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While the opening of Kaduna Textiles Limited in 1957 represented the encouraging beginning of the industrialization of Kaduna, its closure in 2002 had significant consequences for workers and their families. Without payment of their termination entitlements, former KTL workers, wives, and widows met to establish the Coalition of Closed Unpaid Textiles Workers of Nigeria. Compiling a list of the names of deceased KTL workers, they hoped that "the work of the dead" would put pressure on government to pay their entitlements. For former KTL employees, their new ways of thinking about work, labor organization, time, money, and health were challenged by deindustrialization, while the lives of their widows and children were shattered by the loss of their husbands and fathers. Widows buried their husbands and subsequently worked to provide their children with education, housing, and food, while their children had various responses to their families' declining economic situation. As such, deindustrialization in Kaduna, as elsewhere in the world, has contributed to unemployment, poverty, hunger, illness, and death. While remittances for dismissed KTL workers remain unpaid and the mill has not reopened, the Coalition's listing of the names of the dead continues as a constant reminder of their society's injustice.

"Many of the men who worked at KTL who have died since the closing of the Kaduna Textiles Limited mill without being paid their entitlements have had their names included on the list compiled by the Coalition of Unpaid Textile Workers Nigeria. This listing of names, along with their graves, funeral programs, and death certificates constitute "the work of the dead" in redressing some of the failures of their government and their society. The lack of food and health care, the minimum requirements needed for a decent life, suggest the need for new ways of thinking about the growing disparity in wealth—with ever greater inequality—in Nigeria. While
this situation may be lessened through the reduction of corruption and through government programs for widespread food, health care, and education may be implemented, many Nigerians are considering the creation of alternative paths to well-being. Through the numerous programs proposed for increasing youth employment —training and support for small and medium enterprises, agricultural programs, and more efficient and environmentally sound smaller-scale industries, the possibilities for a new deindustrialized era are being imagined and may be pursued. "

The production of manufactured textiles at the Kaduna Textile Limited mill was an important development which led to the employment of many men from the small ethnic groups in southern Kaduna and Middle Belt states. The KTL Handbook, which workers received, laid out work rules which emphasized the importance of being on time. This aspect of industrial labor—the importance of keeping to time with clocks and watches—differed from many workers' earlier experience of agricultural work. Yet despite KTL workers' acceptance of the new work and time regime, the closure of the mill due to irregular electricity, antiquated equipment, and lack of government support led many to return to agricultural labor or to service employment in the city. For those preferring to remain in Kaduna, the difficulties of living without regular income and access to food and health care has contributed to the many health problems experienced by former KTL workers and their subsequent deaths.

Introduction. -- The City of Kaduna as Colonial Construct -- New Work-Time Regimes and the Rise and Fall of Kaduna Textiles Limited -- Workers' Health and Deaths after the Closure of Kaduna Textiles Ltd. -- Burying the Dead: Hometowns, Houses, and Cemeteries -- Widows' Dilemmas and Experiences of Hardship -- Interlude: Widows' Portraits -- Consequences for Children, Problems for Families -- Conclusion: Death, Deindustrialization, and Time.

"Until this century, Northern Nigeria was a major center of textile production and trade. Textile Ascendancies: Aesthetics, Production, and Trade in Northern Nigeria examines this dramatic change in textile aesthetics, technologies, and social values in order to explain the extraordinary shift in textile demand, production, and trade. Textile Ascendancies provides information for the study of the demise of textile manufacturing outside Nigeria. The book also suggests the conundrum considered by George Orwell concerning the benefits and disadvantages of 'mechanical progress,' and digital progress, for human existence. While textile mill workers in northern Nigeria were proud to participate in the mechanization of weaving, the 'tendency for the mechanization of the world' represented by more efficient looms and printing equipment in China has contributed to the closing of Nigerian mills and unemployment. Textile Ascendancies will appeal to anthropologists for its analyses of social identity as well as how the ethnic identity of consumers influences continued handwoven textile production. The consideration of aesthetics and fashionable dress will appeal to specialists in textiles and clothing. It will be useful to economic historians for the comparative analysis of textile manufacturing decline in the 21st century. It will also be of interest to those thinking about global futures, about digitalization, and how new ways of making cloth and clothing may provide both employment and environmentally sound production practices."

Inhaltsverzeichnis: Material religion and Islamic reform in northern Nigeria -- Islamic dress, textile production, and trade in the time of the Sokoto Caliphate -- Muslim identity, Islamic scholarship, and cloth connections in Ilorin -- The Sardauna's turbans -- Veiling, gender, and fashion -- Performing pilgrimage : worship and travel, textiles and trade -- Marks of progress : Islamic reform and industrial textile production in Kaduna -- Failures of modernity and Islamic reform : dress and deception in northern Nigeria in the 21st century -- Epilogue. Moral imagination, material things, and Islamic reform.

In 2008, Northern Nigeria had the greatest number of confirmed cases of polio in the world and was the source of outbreaks in several West African countries. Elisha P. Renne explores the politics and social dynamics of the Northern Nigerian response to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which has been met with extreme skepticism, subversion, and the refusal of some parents to immunize their children. Renne explains this resistance by situating the eradication effort within the social, political, cultural, and historical context of the experience of polio in Northern Nigeria. Questions of vaccine safety, the ability of the government to provide basic health care, and the role of the international community are factored into this sensitive and complex treatment of the ethics of global polio eradication efforts.

This book draws upon thinking about the work of the dead in the context of deindustrialization—specifically, the decline of the textile industry in Kaduna, Nigeria—and its consequences for deceased workers' families.The author shows how the dead work in various ways for Christians and Muslims who worked in KTL mill in Kaduna, not only for their families who still hope to receive termination remittances, but also as connections to extended family members in other parts of Nigeria and as claims to land and houses in Kaduna. Building upon their actions as a way of thinking about the ways that the dead work for the living, the author focuses on three major themes. The first considers the growth of the city of Kaduna as a colonial construct which, as the capital of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, was organized by neighborhoods, by public cemeteries, and by industrial areas. The second theme examines the establishment of textile mills in the industrial area and new ways of thinking about work and labor organization, time regimens, and health, particularly occupational ailments documented in mill clinic records. The third theme discusses the consequences of KTL mill workers' deaths for the lives of their widows and children. This book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, development studies, anthropology of work, and the history of industrialization.

AbstractPeople's relationships with trees reflect the landscape histories associated with distinctive forms of political and religious authority and the moral imaginings of people in Nangodi and its environs in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Their memories of particular trees serve as historical evidence of overlapping yet specific forms of political authority exercised by chiefs, earth priests, past colonial officers, and present-day Ghanaian government officials. In Nangodi, individual family ancestral tree shrines, clan tree cemeteries, and sacred groves associated with earth priests and chiefs coexist with the Red Volta West Forest Reserve and with a succession of tree-related development initiatives. While these relationships are often considered as separate claims to political authority, spiritual power, or scientific knowledge, this paper argues that these relationships of people and of trees are better conceptualized as historical accumulations that represent intersecting and contested forms of authority and political rule continuing into the present. Indigenous tree species such as ebony are associated with sacred groves controlled by chiefs, silk-cotton trees with earth priests' cemeteries, and baobab trees with particular families coexist with foreign teak trees associated with colonial forestry. This situation suggests how institutions of governance as well as the actions of individuals have environmental consequences. A consideration of historical memories of people and trees in places such as Nangodi enables a rethinking of political and environmental dichotomies, and complicates the social dynamics of` the preservation and destruction of trees and forests around the world.