Lillian Trager has written a fascinating account of the concept of the “hometown” among the Ijesa Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria and of how important that connection to “home” may be for the formation of local community and identity as well as for advancing community development. The author undertook this research from 1991 to 1998, a time of considerable political change and economic crisis in Nigeria at the national level. A study of the mobilization and relative effectiveness of grassroots development in the context of disarray at the level of the state adds an important piece to our understanding of many contemporary African puzzles.

Trager begins her story with a description of a recently invented tradition of village “community-day celebrations.” These rituals are not only designed to reinforce themes of unity and group identity around a common “hometown” but are also directed at the very concrete goal of raising money for particular projects like digging wells and building community halls.

Are these rituals effective models for promoting development? Trager cautions that, although the Ijesa Yoruba are exhibiting a model of development that many observers have pointed to as preferable to a top-down, government- or outside aid–directed model, it is not without problems. Despite incorporating such “feel-good” concepts as indigenous knowledge and institutions and participatory development, there are real limits to how much such grassroots efforts can achieve. First, they are subject to differences of interests within these communities, whether along lines of gender, wealth, and residence at home or away or within these categories. Second, self-acknowledged limits exist to how much local communities can achieve on their own without any government assistance. Before outside-aid officials get too excited by “grassroots development,” they would be well served by reading Trager’s analysis.

Keeping alive a strong connection to one’s hometown (usually a kinship link through the father’s lineage) and mobilizing resources might be particularly challenging among the highly mobile Yoruba, who may never have actually lived in their ancestral villages. Trager explores the many benefits Yoruba migrants may continue to gain from their hometowns, including very tangible flows of resources (whereas money may primarily flow back home, food may be transferred to the migrant, and people flow both ways) as well as the social and emotional benefits that may flow from cultural and social networks. Entry into politics, for example, may depend on a strong hometown connection. Yoruba people are “joiners,” in Trager’s view, and the new associations provide an additional forum for expressing group solidarity.

This reviewer was particularly interested, as well, by Trager’s discussion of politics and the place of hometown associations in Nigerian political life of the 1990s. That decade was one of considerable political repression and chaos, and Trager does a particularly skillful job of summarizing the experience of political shifts at the local level and how that may have changed the position of the associations. Babangida, who took control by government coup in 1985 and held power until 1993, for example, tried to ban ethnically based associations as threats to “national unity.” Although the government was primarily concerned about larger regional groups like pan-Yoruba associations, the threat from local associations remained clear and ethnic divisions and tensions increased throughout the country. Did these hometown associations retreat into a more local platform and contribute to the civil, rather than the political, society of Nigerian life during the nineties and beyond? The answer is appropriately complex and points to the associations’ continued efforts at political lobbying and influencing regional and national politics while also opening up space for political debate and participation at the very local level. But even there, Trager reminds readers, not all is unity and harmony, and conflict and its resolution remain a constant.

This study is rich in primary data and ethnographic depth and nuance. Trager’s long-term involvement with Nigeria is clearly evident in the multilayered and rich texture of the study. My only criticism is that she did not build on this work to consider some of the wider, more comparative implications of processes of migration, development, and political change. As the Ijesa Yoruba struggle to prosper in an increasingly chaotic economic and political landscape, so, too, do many others in so many other parts of the world. Given Trager’s firm control over this one case study, widening her lens could have been very illuminating.