Letters, Kinship, and Social Mobility in Nigeria
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A01=Olufemi Vaughan
Africa
Anglican Church
Author_Olufemi Vaughan
bureaucracy
Category=JBSA
Category=JHB
Category=NHH
Christianity
Church Missionary Society
civil society
colonialism
decolonization
epistolary writing
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Freetown
Ibadan
missionaries
Sierra Leone
social networks
Yoruba people
Product details
- ISBN 9780299344542
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 17 Dec 2024
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In 2003, Olufemi Vaughan received from his ninety-five-year-old father, Abiodun, a trove of more than three thousand letters written by four generations of his family in Ibadan, Nigeria, between 1926 and 1994. The people who wrote these letters had emerged from the religious, social, and educational institutions established by the Church Missionary Society, the preeminent Anglican mission in the Atlantic Nigerian region following the imposition of British colonial rule. Abiodun, recruited to be a civil servant in the colonial Department of Agriculture, became a leader of a prominent family in Ibadan, the dominant YorÙbÁ city in southern Nigeria. Reading deeply in these letters, Vaughan realized he had a unique set of sources to illuminate everyday life.
Letter writing was a dominant form of communication for Western-educated elites in colonial Africa, especially in Nigeria. Exposure to the modern world and a growing sense of nationalism were among the factors that led people to begin exchanging letters, particularly in their interactions with British colonial authorities. Vaughan reconstructs dominant storylines, including themes such as kinship, social mobility, Western education, modernity, and elite consolidation in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. He brings to life a portrait, at once intimate and expansive, of a community during a transformative period in African history.
Letter writing was a dominant form of communication for Western-educated elites in colonial Africa, especially in Nigeria. Exposure to the modern world and a growing sense of nationalism were among the factors that led people to begin exchanging letters, particularly in their interactions with British colonial authorities. Vaughan reconstructs dominant storylines, including themes such as kinship, social mobility, Western education, modernity, and elite consolidation in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. He brings to life a portrait, at once intimate and expansive, of a community during a transformative period in African history.
Olufemi Vaughan, the Alfred Sargent Lee ’41 and Mary Farley Ames Lee Professor and Chair of Black Studies at Amherst College, is the author of Religion and the Making of Nigeria, among other works.
