Verso's Southern Questions

An uncompromising look at Nigeria’s crisis of democracy by a renowned essayist and critic

In this groundbreaking work, the essayist and critic Adewale Maja-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria’s crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous country in Africa was fabricated by British colonizers at the turn of the twentieth century. In the years since its independence in 1960, Nigeria spent an unbroken quarter century as a military dictatorship. Yet the blessings of today’s democracy are unclear to many, especially among the more than half of the population living in extreme poverty. Buffeted by unemployment, saddled with debt, menaced by bandits and Islamic fundamentalists, Nigeria faces the threat of disintegration.

Maja-Pearce shows that recent mobilizations against police brutality, sexism, and homophobia reveal a powerful undercurrent of discontent, especially among the country’s youth. If Nigeria has a future, he shows here, it is in the hands of young people unwilling to go on as before.Preface

1. Sọ̀rọ̀ Sókè/Speak Up
2. In the Beginning; or, One-Chance
3. Perpetual War; or, Soja Come, Soja Go
4. The Dividends of Democracy; or, How Not to Move the Nation Forward
5. The Godfather Rules OKAdéwálé Májà-Pearce is one of Nigeria’s leading public intellectuals. He is the author of two memoirs, In My Father’s Country and The House My Father Built. His writing regularly appears in the New York Times, London Review of Books, and Times Literary Supplement.