How have African local communities responded to the modern state? Constructions of Belonging compares changing definitions of belonging in three Igbo communities in Southeast Nigeria over the course of the twentieth century. The book offers an approach that is constructivist, which regards postcolonial communal belonging as inextricably intertwined with the modern territorial state, and which privileges political and administrative aspects. The three case studies show diverse responses to the same policies implemented by the colonial and postcolonial Nigerian state. The various trajectories reflect not only differences between communities within one ethnic group, and the importance of local agency in response to state policies, but especially the diverse ways in which the state was appropriated and manipulated by local actors.
Harneit-Sievers's systematic study is organized in three sections. The first explores four external factors affecting local definitions of community: colonialism, Christianity, political ethnicity and the postcolonial state. Summarizing an extensive reading of the literature, this section offers a sophisticated overview of twentieth-century Igbo history. It carefully explores how the impact of each of the broader processes varied depending on local circumstances. It also discusses how the scale of local communities has changed: from precolonial obodo (village group), via colonial efforts to increase the size of administrative units, to a postcolonial trend towards the fragmentation of autonomous communities. A second section discusses three areas of local self-definition: town unions, the creation of neotraditional institutions and local community historians and their works. These first two sections thus introduce the relevant historical processes against which the case studies can be understood. The differentiation between internal and external factors is analytically useful but artificial: town unions sit towards one end of a spectrum of forms of self-organization, with more general Igbo ‘ethnic’ unions towards the other end; neotraditional institutions are locally discussed and negotiated, but they are also agreed in the context of the nation state – in fact, they owe their very existence to the policies of the colonial and postcolonial Nigerian state.
The results of the interplay of the external and internal factors are explored in the final section which presents the case studies. There are three common themes: the shifting of the external boundaries of the community; the forms of institutionalization of the modern Igbo local community; and the role of local historical knowledge. The cases are well chosen to illustrate differences: in Umuopara in south/central Igboland, modern education arrived early and the area advanced in terms of modern development. However, segmentary structures resulted in peculiar difficulties in defining community boundaries. This case study reveals and analyses fragmentation into ever-smaller autonomous communities, as well as contests between traditional rulers and town unions. The case of Enugwu-Ukwu, a relatively prosperous town in northwestern Igboland, does not show fragmentation. A strong neotraditional traditional ruler managed to split the once-powerful town union, and has claimed – and gained – recognition as an authority on Igbo culture and tradition. Here, highly contested versions of local history are used to increase political influence within wider contexts. While Umuopara and Enugwu-Ukwu are both considered centres of Igbo society (albeit in different ways), Nike in the northeast has remained marginal to the mainstream of Igbo social, economic and political development. Nike communities are characterized by a deep division of local society between the descendants of former slaves and of former slaveholders, and it is this situation of postslavery that influences the framing of local histories, demands for new autonomous communities and definitions of neotraditional leadership.
This book is based on extremely thorough research. In addition to a comprehensive evaluation of the existing literature on Igbo society, it draws on the systematic exploration of the colonial archives, and on written local constitutions of autonomous communities and of town unions, as well as on numerous locally produced works on local history and culture that often had a very limited distribution and are now difficult to find. This source-base is a strength of the book, but also a limitation: these are all documents intended for official or at least public consumption, written by an educated elite. This gives us insight into public discourses about formal definitions of community, often in relation to the gaining – or keeping – of access to resources from the state. Thus definitions of belonging tend to be put in administrative terms of boundaries, territories or villages. It is not about how individuals, social categories or families belong to communities. Even for Nike, where slave ancestry or freeborn ancestry remains of crucial relevance, belonging is explored in terms of the villages of those who descended from former slaves versus the villages of those with freeborn ancestry.
This is an important study of state–society relationships, which will be of equal interest to Igbo specialists and non-specialists. It avoids a binary conceptualization and, instead, emphasizes the extent to which local society is integrated into the state. It explores the ways in which local society expects to make gains from this integration and tries to manipulate state institutions for its own ends. The analysis of the importance of the state for local constructions of administrative belonging is very valuable. However, if we want to push our understanding of local constructions of belonging further, we need to explore more explicitly the workings of local patterns of relative inclusion and exclusion of those living within the boundaries of the community.
