Nigeria’s turbulent and hamstrung historical past has loads to inform us in regards to the present malaise. And, as says author Maya Angelou, “If you do not know the place you have got come from, you do not know the place you’re going.” That’s what Nigerian authors Feyi Fawehinmi and Fola Fagbule had in thoughts once they wrote Formation: The Making Of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation.
Likewise the previous US Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell, with a brand new e-book Nigeria and the Nation-State: Rethinking Diplomacy with the Submit-Colonial World, says that if you wish to reform Nigeria, it’s a must to perceive the forces that form it.
From the early 1800s, when Usman Dan Fodio created his Caliphate in Sokoto, by means of the flowering of city-states like Abeokuta — well-known for producing so a lot of Nigeria’s elite politicians and cultural icons from Olusegun Obasanjo to Fela Kuti — to the eventual hitching collectively of the Northern and Southern Protectorates into the formation that’s now often called Nigeria.
A dialog with the authors, Patrick Smith and Nicholas Norbrook.
