This Present Darkness is Stephen Ellis’s last book—sadly, he died as it was being completed. It is fitting, then, that it draws together many of the signature features of his distinguished scholarly career. Like his previous works, This Present Darkness combines the scope and sources of an ambitious history, a fascination with the cultural and spiritual underpinnings of everyday life and politics, and a “matter of fact” purpose and prose in accounting for one of Africa’s most well-known but intractable issues.
This Present Darkness offers rather more than a specialist history of Nigerian organized crime. It is a general history of the country refracted through a discussion of crime. This is because, from the outset, Ellis opens up the definition of “organized crime” beyond the classic American sense of “Mafiosi-style” racketeering to include a wide spectrum of criminality, fraud, and corruption. Crime therefore becomes a productive way of exploring the faultlines of historical constitution, cultural integration, political engineering, and economic opportunity in the Nigerian national narrative. Above all, Ellis argues, the distinctive Nigerian pattern of criminality is a pervasive system of state corruption. And as such, to take the phrase Ellis and his coauthors coined earlier, this is a Nigerian case study of the “‘criminalization of the state” (Editions Complexe, 1997; James Currey, 1999).
It is a very effective approach, and in this sense the book can be read alongside the work of Daniel Smith, Andrew Apter, and Steven Pierce as an analysis of the historical and cultural factors that have saturated Nigerian everyday life, particularly the generalized “kleptomania.” What distinguishes Ellis’s account is the way that evidence is drawn from a broad archival base, its historical depth and regional sweep, and the integrations of all of these components into a lively narrative played out on a national and international scale.
In the early chapters Ellis establishes the context for the discussion of organized crime, outlining the regional variations of Lugard’s legacy of indirect rule among northern emirates, western city-states, and eastern stateless societies to point to structural proclivities toward manipulations of law and office-holding. Drawing on the colonial archive, he then outlines key forms of fraud of the 1920s and ’30s, including herbal and spiritual charlatanism, market-place “money-doubling,” and the emergence of the Cross River–Gold Coast child- and sex-trafficking ring. From the local he moves to regional and national scales after World War II as elections, marketing boards, and foreign trade deals provided opportunities for kleptocracy, prebendalism, and extraversion among nationalist and then military political classes.
Wole Soyinka argued that victory in the Nigerian civil war consolidated the values of the governing elite so that corruption became synonymous with national identity and even patriotism—or, more aptly, “Nigerianism.” As Ellis shows, from this moment in the 1970s and ’80s—which coincided with the expansion of a “criminal diaspora” of the educated but unemployed—Nigerian criminality reached a global scale. Here, in the most ethnographically detailed sections of the book, he provides histories of criminal careers and business models prevalent in the international cocaine and heroin trade, sex trafficking, and internet advance-fee fraud. Of course, spectacular oil theft during the Babangida and Abacha military governments trumped all these in terms of financial reward, and Ellis describes the confluence between the return to multipartyism in 1999 and the pervasive complicity in the “democratic kleptocracy”—from militant youth to elected state governors to the boards of multinational organizations. It is in this account of the “resource curse,” and of the systematic plundering of state wealth, that his analysis of state formation as organized crime finds its purchase.
Perhaps it could be argued that Ellis’s open-ended and inclusive definition of organized crime incorporates an unresolved tension between an analysis of a generalized culture of corruption, on the one hand, and the more narrowly “organized” dimension of criminal enterprise on the other. Ellis does not seek to synthesize these positions in a common “Nigerian” model of organized crime, but he does show how the histories of criminal networks are grafted onto resilient but reinvented secret societies. It is here, in his discussions of cults, shrines, secrecy, money, and power, that Ellis, as in his previous scholarship, emphasizes the salience of the intersection between religion and politics.
Written in a characteristically crisp manner and with a broad audience in mind, this is an accessible and insightful study. The conclusion about Nigeria’s condition, captured in the book’s title, is bleak. But Stephen Ellis was never shy of tackling the most troubling and controversial of issues, and we have come to expect nothing less from him than a lucid, erudite, and forthright interpretation.
