Abdul Raufu Mustapha was a groundbreaking scholar whose work examined the nuances and complexities of African politics. He believed in the potential of academic research to improve people’s lives and dedicated his career to that pursuit.

Mustapha was born in the Nigerian city of Aba in 1954, the ninth of nineteen siblings. His father was a mechanic and his mother a trader. He obtained his undergraduate and Master’s degrees from Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria before studying for his PhD from St. Peter’s College. Mustapha was a long-term lecturer at both his alma maters and was Professor of African Politics at the University of Oxford.

Mustapha believed that Western approaches to studying Africa problematised African states. Rather than set out to empirically examine the historic and cultural context of political events to understand their causes and effects, researchers narrowed their focus to look solely for reasons for state failure. They invariably found them and in doing so reduced complex dynamic societies down to mere problems to be solved.

In contrast, Mustapha wanted to understand African states on African terms; to examine the conditions that led up to an event in the same way that colleagues examined the history and politics of Western nations. He believed that to understand the consequences of something it was vital to look not just at large events or shocks but to examine what the ‘ordinary’ situation was. How do people live their everyday lives? How do their multiple identities get created, and how do those interact with other identities around them? His work was based on a strong theoretical underpinning into which he blended empirical evidence that respected the realities of the places he studied. 

Three themes run through much of Mustapha’s work: identity and difference in everyday life; the dynamics of conflict; and the ‘whole-of-society’ approach to the African State. This involved studying how divisions become entrenched and how power is created and contested to the point of violence and civil war.

Understanding these phenomena would not only give us a better understanding of Africa and its states it would also give us fresh perspectives that would deepen our understanding of these issues.

Identity and difference

Africa was often studied through the lens of its problems. From this perspective, the realities of African life became the cause of problems, rather than entities that are complex, nuanced and have intrinsic value.

Religion, language, place of birth etc can all provide a person with identity. Sometimes these all point in the same direction, at other times one may hold sway when an individual makes a political or economic choice. Mustapha’s early work focused on Nigeria’s rural poor. But rather than treat them as a monolithic social entity he understood that people have intersectional identities and that these are relevant to understanding the socio-economic processes of a place.

By reducing people’s identities down to a one-dimensional group, you are denying that people have the agency to express themselves. Mustapha argued that what is important is how people lived these identities in everyday life, and how they related to other people, which in turn would help us understand why they reacted to shocks and such as conflict or natural disasters in the way that they did. The everyday and the ordinary matter. This is where key components of politics, society and the economy are formed, and affects how power plays out in extraordinary times.

Mustapha’s work pushed beyond stereotypes and built a more comprehensive understanding of people and their institutions. In his later work, he dismantled the homogenised view of the identity of Northern Nigerian Muslims. He argued that a better understanding of these identities would help develop stronger Muslim-Christian relations in the country. Such work was typical of Mustapha’s approach, not only did it add complexity and understanding, but it engaged with the real world.

Conflict and violence

In his work on conflict, Mustapha sought to place the outcome of violence in the context of the history of interactions between groups and people and not a one-off decision based on a single cause. Taking this longer-term view helped him avoid falling back on off-the-shelf framings developed in other contexts.

This can be seen in his work on Boko Haram. Rather than view the emergence of Boko Haram as part of a global spread of Islamic extremism, Mustapha looked at the details of its emergence at a specific time and a specific place.

This allowed him to identify four key stages that led to the development of the group even before it embraced terrorism: an ideological split with other Nigerian Islamist groups in the 1940s; the reinforcement of regional divisions in the 1950s; the Christian millenarian uprisings in Nigeria in the 1980s; then only in the 2010s did the group engage with international Islamist terror networks. From this viewpoint, you can see that the development of Boko Haram had more to do with events in Nigeria than with Osama bin Laden. This insight would be missed if scholars are not prepared to investigate the history of interactions between groups and people to understand their motives and actions.

In his view of conflict, the state is fundamental, either as an actor or as a source of grievance. The state is therefore pivotal in determining the scale of any violence associated with a conflict and resolving disputes before or after they have turned violent.

A whole of society approach

The more complete view of Boko Haram shows the group’s roots are in different aspects of Nigerian society. To defeat the group, it won’t be enough to focus on one, all of them must be addressed. There needs to be a military response to the group’s actions, socio-economic approaches to limit the disenfranchisement on which the group preys, and even an examination of religion within Nigeria.

Issues of development and ensuring human fulfilment, require a whole-of-society approach. Anything short of that is likely to fall short of its goals.

To be successful, states need to manage the links between the economy, culture, politics, and civil society. Not doing so will lead to governance failures that can be exploited by groups such as Boko Haram, or whoever comes in to fill its place if the group is defeated but the underlying problems are not resolved. This approach should be at the centre of government leadership and successful policymaking.

Upon hearing about his death, the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa released a statement: “His rich intellectual legacy will remain relevant, widely discussed, cherished and avidly utilised. This is because Dr Mustapha’s work captured the lived experiences of Africans in diverse ways.”

Selected readings

Sects & Social Disorder: Muslim Identities & Conflict in Northern Nigeria (editor, 2014), 

Creed and Grievance: Muslim-Christian Relations and Conflict Resolution in Northern Nigeria (co-edited with David Ehrhardt, 2018),

Overcoming Boko Haram: Faith, Society & Islamic Radicalization in Northern Nigeria (co-edited with Kate Meagher 2020)

Political Settlements and Agricultural Transformation in Africa: Evidence for Inclusive Growth (co-edited with Martin Atela 2022)

Adebajo, A. and Mustapha, A. R. Gulliver’s troubles: Nigeria’s foreign policy after the Cold War, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press 2008

Academic papers