This chapter details the circumstances and techniques behind the colonial acquisitions and conquests of Nigeria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It details two broad categories of methods used by colonial forces: forceful acquisitions and acquisitions achieved through diplomacy. While broad categorizations of colonial techniques are made, this chapter outlines that different techniques could and were used for every Indigenous polity involved. The strategy behind every colonial conquest depended on numerous factors such as the size, “sophistication,” geography, and local political landscape of the polity in question. However, while the techniques behind the colonial acquisitions could drastically differ, this chapter outlines the common goals behind each strategy: to drive a set of processes that weakened the power and authority of indigenous power structures. This would create a power void that, through gradual or rapid action, would be filled by colonial forces or actors aligned with colonial interests. The reactions and independent actions taken by indigenous polities are equally crucial to the history in question. Like their European counterparts, the indigenous states of Nigeria reacted to colonial meddling and the actions of their fellow polities in many different ways, with varying degrees of success.

This chapter explores the shifting dynamics between local authorities/peoples in the Niger area and the British government from 1914 to 1939. It builds upon the topics of colonial consolidation explored in Chapter 7, explaining on a macro level why the British government sought to impose these changes and exploring the impacts these changes had (social and economic). World War I and the interwar era significantly strained the British Empire, which necessitated a greater reliance upon its colonies. For Nigeria specifically, colonial officials sought to increase Nigeria’s profitability by promoting a streamlined, export-centered economy and a direct taxation system. Both of these changes required a more centralized, consolidated Nigeria, prioritizing large British firms and institutions at the expense of other foreign and local mercantile networks. Paradoxically, World War I diverted attention and critical administrative officials away from Nigeria, hampering the colony’s management and the implementation of these policies. Consequently, the colonial government relied on local draconian authorities where exploitation and improper native representation were commonplace. In response to these exploitative policies, this chapter will explain the growth of native-oriented political parties such as the NNDP

This chapter explores the methodology behind the attempts of Nigeria’s colonial administration to consolidate the complex patchwork of peoples, cultures, polities, and interests acquired throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As with their conquests and acquisitions of Nigerian polities, the strategies used by colonial officials differed from region to region due to the differing conditions and extreme diversity of Nigeria. The chapter will detail these different strategies and why they were assigned to the regions in question. However, despite the great diversity in administrative techniques, the chapter seeks to contextualize the overarching strategies and policies implemented by colonial officials who wished to maximize control while minimizing costs. To this end, the British colonial government sought to promote local authorities who would bear the brunt of “less important” administrative responsibilities. This marked a shift from previous colonial policies, which sought to destabilize native power structures to make their acquisition easier. The process of administrative consolidation was far from a one-sided affair. The chapter details how native authorities, cultures, and people reacted to and influenced the activities mentioned earlier.

This chapter tests cycles of silence in Lagos to evaluate its applicability in a Global South context where, unlike Baltimore, the state and the police have limited resources. The chapter’s results come from an original survey of shopkeepers, paired with interviews and observation, in the city’s expansive markets, pockets in which “area boy” crews engage in violence and extortion. Consistent with the patterns found in Baltimore, area boy violence reduces cooperation by boosting perceived retaliation risk and making cooperation norms appear to be weaker than they are. Underlying cooperation support exists among shopkeepers, the chapter’s final section explains, in part, because the area boy crews have largely failed to gain legitimacy with Lagosians.

The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

This chapter lays out the study’s research design. The design aims to enhance cycles of silence theory’s generalizability at two levels. At a macro level, the goal is to increase the potential that, contingent on local factors, the theory applies to as many of the communities facing criminal group violence as possible. It does so by drawing on logic derived from human social psychological dynamics, leveraging a wide range of existing datasets including a global survey of 109,000 citizens, and studying communities both the Global North (Baltimore, Maryland) and Global South (Lagos, Nigeria). At a micro level, the design combines cross-national data with original surveys as well as interviews and first- hand observations in Baltimore and Lagos. This multimethod approach improves the likelihood that the findings from the surveys and interviews in Baltimore and Lagos accurately reflect cooperation dynamics in the cities. Finally, the chapter provides definitions for key terms related to the study’s main actors – criminal groups, police, and citizens – and the main outcome of citizen cooperation with the police.

This chapter presents the results of a survey experiment testing cooperation interventions in Lagos. It provides background information on the relatively limited efforts to date to promote police–citizen cooperation in the megacity. The chapter describes the virtual reality–based survey experiment used to test the interventions in which respondents are shown a hypothetical area boy fight from a shopkeeper’s point of view. The results indicate that respondents who viewed the vignettes with an anonymous tip line and the intervention to raise awareness of cooperation support among shopkeepers boosts information sharing. Exposure to co-ethnic police officers in the vignette, however, shows little effect on information sharing. The chapter also discusses the mechanisms through which cooperation support exists despite widespread distrust of the Nigeria Police Force among Lagosians.

The Introduction previews cycles of silence theory, which seeks to explain how criminal groups constrain citizen cooperation with the police. The Introduction focuses on laying out the book’s central contributions. Theoretically, the book provides a new explanation for how criminal groups prevent cooperation with the police, highlighting the role of their violence in suppressing perceived norms favoring cooperation. The theory speaks to the political science literatures on state-building, political conflict, and criminal governance as well as literatures from other social science disciplines including criminology. Methodologically, the study bridges research divides between the Global North and Global South by testing the theory in both regions. The study also employs realistic survey experiments including a virtual reality–based survey experiment. Finally, the Introduction puts the study into perspective: While the book’s focus may be centered around the effect of violence, the violence should not be interpreted as a defining feature of communities that endure criminal groups.

In the Afro-Atlantic city of Lagos, Africans birthed sexualities in slavery and colonialism. Sex undergirded the politics of emancipation, imperial subjecthood, urbanization, and social differentiation. Africans navigated sexual politics as an afterlife of slavery, living a spectrum of gendered unfreedoms ranging from the persistence of slavery to reinventions of Atlantic slavery’s hierarchies under the guise of abolition. Where old slaving and neo-imperial African and European elites exploited African bodies for labour, sex, and power, discourses about the potency and danger of sexed bodies, including slaves, redeemed and adopted children, ‘wives’, soldiers, ‘prostitutes’, ‘delinquent youth’, domesticated and politically marginalized women, and ‘sexually perverse’ subjects, constituted the polysemic production of sexualities. Sexual politics drove British imperial compromises over abolition as well as colonialist conceptions of male bodies capable of wage labour, sports, and political leadership, as distinct from female bodies best suited for social and biological reproduction. Local resistance entailed age- and gender-distinctive conceptions of bodily autonomy to repudiate elite theft of bodily potency and escape the surveillance state. In Lagos the state policed Black youth mobility, criminalized ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’, and used military violence to restrain nonconformist sexuality because it asserted power through sex governance.

Lagos has always been an exceptional site in the Nigerian, African and world imaginary. Both the colonial capital and present-day economic centre of Africa’s most populous nation, Lagos is itself a world. It is therefore no surprise that the city has become a key site through which the world literary imaginary has unfurled, with numerous depictions, projections and imaginative instantiations of the city functioning as a fulcrum around which the contours of world-formation (mondialisation) and contestation have emerged. This chapter explores this rich literary history, conceiving of Lagosian space as a limit case for the wider operations of world-formation in World Literature across the long twentieth century. The chapter is attuned to the articulations and registrations which obtain between the material evolution of the city and its literary image, as well as the larger economic, political and social fields which subtend a range of literary forms. As a mega-city amongst mega-cities, Lagos functions as a setting particularly apt to a wide and often-incongruous range of worldly projections and world formations which lend considerable nuance to the map of World Literature.

Standard approaches to transparency emphasise transparency in data: the principle that data about government activity should be accessible and accurate. This chapter draws on in-depth fieldwork in southwest Nigeria to show how standard data-focused efforts are insufficient to meet popular demands for a government that is knowable and visible. Transparency in data is only one conception of the core concept of transparency. Transparency in things involves demonstrating transparency through the delivery of tangible, concrete outputs, whereas transparency in people demands that the social networks, relations and obligations in which their leaders are embedded should be made legible. Political competition in twenty-first century southwest Nigeria exemplifies the tensions between these rival conceptions of transparency. Whilst the technocratic reforms of the ‘Lagos model’ meant that more government data were in the public domain, there was widespread popular suspicion that official documents may be hiding as much as they reveal. Two examples from Oyo State in the 2010s show how sensitivity to these alternative conceptions of transparency helps explain otherwise counter-intuitive popular responses to government efforts at ‘good governance’. A final section explores the possible consequences of failing to attend to transparency in people, drawing on examples of populist politics in Nigeria and elsewhere.

This chapter introduces the ‘Lagos model’, a transformative package of pro-market developmental policies and reforms that was developed first in Lagos State, Nigeria, in 1999 and subsequently expanded to nearby Ekiti and Oyo. Under progressive Governors Bola Tinubu and Babatunde Fashola, the Lagos State Government reformed government agencies, introduced public–private partnerships, and oversaw an astronomical rise in the state’s tax base. In addition to serving as an effective strategy for building a political base for the opposition, the Lagos model won plaudits from international donors who saw it as a home-grown example of their good governance agenda. The spread of the Lagos model re-animated long-standing tensions in Yoruba politics, putting a vision of leadership rooted in epistemic superiority into conflict with a more socially embedded conception of legitimate rule. In the 2014 gubernatorial elections in nearby Ekiti state, the Lagos model was rejected in favour of its polar opposite. Whilst some have seen this as a straightforward material contest over the sorts of goods that governments should provide, this chapter argues that debates over the Lagos model reveal blind spots in dominant models of good governance.

Nigeria remains a traditional culture, and religion is an inextricable part of society, permeating political, familial and socio-economic life. Young Nigerians are beginning to rebel against traditional roles. Empowered by the anonymity and strength in numbers that a megacity like Lagos provides, a growing feminist movement, led by young women, is seeking greater gender equality across work and family life. A small but vocal LBGTQ+ community is also emerging, particularly in the creative industries, and is using social media to speak out and challenge deeply rooted homophobic assumptions.

The pace of urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa over the last 60 years is without precedence. In 1950, most African countries were agrarian societies and just over a quarter of the population lived in cities. By 2020, the continent had 74 cities with a population of more than one million people, equivalent to the US and Europe combined. Today almost half of sub-Saharan Africans are urban dwellers and by 2050 that number is projected to reach 60 per cent. That means two- thirds of the continent’s projected population growth over the next three decades – an additional 950 million people – will be absorbed by the region’s humming, thriving, bustling megacities. And, as the OECD notes, ‘this transition is profoundly transforming the social, economic and political geography of the continent.’ Lagos, with a population of more than 20 million and economy bigger than that of Kenya is a vast, energetic and flourishing metropolis, a centre of opportunity that is enabling young Nigerians to be wealthier, more open-minded and more cosmopolitan than any before it.

The pace of urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa over the last 60 years is without precedence. In 1950, most African countries were agrarian societies and just over a quarter of the population lived in cities. By 2020, the continent had 74 cities with a population of more than one million people, equivalent to the US and Europe combined. Today almost half of sub-Saharan Africans are urban dwellers and by 2050 that number is projected to reach 60 per cent. That means two- thirds of the continent’s projected population growth over the next three decades – an additional 950 million people – will be absorbed by the region’s humming, thriving, bustling megacities. And, as the OECD notes, ‘this transition is profoundly transforming the social, economic and political geography of the continent.’ Lagos, with a population of more than 20 million and economy bigger than that of Kenya is a vast, energetic and flourishing metropolis, a centre of opportunity that is enabling young Nigerians to be wealthier, more open-minded and more cosmopolitan than any before it.

Nigeria ranks first in the world in youthful entrepreneurship, with 40 per cent of young Nigerians engaged in early-stage entrepreneurial activity. With jobs scarce and often badly paid, a business on the side helps make ends meet. But it’s also a cultural attitude: entrepreneurial nous flows through this generation’s veins. New businesses tend to be focused on local and pan-African consumers and entrepreneurship is fuelled by social media. Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are used as tools to sell physical products and services. Social enterprises are growing, too, as acting with humanity becomes an important consideration for many young entrepreneurs across the continent. The typical Soro Soke generation entrepreneur is a creative disruptor, using their business to deliver solutions to the larger problems the continent faces. But being an entrepreneur on the continent still poses significant challenges. Nigeria has the highest volume of start-ups on the African continent, over 750, but misses out on all the top 10 rankings for categories that are critical to helping a business thrive.