reported as the 'biggest, strangest murder hunt in the world', were not just forensic but also related to the broad historical impact of commercial, Christian and colonial aid relations on Annang society.
As the slave trade entered its last, illegal phase in the 19th century,
the town of Lagos on West Africa's Bight of Benin became one of the most important
port cities north of the equator. Slavery ...and the Birth of an African City explores
the reasons for Lagos's sudden rise to power. By linking the histories of
international slave markets to those of the regional suppliers and slave traders,
Kristin Mann shows how the African slave trade forever altered the destiny of the
tiny kingdom of Lagos. This magisterial work uncovers the relationship between
African slavery and the growth of one of Africa's most vibrant cities.
Boko Haram Brandon Kendhammer, Carmen McCain
10/2018
eBook
From its small-time origins in the early 2000s to its
transformation into one of the world's most-recognized terrorist
groups, this remarkable short book tells the story of Boko Haram's
bloody, ...decade-long war in northeastern Nigeria. Going beyond the
headlines, including the group's 2014 abduction of 276 girls in
Chibok and the international outrage it inspired, Boko
Haram provides readers new to the conflict with a clearly
written and comprehensive history of how the group came to be, the
Nigerian government's failed efforts to end it, and its enormous
impact on ordinary citizens.
Drawing on years of research, Boko Haram is a timely
addition to the acclaimed Ohio Short Histories of Africa. Brandon
Kendhammer and Carmen McCain-two leading specialists on northern
Nigeria-separate fact from fiction within one of the world's
least-understood conflicts. Most distinctively, it is a social
history, one that tells the story of Boko Haram's violence through
the journalism, literature, film, and music made by people close to
it.
In this overview of Africa's most populous country, Ambassador John Campbell and Matthew T. Page assess the socioeconomic, political, and security challenges that Nigeria is facing, as well as the ...country's future potential.
This book focuses on the humanitarian crisis in Biafra from 1967 to 1970 and the historic response of church groups from different parts of the world. This is the first scholarly work to establish ...the Joint Church Aid as the foundation of modern day international humanitarian aid.
