Abstract
ON 16 August 1983, towns throughout Nigeria's Ondo State erupted into violence. The ostensible cause was popular reaction against rigged gubernational elections which favoured a National Party of Nigeria (N.P.N.) candidate in an overwhelmingly Unity Party of Nigeria (U.P.N.) State. It is easy to dismiss the violence in Undo (and in Oyo State too) as the protest of a frustrated plebiscite – as indeed it was. But western accounts of ‘the breakdown of democracy’ in Africa, so often associated with primordialism, tribalism, and class conflict in plural societies, seldom grasp experiences of the breakdown itself.1 From the external perspectives of national integration and voting behaviour, popular violence involving mobs and crowds is characterised as affective, ‘irrational’ action, in contrast to the ‘rational’ norms of institutionalised democracy.2
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Sociology and Political Science,Geography, Planning and Development
Cited by
10 articles.
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