Performing Power In Nigeria

Uses extensive archival material, interviews and fieldwork to explore how Nigerian Pentecostals mark their self-distinction as a people of power.

A fresh and interdisciplinary study of faith and social culture in Nigeria, Abimbola A. Adelakun uses extensive archival material, interviews and fieldwork to explore how Nigerian Pentecostals use performance to mark their self-distinction as a people of power.

Throughout its history, Nigeria has been plagued by religious divisions. Tensions have only intensified since the restoration of democracy in 1999, with the divide between Christian south and Muslim north playing a central role in the country’s electoral politics, as well as manifesting itself in the religious warfare waged by Boko Haram. Through the lens of Christian–Muslim struggles for supremacy, Ebenezer Obadare charts the turbulent course of democracy in the Nigerian Fourth Republic, exploring the key role religion has played in ordering society. He argues the rise of Pentecostalism is a force focused on appropriating state power, transforming the dynamics of the country and acting to demobilize civil society, further providing a trigger for Muslim revivalism. Covering events of recent decades to the election of Buhari, Pentecostal Republic shows that religio-political contestations have become integral to Nigeria’s democratic process, and are fundamental to understanding its future.

In this book, Oluwatoyin Oduntan offers a critical intervention in the scholarly fields of Nigerian, and West African history, as well as towards understanding the intellectual ideas by which modern African society was formed, and how it functions. The book traces the shifting dynamics between various segments of the African elite by critically analyzing existing historical accounts, traditions and archival documents. First, it explores the lost world of native intellectual thoughts as the perspective through which Africans experienced the colonial encounter. It thereby makes Africans central to contemporary debates about the meanings and legitimacy of colonial empires, and about the African cultural experience. It shows that the resettlement of liberated and Westernized Africans in Abeokuta and after them, European missionaries, merchants and colonial agents from the 1840s, did not dismantle preexisting power structures and social relations. Rather, educated Africans and Europeans entered into and added their voices to ongoing processes of defining culture and power. By rendering a continuing narrative of change and adaptation which connects the pre-colonial to the post-colonial, Power, Culture and Modernity in Nigeria leads Africanist scholarship in new directions to rethink colonial impact and uncover the total creative sites of changes by which African societies were formed.

This book examines the contributions, both intentional and unintentional, of Nigerian Pentecostal churches and NGOs to development, studying their development practices broadly in relation to the intersecting spheres of politics, economics, health, education, human rights, and peacebuilding. In sub-Saharan Africa, Pentecostalism is fast becoming the dominant expression of Christianity, but while the growth and civic engagement of these churches has been well documented, their role in development has received less attention. The Nigerian Pentecostal landscape is one of the most vibrant in Africa. Churches are increasingly assuming more prominent roles as they seek to address the social and moral ills of contemporary society, often in fierce competition with Islam for dominance in Nigerian public space. Some scholars suggest that the combination of an enchanted worldview, an emphasis on miracles and prosperity teaching, and a preoccupation with evangelism discourages effective political engagement and militates against development. However, Nigerian Pentecostalism and Development argues that there is an emerging movement within contemporary Nigerian Pentecostalism which is becoming increasingly active in development practices. This book goes on to explore the increasingly transnational approach that churches take, often seeking to build multicultural congregations around the globe, for instance in Britain and the United States. Nigerian Pentecostalism and Development: Spirit, Power, and Transformation will be of considerable interest to scholars and students concerned with the intersection between religion and development, and to development practitioners and policy-makers working in the region.

Quality electricity supply propels industrial growth and boosts economic development. Quality electricity supply goes beyond mere availability of electricity as it is commonly believe to be. This book examines the various elements of quality electricity supply. The book also discussed industrial performance as a whole and identified four (4) key performance indicators that industries measure. It then considered the impact that electricity has on industries and their performance citing cases of Africa, America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. It then identified six general areas that quality electricity supply could impact in any industry.

How does social media activism in Nigeria intersect with online popular forms—from GIFs to memes to videos—and become shaped by the repressive postcolonial state that propels resistance to dominant articulations of power? James Yékú proposes the concept of "cultural netizenship"—internet citizenship and its aesthetico-cultural dimensions—as a way of being on the social web and articulating counter-hegemonic self-presentations through viral popular images. Yékú explores the cultural politics of protest selfies, Nollywood-derived memes and GIFs, hashtags, and political cartoons as visual texts for postcolonial studies, and he examines how digital subjects in Nigeria, a nation with one of the most vibrant digital spheres in Africa, deconstruct state power through performed popular culture on social media. As a rubric for the new digital genres of popular and visual expressions on social media, cultural netizenship indexes the digital everyday through the affordances of the participatory web. A fascinating look at the intersection of social media and popular culture performance, Cultural Netizenship reveals the logic of remediation that is central to both the internet's remix culture and the generative materialism of African popular arts.