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Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency. By Wale Adebanwi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xvii, 295; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography. $95.00.
If Wale Adebanwi's Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria were another biography of Obafemi Awolowo, one would be right to regard the exercise with a sense of being introduced to what is already familiar-especially since the late politician and nationalist left us rich, fairly definitive autobiographical documentations of his influential life. Fortunately for scholars of Nigerian and African politics, the book is much more than a biography of the late icon of Yoruba and Nigerian politics.
In this well written monograph, Adebanwi accomplishes what few scholars dare to attempt: explore the long duree political evolution of a group through the instrumental agency of the group's most recognizable political player and symbol. When a similar individuated frame of analysis has been adopted in other contexts, the result has been that either the individual's symbolic and practical centrality to the group's political identity was subsumed by structural dynamics or the individual's political biography and agency were portrayed as transcending and determining the institutional and cultural universe of his/her group.
Adebanwi's analysis avoids these errors. Instead, he shows that Yoruba ethnic and political consciousness informed and was in turn informed by the stature, ideas, and political symbolism of Obafemi Awolowo....