Omnia magazine has recently spotlighted Wale Adebanwi and his book How to Become a Big Man in Africa: Subalternity, Elites, and Ethnic Politics in Contemporary Nigeria:
In his new book, Wale Adebanwi, Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies and director of the Center for Africana Studies, explores social mobility, ethnonationalism, and democratic politics in Nigeria.
Adebanwi's new book sees him resurrecting the journalistic roots he lived by decades prior. How to Become a Big Man in Africa: Subalternity, Elites, and Ethnic Politics in Contemporary Nigeria delves into youth, violence, and social dynamics against the backdrop of seismic governmental evolution.
Adebanwi focuses specifically on the larger-than-life Gani Adams, who transformed himself from a "subaltern" of lower status into the holder of the most prestigious chieftaincy title among southwestern Nigeria's Yoruba, a culture represented through diaspora in locations from Brazil to the Caribbean.
The book is composed of observations made over decades of Adams' social and political trajectory-a path that came to mirror deeper themes of tradition versus modernity in Nigeria.
"The southwestern and southern parts of Nigeria generally had the earliest encounter with ideas about the Enlightenment, and by the mid- to late-19th century, the role of reason and ideas about human liberty had been embraced prior to the formal imposition of colonialism," says Adebanwi.