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Ohio University Press · Swallow Press · www.ohioswallow.com

Nigeria

Nigeria Book List

Forthcoming

Cover of 'Waterhouses'

Waterhouses
Landscapes, Housing, and the Making of Modern Lagos
By Mark Duerksen

How did Lagos, Nigeria, grow from a tiny island kingdom to a megalopolis famous for its frenetic and congested form of coastal urbanism? This first-of-its-kind history provides a comprehensive narrative for understanding one of Africa’s largest cities—its buoyant vibrancy and its two-headed problem of housing shortages and rising seas—today.

Cover of 'Imagine Lagos'

Imagine Lagos
Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City
By Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi

Combining archival research with a digital humanities–focused examination of cartography, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi reveals the gendered, spatial, and environmental responses to historical, political, and social change in mid-nineteenth-century Lagos, Nigeria.

Available

Cover of 'African Activists of the Twentieth Century'

African Activists of the Twentieth Century
Hani, Maathai, Mpama/Palmer, Saro-Wiwa
By Hugh Macmillan, Tabitha Kanogo, Robert R. Edgar, Roy Doron, and Toyin Falola

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Chris Hani, Wangari Maathai, Josie Mpama/Palmer, and Ken Saro-Wiwa. The volume complements history, social justice, and political science courses and is a useful collection for general readers interested in learning about Africa’s most influential historical figures.

Winner of the 2023 Dan David Prize for outstanding work in the study of the human past.
Cover of 'Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa'

Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa
The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria
By Saheed Aderinto

From debates over the aesthetics of birds in the urban landscape to how horse racing enhanced imperial power to the ways in which water navigation impacted aquatic creatures, Saheed Aderinto argues that it is impossible to comprehend the full extent of imperial domination without considering the colonial subjecthood of animals.

Winner of the 2022 Martin A. Klein Prize in African History, awarded by the American Historical Association
Cover of 'The Great Upheaval'

The Great Upheaval
Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria
By Judith A. Byfield

In this finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation making, Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political engagement in postwar Nigeria. She illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism, offering new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state.

Cover of 'Fine Boys'

Fine Boys
A Novel
By Eghosa Imasuen

Set in Nigeria during the pro-democracy movement and told from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old Gen-Xer, Ewaen, this coming-of-age novel examines the violent university confraternities during the mid-1990s.

Winner of the 2022 Martin A. Klein Prize in African History, awarded by the American Historical Association
Cover of 'The Great Upheaval'

The Great Upheaval
Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria
By Judith A. Byfield

In this finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation making, Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political engagement in postwar Nigeria. She illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism, offering new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state.

Cover of 'Boko Haram'

Boko Haram
By Brandon Kendhammer and Carmen McCain

Going beyond the headlines, including the group’s 2014 abduction of 276 girls in Chibok and the ensuing international outrage, 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 impact on ordinary citizens.

A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Cover of 'Ken Saro-Wiwa'

Ken Saro-Wiwa
By Roy Doron and Toyin Falola

A penetrating, accessible portrait of the activist whose execution galvanized the world. Hanged by the Nigerian government on November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa became a martyr for the Ogoni people and for human rights activists, as well as a symbol of modern Africans’ struggle against military dictatorship, corporate power, and environmental exploitation.

Cover of 'Nation on Board'

Nation on Board
Becoming Nigerian at Sea
By Lynn Schler

Schler’s study of Nigerian seamen during Nigeria’s transition to independence provides a fresh perspective on the meaning of decolonization for ordinary Africans. She traces the workers’ shift from optimism to disillusionment, providing a working-class perspective on nation building in Nigeria and illustrating the hopes for independence and subsequent disappointments.

Winner of the 2015 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize for outstanding book on African women’s experiences from the African Studies Association · Honorable Mention, New York African Studies Association Book Prize
Cover of 'Making Modern Girls'

Making Modern Girls
A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos
By Abosede A. George

In Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria. It draws from gender studies, generational studies, labor history, and urban history to shed new light on the complex workings of African cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the nationalist era of the 1950s.

Cover of 'Who Shall Enter Paradise?'

Who Shall Enter Paradise?
Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890–1975
By Shobana Shankar

Who Shall Enter Paradise? recounts in detail the history of Christian-Muslim engagement in a core area of sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation, home to roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims. It is a region today beset by religious violence, in the course of which history has often been told in overly simplified or highly partisan terms.

Winner of the 2015 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize for outstanding book on African women’s experiences from the African Studies Association · Honorable Mention, New York African Studies Association Book Prize
Cover of 'Making Modern Girls'

Making Modern Girls
A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos
By Abosede A. George

In Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria. It draws from gender studies, generational studies, labor history, and urban history to shed new light on the complex workings of African cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the nationalist era of the 1950s.

Cover of 'Black Skin, White Coats'

Black Skin, White Coats
Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry
By Matthew M. Heaton

Black Skin, White Coats is a history of psychiatry in Nigeria from the 1950s to the 1980s. Working in the contexts of decolonization and anticolonial nationalism, Nigerian psychiatrists sought to replace racist colonial psychiatric theories about the psychological inferiority of Africans with a universal and egalitarian model focusing on broad psychological similarities across cultural and racial boundaries. Particular emphasis is placed on Dr.

Cover of 'Colonial Meltdown'

Colonial Meltdown
Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression
By Moses E. Ochonu

Historians of colonial Africa have largely regarded the decade of the Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. In Colonial Meltdown, Moses E. Ochonu challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the responses of Northern Nigeria’s chiefs, farmers, laborers, artisans, women, traders, and embryonic elites to the British colonial mismanagement of the Great Depression.

Cover of 'The Forger’s Tale'

The Forger’s Tale
The Search for Odeziaku
By Stephanie Newell

In The Forger’s Tale Stephanie Newell draws on queer theory, African gender debates, and “new imperial history” to chart the story of the English novelist and poet John Moray Stuart-Young (1881–1939) as he traveled from the slums of Manchester to West Africa in order to escape the homophobic prejudices of late-Victorian society.

Cover of 'Negotiating Power and Privilege'

Negotiating Power and Privilege
Career Igbo Women in Contemporary Nigeria
By Philomina E. Okeke-Ihejirika

Even with a university education, the Igbo women of southeastern Nigeria face obstacles that prevent them from reaching their professional and personal potentials. Negotiating Power and Privilege is a study of their life choices and the embedded patriarchy and other obstacles in postcolonial Africa barring them from fulfillment.Philomina E. Okeke recorded life-history interviews and discussions during the 1990s with educated women of differing ages and professions.