Moses Ochonu | Vanderbilt University (original) (raw)

Books by Moses Ochonu

The Journal of African History, 2020

In 1921 and 1924 Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina, traveled to Britain on a sightseeing trip,... more In 1921 and 1924 Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina, traveled to Britain on a sightseeing trip, becoming the first emir or chief from Northern Nigeria to visit the British imperial metropole. This article analyzes the colonial relationship that put Dikko in the colonizers' orbit and favor and paved the way for him to embark on the trips, the colonial logistics and networks that facilitated the journeys, Dikko's experiences and adventures in Britain, and, most importantly, his perspectives on British society, institutions, goods, and forms of leisure. I argue that Dikko, though constrained by serving as a prop in a colonial performance of power, used travel to Britain as a platform to advance metropolitan mod-ernity as an aspirational if distant model of socioeconomic advancement and to give his peers and subjects in Northern Nigeria a textual reference for navigating colonial culture in relation to their own natal Islamo-Hausa cultural norms. This article analyzes two trips that Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina from  to , took to Britain in  and . These were sightseeing touristic adventures, but British colonizers clearly saw them as part of a broader, longstanding project of exhibiting British metropolitan civilization to allegedly impressionable African colonial subjects. Dikko, a wealthy Muslim king and colonial intermediary, paid for the trips but received permission and extensive logistical support from British colonial and metropolitan authorities. Emir Dikko paired the first trip in  with a detour to Mecca to perform the hajj, thus combining a religious pilgrimage with a political one. He undertook the second trip in  to attend the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley. Relying on Dikko's travel journal entries, his official sightseeing itinerary in Britain, metropolitan newspaper accounts, and colonial correspondence and reports, this article reconstructs the story of Dikko's metropolitan adventures, framing it as a compelling iteration of how mobility in the form of transnational travel was imbricated in Northern Nigeria's emergent colonial modernity and, more crucially, was part of a broader performance of British colonial authority. British colonizers inducted emirs in Northern Nigeria into the role of partners in colonial business, and some emirs regarded British officials as benefactors and Britain as an aspirational modernist and developmental example for their emirates. Moreover, the aristocrats were arbiters of negotiations between local identities and cultures and colonial modernity. Muslim Northern Nigerian colonial subjects

A tapestry of innovation, ideas, and commerce, Africa and its entrepreneurial hubs are deeply con... more A tapestry of innovation, ideas, and commerce, Africa and its entrepreneurial hubs are deeply connected to those of the past. Moses E. Ochonu and an international group of contributors explore the lived experiences of African innovators who have created value for themselves and their communities. Profiles of vendors, farmers, craftspeople, healers, spiritual consultants, warriors, musicians, technological innovators, political mobilizers, and laborers featured in this volume show African models of entrepreneurship in action. As a whole, the essays consider the history of entrepreneurship in Africa, illustrating its multiple origins and showing how it differs from the Western capitalist experience. As they establish historical patterns of business creativity, these explorations open new avenues for understanding indigenous enterprise and homegrown commerce and their relationship to social, economic, and political debates in Africa today.

Papers by Moses Ochonu

Since Nigeria's transition from military to civilian "democratic" mle in 1999, ther... more Since Nigeria's transition from military to civilian "democratic" mle in 1999, there has been a debate among Nigetian and international commentators abo11t just h01v de111ocratic (or llnde!llocratic) govemance and the exercise of power has become in the country. This essay contributes to this important debate. Refying 011 observed incidents and phmomma and on ne1vspaper repotts and informal conversations behJJeen the author and a ct·oss-sectz'on of Nigerians, this essay brings to the front-blimer the conh'fJdiction behveen the empbasis on popularity and acclamation in del!locratic dispetuatz'ons and the rmde!IJOcratic actions and disco11rses of elected government officials, 1uhicb are aimed, however dubio11s/y, at porh'aying the appearances o/ pop11lari!y, 11biqlfity and acclamation. Using several examples from the last five years of civilian "democt'fJtzi:" rule in Nigena, I atJafyze this dilenJIIJa, JJihJi:b I advance as a problematic of...

African Studies Quarterly, 2008

Introduction This paper explores three interrelated issues; the origins and development of a Haus... more Introduction This paper explores three interrelated issues; the origins and development of a Hausa-Caliphate imaginary in the intertwinements of caliphate and British discourses and its subtle entry into official British colonial policy in northern Nigeria; how the search for administrative coherence prompted British colonialists to craft an administrative policy envisioned to normalize and spread this Hausa-Caliphate socio-cultural and political model to the Middle Belt; and the on-ground unfolding and implementation of this policy in the non-Hausa speaking part of the Middle Belt. [1] This colonial administrative project of politico-cultural uniformity sought to make the Middle Belt more like the Caliphate sector, which was deemed more suitable for the British administrative policy of Indirect Rule. [2] It was not aimed at achieving cultural sameness for its own sake but as a vehicle for ultimately strengthening Indirect Rule in all of northern Nigeria. This was largely a pragmati...

The Law and Development Review, 2011

Page 1. Volume 4, Number 3 2011 Article 3 The Law and Development Review LEGAL MEASURES AGAINST C... more Page 1. Volume 4, Number 3 2011 Article 3 The Law and Development Review LEGAL MEASURES AGAINST CORRUPTION IN AFRICA: PRINCIPLES, POLITICS, PROSPECTS Corruption and Political Culture in Africa: History, Meaning, and the Problem of Naming ...

Journal of the International Institute, Jun 20, 2008

Research Africa Reviews, 2021

As a historian, I am interested in accounting for origins and sources. Accordingly, for me, it is... more As a historian, I am interested in accounting for origins and sources. Accordingly, for me, it is important that any effort to understand or explain contemporary anti-Black racism in the Arab world is faithful to the historical processes that produced and normalized that racism. Fortunately, there are sources that we can consult to yield evidence for such historical accounting. On the weight of historical evidence documented in both primary and secondary sources, we can say authoritatively that the enslavement of Black Africans across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean corridors is the bedrock of Arab anti-Blackness. Saharan and Indian Ocean slavery produced and legitimized the constellation of discriminatory attitudes, devaluing epithets, and institutional exclusions we now describe under the analytic rubric of anti-Blackness in the Arab world and in the Sahelian borderlands. Slavery established baselines for intergroup relations and sociological norms. It also shaped a significant aspect of Islamic exegetical practice, inflecting the direction and meaning of jurisprudential consensuses that remain in place as authoritative legal codes in the Muslim societies of the Middle East and the Sahel. These slave trades, one overland and the other seaborne, predated the Atlantic slave trade by several centuries. Therefore, by the basic law of chronological historical causality, neither the trades themselves nor the anti-Blackness that they authorized and democratized in the Arab world could have resulted from Euro-American Atlantic enslavement, colonial racism, and the resulting global entwinement of white supremacy and capitalism. This fact challenges the increasingly prevalent argument that anti-Blackness in the Arab world maps onto and overlapped with the global ascent of white supremacy along with the rise of mercantile and industrial capitalism and colonization. There is a tendency nowadays to analytically conflate European colonization in the Arab world with the rise of anti-Blackness and ideas of Arab superiority. And this is done in a manner that places the blame for anti-Black racism as much on colonialism as on historical, sociological, and theological processes within Arab Muslim society; ones that predated nineteenth century European colonization in the Arab world by many centuries. So widespread has this explanatory template become in certain scholarly circles that conferences and workshops are framed around it as if its verity has been established by scholarly consensus. One recent example is a workshop organized by the Qatar campus of Northwestern University, which framed its November 17, 2020, workshop as a conversation on "Slavery, Colonialism, and Race in the Muslim World." Furthermore, the workshop's electronic poster/announcement invited scholars to register to listen to "panelists [who] will address how processes of enslavement, colonialism, and contemporary prejudice in Muslim societies have racialized "non-white" Arabs and other Muslims, and perhaps even interiorized imported notions

Journal of Modern African Studies, 2020

Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, 2019

Relating Worlds of Racism

Is Africa a non-racial continent inhabited by racially undifferentiated peoples unschooled in, an... more Is Africa a non-racial continent inhabited by racially undifferentiated peoples unschooled in, and unfamiliar with, the power and privileges of whiteness? This article surveys the quotidian, conceptual, spatial, and symbolic landscapes of racialized privilege and prestige in postcolonial Africa. I analyze this salient but discernible architecture of racial tropes, perceptions, and continuities as a counterpoint to the popular myth of contemporary Africa as a place in which race is an unintelligible and invisible factor in social relations, a place in which the colonial work of race and racism purportedly expired with political independence. Using examples from across Africa, I argue that colonial racial signs have persisted in the postcolonial public space, inflecting elite aspirational cultures and marking social distinctions disguised with the language of class and culture. In addition, African elites and common folk alike have actively expanded and added to a vast, variegated system of socio-cultural valuation and devaluation that is rarely acknowledged as racial in origin or interpellation, and whose connections to contemporary transnational structures of racial privilege remain hidden beneath non-racial signifiers. Deploying the popular Anglophone African conversational idiom of “colonial mentality,” which is often advanced to designate a range of practices, behaviors, and ways of seeing, acting, and conceptualizing the world, I contend that postcolonial Africa is saturated with numerous social idioms of race and racism. Africans, I argue, have not been passively imbricated in this universe of racial meanings; rather, they have been active participants in it.

SubTitle: Why Salafi clerics' London visit sparked a debate The innocuous photos of two Nigerian ... more SubTitle: Why Salafi clerics' London visit sparked a debate The innocuous photos of two Nigerian Islamic clerics shopping and relaxing in London circulated in Northern Nigerian social media communities two weeks ago. These photos and the debate they sparked in these communities open a window onto an ongoing but little noticed ideological struggle over modernity, morality and piety in Muslim-majority Northern Nigeria, which is in the throes of Islamist group Boko Haram's violent insurgency. The photos in question were unremarkable, familiar banalities in the age of social media and online visual culture. One picture shows the two men sitting on a park bench; another shows them in a clothing store wearing cowboy hats. In both pictures, they are dressed in suits. To protect themselves from the elements in cold, wet London, they are wearing cloves and scarves. Why were these images so controversial, and why did they become touchstones for debate in online communities of Western-educated Northern Nigerian Muslim men and women? In a Muslim-majority region in which Islamic clerics attempt to define the boundaries of private and public morality, modes of dress, the sexual conduct of adults, and their engagements with modernity and Western goods, there is a constantly present cloud of judgmental scrutiny on the conduct of clerics. This reverse judgmental gaze is heightened by the fact that the clerics routinely espouse a neat moral binary between supposedly Muslim material cultures and those of the West, which they condemn. Given this policing of morality that conservative clerics thrive on, there is often a silent collection of Muslims waiting to call the same clerics out on acts and choices perceived to contradict their teachings. As clerics have come to wield an outsize influence over the body of Muslims and to act as moral enforcers of an increasingly puritan religious order, the sartorial choices of the two clerics — they were wearing what in Northern Nigerian is considered Western dress — touched off debates between Muslim youths who long resented the growing intrusions of the clerics into their lives and those who continue to look upon the religious figures as revered exemplars of piety. The two clerics were in London to attend an Islamic conference and squeezed in leisure and tourism into their itinerary. Their touristic adventures in the British capital, which, in the rhetoric of many puritan clerics, is a bastion of an immoral modernity, Western education, and cultural trends antithetical to righteous Muslim living, surprised many Northern Nigerian Muslims. It polarized online Northern Nigerian Muslim communities into two broad camps — those who accused the clerics of hypocrisy and those who defended their sartorial choices as consistent with Islamic prescriptions on decent dressing and their London activities as personal choices that do not violate any Muslim precepts. As the debate progressed, some Northern Nigerian Muslims wondered if the two clerics were

M O S E S E. O C H O N U J U L Y 6 , 2 0 1 7 J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 1 7 o o o o o In the aftermath... more M O S E S E. O C H O N U J U L Y 6 , 2 0 1 7 J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 1 7 o o o o o In the aftermath of the last US presidential election, I have been trying to re-understand America, a country that I have adopted as my own. Shocked and humbled by the outcome of the election, and as a lifelong student of the human condition, I've been trying to better comprehend the economic and cultural anxieties of the white working class, a group that assumed a mythical factor in pre-and post-election political prognostications and in new discussions about the vagaries of globalized neo-liberalism. Being a Nigerian, however, my frame of reference and comparison remains Nigerian workers, who, like their more venerated white American counterparts, have, in their own country, had to respond and adjust their lives to globalization.

The Journal of African History, 2020

In 1921 and 1924 Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina, traveled to Britain on a sightseeing trip,... more In 1921 and 1924 Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina, traveled to Britain on a sightseeing trip, becoming the first emir or chief from Northern Nigeria to visit the British imperial metropole. This article analyzes the colonial relationship that put Dikko in the colonizers' orbit and favor and paved the way for him to embark on the trips, the colonial logistics and networks that facilitated the journeys, Dikko's experiences and adventures in Britain, and, most importantly, his perspectives on British society, institutions, goods, and forms of leisure. I argue that Dikko, though constrained by serving as a prop in a colonial performance of power, used travel to Britain as a platform to advance metropolitan mod-ernity as an aspirational if distant model of socioeconomic advancement and to give his peers and subjects in Northern Nigeria a textual reference for navigating colonial culture in relation to their own natal Islamo-Hausa cultural norms. This article analyzes two trips that Muhammadu Dikko, the emir of Katsina from  to , took to Britain in  and . These were sightseeing touristic adventures, but British colonizers clearly saw them as part of a broader, longstanding project of exhibiting British metropolitan civilization to allegedly impressionable African colonial subjects. Dikko, a wealthy Muslim king and colonial intermediary, paid for the trips but received permission and extensive logistical support from British colonial and metropolitan authorities. Emir Dikko paired the first trip in  with a detour to Mecca to perform the hajj, thus combining a religious pilgrimage with a political one. He undertook the second trip in  to attend the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley. Relying on Dikko's travel journal entries, his official sightseeing itinerary in Britain, metropolitan newspaper accounts, and colonial correspondence and reports, this article reconstructs the story of Dikko's metropolitan adventures, framing it as a compelling iteration of how mobility in the form of transnational travel was imbricated in Northern Nigeria's emergent colonial modernity and, more crucially, was part of a broader performance of British colonial authority. British colonizers inducted emirs in Northern Nigeria into the role of partners in colonial business, and some emirs regarded British officials as benefactors and Britain as an aspirational modernist and developmental example for their emirates. Moreover, the aristocrats were arbiters of negotiations between local identities and cultures and colonial modernity. Muslim Northern Nigerian colonial subjects

A tapestry of innovation, ideas, and commerce, Africa and its entrepreneurial hubs are deeply con... more A tapestry of innovation, ideas, and commerce, Africa and its entrepreneurial hubs are deeply connected to those of the past. Moses E. Ochonu and an international group of contributors explore the lived experiences of African innovators who have created value for themselves and their communities. Profiles of vendors, farmers, craftspeople, healers, spiritual consultants, warriors, musicians, technological innovators, political mobilizers, and laborers featured in this volume show African models of entrepreneurship in action. As a whole, the essays consider the history of entrepreneurship in Africa, illustrating its multiple origins and showing how it differs from the Western capitalist experience. As they establish historical patterns of business creativity, these explorations open new avenues for understanding indigenous enterprise and homegrown commerce and their relationship to social, economic, and political debates in Africa today.

Since Nigeria's transition from military to civilian "democratic" mle in 1999, ther... more Since Nigeria's transition from military to civilian "democratic" mle in 1999, there has been a debate among Nigetian and international commentators abo11t just h01v de111ocratic (or llnde!llocratic) govemance and the exercise of power has become in the country. This essay contributes to this important debate. Refying 011 observed incidents and phmomma and on ne1vspaper repotts and informal conversations behJJeen the author and a ct·oss-sectz'on of Nigerians, this essay brings to the front-blimer the conh'fJdiction behveen the empbasis on popularity and acclamation in del!locratic dispetuatz'ons and the rmde!IJOcratic actions and disco11rses of elected government officials, 1uhicb are aimed, however dubio11s/y, at porh'aying the appearances o/ pop11lari!y, 11biqlfity and acclamation. Using several examples from the last five years of civilian "democt'fJtzi:" rule in Nigena, I atJafyze this dilenJIIJa, JJihJi:b I advance as a problematic of...

African Studies Quarterly, 2008

Introduction This paper explores three interrelated issues; the origins and development of a Haus... more Introduction This paper explores three interrelated issues; the origins and development of a Hausa-Caliphate imaginary in the intertwinements of caliphate and British discourses and its subtle entry into official British colonial policy in northern Nigeria; how the search for administrative coherence prompted British colonialists to craft an administrative policy envisioned to normalize and spread this Hausa-Caliphate socio-cultural and political model to the Middle Belt; and the on-ground unfolding and implementation of this policy in the non-Hausa speaking part of the Middle Belt. [1] This colonial administrative project of politico-cultural uniformity sought to make the Middle Belt more like the Caliphate sector, which was deemed more suitable for the British administrative policy of Indirect Rule. [2] It was not aimed at achieving cultural sameness for its own sake but as a vehicle for ultimately strengthening Indirect Rule in all of northern Nigeria. This was largely a pragmati...

The Law and Development Review, 2011

Page 1. Volume 4, Number 3 2011 Article 3 The Law and Development Review LEGAL MEASURES AGAINST C... more Page 1. Volume 4, Number 3 2011 Article 3 The Law and Development Review LEGAL MEASURES AGAINST CORRUPTION IN AFRICA: PRINCIPLES, POLITICS, PROSPECTS Corruption and Political Culture in Africa: History, Meaning, and the Problem of Naming ...

Journal of the International Institute, Jun 20, 2008

Research Africa Reviews, 2021

As a historian, I am interested in accounting for origins and sources. Accordingly, for me, it is... more As a historian, I am interested in accounting for origins and sources. Accordingly, for me, it is important that any effort to understand or explain contemporary anti-Black racism in the Arab world is faithful to the historical processes that produced and normalized that racism. Fortunately, there are sources that we can consult to yield evidence for such historical accounting. On the weight of historical evidence documented in both primary and secondary sources, we can say authoritatively that the enslavement of Black Africans across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean corridors is the bedrock of Arab anti-Blackness. Saharan and Indian Ocean slavery produced and legitimized the constellation of discriminatory attitudes, devaluing epithets, and institutional exclusions we now describe under the analytic rubric of anti-Blackness in the Arab world and in the Sahelian borderlands. Slavery established baselines for intergroup relations and sociological norms. It also shaped a significant aspect of Islamic exegetical practice, inflecting the direction and meaning of jurisprudential consensuses that remain in place as authoritative legal codes in the Muslim societies of the Middle East and the Sahel. These slave trades, one overland and the other seaborne, predated the Atlantic slave trade by several centuries. Therefore, by the basic law of chronological historical causality, neither the trades themselves nor the anti-Blackness that they authorized and democratized in the Arab world could have resulted from Euro-American Atlantic enslavement, colonial racism, and the resulting global entwinement of white supremacy and capitalism. This fact challenges the increasingly prevalent argument that anti-Blackness in the Arab world maps onto and overlapped with the global ascent of white supremacy along with the rise of mercantile and industrial capitalism and colonization. There is a tendency nowadays to analytically conflate European colonization in the Arab world with the rise of anti-Blackness and ideas of Arab superiority. And this is done in a manner that places the blame for anti-Black racism as much on colonialism as on historical, sociological, and theological processes within Arab Muslim society; ones that predated nineteenth century European colonization in the Arab world by many centuries. So widespread has this explanatory template become in certain scholarly circles that conferences and workshops are framed around it as if its verity has been established by scholarly consensus. One recent example is a workshop organized by the Qatar campus of Northwestern University, which framed its November 17, 2020, workshop as a conversation on "Slavery, Colonialism, and Race in the Muslim World." Furthermore, the workshop's electronic poster/announcement invited scholars to register to listen to "panelists [who] will address how processes of enslavement, colonialism, and contemporary prejudice in Muslim societies have racialized "non-white" Arabs and other Muslims, and perhaps even interiorized imported notions

Journal of Modern African Studies, 2020

Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, 2019

Relating Worlds of Racism

Is Africa a non-racial continent inhabited by racially undifferentiated peoples unschooled in, an... more Is Africa a non-racial continent inhabited by racially undifferentiated peoples unschooled in, and unfamiliar with, the power and privileges of whiteness? This article surveys the quotidian, conceptual, spatial, and symbolic landscapes of racialized privilege and prestige in postcolonial Africa. I analyze this salient but discernible architecture of racial tropes, perceptions, and continuities as a counterpoint to the popular myth of contemporary Africa as a place in which race is an unintelligible and invisible factor in social relations, a place in which the colonial work of race and racism purportedly expired with political independence. Using examples from across Africa, I argue that colonial racial signs have persisted in the postcolonial public space, inflecting elite aspirational cultures and marking social distinctions disguised with the language of class and culture. In addition, African elites and common folk alike have actively expanded and added to a vast, variegated system of socio-cultural valuation and devaluation that is rarely acknowledged as racial in origin or interpellation, and whose connections to contemporary transnational structures of racial privilege remain hidden beneath non-racial signifiers. Deploying the popular Anglophone African conversational idiom of “colonial mentality,” which is often advanced to designate a range of practices, behaviors, and ways of seeing, acting, and conceptualizing the world, I contend that postcolonial Africa is saturated with numerous social idioms of race and racism. Africans, I argue, have not been passively imbricated in this universe of racial meanings; rather, they have been active participants in it.

SubTitle: Why Salafi clerics' London visit sparked a debate The innocuous photos of two Nigerian ... more SubTitle: Why Salafi clerics' London visit sparked a debate The innocuous photos of two Nigerian Islamic clerics shopping and relaxing in London circulated in Northern Nigerian social media communities two weeks ago. These photos and the debate they sparked in these communities open a window onto an ongoing but little noticed ideological struggle over modernity, morality and piety in Muslim-majority Northern Nigeria, which is in the throes of Islamist group Boko Haram's violent insurgency. The photos in question were unremarkable, familiar banalities in the age of social media and online visual culture. One picture shows the two men sitting on a park bench; another shows them in a clothing store wearing cowboy hats. In both pictures, they are dressed in suits. To protect themselves from the elements in cold, wet London, they are wearing cloves and scarves. Why were these images so controversial, and why did they become touchstones for debate in online communities of Western-educated Northern Nigerian Muslim men and women? In a Muslim-majority region in which Islamic clerics attempt to define the boundaries of private and public morality, modes of dress, the sexual conduct of adults, and their engagements with modernity and Western goods, there is a constantly present cloud of judgmental scrutiny on the conduct of clerics. This reverse judgmental gaze is heightened by the fact that the clerics routinely espouse a neat moral binary between supposedly Muslim material cultures and those of the West, which they condemn. Given this policing of morality that conservative clerics thrive on, there is often a silent collection of Muslims waiting to call the same clerics out on acts and choices perceived to contradict their teachings. As clerics have come to wield an outsize influence over the body of Muslims and to act as moral enforcers of an increasingly puritan religious order, the sartorial choices of the two clerics — they were wearing what in Northern Nigerian is considered Western dress — touched off debates between Muslim youths who long resented the growing intrusions of the clerics into their lives and those who continue to look upon the religious figures as revered exemplars of piety. The two clerics were in London to attend an Islamic conference and squeezed in leisure and tourism into their itinerary. Their touristic adventures in the British capital, which, in the rhetoric of many puritan clerics, is a bastion of an immoral modernity, Western education, and cultural trends antithetical to righteous Muslim living, surprised many Northern Nigerian Muslims. It polarized online Northern Nigerian Muslim communities into two broad camps — those who accused the clerics of hypocrisy and those who defended their sartorial choices as consistent with Islamic prescriptions on decent dressing and their London activities as personal choices that do not violate any Muslim precepts. As the debate progressed, some Northern Nigerian Muslims wondered if the two clerics were

M O S E S E. O C H O N U J U L Y 6 , 2 0 1 7 J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 1 7 o o o o o In the aftermath... more M O S E S E. O C H O N U J U L Y 6 , 2 0 1 7 J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 1 7 o o o o o In the aftermath of the last US presidential election, I have been trying to re-understand America, a country that I have adopted as my own. Shocked and humbled by the outcome of the election, and as a lifelong student of the human condition, I've been trying to better comprehend the economic and cultural anxieties of the white working class, a group that assumed a mythical factor in pre-and post-election political prognostications and in new discussions about the vagaries of globalized neo-liberalism. Being a Nigerian, however, my frame of reference and comparison remains Nigerian workers, who, like their more venerated white American counterparts, have, in their own country, had to respond and adjust their lives to globalization.

But theirs is not nostalgia for corruption per se but for a period in which, despite or because o... more But theirs is not nostalgia for corruption per se but for a period in which, despite or because of corruption, the flow of illicit government funds created a sense of economic opportunity and prosperity. During a recent research trip to Nigeria I sampled the opinion of various segments of the Nigerian people to gauge their perspectives on the troubled economy of President Muhammadu Buhari, which just entered recession. One refrain I heard fairly regularly was " bring back corruption. " It is not an entirely new rhetoric. For months, Nigerians have been advancing this idiom on social media as a sarcastic rebuke of what they see as Buhari's narrow, obsessive focus on corruption. " Bring back corruption " mocks the logic of making the fight against corruption the sole preoccupation of government while unprecedented hardship stalks vulnerable Nigerians and expands to the ranks of citizens who previously occupied safe economic perches, and while the government fails to ease the economic strictures and contractions caused by the said fight against corruption. When the refrain first appeared in Nigeria's dynamic political lexicon, its architects intended to use it to draw attention to the tension between fighting corruption, a vice which Nigerians believe to be responsible for their economic predicament, and worsening economic conditions. It was meant as an indictment of Buhari's singular focus on corruption to the detriment of sound economic management. Many of those who invoke the refrain today do so half-seriously to make two points; first, to illustrate the primacy of economic survival and wellbeing above all else, including the fight against corruption; and second, to yearn for a return to the imperfections of the pre-Buhari era, when, in their reckoning, corruption was rampant but life was easier, cheaper, more livable. " Bring back corruption " is profound beyond the awareness of those deploying it as an idiom of political critique. It underscores the paradoxical, often unacknowledged political and economic utility of corruption in Nigeria — the functional, instrumental entwinement of corruption in statecraft as well as corruption's capacity to mediate the economic relationship between Nigerians and the state. The Buhari administration's feisty rhetoric on corruption ignores the ways in which governmental graft has been democratized in the polity, trickling down in the form of monetary flows, patronage, expanding volumes of business transactions, and general liquidity. The Nigerians I heard saying " bring back corruption " were not simply saying that they preferred the corrupt but more prosperous era of former president Goodluck Jonathan to Buhari's less corrupt but leaner time, although their rhetoric signals that order of preference. They were not endorsing corruption either. Without realizing it, they were making an insightful comment on how corruption is paradoxically, and

Lasting for over five hundred years, the trading network build by the Wangara — an ethnic coaliti... more Lasting for over five hundred years, the trading network build by the Wangara — an ethnic coalition of Mande speaking peoples — confronted and overcame many obstacles but ultimately succumbed to convergence of several economic and political factors. The Wangara saw West Africa as a vast, interconnected zone of trade and investments. Their investment in trade, in the extraction industry, and in artisanal manufacturing helped to commercially integrate the region and to dissolve political, cultural, and economic barriers to trade. This paper analyzes the beginnings and expansion of the Wangara trading system, the strategies the Wangara deployed to capture trade and investment opportunities in many economic sectors across West Africa, their approach to overcoming barriers to trade, the decline of the network, and the lessons and insights of both the successes and failures of this vast commercial empire.

Nigeria, this essay analyzes four overlapping phenomena: archival fragmentation, the politicizati... more Nigeria, this essay analyzes four overlapping phenomena: archival fragmentation, the politicization of data and research transactions, the proliferation of memoirs and other texts of self-representation, and the question of sensing the African past beyond the recognized oral, written, and ethnographic corpus. At once familiar and novel, these trends present both problems and possibilities for historians of postcolonial Africa, and need to be negotiated carefully. I propose, in preliminary terms, that a complementary methodology of what I call sensing is not only possible but necessary if we want to fully capture the pace and flavor of postcolonial African experiences.