Abstract
This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime is an astoundingly ambitious piece of work that is yet another testament to Stephen Ellis’s enormous contribution to African affairs (and beyond). The book is Ellis’s final work; the author, a well-known British journalist and historian of African affairs, passed away in 2015. The book offers an account of the history of “organized crime” in Nigeria during the previous century. In Ellis’s usual fashion, the work is based on serious, meticulous, simultaneously deep and wide, and archival research as well as interviews with experts on Nigerian organized crime in Nigeria and abroad. The book is organized along 11 insightfully written chapters following an introduction where the author nails his point of departure: “Can culture be an explanation for such behavior?”
Chapter 1 focuses on the inception of Nigeria as a country, the circumstances in which colonial power was established and their effect on the success of the British administration in an area of vast diversity. In Chapter 2, Ellis provides an account of the spirit world as an integral feature to one’s understanding of (organized) crime in Nigeria. Here, what also becomes explicit is that activities that are considered as “recent” have in fact a much longer history.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on nationalism, political parties, and corruption. By the late 1950s, nearly all businessmen in Nigeria were involved in politics, and nearly all politicians were involved in business in one way or another. By the early 1960s, corruption of Nigerian political life (coupled with the process of decolonization) became diffused to the whole of Nigerian society and encouraged disrespect of the law.
Chapter 5 discusses the entrenchment of state corruption at all levels after Nigeria became subject to a military government, whereas Chapter 6 deals with the oil “boom time” in the 1970s when among other “it was customary for a junior officer…to pay a percentage of his [illegal] profits to his military superior for the right to continue unpunished” (p. 103).
Chapters 7–10 focus on Nigerian organized crime from the 1980s onward. When the country’s oil boom came to an end in the early 1980s, young Nigerian college graduates migrated primarily to the Western world, determined to make money in any way they could. This is when Nigerian crime “went global.” Ellis identifies a set of major (organized criminal) activities: the drug trade, a business context in which perceived or real qualities that Nigerians possess are sought after; advanced fee scams (also known as “419” frauds after the section of the Nigerian penal code addressing fraud) that Nigerians are often identified with internationally; sex trafficking; and oil fraud and smuggling involving the participation of significant “upperworld” figures including senior government officials. Finally, in Chapter 11, Ellis highlights the core features of Nigerian organized crime and returns to the question he raised in the introduction.
The book is a necessary and valuable addition to organized crime studies. Although there is a lot of “noise” around Nigerian organized crime, not much solid academic work has been published with some exceptions. The title of the book may appear to many readers as slightly misleading in the sense that it does not discuss organized crime only but much more than that. It deals among other with fraud, corruption, nationalistic politics, and “magic.” The work is in essence a historical account of Nigeria in the last century and the very conditions that allowed Nigerian organized crime to acquire its reputation internationally. Ellis uses the term “organized crime” as an inclusive and wide category, something that may irritate some criminologists or may be considered by others as a rather rudimentary, but effective way of dealing with some unbridgeable “philosophical” divides associated with defining the issue. The book, as Ellis notes early in the work, “is not the place to examine different definitions of organized crime” (p. 4), and in the final chapter, he attempts at explaining why. In Ellis’s explanation, there is a rather common factual error: Although, the notions of ethnicity and migration have been at the core of the concept of organized crime, and in the media and public perception, the phenomenon has been represented at its best by the Italian “Mafia,” the concept of organized crime initially had no ethnic connotation.
The work, which is filled with many characters such as Prince Orizu and P. Crentsil, also known as the “Professor of Wonders,” and numerous members of the Nigerian kleptocracy never becomes monotonous, dull, or dry, as my brief presentation of the chapters perhaps makes it sound. With regard to substance, the book does communicate certain major points. Firstly, it explains why organized crime is so pervasive in contemporary Nigeria through a notable interweaving of the past and the present, history and politics, state and nonstate actors, and the spiritual and the physical. Secondly, it highlights the many shades of gray that exist between legality and illegality. Exactly because of the wide scope of the work, it is a remarkable and critical account which highlights that the legal and the illegal can be increasingly blurred. Finally, the book under review constructs a complex mosaic of Nigerian organized crime through the decades, and highlights that the phenomenon is an ongoing and continually developing social process, and indeed forms of organized crime are embedded in and have to be seen as an integral part of the general social, historical, legal, religious, and economic contexts in Nigeria.
This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime is an extraordinary and refreshing piece of work that attacks conventional wisdom and a consistently arresting chronicle of Nigerian organized crime that will satisfy even the most demanding reader.