This Fiction Called Nigeria: The Struggle for Democracy

An uncompromising look at Nigeria’s crisis of democracy by a renowned essayist and critic

In this groundbreaking work, the essayist and critic Adewale Maja-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria’s crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous country in Africa was fabricated by British colonizers at the turn of the twentieth century. In the years since its independence in 1960, Nigeria spent an unbroken quarter century as a military dictatorship. Yet the blessings of today’s democracy are unclear to many, especially among the more than half of the population living in extreme poverty. Buffeted by unemployment, saddled with debt, menaced by bandits and Islamic fundamentalists, Nigeria faces the threat of disintegration.

Maja-Pearce shows that recent mobilizations against police brutality, sexism, and homophobia reveal a powerful undercurrent of discontent, especially among the country’s youth. If Nigeria has a future, he shows here, it is in the hands of young people unwilling to go on as before.

Born in London and raised in Lagos, where he lives today, Adewale Maja-Pearce is one of Nigeria’s leading public intellectuals. He is the author of two memoirs, In My Father’s Country: A Nigerian Journey and The House My Father Built along with numerous other books. His writing regularly appears in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.