“Colours of My Mind”: A citizen’s chronicle of Nigeria in real time

Colours of My Mind is…a record of how an engaged Nigerian citizen thought through his country in real time, from the particular vantage point of the Niger Delta. Its value lies less in the comprehensiveness of its political analysis than in the immediacy of its observations, the force of its convictions and its willingness to turn the critical gaze upon the author’s own community.

In the foreword to Colours of My Mind, Professor Godini G. Darah places Austin Emaduku within a distinguished lineage of Nigerian public intellectuals, from Nnamdi Azikiwe and Anthony Enahoro to Dele Giwa and Tunji Dare, who used the written word to interrogate power and hold public authority to account.

It is an ambitious comparison for this collection of 69 commentaries. But the ambition is not entirely misplaced.

Colours of My Mind is something perhaps more modest, but in some respects more interesting: a record of how an engaged Nigerian citizen thought through his country in real time, from the particular vantage point of the Niger Delta. Its value lies less in the comprehensiveness of its political analysis than in the immediacy of its observations, the force of its convictions and its willingness to turn the critical gaze upon the author’s own community.

The pieces, written predominantly between 2016 and 2017, with some extending to 2023, cover politics, governance, religion, ethnicity, culture, social values and local affairs. They originated largely as social media commentaries, and the book retains much of the immediacy of that form.

This is not a conventional work of political philosophy. It is part political commentary, part local history, part moral argument and, above all, an archive.

What Kind of Book Is This?

Emaduku himself provides the key to understanding the collection. In his introduction, he explains that “a bulk of these articles were written between 2016 and 2017, a trying period in my life that turned out to be my most productive and creative years thus far.” He says he put the collection together “to record my thoughts for posterity.”

Fair enough. That is an important declaration of intent.

The reader should therefore resist the temptation to judge every piece as though it were written as part of a single, carefully constructed political thesis. These are interventions made at particular moments, responding to particular events and controversies. Some are angry. Some are reflective. Some are deliberately provocative. Some are much stronger than others.

Taken together, however, they create a portrait of a Nigerian citizen trying to make sense of his country during a difficult period.

That is the book’s real organising principle.

The Niger Delta Vantage Point

Emaduku’s most distinctive contribution is his rootedness.

He writes from Udu Kingdom in Delta State, from a region that produces a substantial portion of Nigeria’s wealth while bearing many of the environmental, economic and social consequences of oil extraction. His commentary, therefore, comes with a perspective that is often missing from national political writing.

In a keynote address on youth restiveness and militancy delivered in October 2016, he recalls the Warri of his youth:

“I can recall the mid-80s to the early 90s when Warri, the economic hub of Delta State was home to hundreds of oil companies. Oil production was at its peak and many of our young men and women were engaged in one form of employment or the other. Technicians, fitters, welders, caterers, security guards, etc.”

The passage is valuable because it is not simply nostalgia. It becomes an indictment of what happened afterwards. Emaduku writes:

“We created the state of insecurity that chased away the companies that would have provided employment for our teeming unemployed youths.”

The significance lies partly in where the criticism is directed. He acknowledges the failures of government and the injustices suffered by the Niger Delta, but he is equally prepared to confront destructive choices made within the region itself.

That willingness to look inward recurs throughout the book.

His description of the social consequences of the collapse of the local economy, including the uncomfortable account of “club girls” who once rejected African customers because of their lack of “dollar power”, is hardly polished sociological analysis. But it is vivid social observation, recording the mentality that developed around oil wealth, foreign workers, local deprivation and the distorted expectations created by a boom economy.

He does not merely describe the Niger Delta as a victim. He tries to understand how victimhood, grievance, opportunism, militancy and communal responsibility became entangled.

The Community Intellectual

The book also introduces us to Emaduku as a community intellectual.

His interventions in Udu politics, the affairs of the Union of Udu Communities, the BEDC electricity crisis and the Aladja-Ogbe-Ijoh conflict may appear specifically local to readers outside Delta State. Yet they reveal something important about citizenship.

For Emaduku, politics is not an abstraction taking place in Abuja. It is electricity that does not reach communities, institutions that fail, traditional authorities that are contested, neighbours who become enemies and local leaders whose conduct affects ordinary people.

His letter to the Aladja and Ogbe-Ijoh communities in August 2017 is particularly striking because it draws upon memory as a form of moral argument. Recalling a period when the two communities enjoyed close relations, he writes:

“I recall with clarity and fond memories the peaceful brotherly relationship that existed between your two communities. I recall my first visit as a student of Aladja Grammar School to the then sleepy community of Ogbe-Ijoh.”

Then comes the question:

“What or who brought this calamity upon you?”

It is a simple question, but its force comes from the person asking it. This is not an outsider offering an editorial judgement on an unfamiliar communal conflict. It is someone invoking a shared past to challenge a present he regards as intolerable.

In passages such as this, Colours of My Mind becomes something more than political commentary. It becomes journalism of memory.

The Courage to Criticise One’s Own

Perhaps the most admirable quality in the collection is Emaduku’s willingness to criticise his own side.

He challenges Niger Delta militancy, questions aspects of Urhobo political culture and takes issue with Igbo nationalism. His targets include governments, political parties, ethnic communities, religious institutions and ordinary citizens.

His critique of Niger Delta militancy is particularly uncompromising:

“You are like the mad man who in an attempt to solve the problem of rats in his house, set the house on fire only to sleep out in the rain.”

He then goes further, arguing that militants are in an even worse moral position than Boko Haram because, unlike the latter’s distorted religious justification, the militants have no theological escape from the consequences of their actions.

The language is severe. But its significance lies in its direction. Emaduku is not simply denouncing a distant enemy. He is speaking to his own community.

The same tendency appears in his criticism of Urhobo social media activists. Reacting to the celebration of the Olu of Warri’s English-language coronation speech alongside criticism of another Urhobo leader for speaking English, he asks:

“‘You well?’ ‘Them, do you?’”

The humour is unmistakably Nigerian, but the underlying point is serious. Emaduku is attacking what he sees as the selective application of standards according to ethnic and political convenience.

That willingness to apply uncomfortable standards to one’s own community gives the book much of its moral credibility.

Interesting Contradictions

Emaduku’s arguments also contain tensions that the book does not always resolve.

In “Where Did Our Values Go?”, he criticises Pentecostal Christianity for having “demonised those traditional beliefs that helped maintain the right values in our communities”. At one point he declares:

“Christianity is our greatest problem.”

Yet elsewhere his writing is unmistakably shaped by Christian moral convictions, and he criticises the failures of Christian institutions from within a recognisably Christian worldview.

There is a fascinating argument waiting to be developed here: whether Christianity itself is the problem, or whether the problem lies in the way Christianity has been institutionalised and practised.

The same applies to restructuring. Emaduku advocates greater autonomy while criticising state and local political actors for misappropriating resources and failing their communities.

To be fair, these are not necessarily irreconcilable positions. Greater decentralisation can coexist with stronger accountability. But the argument requires more careful institutional reasoning than the book provides.

The contradictions should therefore not simply be condemned. They should have been explored.

The Missing Conversation with His Former Self

Perhaps the greatest missed opportunity in the book is the absence of retrospective reflection.

Emaduku tells us that these writings were gathered “to record my thoughts for posterity.” Posterity, however, has arrived with questions.

What does he now think of his earlier positions? Which predictions came true? Which political figures surprised him? Did subsequent events alter his understanding of restructuring, ethnic politics, militancy, religion or protest? What does he now make of the Buhari years from the vantage point of their aftermath?

A concluding essay would have transformed the book. It would have allowed the author to sit across the table from his younger self and ask whether he was right, where he was wrong and what subsequent events taught him.

That would have turned an archive of opinion into a record of intellectual development.

The Audience Problem

The book also has an audience problem.

Its local material is potentially fascinating to readers from Delta State and the Urhobo community but can be opaque to outsiders. Its national essays, meanwhile, sometimes do not quite reach the depth required to distinguish them from the large body of Nigerian political commentary already available.

The answer is not to remove the local material but to contextualise it. A glossary of local institutions and terms, brief explanatory notes and perhaps a short introduction to the political history of Udu and the wider Urhobo area would help national readers understand why these local disputes matter.

The local can become national when properly framed.

Indeed, one of the book’s most important contributions could be precisely this movement from the particular to the general: showing how the Nigerian state is experienced not in constitutional abstractions but through electricity supply, traditional institutions, communal conflict, employment, political representation and the conduct of local leaders.

A Book Worth Preserving

Colours of My Mind is a worthwhile book.

Its value lies in the fact that Emaduku has preserved something that disappears easily in the digital age: the record of sustained civic engagement.

Social media is full of opinions. Far fewer people preserve those opinions systematically enough for others to examine them years later. Emaduku has done so.

His collection allows us to see what Nigeria looked like from the mind of one engaged citizen at particular moments in its recent history. It captures anger, disappointment, humour, moral conviction, ethnic anxiety, community pride and the persistent desire to make sense of a difficult country.

Emaduku belongs to the democratic tradition of citizens who believe that public affairs are too important to be left entirely to politicians. He is also a community intellectual and citizen commentator who decided to put his thoughts on record.

That is valuable in its own right.

Conclusion

The greatest contribution of Colours of My Mind is perhaps its demonstration that citizenship is more than voting, paying taxes or complaining about government. Citizenship also involves thinking, arguing, remembering and holding oneself and one’s community accountable.

That is what Emaduku attempts throughout these pages.

Crispin Oduobuk is a former acting editor of Weekly Trust.