In 1959–60, a young American named Peter Judd spent nine months teaching history at a secondary school in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Around 2014, the Boko Haram crisis inspired Judd to revisit his diaries from that period and eventually publish them, lightly edited, as Figures in a Spare Landscape: Serving in the Twilight of Empire, Bornu Province, Nigeria 1950–60. The memoir offers precious snapshots (literal and figurative) of Nigeria on the brink of formal decolonization, with all the contradictions that process entailed.

Indeed, several details from the book hint that the actors involved in decolonization were themselves uncertain about how much authority was really being transferred from colonizer to colonized. Early on in his time in Nigeria, posted to the north at his own request (and on the advice of Basil Davidson), Judd ‘was surprised to shortly receive an official letter of appointment from Sir Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Colonial Secretary at Westminster… .(In fact, the Northern Region was then self-governing; someone from Westminster made a mistake.)’ (7). A mistake, but a revealing one that points toward the ways in which self-government and then independence would be colored by lingering British influence.

Some of the most interesting passages in the book concern Judd's participation in organizing and administering the November 1959 plebiscite for the Northern Cameroons, a British mandate territory that eventually opted to join Nigeria in a second referendum held in 1961. Here, too, the colonial influence comes through strongly: at one meeting, Judd notes, ‘the polling officers were all literate in Kanuri [the dominant language in far northeastern Nigeria] but few of them knew Hausa, the language of the vernacular instruction pamphlet [and the language favored by the British colonial administration for use across northern Nigeria, even in non-Hausaphone areas]’ (45). Fateful policy choices that British administrators made in the early 1900s concerning language and education continued to reverberate in 1959 — as they do yet today. Yet Judd also notes the agency of the colonized, flagging the ‘surprising outcome’ of voters who opted, in 1959, to defer the question of joining Nigeria. Judd notes that by deferring, the Kanuri voters and farmers in the Northern Cameroons may have been expressing resistance to the colonial ‘Native Authorities’, to the dominant Northern People's Congress party, and even to the idea of the British authorities leaving. The ambivalence surrounding decolonization comes through in that particular historic moment, as it does elsewhere.

The memoir seldom pauses for sustained analysis. When it does, the reader finds Judd to be self-reflective but also sometimes essentialist. There are moments when a young Judd expresses dismay at the insularity of the ‘segregated white community’ in Maiduguri, and much of the memoir concerns his efforts to escape that self-segregation (124). Judd also feels ‘ashamed of my “civilizing” viewpoint’ after observing that one interlocutor was ‘a man doubtless learned in Islamic law and culture and skeptical of Enlightenment secularism’ (6). Yet these passages alternate with moments where Judd indulges in romanticism tinged with a sense that Africa is inescapably primordial and primitive: ‘Riding into the African darkness is not an experience for the eyes alone; the dark envelops everything; one's whole being in its embrace’ (91).

The Judd of both 1959 and 2018 is also prone to framing his experiences, and the experiences of northeastern Nigeria as a whole, in terms of the traditional-modern binary. The people he met, he writes in the Preface, comprised ‘the settled, dark-skinned, dignified Kanuri with centuries of tradition, the nomads and their herds continuing their own centuries-old tradition of seasonal migrations between Lake Chad and Niger River, and tribes in the hills, some untouched by modernity’ (ix). The traditional-modern binary becomes Judd's primary vehicle for establishing a connection between his material and the task of comprehending Boko Haram. Judd understands Boko Haram as a ‘violent reaction’ to English-language schooling, and more broadly to ‘a modernizing world’ (7). There is a missed opportunity here to further connect the lived experiences of the people he met, that is, the generation to which the parents and grandparents of Boko Haram's members belonged, to the emergence of Boko Haram and the genesis of the current crisis; such analysis might have produced a more robust understanding of what 1959 tells us about 2018 (and beyond).

To reiterate, the primary historical value of this book is not its insight on Boko Haram, but rather its relevance for understanding decolonization and independence-era politics, society, and everyday life. The often tantalizingly brief anecdotes that float by in the book — the young Cameroonian customs inspector who asks Judd to ‘help him understand how a people [the British] could reject socialism in a time like this’ (88); the power dynamics at play when an embarrassed boss punishes a drunk subordinate in a village dispensary, dynamics that are interwoven with broader questions of political and religious authority (100); an Islamic judge seemingly stumped by the question of how to rule in a case of alleged ballot box tampering (150) — all cry out for deeper analysis. Despite its limitations, this rich memoir merits attention from specialists of twentieth-century Africa and of Nigeria in particular.