West African intellectuals have a long history of engaging with European intrusion by reflecting on their status as colonial and postcolonial subjects. Against the tendency to view this engagement as a confrontation between the modern west and traditional Africa, Philip S. Zachernuk argues that the interaction is far more fluid and diverse. Challenging the frequent denigration of western-educated Africans as a culturally barren "kleptocratic" elite, Colonial Subjects shows that they occupied a shifting medial position between colonizers and colonized. In the process they created a distinctive intellectual culture grounded in indigenous and European sources. Looking carefully at southern Nigeria from 1840 to 1960, Zachernuk locates intellectuals in the contours of their society as it changed from late precolonial times to the beginning of independence. He examines their engagement with British and Black Atlantic assumptions and assertions about Africa's place in the world. These ideas, shaped by the needs of others, became the often awkward material with which these intellectuals endeavored to construct their own image of their home continent. In this context, a group of Nigerian intellectuals created a dynamic intellectual tradition motivated by self-interest and marked by innovation, counter-invention, and imitation within the confines of the Atlantic world. At different times they opposed and supported the colonial state, adopted and rejected notions of racial destiny, and advocated free market principles, cooperative self-help, and state socialism. Colonial Subjects provides a historical framework for connecting these divergent ideas, thereby recovering the complexity of an intellectual tradition both colonial and modern.

Book Delisted

When a country's army headquarters that is commissioned to deafeat the enemy becomes an indisputable agent of the enemey, defeat of the country is inevitable. This book is about ethnic dynamics and conflict in a multi-ethnic federation where one ethnic group sets out to eliminate an economically and academically domination one by a pogrom. The pogrom led to the secession of the oppressed ethnic group along with its minority elements in the region. In effect, a Civil War ensued. The oppressed and secessionist ethnic group, the Igbos, had the wherewithal to defeat the federal forces within three weeks, but they were internally defeated by a culture of segregation. The culturally segregated class secretly allied with the federal forces to crush the secessionist region- Biafra. The author lays down, in describing the modue operandi of the segregated class- (saboteurs), his nerve-racking experiences in the battlefiled where bonafide Biafran soldiers were hunted by their fellow comrades. Unfortunately, they did not know that they were being hunted by those they had no reason to fear. Some lucky and sincere Biafran soldiers came to know what was happening when the war was virtually over. But many did not survive the acts of sabotage. They perished in the hands of their fellow comrades. The author prescribes manifest nullification of all forms of overt and covert cultural segregation in Igbo culture for the ethnic survival. On the whole, the book demonstrates a convergence of conflict sociology, cultural anthropology, plotical history, military science, ethos of mysticism, spiritualism, and mystic philosophy in an amazing story.