Adam Mayer

ABSTRACT Throughout the Cold War the USSR was the most important external source of funds, ideological transfers, and organizational help for Marxists in Nigeria. The events of 1989 and the USSR’s subsequent withdrawal from this role created a major hiatus for the Nigerian Left. In this article, I prove that Nigerian socialist movements and thinkers, after a short adjustment period, successfully recovered from the shock of 1989. I present a plethora of coping mechanisms that Leftist intellectuals employed as private survival strategies. I also show that the Nigerian Left as a movement retained their Marxist and radical inspirations, and it also grew and became suffused with a new spirit of human rights, gender sensitivity, and attention to ethnicity from the 1990s onward. The Nigerian Left turned the disappearance of its external backer from a calamity into an engine of growth and ethical conscientization after 1989.

ABSTRACT Space for emancipatory projects during military rule in Nigeria shrinks considerably (1983–1999, with short interruptions). This affects anti-feudalist initiatives and radical feminist movements equally. Ifeoma Okoye, the preeminent socialist-feminist writer of Igboland, publishes novels and short stories in these years that deal with women’s lives and that attack post-colonial patriarchy. Her novel Men Without Ears also uncovers the mechanisms by which processes of feudalization come to characterize ethnic Igbo regions that hitherto had had no traditional rulers. Okoye in the novel weaves a narrative around a particularly toxic kind of masculinity, feudal masculinity, which imprints the newly instituted faux Igbo royal and faux Igbo feudatory. In Okoye’s world, Nigerian mainstream academic feminists, criminal uncles who try to disinherit orphans, and Igbo royalty with invented ranks but with very real thugs in their employ, all represent the comprador class that directs the developmental failure of Nigeria under military rule and beyond.

and 1930s Latvia as strongly hostile – unsurprisingly since, in addition, male same-sex relations specifically were criminalized. Interestingly, she also provides an interesting explanation as to why homosexual men in Latvia were referred to in the press as “black carnations.” The first account dealing with homosexuality in the Latvian-language press appeared in 1924; in it, the journalist discussed the rumour that there existed a “pederast club” (146) in Riga known as the “Black Carnation.” In order to enter, one had to wear a badge of a black carnation on a green enamel background. Interestingly, stereotypes in the Latvian media represented same-sex relationships between men as a form of “male prostitution” (147), wherein an older, richer man paid young boys for sexual services in a perceived unequal power relationship of seducer/offender and seduced/ victim, and active/passive. To conclude, this review has underscored chapters and passages in this collection that were particularl...

Space for emancipatory projects during military rule in Nigeria
shrinks considerably (1983–1999, with short interruptions). This
affects anti-feudalist initiatives and radical feminist movements
equally. Ifeoma Okoye, the preeminent socialist-feminist writer of
Igboland, publishes novels and short stories in these years that deal
with women’s lives and that attack post-colonial patriarchy. Her novel
Men Without Ears also uncovers the mechanisms by which processes
of feudalization come to characterize ethnic Igbo regions that
hitherto had had no traditional rulers. Okoye in the novel weaves
a narrative around a particularly toxic kind of masculinity, feudal
masculinity, which imprints the newly instituted faux Igbo royal and
faux Igbo feudatory. In Okoye’s world, Nigerian mainstream academic
feminists, criminal uncles who try to disinherit orphans, and Igbo
royalty with invented ranks but with very real thugs in their employ,
all represent the comprador class that directs the developmental
failure of Nigeria under military rule and beyond.

I propose that we stop ignoring Naija Marxisms and recognize those as more than esoteric politics and academic scribbling – their discourse is all part and parcel of African philosophy, African political thought, African achievement in the social sciences, as well as a tool for organizers. The fact that many of Naija Marxism’s authors, even feminist socialists, did not disavow Lenin, will not change this. I am proposing a new way of looking at entire schools of thought and their value in Nigeria. Nigerian Marxist tomes have disappeared from public libraries in Nigeria and in the UK, even when they had been published by Zed or New Beacon Books in the 1980s. The new NGO paradigm, although fed to a large extent by former and actual Marxists, also diverted attention away from resistance, to charity, and while today’s radicals acknowledge even their Leninist predecessors, some are afraid of being labelled as – hard core – Marxists. My work, after brief introductions on Nigeria, traces the historical trajectories that leftist movements had gone through since the 1940s in the country.

The paper offers a critical reading of Eurocentrism and Western hegemony of social thought by highlighting the essential similarities between the African and post-1989 Eastern European experience. It argues that Eastern European local knowledge and difference should be addressed in new ways, which take into account our neo-colonial negation and subjugation in Eastern Europe. The reorientation of what I call an essentially orientalist discourse in Eastern Europe can come from renewed engagement, after a nearly thirty-year gap, with African political theory, labour activism, and resistance movements. The article offers a discussion in what ways the African experience can be paralleled with the Eastern European peripheral integration into the global capitalist economy and it argues that African social thought, which has been hitherto largely neglected in post-socialist Europe, can, indeed, have illuminating insights into a history of global marginalisation. Further, I argue, that in that sense, African social thought can be an inspiring source in order to reorient current Eastern European histories, which have been developing self-defeating, self-deprecating and self-orientalising tendencies since at least 1989. Afrikanizacija, a grand metaphor for our region's descent into a world of neo-colonialism, should also mean that we recognise the liberating and emancipating contents of African social thought especially in the fields of labour and feminism when we look for ways to fight Western hegemony.

Recent military coups in West Africa have put the continent’s democratisation itself
into question. In some places, for the moment, these coups appear to have popular backing. Nigeria, where radicalism is firmly rooted in democratic values and a
human-rights framework, the radical grassroots opposition to the Buhari government’s creeping authoritarianism lies drenched in blood. The roots of this development go back to the history of Nigeria’s radicalism in the twentieth century. Much
has appeared on the global 1968 recently, including that of Africa. 1970s/1980s-style
radicalism is reappearing today with Omoyele Sowore’s 2018 presidential candidacy,
with the African Action Congress party, the #EndSARS protests and the tragic Lekki
Toll Gate massacre (2020) in Nigeria. The shift towards radicalism is palpable with
protest music such as Falz’s This is Nigeria, and Burna Boy’s Monsters you Made, both
explicitly targeting neocolonialism and police brutality. Contrary to Achille Mbembe’s
sweeping dismissal of African radicalism, the movement with very deep roots under
study is meaningful once again, and is gathering momentum in West Africa’s giant
polity. This article applies Walter Benjamin’s and also Nigerian radical thinkers’ conceptualisation of political, social and artistic radicalism, while it frames the Nigerian
version via the movement’s history, in which marxisant theory and praxis, feminism,
human rights and pro-democracy movements interact with emancipatory strands of
Islam, Christianity, Igbo Judaism, and animism. In the context of Nigerian radicalism,
even expressly pro-capitalist art theory performs a radical social function by stressing
the African’s right to make universal statements (Olu Oguibe) in its de facto defiance of
the neo-colony. As these different strands of protest meet, ethnic uprisings (amongst them ipob) find ways to establish common cause with social radicalism, posing a composite threat to the prebendalist oligarchy that rules and oppresses the country via a
militarised neoliberalism.