Religion and the Making of Nigeria by Olufemi Vaughan (review)

Nigeria, like several other postcolonial African nations, is a country of many religious and ethnic groups. This fact and other pertinent details are confirmed by Olufemi (“Femi”) Vaughan, the Geoffrey Canada Africana studies and history professor at Bowdoin College, in Religion and the Making of Nigeria, a well-researched book, exploring “four major issues of importance to the critical roles of Muslim and Christian movements in the formation of the modern Nigerian state and society: the role of Islamic reformism and mission Christianity in the transformation of precolonial Nigerian communities in a turbulent nineteenth century; Islam, Christianity, and colonial rule in Nigeria’s Northern and Southern Provinces; Islam, Christianity, and the political transformation of the Northern and Middle Belt regions during Nigeria’s decolonization process; and Islam, Christianity, and the crisis of the postcolonial Nigerian nation-state” (p. 8). The book is a new entry in the series Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People.

Relying heavily on rich archival and Africanist scholarship, Vaughan uncovers several aspects of Nigeria’s socioreligious and political history from the early nineteenth century to the present day. He does an excellent job of underscoring the fact that, after Nigeria’s independence from Great Britain, on October 1, 1960, conflicts between the Muslim majority of the northern region and the Christian south became regular occurrences, often because of issues emanating from political and religious hegemony. Part of the problem reflected Islamic leaders’ desire to carve out a sharia-controlled northern Nigeria, but a murderous militant Islamic group, known globally as Boko Haram, emerged to terrorize the country and its political leaders.

In this book, of nine chapters and two sections, Vaughan demonstrates an “impact of Islam and Christianity on three major Nigerian regions, where the two world religions consistently intersect to shape the evolution of modern Nigeria from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century; these three interesting regions are the Hausa-Fulani and Kanuri Muslim North (the region dominated by the Sokoto Caliphate), the traditionally non-Muslim Middle Belt region (a religious and culturally distinct section of Britain’s Northern Nigerian Protectorate in contemporary central and northeastern Nigeria), and the Yoruba Muslim–Christian crossroads in the southwest region of Britain’s Southern Provinces” (pp. 7–8).

In the second section of the book, Vaughan provides “detailed analyses of how the recurring crisis of sharia (Islamic law) in post-colonial Nigeria essentially reflects the structural imbalance between emirate Northern Nigeria on the one hand, and Nigeria’s Middle belt and Southern regions on the other, going back to the amalgamation of Britain’s Northern and Southern colonial provinces in 1914” (p. 8).

Apart from an unambiguous emphasis on religion, Vaughan—author of Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics, 1890s–1990s (2006), another well-received book on Nigeria—discusses a variety of topics: colonial rule and the transformation of the colonial presence; Nigeria as a postcolonial state; resistance, violence, and reconciliation in response to agitation for sharia and other religious challenges; and, above all, sharia-related politics during the presidency of the PDP political party’s President Olusegun Obasanjo, the federal government, and the prevailing 1999 Nigerian constitution.

Vaughan makes a serious effort to include recent research on radical religiosity. In the concluding part of the book, he discusses a notorious kidnapping: “In April 2014, Boko Haram became a global household name following the militant Islamic group’s abduction of 276 schoolgirls from a secondary school in Chibok, a remote town in Nigeria’s northeastern state of Bornu” (p. 223). Worldwide jubilation occurred when several of the girls, wearing festive Nigerian clothes, were freed, several days before Christmas in 2016. Nigerian President Buhari’s government was lauded globally for its military efforts to have the girls released.

Religion and the Making of Nigeria is recommended to scholars of African studies, students, and any general readers interested in deepening their knowledge of Nigerian religious politics in particular and the socioreligious politics...