This special issue takes stock of civic dissent in the guise of public displays of violence, which are often used as a political tool, a leveraging principle by multiple power stakeholders in a pluralistic society like Nigeria. It examines key events that shaped postcolonial Nigeria, particularly those that bring civic dissent into the public sphere to evoke both local and international responses—be it through media, protests, riots, unauthorized use of violence, or open display of arms. In the post-9/11 context, much of this civic dissent has been absorbed into the global discourses on the war on terror, which are often domesticated by postcolonial nation states such as Nigeria to suppress local dissent as well as unresolved ethno-nationalist aspirations. In the global terrorism index today, Nigeria occupies an unenviable third place.

Challenging this, the special issue advances the notion of civic dissent as a conceptual platform to understand public manifestations of unfulfilled nationalist aspirations, unabated ethno-religious tensions, unequal distribution of resources, chronic disruption of democratic institutions, and other such contesting practices that are both socially embodied and have historically crystallized since the formal end of colonialism. Such an expansive definition of civic dissent includes civil wars, political coups, shadow or parallel governments, insurgencies, terrorism, and acts of public violence—all of which feature as prominent themes in postcolonial Nigerian literature, films, and media narratives.

Most notable among these events are the coup and counter-coups of 1966, which brought the looming cultural and socio-economic differences between Nigeria’s large ethnic communities such as the Igbos, Hausas, and Yorubas, as well as many smaller ethnicities, to the forefront of inter/national politics and culminated in the ethno-regional ruptures between South, North, and Eastern Nigeria as evinced in the most momentous event in Nigeria’s history: the Nigerian-Biafran War of 1967–1970. The subsequent political coups—both attempted and failed—have led to a deep entrenchment of civic distrust in democratic institutions which were being periodically disrupted and reshaped by ethno-religious, fraternal, and regional interests. Other concurrent events such as the Maitatsine riots (1980–1985) which inspired the current-day Boko Haram (2009 to date); the Niger Delta insurgency (1990s to date); the farmer-herder crisis (2000s to date); and the End Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) movement (2017 to date) have all captured the public imagination both within and outside Nigeria due to the open nature of their dissent, and the attempts by their respective stakeholders to gain leverage through organized protests, kidnappings, sabotage, acts of terror, media wars, and outright public executions.

Taken together, these events have not only exposed the regional disparities that always ran along the major ethno-religious axis but also the internal ruptures within and among the so-called ‘oil communities,’ most prominently the Itsekiri, Ijaw, and Urhobos in the South. In addition to these historical conflicts, Nigeria has witnessed a strong wave of civic protests against an anti-LGBTQ bias of the state laws, the criminalization of youth (spearheaded by the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad—SARS) as well as police brutality, the periodic clashes between Hausa-Fulani Muslim majorities and other religious groups in the North, the sporadic violence between Southern farmers and Fulani herders, to say nothing of the growing resistance to environmental destruction in the Niger Delta, which resulted in the execution of renowned writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995—an event that inspired a broad array of environmental movements, literature, films, and documentaries.

Corresponding to these political developments is a growing body of literature, film, and media discourses responding to the various events of civic dissent outlined above. These include fictional works on the Biafran War as well as a spate of political coups (post-1970s) such as Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004), Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003), and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002).¹ In addition to these, other more recent Nigerian novels such as Chigozie Obioma’s The Fisherman (2015), Richard Ali’s City of Memories (2012), Uwem Akpan’s New York, My Village (2021), and Ishaya Bako’s film 4th Republic (2019),² among many others, have exposed the fault lines of secular civic life in contemporary postcolonial Nigeria. With the onset of the oil conflict, too, there has been a bourgeoning output of novels, films, and documentaries on the Niger Delta which include Christie Watson’s novel Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away (2011), Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), and Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow (2006), as well as Ahmed Yerima’s play Hard Ground (2006), Ilse van Lamoen’s documentary Daughters of the Niger Delta (2012), and films such as Rajah Arase’s In my Country (2017), and Jeta Amata’s Black Gold (2011) and Black November (2012).³

More recently (post-2009), Boko Haram has emerged as the subject of several literary works: Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (2015), Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree (2018), and Patience Ibrahim and Andrea Hoffmann’s memoir A Gift from Darkness (2016) have mediated the crisis.⁴ Among other arenas of civic strife, particularly on the struggles of LGBTQ communities, Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Tree (2015), Nnanna Ikpo’s Fimi Sile Forever (2017), and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018) have been particularly noteworthy.⁵ In addition to the above, there are a number of fictional works and media productions that both document and diagnose everyday forms of dissent as well as the routine violence of civic life in the domains of bureaucracy, law and policing, slums, urban spaces, and political mobilization: Michael Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars (2009), Obianuju V. Chukwuorji’s Delusions of the Patriots (2019), Olu Obafemi’s play Near and Distant Cries (2018), Teju Cole’s Everyday is for the Thief (2007), Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), and Nollywood films such as Stephanie Okereke Linus’s Dry (2014).⁶

In view of such a prolific body of literary and filmic responses, this special issue features eight essays that depict the various instances of public violence outlined above—and the corpus that represents them—as manifestations of civic desires that envision a reconstruction of Nigeria’s public sphere, as opposed to their dismissive treatment in global discourses as acts of terrorism.

Since its independence, Nigeria has been shrouded in internal conflicts over questions of belonging, entitlements to land, wealth and citizenship, owing largely to the arbitrary marking of national boundaries over ethnic identity. The ensuing Nigerian Civil War between 1967–1970 can be read as a symptom of persistent yet periodic civic dissent—a founding moment of Nigerian history through the “crutch of violence.”⁷ While scholars warn against seeing the Nigerian civil war as an entry point into Nigeria’s nation building, many contend that “Biafran secessionism has come back into Nigerian politics with a vengeance.”⁸ The anxieties of a single ethnic group occupying the political vacuum left behind by the colonizers were already evident in the Tiv Riots of 1960–1964 in the Benue Valley (now Benue State), where the Christian minorities rose against the Muslim-dominated regime of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) and their ally, the Action Party. When their attempts to gain political leverage and carve out new regional autonomy through the United Middle Belt Congress (UNBC) failed, the Tiv staged riots in the 1960s, and subsequently in 1964 because they had been forced by Abubakar Tafawa Balewa’s government—the first and only Prime Minister of Nigeria—to pay compensation for the riot damages. Notwithstanding these civic causes and concerns, the subsequent clashes between the NPC local leaders and the Tiv peasants, and the arrest of the UNBC leader Joseph Taka in 1962 as well as the killing of Gbargbar Apinega, the clan head of Mbalagh, led to a full-fledged insurgency. The Nigeran state, under Balewa, dealt with the insurgency as an internal security threat, and went on to mobilize the army to suppress it. As Dele Ogun asserts: “in the run up to the Biafran war, the Western Region and its allies, the Tiv, in the middle Belt, were both under effective military occupation. The ‘Special attention’ that was to be given to the Niger Delta Calabar was still to come.”⁹ The draconian colonial language of sedition and emergency came into effect long before the Biafran war, as did the advent of militant and military culture that became synonymous with post-Balewa Nigeria.

In much the same way, “a militarization of the West Africa oil region under the sign of an American Empire intent on rooting out ‘terrorism’ ”¹⁰ has been under way since September 2002, as outlined in the US National Security Strategy. Following this, “the Nigerian National Assembly seized the opportunity of criminalizing terrorism to subsume the Niger Delta militancy, since they argued that the latter had taken on a terrorist dimension.”¹¹ Today, a complex network of area studies, counterterrorism studies and state-sponsored think tanks on the global South have unpacked a subsidiary discourse of “energy security” that is designed to provide military strategies for protecting natural resources such as oil, gas, uranium and forestry products from terrorist threats in the interests of “long-term health of the world economy.”¹² This has recast the entire history of Nigerian conflicts into a “cultures of violence”-thesis,¹³ which tends to temporalize the events in relation to specific conception of political violence by emptying out their historical geneses, such as the specters of Biafra. Although there is a modicum of truth to the claim that violence has been infiltrated into the social fabric as a legitimate means of political resistance, to read the entire national cultures through the lens of violence—as a satanization of the world, or symbolic power gained through the public display of arms—does much disservice to the political uses of such violence, including its civic functions.¹⁴

Rather than relegate such cultures of violence to apocalyptical visions of terrorism or reduce them to some pathological phenomenon associated with “bandits, and backward-looking violent criminals”,¹⁵ as a number of studies on the historical conflicts on Nigeria do,¹⁶ the theoretical revision as well as the empirical contexts of the essays presented in this special issue allow for a constructive engagement with multiple modes and modalities of civic dissent as they are manifested in Nigeria today. Sure enough, the complex ethnonational struggles after the Biafra war led to a series of military coups, counter-coups, and failed coups in Nigeria between 1966 and 1993 which played into the cultures of violence-thesis among the social scientists, as though the Nigerian society and nation are inherently and congenitally violent. This is despite the fact that there is a historical precedent since the heydays of colonialism:

Frederick Lugard, the high commissioner (1900–1906) and then the governor-general (1912–1919) of Nigeria, further developed this doctrine in Africa. He proscribed that one ethnic group should dominate the colonial army, provided that that group was both politically reliable and unable to dominate civilian political life (i.e., the local civil service). It was a policy of ‘making the politically strong militarily weak and the politically weak militarily strong (Adekson 1979)’.¹⁷

Thus, if the colonial constellations of Nigeria sowed the seeds for the “ethnic hostilities within these military institutions” and moreover, “played an important role in inciting particular coup attempts,”¹⁸ then the culture of nepotism and of corruption bred by the military leaders led to further instability and social insecurity in the civic sphere of the country where the disequilibrium between ethnic identity and political power ensued fears of persecution. The violence that emerged from Nigeria in the postcolonial era must be understood from this perspective of instability and insecurity within the civic sphere, as opposed to the imputation of some congenitally and inherently warring nature of the communities involved. Ebenezer Obadare and Wale Adebanwi (2010) belabor this point in the most compelling fashion: since Nigerians are not the active chooser of their state, they are “found trapped in it,” and both passively and subversively attempt to mimic it, modify it, and even mirror its means and methods of statecraft:

in this terrain, for instance, the fragmented, pulverized, and discredited state (17–18) can no longer claim a monopoly of violence—one of the most critical indices of its eminence. For the youths of the oil-bearing communities, banditry has become an (il)legitimate mode of accumulation (Cf. Roitman, 1998: 298). State banditry is, therefore, confronted in the Delta by the banditry of the creeks which questions or challenges not only the state’s assumed monopoly of violence and entitlement to generalized obedience, but also the continued existence of that state.¹⁹

Sure enough, the very foundation of the Nigerian state is shrouded in violence. The 1966 coup has been read as an Igbo plotting by General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, which expectedly instilled fears among Northern Nigerians, whose urge to retake power became evident in subsequent political emplotting and replottings that followed the 1966 coup. Muhammadu Buhari’s coup of 1983, and the 1985 coup of General Ibrahim Babangida are all evidence of the Northern desire for political control. This was also a time during which Nigeria witnessed a public momentum towards anti-military sentiments, buoyed by civic uprisings by the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) against Babangida’s corruption masked under the Structural Adjustment Programs.²⁰ Even before the 1983 coup, religious ideologies had already infiltrated into civic society, as in the Maitatsine uprising in Kano, targeting the Christian minorities, which further spread to Yola and Kaduna in the early 1980s:

During the last phase of military rule, especially under the Babangida and Abacha administrations (1985–2008) (sic), acts of state terrorism manifested in bomb explosions and political assassinations of pro-democracy and human rights activists across the nation. For example, between 1991 and 2000 there were over 30 violent crises and uprisings in different parts of Nigeria, especially in the North-Central region. The Kaduna anti-sharia riots resulted in deaths estimated at over 5000 and loss of valuables running into several millions of dollars in 2000.²¹

Likewise, while the brutal dictatorship of General Sani Abacha from 1993–1998 represented an era of repression in the civic sphere, including the infamous state murder of Nigeria’s renowned writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, it was also a period under which a culture and art of protest took its roots. In a similar vein, Ayo Olukotun observes:

The state, it should be noted, also sought to use the same artistic resources to bolster its legitimacy, for instance in March 1998 during the so-called two-million man march, when a rare ensemble of musicians and comedians from Yorubaland and beyond regaled a huge audience campaigning for the self-succession of General Sani Abacha. Hence, the struggle for democratization and a reformed polity moved into the crucial terrain of controlling discourse at popular levels, especially in the vernacular medium.²²

Like art, it is often humour, not necessarily violence in times of extreme repression, that served the function of civic protest: “although humour is a non-violent way of escape (and simultaneously, engagement), it may, as we have seen, have violent consequences depending on who uses it, how it is ‘received.’ ”²³ This form of civic dissent is tantamount to ‘literary activism’ which facilitates “conversations among African writers, publishers, festival organizers and translators who work across this space.”²⁴

While a number of essays in this special issue draw attention to such vernacular as well their distinct ethno-historical contexts (e.g., essays by Hannah Pardey, David Temitope Stephen, and Tolulope Akinwole), they also reflect the spirit of Nigeria’s fourth republic, which is marked by civic uprisings against General Abdulsalami Abubakar’s military rule. The civic uprisings against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in 2020 are perhaps the most significant events since 1999, apart from the violent uprisings in the Niger Delta region, and the Boko Haram insurgencies, which arguably have their own roots in civic and intracultural neglect, poverty, lack of education, and unemployment.²⁵ More recently, the putting into effect of the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act by the Nigerian state also sparked a series of protests against the criminalization of the LGBTQ community, which received support from a wider spectrum of civil society actors, including labor unions as well as the #EndSars-campaign.

In the South, the scenario was no different. Founded by the local scribe and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1990, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MASOP) rallied the Ogoni minorities against the ecological and health hazards of the oil exploration in the region. Following Saro-Wiwa’s execution, the violent conflict in the Ijaw city of Odi in 1999 resulted in the murder of 2400 civilians by the Nigerian military.²⁶ The Warri Crisis of May 1997 marked the tensions between three major oil communities, Itsekiri, Ijaw, and Urhobos, intensified by the claims over ownership and the sharing of oil revenues between the federal and regional governments. The Warri crisis dates back to the colonial contact with the Itsekiri. Soon after the British departed, the Itsekiri ruler’s decision to change the title of his crown from Olu of Itsekiri to Olu of Warri added much fuel to the fire. The move was perceived as an extensional threat by the Ijaws and Urhobos, who consider themselves native to Warri. The ensuing tensions culminated in ethnic riots in March 1997, resurfacing again in 2003–2004, with the alleged involvement of hired guns by a consortium of oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Agip and TotalFinaElf.²⁷

In the wake of these developments in the South, a number of civil, vigilante and semi-armed groups such as the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NDPVF), the Niger Delta Liberation Front (NDLF) and the Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC) waged an uncoordinated war against both the Nigerian state and the foreign oil companies. These groups, often campaigning secessionism in the name of environmentalism, sprang from a political vacuum created by the interethnic, resource-based hostilities in the Niger Delta since the days of the Nigerian civil war, fought between the Republic of Nigeria and Igbo nationalist leader Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu who declared an independent Biafran Republic, encompassing the entire Niger Delta region, in 1967 under the auspices of protecting Igbo ethnic groups against their alleged genocide by Hausa-Fulanis—a Muslim majority in the North of the country. Despite their support for the secessionist state that later became defunct in 1970, minority ethnic groups of the Niger Delta such as Ijaw and Ogoni were reluctant to concede the possible Igbo dominance once Biafra was created. It thus comes as no surprise that the prominent leaders of Niger Delta resistance such as Saro-Wiwa and Mujahid Dokubo-Asari (founder of NDPVF) followed the footsteps of the Ijaw uprising in 1966 led by their nationalist leader Isaac Boro, the founder of the Niger Delta Voluntary Force. At the turn of the millennium, an umbrella organization called Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) rose to prominence, which has been eclipsed by a less powerful but more determined group called the Niger Delta Avengers.²⁸

The essays featured in this issue follow a similar trajectory of sequestering the civic origins and geneses of violence from its ideological obfuscation in the discourses and regimes of security both within and outside of Nigeria. The opening essay by Hanna Pardey’s “ ‘Who’s Afraid of Elesin Oba?’ Dramatic Dissent in Wole Soyinka’s Play Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) and Biyi Bandele’s Netflix Adaptation (2022)” revisits a modern adaptation of a Nigerian classic to read the civic pulse of conflictual drama. Challenging the conventional readings of Soyinka’s play that it is a document of cultural clash between the British and Yoruba, and aided by new interpretations and iterations of Bandele’s filmic adaptation, Pardey argues that “reinforcing Nollywood’s budding relationship with Netflix and its accompanying globalisation, the movie brings Soyinka’s dramatic negotiation of dissent with and deviation from the ritual suicide of the king’s horseman into the Nigerian public sphere—and beyond”. By placing the adaptation of Soyinka’s classic in the new media cultures embraced by Nollywood, Pardey argues that Bandele’s adaptation adheres to new marketing techniques, changing technologies of cinematography, and editing and elements of sound that cater to transnational audiences, inviting them to “compare past and present manifestations and representations of dissent as a means of managing and imagining possible solutions to contemporary conflicts.”

In “Ecobordering: Women, Agency and the Environment in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow,” Mary J.N. Okolie and Ogochukwu Ukwueze caution against a homogenized history of dissent in postcolonial Nigeria, as such an approach overlooks various ways subaltern subjects wrestle with state power. Insisting that “most exploitation of the environment directly affects women,” the authors query the discourse of dissent in the Niger Delta environmental justice context that valorizes the masculine militant engagement in the region while ignoring other modes of dissent. In a seeming nod to Cajetan Iheka’s call for “a revised notion of struggle” in the Niger Delta resistance,²⁹ Okolie and Ukwueze contend that “while the militant men in their quest for environmental justice devise violent means that exclude and victimize their women, women manifest a diplomatic yet potent dissent model.” Beyond reclaiming the agency and visibility of women in the Niger Delta environmental justice movement, their major contribution is to rethink dissent as necessarily violent or spectacular.

On the conceptual front, Tolulope Akinwole’s essay “Proximate Thuggery: Perpetual Dissent as Civil Structure in Lagos” shifts attention from the macro structures of violence to the quotidian character of civic dissent: “non-spectacular forms of dissent that so vibrantly shape the largest city in Africa.” Building on the work of Achille Mbembe, Tejumola Olaniyan, and AbdouMaliq Simone on urban spaces, proximity and the aesthetics of vulgarity, Akinwole overwrites the concept of dissent with that of thuggery, one that has “significant implications for the performance of civic functions associated with citizenship.” Playful, erudite yet anecdotal, Akinwole’s essay makes a compelling argument towards turning criminalized concepts and ideologies on their head to reveal their radical civic character under extreme circumstances through three specific examples: the musical and bodily performance of Fela Kuti; examples and episodes of thuggery of a prominent Nigerian political figure, and finally a literary example offered in Chibundu Onuzo’s 2018 novel Welcome to Lagos.³⁰

“Trust in Shared Narratives: Docudrama and Reenactment of Violent Conflict in Benue and Plateau States, Nigeria” by Esther Nyam and Vinzenz Hediger presents an innovative self-ethnographical enquiry into the civic constitution of trust in the face of violence. Against the growing securitization of farmer-herder conflicts, in which the Fulani herders are often equated with Islamic terrorists and bandits, if not transporters of illegal weapons,³¹ Nyam and Hediger provide a grounded understanding of the conflicts by focusing on the victims of violence, the civic subjects and agents who are caught between the Fulani herdsmen and farmers in Benue and Plateau State. Employing the “Reflective African Theory” built on African experiences spanning from Kenya to Nigeria and Bertolt Brecht’s “Forum Theatre” technique, Hediger and Nyam demonstrate, through selected media examples, that docudramas can be “used as a tool for conscientization and change in the conflict situations.” A central argument of the essay is that docudramas have the capacity to engage the audience as though they are participants of a reality in which they are not involved, and thereby “create a sense of “passive injustice,” which can prompt the audience to engage in social action and change.”

Through the lens of the forgoing essays, our own theorization of civic dissent in postcolonial Nigeria locates civic resistance within the public if not often with the state—what Mathias and Chikezirim in their contribution called “statist violence.” However, Ana Nenadović in “What About Love? ‘Defiant Love’ and Civic Dissent in Season of Crimson Blossoms and The Death of Vivek Oji” and Alessandra Di Pietro in “Literature as Worldly Action: Representations of Public and Private Dissent in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji” insist on an expansive framing of dissent that ruptures the boundary between public and private forms of dissent in postcolonial Nigeria. In their various readings of Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji,³² the two authors focalize how the politicization and governmentality of sexuality in the postcolonial Nigerian state not only rupture the boundary between private and public dissent, but forecast the private sphere as a realm of politics, power, and resistance. In other words, for those who live beyond the rigid heteronormative gender norms in Nigeria, dissent could be quotidian, private, and yet violent. In the face of such debilitating social conditions, Nenadović resists the focus on violence, riots, and protests as “the most evident displays of dissent,” but asks, as is clear in their clever title: “What about love?” Thus, Nenadović argues for the affective potentialities of love as a form of dissent—what they call “defiant love;” which can be both recuperative and fatal.

If Nenadović mobilizes “defiant love” as a concept to make sense of the quotidian politics of living otherwise in a heteronormative Nigerian society, then Alessandra Di Pietro’s paper underscores the literary narratives’ capacities to open up “alternative spaces of representation.” Through an analysis of Emezi’s text, Di Pietro defines dissent as “a performative manifestation of dissidence that enables the narrative’s world-making capacities;” thus foregrounding the affordances of the literary text as “an active force that provokes dissent, a source through which literature’s poietic nature can manifest.” It is through literature’s capacity to create alternative spaces of representation and world-making that the author locates literary narratives as a potential “form of resistance and dissent” through which the novel contests “the current world in order to engage in the construction of a more equal one.” Di Pietro analyzes the representation of public and private dissent in Emezi’s novel to instantiate literature’s poietic capacities. Literature, thus, can be a form of resistance, a space for dissent, and an “active force.” Consequently, Di Pietro reclaims the public and private dissent depicted in the novel as a way through which the characters can resist systems of oppression while the narrative suggests the possibility of a new world. In this sense, Emezi’s novel is an instance of a form of “literature that seeks to have a worldly causality in contemporary globalization.”

The last two essays in the issue return to the historicization of state violence in order to confront the inherent normative violence of the Nigerian state. In his study of the #EndSARS protest and its afterlife, Stephen Temitope David’s “Na Today? Reading the Long Memory of Grief in Poetic Responses to the Lekki Massacre” follows Alessandra Di Pietro in making a case for the affordances of creative arts in civic dissent, this time arguing that “the poetic responses to the Lekki massacre generate alternative, unvarnished historiographies that call attention to the haunting and brooding presence of Nigeria’s brutal past in the present.” Consequently, creative arts do not just act as archives of Nigeria’s violent memories that are silenced by the state; they also curtail the state’s power to monopolize “the creation and interpretation of memory, truth, and reality.” Against the denialism of the government towards the Lekki massacre, David theorizes these texts as performing what Christina Sharpe called “wake work”³³ and engaging in insurgent acts of mourning, grieving, and remembering the dead whose lives are otherwise silenced. Perhaps his most fundamental critique, which is also raised by some of the contributors in this special issue, is the refusal to historicize Nigerian state violence within the terrors of the colonial encounter. Rather, he takes the Nigeria-Biafra war (1967–1970) as a historical marker through which to center “the irresponsible agency of the postcolonial state.” According to David, “The Nigeria-Biafra War led to a rapid militarization of the country, it reshaped the idea and demands of citizenship and birthed a paranoid state that weaponizes the existence of a ubiquitous enemy as an imprimatur for its gratuitous use of violence.” David, thus, reads the civil war “as the kiln in which the Nigerian state forged its violent governmentality.” Hence, David locates the brutal violence of the #EndSARS massacre and the Nigerian state’s repressive apparatuses within its postcolonial governmentality with the Nigerian-Biafran war as its original sin, thus taking the agency of the postcolonial Nigerian state seriously, as Olufemi Taiwo recently demanded.³⁴

Mathias Iroro Orhero and Chikezirim Nwoke’s “Violence-as-Norm in the Postcolony: Reading Statist Violence and Civic Dissent in Nigerian Literature” closes the issue by situating postcolonial state violence in the colonial encounter, thus positioning “the Fanonist category of violence as a way to imagine the inherent coloniality of postcolonial nation-states.” Although their historicity of Nigerian state violence reproduces the pitfalls that David’s paper contests, their comparative reading of Peter Omoko’s Majestic Revolt and Chidozie Omeje’s “When Cowards Win” foregrounds the continuities of state violence and civic dissent from the colonial era to the 2021 EndSARS movement, thus underscoring their claim that violence and civic dissent are not just coterminous with postcolonial Nigerian state-making. Rather, their reading shows how the state’s repressive response to civic dissent in the fourth republic is still inherently rooted in the colonial encounter. Importantly though, as they argue in a Foucauldian flair, “both violence and resistance are normative in the postcolony, and violence is mutually produced by the state and the people,” thus questioning the “binaristic modes” that pitted the state against the people in the discourse of civic dissent in postcolonial Nigeria.