Book Review: This present darkness: A history of Nigerian organized crime

• Author: Georgios A. Antonopoulos
• Published date: 01 March 2019
• Date: 01 March 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1057567717737351
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

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Ellis, S. (2016).

This present darkness: A history of Nigerian organized crime. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. xv þ313 pp.

£20.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-190-49431-5.

Reviewed by: Georgios A. Antonopoulos, School of Social Sciences, Humanities & Law, Teesside University,

Middlesbrough, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.1177/1057567717737351

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 encour-

aged 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;

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