This book provides an important contribution to ongoing debates about the Nigerian state’s struggle to unify its diverse citizens and treat them equitably. Nigeria is one of the world’s most heterogeneous nations, and the Niger Delta, where historian Oghenetoja Okoh works, is a region with a multitude of minority ethnic groups and the location of vast oil reserves. Rather than reaping the rewards of these riches, Delta minorities see little economic investment in their communities because of the Nigerian federal government’s corruption, face environmental devastation wrought by oil extraction most directly, and lack real political power. While Nigeria’s ethnic conflict and fragmentation are well-studied subjects, Okoh offers a fresh perspective by tracing the historical development of political practice that continues to animate Delta minorities’ collective organization today.

The introduction begins with an episode from 1997, in Warri, a major city of the western Delta, where clashes broke out following the military government’s announcement that it was going to move the capital of a local government from an Ijaw community to an Itsekiri one. The move would have given the Itsekiri more oil revenue shares and reduced those of the Ijaw. The violence led to many deaths and the displacement of hundreds in and around Warri. According to Okoh, the disturbances continued for two years and engulfed the Urhobo, who had older conflicts with the Itsekiri. She argues that Warri communities were suffering from “a historical problem of governance,” not just “ethnic rivalry” that the media and other observers uncritically claimed (1).

Okoh takes readers back from this period, likening the Nigerian state to the British colonial state, with which Delta communities had to contend for “land, rights, and resources” (6). Her central contention is that while ethnicization was a strategy deployed by the colonial state and thus embedded in the very making of Nigeria as a modern nation, ethnic minority identification was neither “passive” nor “marginal in the decolonization process” (15). Elites from ethnic minorities articulated political claims at all levels of government, and, though they failed to achieve their aims, their strategies have been part of the making of Nigeria’s political culture, which is characterized by persistent “political fragmentation—tying social, political, and economic interests to ever-smaller sociopolitical units” (15).

This sobering start to the book—posed with the question of what, if any, “moral commitment” minorities should have to the Nigerian state (14)—is honest and searching, as Okoh is reflective on the past rather than prescriptive about the present or future. Indeed, the five body chapters of the book concentrate largely on the first half of the twentieth century, roughly the three decades between 1927 and 1958, concluding on the eve of independence. Telling western Delta history for this period is itself a difficult task because an electrical fire at the Warri Provincial headquarters in 1944 destroyed the local records housed there up to that point (18). Using what archival evidence is available in Nigeria and the UK and accounts found in older studies, Okoh is able to reconstruct a dynamic, but ultimately thwarted, movement for minority rights that came to exist in the era of Nigerian state formation.

Chapter One shows how the 1927 boycott of the palm oil trade, conducted by a multiethnic coalition in Warri, forced the British to change their plans for taxation in the western Delta. This protest movement predated the 1929 Women’s War and, though it was part of a broader wave of struggles throughout southeastern Nigeria, is far less well known, in part because the colonial reports about the Warri boycott suggest an anticlimactic end to them by downplaying the violence (57). The British did not have a deep understanding of Warri and surrounding communities, a point Okoh makes throughout the book, most clearly in Chapter Two, where she shows how the colonial government concocted or in some cases revived chieftaincy in the western Delta in order to have indigenous rulers through whom to exercise power. Here she discusses how the British “reorganization” of the western Delta to widen the contested warrant chief system created in the southeast of Nigeria fractured possibilities for ethnic cooperation to forestall protest and involved political and economic engineering that was in the interest of colonial power; this produced and rewarded a more competitive assertion of identity (94).

The competition escalated in the era of political party formation, discussed in Chapter Three. Okoh examines how voluntary associations (that often began or operated on the basis of hometown affiliations) were absorbed into the few political parties that the British recognized during constitutional negotiations. She provides a detailed look at how some of the elite Itsekiri and Ijaw brokers jockeyed for power vis-à-vis the larger political parties such as the Action Group that came to represent the three regions—North, West, and East—created by the 1946 Richards Constitution. Conflicts between minority communities laid the groundwork for even greater loss of political power with new constitutional negotiations that established Nigeria’s federal system and allowed majority consolidation. Left with few means for representation, minorities began to make more claims for separate states, as detailed in Chapter Four. The final chapter shows how the Delta minorities created temporary alliances to form the Mid-West State Movement and press the Willink Commission, which the British formed in September 1957 to investigate the problems of minorities, for federal political representation and resources such as access to development funding. Ultimately, the Commission “allowed the British government to put a lid on the ethnic and religious tensions that had been building since … the mid-1930s,” Okoh argues (204). Very little discussion of religion appears in the book, though a Delta perspective would have provided a much-needed look beyond the well-understood Muslim-Christian (North-South) divide.

One weakness of the book is the absence of exploration of how ethnic identification works in the western Delta. Okoh might have offered evidence of how voluntary associations defined their agendas and differentiated themselves from others. What did these associations offer members, and how could ever-smaller units fulfill their needs? As Okoh’s book makes clear, obstacles to doing historical research on the Niger Delta are many, but there is a pressing need for deeper study of the political marginalization of communities in this conflict-prone region.