Conceptualization and agency in research on vigilantism in Nigeria

The exclusion of mobs from the research on vigilantism in Nigeria can be attributed to a lack of conceptual clarity. A disregard for conceptual issues has allowed researchers to arbitrarily choose some objects of research while excluding others. For example, the introduction to the aforementioned special issue of the journal Africa does not provide the reader with a definition of the word vigilantism. Furthermore, it does not explain why the focus is on ‘vigilante groups as popular responses to theft and armed robbery’ (Pratten Reference Pratten2008a: 1, emphasis added) in Nigeria.

This dual omission, shared by most publications on the topic, is important to note because spontaneous mobs have never been expressly excluded from any definition of vigilantism. For Les Johnston, ‘[s]ome vigilante acts are clearly “one off” events, involving isolated individuals or larger groups in ad hoc mobilization. In contrast to this minimal level of organization, other examples involve the relatively long-term mobilization of members for some highly organized collective end’ (Reference Johnston1996: 223). According to Kirsch and Grätz, vigilantism is ‘an ever-evolving and contested social practice that can be enacted by different types of social agencies and that takes diverse organisational forms’ (Reference Kirsch and Grätz2010: 1, emphasis added). In other words, the difference between ‘mobs’ and ‘groups’ as agents of vigilantism lies in their respective levels of organization and the duration of their mobilization, and not in their nature or in the objectives they seek to attain. In fact, by shifting the analytical lens from the participants to the practice itself, the political scientist Eduardo Moncada (Reference Moncada2017) was able to erase the groups–mobs and organized–disorganized dualities that underlie earlier conceptualizations (Johnston Reference Johnston1996: 222–4; Sherrington Reference Sherrington2007: 7). Instead of focusing on the perpetrators – whether they claim membership of an organization or not, for example – he focuses on the ‘degree to which vigilantism is critical for an organization’s survival [which he calls] the primacy of vigilantism’ (Moncada Reference Moncada2017: 414, emphasis in the original). He identifies three ideal levels of primacy: high, medium and low. The ‘high primacy’ level applies to instances ‘where vigilantism is both necessary and sufficient for sustaining the organization that carries it out’ (ibid.: 414). In other words, the idea of high primacy conceptualizes vigilantism as a kind of magnet that brings people together and which loses its magnetism once the punishment is enacted – a fairly accurate description of how mobs operate. Given this consideration, why have spontaneous mobs been ignored in studies of vigilantism in Nigeria?

I suggest that this tendency might stem from the propensity among many social scientists to deny participants in mobs any agency (see Gross Reference Gross2016). Typically, when vigilantism perpetrated by immediate bystanders and witnesses to an act that is deemed criminal is mentioned in studies of vigilantism, it is often to illustrate journalistic excesses in reporting (Buur and Jensen Reference Buur and Jensen2004: 139–40) or elite fears (Buur Reference Buur2009), and to claim more complexity and sophistication for the social practice in reference to relatively structured groups, which scholars then move on to study (Buur and Jensen Reference Buur and Jensen2004). This bias, which sees mob lynching as mere violence driven by aggrieved individuals, suggests an unease with a form of social agency that, despite its contemporaneity, looks premodern and barbaric. Interestingly, while they were being ignored by vigilantism scholars, mobs featured prominently in studies of political, ethnic and religious violence and conflict in Nigeria as faceless social formations manipulated by sectarian interest groups, leaders or big men (see, for example, Apter Reference Apter1987; Falola Reference Falola1998; Osaghae and Suberu Reference Osaghae and Suberu2005; Thurston Reference Thurston2018; Ukeje Reference Ukeje2001).

The subtle inclination among scholars to deny mob participants agency recalls the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon (Reference Le Bon1960), who believed that individuals are transformed and their subjectivities subsumed and dominated by collective behaviour in mobs. Very influential in the mid-nineteenth century, the ‘myth of the madding crowd’ has since been discredited by collective behaviour scholars, who mostly believe that individuals retain their identity and follow their own objectives while participating in a mob action (see McPhail Reference McPhail1991). Furthermore, elsewhere I have described a rationale behind the seemingly irrational violence of (mob) vigilantes (Tiwa Reference Tiwa2021). Specifically, I have demonstrated how the illegality of the practice and the related risk of prosecution, as well as the risk of retaliation by surviving offenders, influence the form and the quantity of incapacitation (i.e. lethal or non-lethal) that vigilantes apply.

Besides the failure to address conceptual issues surrounding vigilantism and an unease with a form of collective action that looks premodern, the controversy surrounding the true motivations of members of the vigilante groups that mushroomed in the country in the early 2000s also contributed to the exclusion of spontaneous mob vigilantism in the research on vigilantism in Nigeria.

Angels or devils? Controversy and research on vigilantism in Nigeria

Many analysts of vigilantism in Nigeria have doubted that fighting crime is what motivates the thousands of young men who have formed vigilante groups in the country since the late 1990s. This suspicion has arisen from the fact that many vigilantes work hand in hand with – and often for – corrupt politicians (Baker Reference Baker2002; Harnischfeger Reference Harnischfeger2003; Nwankwo Reference Nwankwo2006; Reno Reference Reno2005; Smith Reference Smith2004; Ukiwo Reference Ukiwo2002), due to their tendency to fight among themselves as well as against external competitors over lucrative turfs (Duruji Reference Duruji2012; Guichaoua Reference Guichaoua2009; Reference Guichaoua2010; Nolte Reference Nolte2004; Reference Nolte2007; Reference Nolte2008), and for the type of people who become members, often made up of ‘thugs’, hoodlums and other individuals who populate Nigerian cities (Gore and Pratten Reference Gore and Pratten2003; Guichaoua Reference Guichaoua2009; Nolte Reference Nolte2007). The group that has encapsulated most of these paradoxes is the ‘Bakassi Boys’, which emerged in the south-eastern region of the country in 1998.

Before it was disbanded in 2002 by the federal government following growing accusations of serious human rights abuses, the Bakassi Boys had extrajudicially killed hundreds of alleged criminals (Baker Reference Baker2002: 225–7; Harnischfeger Reference Harnischfeger2003: 23–4; Human Rights Watch 2002; Meagher Reference Meagher2007: 93–4; Nwankwo Reference Nwankwo2006; Smith Reference Smith2004; Ukiwo Reference Ukiwo2002). The inhabitants of the region initially welcomed the Bakassi Boys as saviours because of the perceived effectiveness of their methods – torture, occult practices to determine guilt, extrajudicial killings – and their alleged incorruptibility, which contrasted sharply with the widespread practice of bribe taking by policemen. In fact, the vigilante group was so popular at first that the demand for its services quickly expanded beyond Aba, the capital city of Abia State, where it was formed spontaneously following the umpteenth attack by armed gangs at a marketplace, one that left a businesswoman dead (Meagher Reference Meagher2007). Neighbouring states – namely Anambra, Ebonyi and Imo – where the level of insecurity had forced many ‘residents into a self-imposed curfew after 7 pm’ or to seek refuge in churches at night (Baker Reference Baker2002: 225) invited the Bakassi Boys to do in their cities what they had achieved in their home town: that is, a swift and complete elimination of armed robbers and other violent street gangs.

The problem, however, was that, as well as dealing with ‘criminals’, the group’s members were also used by local politicians to settle personal scores with their opponents (Human Rights Watch 2002: 16). In addition to politically motivated violence and killings, the members of the group were also accused of preying on the local population through ‘levies they imposed on businesses of every size – fees increasingly viewed as protection money’, or by intervening in disputes as ‘paid muscle’, or, even worse, by kidnapping people for ransom (Smith Reference Smith2004: 448).

In the south-western part of the country, a vigilante organization has attracted attention for similar reasons. Originally an ethno-nationalist organization formed in the aftermath of a failed transition to democracy in 1993 to defend the political interests of the Yoruba nation within the Nigerian federation,Footnote ⁴ the O’odua People’s Congress (OPC) embraced vigilantism both as a response to a crime wave and as a strategy to secure legitimacy among the residents of the major cities across the region (Guichaoua Reference Guichaoua2009: 528). Like the Bakassi Boys, the OPC quickly demonstrated tangible results thanks to extra-legal lethal violence and the use of magical practices that allegedly helped them both speed up investigations and avoid killing innocents. A legend about the group claimed that, whereas the police had deserted entire neighbourhoods in some cities because of the superior firing power of criminals, OPC members, more courageous and supernaturally powered, raided these ‘no-go areas’ and either killed the criminals living there or forced them to flee to neighbouring cities and states (see Guichaoua Reference Guichaoua2009: 528; Nolte Reference Nolte2004; Reference Nolte2007; Reference Nolte2008).

However, the vigilante group has also been accused of using criminal violence against non-indigenous groups – the Ijaw, Igbo, Hausa–Fulani – generally to take over lucrative turfs such as marketplaces or rent-friendly activities such as the Dockers Union (Guichaoua Reference Guichaoua2009: 530–1; Human Rights Watch 2003), and of organizing a ‘protection racket’ (Guichaoua Reference Guichaoua2009: 529). Many of the group’s members were thought to be ‘[from] street gangs and ex-areas boys’, whom many Nigerians believe are criminals (Adebanwi Reference Adebanwi2005: 348; see also Guichaoua Reference Guichaoua2009: 527). This tendency to enlist disenfranchised youth and social delinquents in urban insecurities has been reported among many other vigilante organizations across Nigeria (for Benin city, for example, see Gore and Pratten Reference Gore and Pratten2003: 226), raising the question of the real motivations of these groups’ members.

This question appears to have both fuelled and dominated debates about vigilantism in Nigeria as scholars disagreed on how to understand vigilantes’ criminal behaviour. One theory believes that what motivates most young men to become vigilantes are the economic and political benefits they anticipate. In other words, the increasing vulnerability to crime and widespread feelings of insecurity that followed the retreat of the Nigerian state from security provision created opportunities countrywide for disenfranchised youth with nothing to lose and with competency in violence to force ‘their way into the social system from which they [were] excluded’ (Reno Reference Reno2002: 839).

The second theoretical account has taken the opposite direction. While recognizing that vigilante members have become involved in criminal activities, this outcome has been attributed not to their initial ‘criminal mindset’, but to their vulnerability to local authorities who, foreseeing the political gains they could make from the popularity of such groups, successfully ‘hijacked’ them. In other words, while Reno’s account of the emergence of vigilantism in Nigeria claims that bandits and other miscreants formed security provision organizations to enrich themselves, this second school of thought argues that vigilantes were originally concerned citizens appalled by the levels of crime in their communities (see Meagher Reference Meagher2007; Nwankwo Reference Nwankwo2006).

This Manichean view – one that tries to differentiate between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ vigilantes – has been criticized as normative and artificial by the proponents of what can be termed a third perspective on Nigerian vigilantes. This view emphasizes the situated practices and moral imperatives that drive young men to engage in vigilantism (Pratten Reference Pratten2008a: 6). This perspective has sought to ‘understand the [local] imperative to protect and punish’ (ibid.: 4) through a historically informed analysis of indigenous cultures and the avoidance of artificial oppositions – such as state versus society, law versus disorder, genuine versus non-genuine civil initiatives, legitimate versus illegitimate violence – in which ‘vigilantes are ambiguously sited’ (ibid.: 11). Here, vigilantism in Nigeria is ‘the articulation of claims to a set of rights based on the historical and spiritual legitimacy of young powerful men, “sons of the soil”, defending the community under the protection of local religious injunction and protection’ (Pratten Reference Pratten2008b: 65). The conflation of vigilantism with traditional institutions such as secret societies, charms, traditional medicines and oaths that dominates vigilantism scholarship about Nigeria (see Gore and Pratten Reference Gore and Pratten2003) has been criticized for othering the civil initiatives of these communities as a reversion to the past (Meagher Reference Meagher2007; see also Adebanwi Reference Adebanwi2005).

This debate reveals the unique features of Nigerian vigilantism that have forced scholars to spend a great deal of time and effort trying to understand the real motivations of vigilante group members. Virtually all publications about vigilantism in Nigeria contribute to one or other of the debates above, thus raising the question of why scholars are so invested in establishing the real motivation of vigilantes in Nigeria.

I argue that vigilantism in Nigeria provided scholars with the opportunity to test various hypotheses about civil society, citizenship and democracy in Africa. In other words, with a few exceptions (Agbola and Sobanjo Reference Agbola, Sobanjo, Fourchard and Albert2001; Baker Reference Baker2002; Fourchard Reference Fourchard2008; Gore and Pratten Reference Gore and Pratten2003; Harnischfeger Reference Harnischfeger2003), research on vigilantism in Nigeria has typically been driven by concerns located beyond vigilantism itself. The self-interestedness model was elaborated at a time when many countries in Africa – Algeria, Burundi, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Nigeria – were either undergoing, were at risk of, or had just come out of civil wars or rebellions. Many of those conflicts, unlike the more ideologically driven liberation wars of the Cold War period, had been dominated by economic interests in the form of ‘looting’, ‘banditry’, ‘greedy warlords’, ‘diamond trafficking’ or ‘well-heeled arms traffickers’ (Reno Reference Reno2002; Reference Reno2005). In addition, many other countries across the continent had shown signs of collapsing or decaying state institutions for over a decade, a situation that, in the view of many observers, should have awakened revolutionary impulses among their populations. This, however, was not the case, and, as a conflict scholar, William Reno wanted to understand why. Vigilante groups in Nigeria – specifically the OPC and the Bakassi Boys – were also called ethnic militias because they agitated for the autonomy or independence of their ethnic communities; this context gave Reno the opportunity to study why such groups, despite their ample capabilities, failed to transform into revolutionary mass movements. His conclusion was that disenfranchised and daredevil youth allied with local patrons to better themselves – in criminal ways – to the overall detriment of the wider population. For this reason, he expressly disqualified vigilantism in Nigeria as a civil initiative (Reno Reference Reno2002: 839) because vigilante groups ‘bear little resemblance to “civil society” in its liberal ideal’ (Reno Reference Reno2005: 129).

Kate Meagher, in contrast, was unsettled by the transformation of discourses about ‘African civil society’ caused by the ‘proliferation of brutal militias’ on the continent (Reference Meagher2007: 90). In her view, ‘unrestrained enthusiasm’ for social, economic and political transformative potential had been replaced by pessimism and ‘disappointment’ (ibid.: 90). Her objective, therefore, was the reversion of this seemingly miserable fate of civil society on the continent (also see Nwankwo Reference Nwankwo2006). Accordingly, she argued that the issue is not the uncivil character of civil initiatives in Africa (Fatton Reference Fatton1995; also see Ikelegbe Reference Ikelegbe2001) but the lack of institutional protection, for ‘the case of the Bakassi Boys demonstrates … remarkable resilience [for three years] in the face of neglect and abuse by elite forces and international policy agendas’ (Meagher Reference Meagher2007: 112). She subsequently warned commentators against the risks of blaming ‘African social institutions for the failures of neo-liberal reforms and weak states’ (ibid.: 112) and invited them to renew their efforts to identify ‘genuine civil impulses in the fluid and fractious institutional environment of contemporary Africa’ (ibid.: 111, emphasis added).

Scholarly interest in these issues had at least one major implication and one important consequence. The implication was that scholars needed clearly identifiable research participants whose agency they could easily scrutinize and compare with those found elsewhere, a requirement that one can argue disqualifies participants in mob vigilantism. Indeed, it can be argued that a concern for a ‘liberal ideal’ of African civil societies among scholars has meant that only ‘autonomous’ groups – and not ‘formless’ mobs – were worth their attention (Meagher Reference Meagher2007; Reno Reference Reno2002; Reference Reno2005).Footnote ⁵

The major consequence of the focus on vigilante groups is that scholars have missed the extent to which the bulk of vigilante violence in Nigeria has shifted, over the last few years, from vigilante groups and ethnic militias to mobs. While it is difficult to trace precisely when this shift occurred, it is possible to link it to two complementary factors. The first is the dual strategy of repression–incorporation by the state against organized vigilante groups (see Fourchard Reference Fourchard2021: 129–57). With their members persecuted, imprisoned or killed by the police and the groups disbanded, as was the case of both the Bakassi Boys and the OPC, vigilante groups have had no other choice but to become the informal substitutes of the police. In practice, this has meant that each local divisional police officer in the country knows exactly which group is active in each street or neighbourhood of his division and its leader. While this outcome certainly delighted the academic community, many of whom have advocated for ‘domesticating vigilantism in Africa’ (Kirsch and Grätz Reference Kirsch and Grätz2010), the pacification of vigilante groups has also resulted in tremendous powerlessness for many vigilante groups that now have to follow the same strict rules – for example, assumption of innocence, burden of proof, right to a fair trial, proportionality of the punishment (Fourchard Reference Fourchard2021) – that they used to subvert, a crucial reason for their ‘successes’ and popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Baker Reference Baker2002; Harnischfeger Reference Harnischfeger2003).

The second factor is the inherent vulnerability of Nigerian associations in particular and civil society in general to capture by anti-popular and anti-democratic forces (Meagher Reference Meagher2007; Obadare Reference Obadare2005). When they are effectively captured or ‘highjacked’, vigilante groups become indistinguishable from organized crime groups, using protection rackets to prey on the communities they were supposed to protect, and deploying violence to intimidate or oppress those who do not submit to their authority and power (see Smith Reference Smith2004). Against this background, one could argue that the rise in importance of ephemerous formations such as mobs amounts to a growing popular awareness of the limitations of responses that take associational forms. While empirical evidence to back this claim is still to be collected, I suggest that the idea deserves scholarly attention because it points to the possibility of mobs being the ultimate frontier of genuine (as opposed to state-initiated or endorsed) civil society in Nigeria.

The consequence of the successful domestication, capture or hijacking of vigilantism has been that ‘ordinary’ people, claiming allegiance to no group, have become the leading perpetrators of vigilante violence across Nigeria. In the process, they often confront not only the police but also their ‘substitutes’ in the community – that is, vigilante group members tasked with day-to-day policing.Footnote ⁶ These developments have not been anticipated by the academic community, perhaps because most scholars have been more interested in issues located beyond crime and crime control than vigilantism itself. It is only by redirecting our attention to the criminological dimensions of vigilantism – that is, to vigilantism as a crime control mechanism – that we can truly understand its dynamics and perhaps anticipate its next move. Relocating the gaze is even more important because the explanations provided for the motivations of organized vigilantes can hardly help us understand what drives people to join spontaneous mobs.

Consider the youth looting model, which holds that the involvement of disenfranchised young men in vigilante organizations across Nigeria is an attempt by these men to better their social, economic and political lot, including through criminality (Reno Reference Reno2002; Reference Reno2005). This explanation cannot account for people’s – young or otherwise – involvement in mob lynching insofar as participation in such collective activities does not seem to produce any social, economic or political advantage for the participants. Put differently, while young men who form vigilante organizations in Nigeria might be motivated by the money that people pay for their security, the same argument does not apply to those who perpetrate ‘jungle justice’ because there is no money involved. Similarly, it is difficult to argue that they are seeking political ‘advantages’ in the form of increased influence in their communities because, as both a mob action and a semi-clandestine activity whose authorship no individual can – nor is willing to – claim, it is difficult to see how it can possibly accrue any political dividends for the perpetrators, who, in theory, meet and work together only once (Moncada Reference Moncada2017).

The second theory argues that vigilantes in Nigeria should be seen as concerned citizens pushed to the brink by criminal victimization and who have decided to combat that victimization for the good of all and despite an unfavourable institutional environment (Meagher Reference Meagher2007). While Meagher’s explanation, compared with the youth looting model, seems more equipped to account for young men’s participation in jungle justice, as they can indeed be described as concerned citizens, I suggest that this is not enough. A closer look at the identity of vigilantes exposes the limits of this argument. Indeed, from her explanatory model, one should expect that those on the front line of criminal victimization would lead the revolt against criminals. This, however, has never been the case, as vigilantes are typically recruited among the most impoverished segments of Nigerian society – jobless youth and unemployed young adults. There is no reason why they should be more concerned than other sections of society; they cannot be the main targets of criminals given that they have very little property. This is not to say that the little they have cannot be stolen. What I am suggesting is that, because they are marginal crime targets, they should not be leading the fight against criminals. The second problem with this model is that it ignores the fact that most vigilantes – if not all of them – are men (though there have been women involved in the groups). This fact requires an explanation of its own. Again, these shortcomings can be attributed to interest in the mechanisms through which ordinary people’s civil initiatives are hijacked by corrupt politicians. This hypothesis or explanation of vigilantism (Lund Reference Lund2006: 678) could be said to have lost sight of the composite identity – they are at the same time men, poor and young – of the actors through which vigilantism itself takes shape, spreads and is normalized.

The final perspective on vigilante motivations holds that young men in Nigeria use vigilantism to make demands on society and on the state to address their predicaments, but that they are also compelled and legitimated by traditions to use violence to defend their communities against criminal threats (Gore and Pratten Reference Gore and Pratten2003; Pratten Reference Pratten2008a; Reference Pratten2008b). In other words, they are at the same time opportunists and citizens committed to fulfilling their traditional obligations vis-à-vis their communities. The limits of the ‘opportunist youth’ model have been discussed above, but the role of moral imperatives is also limited when it comes to explaining mob lynching. For example, while David Pratten’s claim that historically constructed moral communities are defended by groups of powerful young men modelled after precolonial secret societies (Reference Pratten2008b) might be true for the Annang, it does not apply to most cities in Nigeria, which are cosmopolitan in nature.

Clearly, at the precise moment when these articles were published, vigilantism was an issue of interest to scholars working comparatively, both in and beyond Africa: following Max Weber (Reference Weber1965 [Reference Weber1919]), the state’s monopoly of violence had long been taken for granted, but at the start of the millennium this was increasingly challenged, by ongoing liberalization (creating space for private security as a business), democratization (leading to more devolved forms of control of violence in many African contexts, including Nigeria), and other, less ‘legitimate’, forms of violence ‘from the bottom up’ – including terrorism. Since September 2001, awareness of the failure to control violence had risen globally and had generated interest in the extent and limits of state control. Whereas US and European interest in Africa had been limited in the 1990s, concerns about ‘weak’ or ‘failed’ states emerged as a central theme in policymaking and drew renewed attention to the African continent (for an overview, see Kraxberger Reference Kraxberger2005).

Scholars who understood Nigerian societies in great detail thus deemed it necessary to highlight the embeddedness of vigilantism in local moral (ethnic or religious) economies to challenge US-led global debates about Nigeria in particular and Africa in general as a locus of disorder (see, for example, Meagher Reference Meagher2012). One could in fact argue that two decades of efforts and interventions by anthropologists, sociologists and historians have been beneficial, since political scientists and analysts have now joined them in opposing the framing of African states as ‘failed states’ (Aina and Cheeseman Reference Aina and Cheeseman2021). Yet, this ostensible success story leaves at least one question unresolved: did highlighting the importance of ethnic and religious belonging misrepresent Nigerian lives and social processes even as it challenged stereotypical representations of Africa as a continent in need of intervention? It is probably fair to acknowledge that, by drawing the link between extrajudicial control/violence and identity, the literature reflected the ongoing violence in Delta State and anticipated the growing unrest in the north-east. It would be equally fair to acknowledge that the authors’ focus on debates about the ‘weak’ state have tended to downplay the effects of crime on the level of communities and individuals, and, in so doing, they have missed the mechanisms through which crime fuels vigilante mobilization. Next, I discuss how unresolved crimes feed suspicions and accusations, which in turn incentivize victims to take part in violent vigilantism.

Unexplained crime, distrust and violent vigilantism

Throughout the month of August 2017, dozens of mentally ill people were lynched in Lagos.Footnote ⁷ The attacks started with an incident early in the morning of 8 August in a northern district of the city. Informants from the Ijaiye Ojokoro police station told me on 7 December 2017 that, when they arrived on the scene to rescue the people being lynched, they were told that a female street sweeper had alerted the population after hearing someone crying for help from a sewer. Because people with mental illnesses used to gather in that sewer, people concluded that they were kidnappers masquerading as mentally ill to take their victims by surprise. Although no trace of the alleged victim was found, the rumour quickly circulated in Lagos, leading to spontaneous mobs attacking people with mental illnesses at different locations.

A senior police officer from Isokoko police station who led the disruption of one such lynching at the Ile-Zik bus stopFootnote ⁸ told me later in December 2017 that he believed some of the victims were real criminals, and that, ‘in fact, many crimes had been perpetrated at that place [where people with mental illnesses gathered] and many lives wasted’. I suggest that such incidents express people’s need to rationalize criminal incidents that have remained unexplained, and that such collective hysteria is a large-scale manifestation of a deeper crisis of trust caused by unexplained crime. I argue that a lack of reporting and investigationsFootnote ⁹ allows suspicions and accusations to thrive at the expense of group cohesion. Much of vigilantism violence, I further argue, is about countering the effects of unexplained crime. Consider the personal experiences of two research participants in their mid-thirties who live in Coker-Aguda, a typical community in Surulere, Lagos State.

Unlike Bolade, Ebuka was the chief vigilante of his neighbourhood when his community started suspecting and accusing him of being a criminal. He resigned, but the harassment continued.

There are three interesting points in what Ebuka said. First, it shows unambiguously how serious the consequences can be for the targets of suspicions and accusations: stigmatization, job loss or police arrests, for instance. Furthermore, as the very last sentence suggests, the consequences for the community can be even worse, given that Ebuka is no longer willing to involve himself in community affairs. When Bolade was accused of having a hand in the theft of his neighbour’s motorbike about a decade ago, the Yoruba ethnic militia, the OPC, was still actively involved in the extra-legal killing of suspected criminals reported to them by people such as the woman who accused him. Naturally, Bolade got angry, and it took all the men in the compound to prevent the fight that nearly broke out. The mediation of elders and time was then needed to reconcile Bolade and his neighbour, as he told me.

According to Bolade, his neighbour suspected him of stealing the motorbike because ‘most people believe that my friends and I are criminals because we behave like bad boys. We smoke weed, drink alcohol days-long, and fight regularly.’ Bolade had a point: many in Nigeria suspect people with similar lifestyles to be criminals. Typically, they are labelled ‘touts’, ‘thugs’ and ‘hoodlums’. Although Bolade disapproved of such prejudice against people like him, he shared with his accuser – and with many others in Nigeria – the strongly held belief that ‘somebody’ cannot come ‘just from nowhere’ and successfully steal in a community without local backing. Many hold this belief ‘because the thief must have a place … to hide before the operation, and [after it is done] to wait for the daybreak to safely leave the environment’.Footnote ¹² In other words, many in crime-beset communities across Nigeria believe not only that they are surrounded by people who can directly victimize them, but also that even when the criminal is an outsider, he still receives support from insiders (also see Pratten Reference Pratten2008b: 71), including seemingly respectable community members such as the leader who, in Ebuka’s story, came out ‘fully armed’ but did not ‘shoot down’ the robber. Ebuka suspected the community leader of being the co-conspirator of the criminals victimizing the community just as he was being suspected by other members of the community.

During the interview, Ebuka told the story of a young man he had once caught with a stolen car battery and made the following statement:

Following on from this extract, I want to discuss the issues of violence and confessions. According to Ebuka, they physically abused the alleged thief because they were stigmatized and harassed following his crimes. This is an interesting justification considering the polemics on the morality of vigilantes in Nigeria discussed earlier. Since each unexplained crime increases the social control that crime-beset communities apply, through suspicions and accusations, to their most morally ambiguous members (also see Gore and Pratten Reference Gore and Pratten2003: 226; Pratten Reference Pratten2008b: 70), it makes sense that the latter join mobs demanding retribution. In fact, I argue that violent vigilantism offers morally ambiguous characters in under-policed communities a unique opportunity to demonstrate their innocence as it allows them to forcefully extract confessions from alleged offenders. In under-policed communities, each arrest of an alleged criminal is an opportunity to explain crimes that had remained unexplained.

The last time I met Bolade, on 13 March 2018, in Coker-Aguda, he was preparing his introduction ceremony.Footnote ¹⁴ He told me that another neighbour who used to accuse him of stealing batteries from his cars had offered to make a financial donation for the ceremony. When I asked him how that was possible, he simply told me that they had once arrested a thief and ‘after some beatings he confessed being the one vandalizing cars in his street’. He added, amused, that since then his neighbour ‘had been trying to redeem himself’. What Bolade meant is that the confession of the real thief had turned the whole situation upside down. Not only was he no longer the suspect, but the person who used to accuse him of being a criminal was now going the extra mile to restore trust between them. Thus, violent vigilantism is often the instrument through which stigmatized community members attempt to restore their image in the community.