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Ulf Hannerz, 2022, Afropolitan Horizons: Essays toward a Literary Anthropology of 

Nigeria, New York: Berghahn Books, 226 pp., ISBN 978-1-80073-250-6 

 

Ulf Hannerz’s Afropolitan Horizons is a beautifully written book that convincingly 

displays how to do literary anthropology. Starting with a cosmopolitan city roughly located at 

the center of Nigeria, Kafanchan, Hannerz meticulously presents to the readers his personal 

but insightful and analytical essays on various settings and themes in Nigerian writings. The 

autoethnography style of writing adopted by him is highly accessible to anyone, also to those 

without the technical knowledge of the discipline. Afropolitan Horizons is written in lucid 

and simple language, yet it offers a rigorous anthropological analytical perspective on the 

themes, events and locations that shape the trajectory of Nigerian creative writings. Within it, 

one can easily deduce the sociocultural trajectory of Nigeria and how her citizens shape the 

urban cultures of their cities and their borderless reach within the globalized world. Reading 

the book is an entertaining and introductory experience to the literary anthropology of 

Nigeria, especially the inter-cultural contexts that birthed numerous novels, from the ground-

breaking Amos Tutuola’s 1952 Palm Wine Drinkard to contemporary Afropolitan novels like 

Chigozie Ogioma’s 2019 An Orchestra of Minorities. Hanner’s reader-friendly tone is a 

synthesis of fieldwork narratives, the history of Nigeria, and an analysis of his selected 

novels.  

 

Hannerz’s analysis is conceptually framed by here and there, a phrase which appeared 16 

times in the 226-page book. Here and there is the metaphor that Hannerz uses to capture the 

essence of fictional writings on Nigeria. In my view, Hannerz has used this metaphor as an 

indexical sign to capture numerous meanings, some of which could be only accounted for by 

the anthropological eye. For instance, it could refer to authors (Nigerians, non-Nigerians 

(e.g., British colonial workers, European anthropologists like Hannerz), diaspora Nigerians), 

or cities like Lagos, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Kaduna, Nsukka, Enugu, Abuja, or Kafanchan 

which was the anthropological site that attracted the author to Nigeria in the first place. It 



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could also mean any location in Europe or the USA like Oyotunji village in South Carolina 

where anyone with a Nigerian affinity enacts their Nigerianess through 

creativity. Here and there covers cities touched by anyone with a Nigerian connection. It 

includes the ever-changing temporospatial realities of Nigeria, which started during the 

transatlantic slave trade era, and continued in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial 

periods. It bestows a unique experience on Nigerians and creates another one for non-

Nigerians, like Hannerz, that interact with the country and her peoples. It is therefore not 

surprising that Hannerz’s anthology of literary anthropology essays is entangled with themes 

like globalization, hybridity, Pan-Africanism, cultural crossover or fusion, all of which are 

concepts encoded into Afropolitanism. In choosing Afropolitan Horizons as the title, the 

author implied that, in time and space, the Nigerian literary landscape is shaped by the 

involvements of the West African nation with the global community. Thus, Nigerian 

literature has never remained within national boundaries but has been delineated by “the real 

homeland of imagination” that is continuously being “stretched out along” the 

“transcontinental cultural continuum” (p.7). 

 

It is the cultural continuum with Nigeria at its center that Hannerz captures in his 19 chapters. 

He begins with Tutuola’s writings in the first chapter, whose idiosyncrasy of style belittles 

what other Nigerian writers would achieve in a non-native language like English, especially if 

the Palm Wine Drinkard is compared with the writings of Achebe and Soyinka. In chapter 

two, Hannerz switches to a Brazilian writer, Antonio Olinto who wrote about even earlier 

times in the country- the return of freed slaves to their roots. Readers are therefore introduced 

to how Hannerz analyzed Nigerian writing through an Afropolitan eye as different authors, 

cities and characters traversing fluid identities keep popping up across the whole work. This 

way, the author showed that Nigeria is not only microscopic of global cultural diversity but 

also shapes it, as the country’s horizon is habitually stretched beyond local cities, national 

borders or indigenous people to include expatriates, other countries and foreign cities where 

Nigerians are making a living. So, for instance, we see Hannerz discussing Nigerian 

engagements with America (chapters 16, 17 and 19). Nevertheless, we can divide these 

chapters along the lines of Nigerians in Nigeria writing about their country, Europeans in 

Nigeria reporting their experiences about Nigeria, Diaspora Nigerians writing on Nigerian 

life and experiences, and, Nigerians writing about Europe and America. But because 

Hannerz’s anthropological approach is defined by here and there, his analyses are not 

bounded by these dimensions, rather they are intertwined in a multicolored manner that one is 



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easily transposed from one shade to another without knowing it. One can easily see that the 

cities that make up Nigeria and where the stories are set are imagined communities with 

boundaries not limited to their physical locations, but are defined by how much the people 

and stories created in them shape their margins.  

 

Hannerz covered an extensive range of texts in his essays on Nigerian literature. The array of 

Nigerian writings he analyzed bespeaks a comprehensive knowledge of Nigerian fictional 

writings. From the leading internationalized writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju 

Cole and Ben Okri to the globally less-known writers of the Macmillan Pacesetters series, 

Hannerz offers a “view of Nigerian life and Nigerian imagination” (p. 12). Because he 

moved here and there, he also included “certain writings by expatriate colonial officials, 

journalists, and fiction writers with their long-term bases elsewhere, as well as 

anthropologists” (p. 13). Furthermore, by drawing on “a border-crossing combination of 

insider and outsider writings” (p. 12-13), Hannerz practicalizes the need for anthropologists 

“to study sideways: taking an interest in other groups of people involved in knowledge 

production” (p. 13).  Afropolitan Horizons appears to be a valid approach to studying 

Nigerian writings sideways, because journalistic writings from foreign newsmen and colonial 

notes on Nigeria by white colonial administrators do not constitute Nigerian literary writings. 

However, their inclusion in Hannerz’s work contradicts the arguments against studying 

down. Although they are fictitious, they are not authentic Nigerian writing in the same way 

that Tutuola’s, Achebe’s or Adichie’s writings are. Although this limitation is well-buried in 

the convincing enthusiastic tone of Hannerz, it might mislead his targeted audiences in the 

West who are not familiar with Nigerian authors and their works. Nevertheless, Hannerz has 

provided readers with a captivating introduction to an anthropology of Nigerian writings. 

Afropolitan Horizons is strongly recommended for all students and scholars of literature and 

anthropology, and anyone who is interested in knowing about the cultures or history of the 

most populous African nation, Nigeria.  

 

Works cited: 

Tutuola, Amos. The palm-wine drinkard. London: Faber and Faber, 1952. 

Obioma, Chigozie. An orchestra of minorities. New York: Little, Brown, 2019. 

 



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Ibukun Filani is a graduate student in Communication at the University of Massachusetts 

Amherst. He taught English linguistics courses at Augustine and McPherson Universities in 

Nigeria. His research interest is humor and he has written extensively on stand-up comedy in 

Africa.  

 

 

 

© 2024 Ibukun Filani 

 

 


