The book ends by tracking the legacy of the Minorities Commission. The commission set a precedent for managing minority anxieties as Nigeria entered nation-statehood in 1960. It also failed to resolve the political tension these anxieties caused, leaving the newly independent Nigerian state with a crisis of citizenship that lingers to this day. This crisis of citizenship informed the national breakdown that led to the devastating civil war (also known as the Biafran War, 1967–70) and the ongoing fragmentation of Nigeria into smaller and more numerous states. Because certain Niger Delta peoples have been fixed as minorities in Nigeria, the needs and well-being of Niger Delta communities are not priorities, especially as they are construed as being at odds with national needs and priorities. It is in this context that their status as minorities has had the most devastating implications. The book closes by exploring the various ways these communities have used their minority status to simultaneously challenge and insist upon inclusion within the Nigerian state, asking what might be possible for their future as Nigerian citizens.

The minority claims made by the various minority movements that emerged in the 1950s coalesced in separate state movements. Separate states claims were made by minority communities in all three major regions and these claims were championed by their political elites who strategically occupied seats in the regional houses of assembly, starting in 1953. Niger Delta elites formed provisional alliance, supressing local disputes and differences, in order to keep their claim for a separate Mid-West state alive in the constitutional reform process. Their efforts succeeded in halting the final constitutional conference, which was to be held in London in 1957. The push for separate states was strong enough to threaten the decolonization process altogether, and the British government decided to establish a Minorities Commission to address and resolve these claims prior to formal independence.

As ethnic competition gained momentum on the local level, similar developments occurred at the regional level. Decolonization in the postwar period involved constitutional reform and the slow development of African political parties. The British government used constitutional reform to ensure its political and economic interest to maintain the status quo, while emerging African political parties engaged constitutional reform to make various claims for self-determination. The British government insisted African political parties operate at the regional level and discouraged any efforts to form broad, multi-ethnic, cross-regional nationalist parties, such as the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) had aimed for. By 1952, broad nationalist sentiments had distilled into a regionally focused politics. In this context, ethnic majorities within each region had more power than their minority counterparts. The emerging regionalist politics informed the development of a minority consciousness among Niger Delta elites in the 1950s, and they engaged the constitutional reform process through their positions as minorities to claim the right to self-determination.

In the wake of the boycott, the British govenment strengthened the warrant chief system, gathered intelligence on these communities to reorganize them into discrete, governable units. Reorganization was carried out in the context of interwar colonial development policy, which sought to increase the efficiency and productivity of the colonies. The British government coerced Africans across their colonies to engage in waged labor, in order to pay taxes and contribute to local development initiatives. In the Niger Delta, ethnic competition was used as a mechanism by which colonial development was distributed. Paramount chieftaincy increased a community’s ability to access colonial resources, contributing to a proliferation of new chieftaincy titles in competition for these resources. The case of the Olu title among the Itsekiri people is exemplary of these developments.

The Minorities Commission of 1957-58 demonstrated the degree to which people had aligned their ethnic affiliation with the newly articulated political identities by the late 1950s. Even though each region contained significant heterogeneous populations, each of the major political parties aligned with the numerically major ethnic group, which also conformed to colonially construed majorities (i.e., Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo). This further exacerbated the growing sense of alienation minorities felt amid nationalist fervor during this period. In the end, the Minorities Commission recommended that Nigeria enter independence with the existing tripartite regional structure. However, it did recommend the new Nigerian state set up “special areas” or “minority areas” in the Western and Eastern Regions under the jurisdiction of the federal government; the idea was that these would receive special consideration for further development. Addressing the minority question would have required more time and resources than the British government was willing to give to this colony.

The communities of the western Niger Delta, in the midst of economic turmoil, confronted the British colonial government’s effort to integrate them into the wider colonial economy with a boycott on palm oil exports in 1927. Taxation was the primary instrument of incorporation for the British government, and Niger Delta community’s primary form of leverage against taxation was a systemic boycott. Beyond taxation, these communities resented the imposition of warrant chiefs, who were tasked with enforcing taxation and carrying out local administration of the courts (another vital source of income for the colonial government). The 1927 boycott succeeded in slowing down the palm oil trade. It was also part of a broader pattern of resistance in the palm-producing region across southern Nigeria. This widespread resistance indicated the lack of knowledge and control the colonial state had regarding these communities, and the need to impose stronger mechanisms of contol, through the warrant chiefs, increased surveilance and policing, and by exploiting ethnic differences.

In order to understand the current intercommunal violence in the western Niger Delta we must examine the historical deprivation of representation and resources by the Nigerian state--in its colonial, nationalist, and post-independence forms. This introduction provides an overview of this historical process, laying out the key interventions of this book. First, Nigeria’s current political culture relies on the competition between majority and minority ethnic and religious groups. Second, minorities are constitutive of the national story, and their existence disrupts the standard nationalist narrative that centers a tripartite social structure based on the three numerically major ethnic identities. Third, considering the history of minority communities in Nigeria compels us to question the nature of citizenship and belonging in modern Nigeria.