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Farmers and Townspeople in a Changing Nigeria: Abakaliki during Colonial Times (1905-1960). Simon Ottenberg. Lagos, Nigeria: Spectrum Books Limited, 2005. 373 pp.
Relatively few ethnographic monographs seem genuinely-much less primarily-aimed at an audience in the place of study. Simon Ottenberg's account of colonial Abakaliki in southeastern Nigeria is a striking and unusual example. Ottenberg, a preeminent anthropologist of the Igbo people in southeastern Nigeria, explains in the preface his purposeful decision to publish what he describes as his "last major work" at a Nigerian press to increase the readership in Nigeria. Primarily a historical narrative, Farmers and Townspeople in a Changing Nigeria offers a multifaceted and detailed description of the emergence and growth of Abakaliki, a backwater town at the northern edge of the Igbo-speaking region. Ottenberg undertook the fieldwork that forms the basis for the book in 1960. His history of the town relies on a combination of interviews and observations from 1960, archival research, and published scholarship, mostly by Nigerian researchers. The tone of the book is "old school" in the sense that the author is relatively absent in the text and the perspective is very much a bird's-eye...