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Toyin Falola and Bola Dauda. 2017. Decolonizing Nigeria, 1945-1960: Politics, Power, and Personalities. Austin, Texas: Pan-African University Press. 612 pp.
Nigeria, the world's most populous black nation and a former British colony, has, undoubtedly, a plethora of historical documentations of its decolonization making yet another volume on same subject seemingly hackneyed. But the uniqueness of Falola and Dauda's account of the political ferment of the fifteen seedy years before Nigeria's political independence in 1960 is unarguable. Beyond mere chronicling, the book critically reviews, interprets and interrogates the past in light of the present and with an eye on the future. It wades through the labyrinthine intercourse of the triad of politics, power, and personalities as they played out in Nigeria mainly, but not exclusively, between 1945 and 1960. In constructing Decolonizing Nigeria, 1945-1960, the authors revealed the many tripods of the politics of the period. First is the British ethnic politics of tense relationship among the Irish, the Scots, and the English that seeped into Nigeria through the colonial heads of the then three regions of Nigeria. Another tripod was world opinion represented by the United States that put...