2024
Literature as Legal History: Understanding the Colonial Roots of the Nigerian Police Force
By Ọláolúwa Òní
Abstract:
On the 21st of October 2020, the world woke to images and video clips of the bloodied, broken bodies of Nigerians shared across social and traditional media. The night before, young Nigerians protesting police brutality were met with a government-sanctioned, combined police and military onslaught; Nigeria’s decades-long struggle with police dysfunction was brought to a head with the massacre of its citizens at the Lekki toll gate on the evening of October 20, 2020 (“Lekki Massacre.”)
This paper makes the case that the brutal character of the Nigerian Police Force (NPF) is connected to the colonial character of the institution, and that incorporating Indigenous literature in our study of the history of the NPF inevitably exposes the colonial roots of the institution. In this work, we read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as an account of Igbo pre-colonial history that helps our understanding of police dysfunction in Nigeria and can inform the country’s police reform ambitions.
About the author:
Ọláolúwa Òní is in the PhD program at Osgoode Hall Law School. Laolu studies the intersections between law and popular culture paying special attention to themes in colonial, postcolonial, and critical colonial studies. She is a writer and author; her novel The yNBA is sold in bookstores across Nigeria.