The archival record of the transatlantic slave trade poses a methodological challenge to researchers who wish to center the lives of enslaved people in their scholarship. In more recent years, such archival scrutiny has evolved into its own vibrant field of inquiry concerning the politics of the archive. This article contributes to this burgeoning field by studying the pharmaceutical dimensions of the British slave trade and examining the underexplored relationship between captivity and drugs that articulated across the Atlantic world. By performing three different readings of a slave ship drug invoice—as a textual artifact, epistemic argument, and narrative of loss—I argue that the drug invoice stimulates new illness narratives of captive Africans in the historiography of the British slave trade.

Why do Igbo nationalists subscribe to the view that Igbos are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel and thus descend from Jewish people despite evidence against such genealogical and cultural ties? This problematic is largely underexplored in the copious literature on ethnonationalist agitations in Nigeria. Drawing on ontological security theory, I contend that Igbo nationalists employ the analogy of Jewishness to posit the Igbo as a unique ethnoreligious and ethnoracial group whose identity is under existential threat in postcolonial Nigeria and to draw global attention to their separatist cause. Further, I argue that although belief in the similarities between Jews and Igbos predates postcolonial Igbo nationalism – there are scores of racialist writings advanced by European colonizers in precolonial times to undermine African cultures (the so-called Hamitic hypothesis) – it was particularly invoked by Igbo nationalists during the gory Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), a defining moment in the social construction of Igbo identity. Igbo nationalists appropriated the Jewish experience of persecution in Central and Eastern Europe to make their case for the ontological security of Igbos. Whilst this political strategy was partially successful, it did not halt the Nigerian state from extirpating Biafra. Despite the reincorporation of Biafran territory into Nigeria, Igbo nationalists still see themselves as Jews and Jewishness has mutated into something of a pristine Igbo identity in postcolonial Nigeria.

This article uses the death and burial of one of the most important political leaders in twentieth-century Africa, and Nigeria's first and only ceremonial president, Rt. Hon. (Dr.) Nnamdi Azikiwe, to reflect on how and why the deaths and burials of significant persons in Africa represent occasions for the (re)production and management of cultural crises. It argues that the extant literature on the death of consequential persons in Africa either understates or overlooks the generalizability of the “essential contestability” of the material and immaterial relations of the past, present, and future provoked by such deaths. This is particularly visible when these relations are disturbed or challenged by the absence of the person and the process of their burial or reburial.

This article examines processes of economic inclusion in divided societies, with a focus on both religious and formal–informal divides. Drawing on recent fieldwork in the northern Nigerian cities of Kano and Kaduna, the article challenges the assumption that identity-based informal organization intensifies violent social divisions, and that taxation and linkages with the state foster more stable and inclusive governance. A range of informal sector activities provides insights into escalating religious conflict and uneven patterns of formal inclusion in interreligious relations. Attention is focused on the relative role of informal institutions and formal interventions such as taxation in diffusing or exacerbating conflict at the grassroots level.

Amid assumptions of a hegemonic Igbo Christian identity, conversions to Islam began in the late 1930s in the Igbo territory of south-east Nigeria – the only region in the country that was not touched by the nineteenth-century Islamic jihad and subsequent efforts to extend the borders of Islam in Nigeria. Four decades after the emergence of Islam in the Igbo homeland, and with the mixed blessings of a civil war, Igboland began to manifest clear evidence of indigenous Muslim presence. A key aspect of this article is how one can be both Igbo and Muslim. It considers the complex interplay of religious and ethnic identities of Igbo Muslims (including the mapping of religious values onto ethnic ones) until the 1990s, when Igbo Muslims began to disentangle ethnicity from religion, a development that owes much to the progress of Islamic education in Igboland and the emergence of Igbo Muslim scholars and clerics. Igbo reactions to conversions to Islam and the perceived threat of these conversions to Igbo Christian identity also receive some attention in this article.