A review of Olufemi Vaughan’s book, Letters, Kinship, and Social Mobility in Nigeria by Nimi Wariboko.
THIS book, ‘Letters, Kinship, and Social Mobility in Nigeria,’ presents the family as a collective action. There is nothing novel about this perspective, you might say. However, when you realise what Professor Olufemi Vaughan has done in it is a deft presentation of “family worlds,” something akin to what Howard S. Beeker did with his now famous classic Arts Worlds (1984), you would marvel at his perspicacity.
If Beeker presented the sociology of art worlds, the extensive social systems in which various types of art are produced and preserved, then Vaughan presents the sociology of elite Yoruba family worlds. Unusual and brilliant, Letters, Kinship, and Social Mobility in Nigeria demonstrates the ways Vaughan family members and friends fit together and cooperate to produce family worlds, the ethos, achievements, and performances characteristic of early Yoruba elites in westernised Ibadan.
In this excellent book of narratives and interpretative analyses, we see how individuals in the family worlds produce the cooperative networks of their doings, and the normativity and convention by which their activities, aspirations, and acquisitions are coordinated. The book also illustrates how the collective making of the character of family worlds involves the creation and use of reputations, highlighting how various interwoven doings and sayings make and unmake the tapestry of reputations. All these are revealed by how members of the Vaughan family deal with moral, aesthetic, and normative questions, and how they negotiate, contest, and construe conventions.
The ethics of the family world is local-national, glocal, and univocal. The stories of coordination and reputation that Professor Vaughan weaves involved lines (of àjọbí and àjọgbé) of activities that were rooted in Ibadan; lines that routed to other parts of the Yoruba region and spread to various other places in Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Though in telling these stories, the author did not foreground any universal morality that should bind the family—or, indeed, the whole of humanity for that matter—we clearly see common moral values among the family worlds. In this sense, morality was only univocal within the particular family worlds.
Vaughan’s portrait of his family worlds could form the basis for crafting Nigeria’s family worlds. This is an extended network of families’ cooperation that generates, attracts, and sustains the power and resources that have dominated and maintained hegemony over the nation’s political economy. Vaughan has given us, arguably, the first account of the intertwined processes of families that might aid us in theorizing the full political family worlds of Nigeria.
While I have so far portrayed Vaughan’s book as sociological, a discussion of how family members live together, it is germane to add that individual members remain visible in his narratives. He pays attention to the particular characters and contexts of individual persons who simultaneously are the corporate facades of the family world as well as its particular instantiations. Their instantiations or manifestations are always conveyed as historically and culturally contingent. The genius of Vaughan’s book is that the persons discussed in it always appear to this reader as flesh and blood, not as social forces of Pierre Bourdieu’s “force-field” or milieu, or as ideal types of Max Weber.
Vaughan’s book focuses on family members doing things or doing things together, and not on the rules and regulations of household or lineage organization. They were not presented as persons behaving as predicted by an explanatory paradigm of the author or any other scholar. They were rightly captured as persons merely searching for possibilities for various projects, lifestyles, and relationships.
Their portrayal as doing things together should not be construed to mean that the Vaughan family worlds were a haven of cooperation and harmony.
They were not devoid of conflicts, but the family worlds were also not overdetermined by conflicts. Their togetherness integrated those conflicts within itself.
Vaughan was able to pack all these salient features I have uncovered in his book because of his novelistic approach to scholarly history writing.
The novelist, through attentiveness to particularity in the narrative of characters, is often able to invoke in the reader identification with and sympathetic understanding of fictional characters. Vaughan articulates a style by which we can connect the novelist’s art and historical-sociological scholarship.
This is an excellent and pathbreaking book. It is original in its conception, brilliant in its execution, and pacesetting in its meticulous scholarship. The book is painstakingly done. It comes across as a saga. Vaughan seems to have turned himself into a griot to offer us this book on family worlds.
As I stated earlier, this book is not just about the Vaughan family but a first deposit toward building a solid scholarship on family worlds across Nigeria. In this extended sense, it is also a book about “worlding,” to use a Heideggerian term. It tells us about the process of world becoming and worldmaking by Nigerian citizens across time.
The extension of my evaluation of the book from the genre of family worlds to worldling is an expansion and deepening of our understanding of the making of Nigeria as an ongoing process of its citizens making sense of their colonial inheritance. And it is a recognition that the historical constellation of Vaughan’s scholarship has now become legible to us as Walter Benjamin might put it. His academic work is about the making of Nigeria in various forms, from the micro to macro.
- Wariboko is Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics, Boston University, USA.
