Yorùbá Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria
?báfemi Awólowo and Corporate Agency

This book investigates the dynamics and challenges of ethnicity and elite politics in Nigeria.

Wale Adebanwi (Author)

9781107696662, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 April 2016

318 pages, 19 b/w illus. 3 maps
23 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.45 kg

'Rather than providing more narratives of Awólówò's biography, Adebanwi uses elitism and agency to explore political profiles in Nigerian colonial and postcolonial politics. Long-term fieldwork and engaging methodology result in an amazingly dense description of Awólówò as an agent of political modernity in Yoruba society. Thus this book will spark interest. … Adebanwi's book is a good and classic work that problematizes elitism and agency in 20th-century Yoruba politics. It successfully illuminates Yoruba influences on 21st-century Nigerian politics. Thus I can recommend it.' Aderemi Suleiman Ajala, American Anthropologist

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 around the ideas and cultural representations of ?báfemi Awólowo, the central signifier of modern Yorùbá culture. Through the narration and analysis of material, non-material and interactional phenomena - such as political party and ethnic group organization, cultural politics, democratic struggle, personal ambitions, group solidarity, death, memory and commemoration - this book examines the foundations of the legitimacy of the Yorùbá political elite. Using historical sociology and ethnographic research, Adebanwi takes readers into the hitherto unexplored undercurrents of one of the most powerful and progressive elite groups in Africa, tracing its internal and external struggles for power.

Introduction
Part I: 1. Elite agency: the making of the modern progenitor
2. The secular ancestor: the political life of a dead leader
Part II: 3. The politics of heritage: (re)constitution, conservation and corporateness in Yorùbá politics
4. The mantle of Awo: the politics of succession
5. Reconciliation and retrenchment
6. How (not) to be a proper Yorùbá
7. Seizing the heritage: playing proper Yorùbá in an age of uncertainty
Conclusion: corporate agency and ethnic politics.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], African history [HBJH]