The Master's Tools

Abstract

After independence, Nigeria and other African countries were left with a mixed bequest from Britain. Military officers wanted to keep some parts of it and discard others. The first task of independence was to sort through it and see what was what. That process was especially important with regard to two related parts of the state—the culture of the military and the apparatus of law. For many of the problems that Nigerians faced during military rule, colonialism’s jumbled inheritance was both the wound and the remedy. The challenge, both for those who supported military rule and those who opposed it, was figuring out what was what.