The lay literature on the personal and political life of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, a pre-eminent Nigerian politician and acknowledged leader of the Yoruba, is rich and diverse. However, the academic literature on the man who has been described as ‘the best president Nigerian never had’ is sparse. While his name, actions and inactions are often invoked in scholarly writings on Nigeria, as a critical agent in the making of Nigeria he has largely escaped much close academic scrutiny. Insa Nolte provides a critical scholarly remedy with this book.

The book examines the ‘high politics’ of a locality and the local politics of a national leader. The author presents and analyses personal plots for power, strategies of personal and collective autonomy, and the will to generate cultural and/or political legitimacy – described by Margaret M. Archer as ‘cultural elaboration’ – in the Remo area of Yorubaland. Nolte's central argument concerns how popular participation in local politics complicates the political spaces and opportunities available for social actors. She fleshes this out by positing that ‘the possibility of popular participation in decision-making contains central democratic elements that allow participants to express views about the legitimacy of their leaders and enable them to express ideological and moral points of view’ (p. 7). She contends further that these ‘democratic elements’ have been underemphasised in studies of both Yoruba traditional politics and the general literature of (post-)colonial Africa.

Nolte inserts her subjects within a specific socio-cultural context, yet expands their everyday practices beyond its argotic expressions; she then articulates the cultural and political moralities geared towards modernist visions – despite local contradictions and challenges – that circulate beyond the specific locality. This approach forms the departure point of her study of ‘the local politics of a Nigerian nationalist’. The book examines how Awolowo strategically combined ‘Christian-derived enlightenment values’ with the ‘validation and democratisation of traditional political hierarchies’, which, as Nolte correctly argues, ‘illustrated [Awolowo's] awareness that the creation of popular consent was not only a requirement of modern democracies but also one of older local political discourse’ (p. 16). Nolte's ethnographic approach underscores the fact that Awolowo, as a ‘product and producer’ of local politics, was basically what elite theorists would call a ‘strategic improviser’ (SI). The details in this book that centralise this perspective are crucial, because they help to explain Awolowo's controversial role in Nigeria's history. As a SI, despite the grand egalitarian visions (detailed by the author) that subtended his politics and his unique capacity for intellectual understanding of social problems, Awolowo could not but enter into certain public (in)actions at the local level that would test the morality of his politics. Here, Nolte gives narrative coherence to a complex political life through which a SI leveraged his personal political ambitions in establishing egalitarian politics.

One of the most important contributions of this book is the way in which the author not only (conceptually) emphasises but also (empirically) demonstrates the everyday-ness of political and cultural legitimacy in late colonial and post-colonial Africa. This approach constitutes the signal strength of post-colonial anthropological scholarship on African politics. While political science in Africa often searches for the grand moments, institutions and policies that constitute and define political life, ethnographic data present everyday practices for coping with or managing persons, events, institutions and uncertainty and the processes through which local interpretations of the world – which ultimately defines popular politics in the continent – are generated. By historicising and spelling out ideology in a local milieu as politico-cultural guide in the daily practices of social actors, Nolte instructs that the discourse of democracy must begin to contend more with the ‘wider ranges of social routines’ that define political life in Africa.

The book avoids any entanglement in theory, while demonstrating and emphasising ‘the importance of personal convictions and concerns about morality, honour and truth in the political process’ (p. 10). However, it teases out the transcendental politico-cultural morality play that constitutes politics in Remo, and uses this to challenge the overdrawn conceptual framework of the ‘primordial’ – a favourite entry-point for most analysts of ‘ethnic politics’ in Africa.

However, by not speaking with a particular faction of the Awolowo political ‘heirs’, Nolte understates the manner in which contemporary politics destabilises Awolowo's legacy, even as all sorts of SIs take pieces of the legacy and use them in the service of contradictory personal and political ambitions. Despite this, the book is a compelling narrative about the dynamics of local democratic politics in contemporary Africa.