Wale Adenbanwi on social mobility, ethnonationalism, and democratic politics in Nigeria

To hear Wale Adebanwi describe his time as a young journalist in a destabilized Nigeria is like something out of a movie: a young reporter fleeing to the underground to avoid reprisals and jail time from ruthless military rule.

"It was both terrific and terrifying," says Adebanwi, Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies in the School of Arts & Sciences and director of the Center for Africana Studies. "Some members of my generation of journalists and activists were killed, some went to jail, but it was like the duty of our generation to be the foot soldiers for the democratic struggle in Nigeria. It was useful in terms of understanding social dynamics, and I think it has contributed a lot to the kind of intellectual enterprise that my generation has been engaging in since the end of that era."

Adebanwi's new book sees him resurrecting the journalistic roots he lived by decades prior. "How to Become a Big Man in Africa: Subalternity, Elites, and Ethnic Politics in Contemporary Nigeria" delves into youth, violence, and social dynamics against the backdrop of seismic governmental evolution.

Adebanwi focuses specifically on the larger-than-life Gani Adams, who transformed himself from a "subaltern" of lower status into the holder of the most prestigious chieftaincy title among southwestern Nigeria's Yoruba, a culture represented through diaspora in locations from Brazil to the Caribbean. The book is composed of observations made over decades of Adams' social and political trajectory-a path that came to mirror deeper themes of tradition versus modernity in Nigeria.

"The southwestern and southern parts of Nigeria generally had the earliest encounter with ideas about the Enlightenment, and by the mid- to late-19th century, the role of reason and ideas about human liberty had been embraced prior to the formal imposition of colonialism," says Adebanwi.

Adams' rise was fueled by mobilizing violence and "culture." Adams, who dropped out of high school in the third year due to poverty, went back to school to get his degree and was eventually awarded an honorary doctorate.

"One of the things I try to capture, against the backdrop of history, is how the Yoruba embraced the idea of modernity in their earlier encounter with missionary Christianity and how Adams, in this context, transformed the old traditional ideas of warlordism into a modern context of democratic aspirations and ethno-nationalist struggle," says Adebanwi. "The second focus is what it means to be a Yoruba in the modern age: to be educated and to mobilize the idea of 'progress.'"

Read more at Omnia.