Oliver Coates
Biographic Data
| ID | 80237 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Oliver Coates |
| GIVEN NAMES | Oliver |
| FAMILY NAME | Coates |
| SIGNATURE | COATES O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9784-8002 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Blacks of Tunis in al-Timbuktāwī’s Hatk al-Sitr By Ismael M. Montana
The 1943 West African Editors’ Press Delegation to the United Kingdom: Mediating the Metropole from World War II Nigeria
The 1943 Tour of Eight West African editors to London formed a major event in World War II United Kingdom–West Africa relations. The tour is often understood in terms of the symbolic importance of Azikiwe's landmark Memorandum on the Atlantic Charter. This article argues that we should reappraise our understandings of the tour and pay closer attention to African actors and networks beyond the Colonial Office. We must understand Britain as a perip…
Beyond Anonymity: Nigerian Participation in World War One Commemoration: 1919–1939
African Correspondents in the Second World War in Burma: Reporting on Soldiers’ Experiences of Conflict, June–August 1945
The four pioneering African war correspondents who travelled to Asia in 1945 develop our understanding of Africa and the Second World War. This article argues that their tour challenges the existing scholarship on the conflict in two ways. Firstly, it bridges the common divide between “home” and fighting fronts in our understanding of wartime Africa. Secondly, due to the correspondents’ own positionality as colonial African newspapermen, it offer…
African Objects and Restitution
Within wider debates surrounding the restitution of African objects, Achille Mbembe's thought has not yet received full exploration. Compared to major contributions by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Mbembe's work on the matter remains relatively marginal. This article argues that Mbembe's writings on restitution merit greater visibility and centrality. It demonstrates how his views on restitution are distinguished by their unusually broad phil…
Introduction: Media and world making between West Africa and India
May God protect Nigeria from the calamities that have befallen India: Nigerian visions of Indian independence and the birth of Pakistan, 1944–50
India’s 1947 independence and the violent birth of Pakistan had a major and still unexplored impact in West Africa. Despite existing studies assessing Gandhi’s intellectual impact on African leaders, little scholarship has examined African perceptions of events in India and Pakistan. Examining the case of Nigeria, this article moves from a brief history of Nigerians’ interest in South Asian politics during the 1940s to identify two key elements o…
The Oxford Handbook of the African Sahel Edited by Leonardo A. Villalón
The use of biographical narratives in exemplarist moral education
This article examines the use of biographical narratives in contemporary moral education, with particular reference to the exemplarist moral theory (EMT) of Linda Zagzebski. It distinguishes between classical and modern versions of exemplarist moral education, highlighting the seminal contribution of Augustine’s Confessions. Itself an autobiography, Confessions presents a new way to read a life, highlighting a transition from the conformist patte…
Symposium Introduction: The Pedagogical Potential of Exemplar Narratives in Moral Development and Moral Education
This symposium engages the important question of how exemplars might shape the character of learners, focusing on the pedagogical potential of exemplar narratives. In recent years there has been growing interest in the topic of moral exemplars, from educational, philosophical, and psychological perspectives. The pedagogical potential of learning by example has been known since antiquity, though the respect accorded to emulating heroes or saints w…
Nigeria and the World Wars
The First and Second World Wars marked a turning point in Nigeria’s history. The unprecedented speed and intensity of social and cultural change in Nigeria during the Second World War were accompanied by military service transformations that saw more Nigerians traveling to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East than ever before. Nigerian elites experienced an intensified engagement with African American politics while soldiers were exposed to Asian cu…
Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa . By Mauro Nobili
This book reveals the existence of a distinct nineteenth-century text within the body of a well-known source for pre-colonial West African history: the Tārīkh al-fattāsh. Nobili shows (p. 121) how the latter text, written by Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir partly to legitimize the rule of Aḥmad Lobbo in the Hamdallahi Caliphate on the Middle Niger, was embedded within a seventeenth-century work by Ibn al-Mukhtār: the Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār. Peeling away multiple …
African American Journalists in World War II West Africa: The NNPA Commission Tour of 1944-1945
The National Negro Publishers Association (NNPA) Commission to West Africa in 1944-1945 represents a major episode in the history of World War II Africa, as well as in American-West Africa relations. Three African American reporters toured the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and the Congo between November 1944 and February 1945, before returning to Washington, DC to report to President Roosevelt. They documented their tour in the page…
Jihadists of North Africa and the Sahel: Local Politics and Rebel Groups, by Alexander Thurston
Alexander Thurston, Jihadists of North Africa and the Sahel: Local Politics and Rebel Groups. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 360 pages, £ 22.99. ISBN: 978-1108726863.Thurston’s ‘Jihadists’ focuses on the political alliance building of Salafi-Jihadist groups across north-western Africa. Far from being the ‘delocalized roving predators’ of the popular imagination, Thurston shows how these groups pursue localised alliances and accommodation …
Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement By Alexander ThurstonSearching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa By Scott MacEachern
Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement By Alexander ThurstonSearching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa By Scott MacEachern Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement By Alexander Thurston (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics), viii + 333 pp. Price HB £24.00. EAN 978–0691172248.Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa By …
The Threat of Aerial Bombing in World War Two Lagos, 1938–1943
The spectre of air bombing attacks on West African cities during World War Two remains an unexplored dimension of World War Two history. Lagos had long been perceived as vulnerable to attack from neighbouring Dahomey (Benin), and the Fall of France in June 1940 intensified these threats, while increasing anxiety concerning potential Axis raids. Focusing on air-raid planning in Lagos particularly, this article will argue that the possibility of ae…
New Perspectives on West Africa and World War Two: Introduction
Focusing on Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria and the Gold Coast (Ghana), this article analyses the historiography of World War Two, examining recruitment, civil defence, intelligence gathering, combat, demobilisation, and the predicament of ex-servicemen. It argues that we must avoid an overly homogeneous notion of African participation in the war, and that we should instead attempt to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants…
Understanding Boko Haram
Understanding Boko Haram Coates Oliver Coates Oliver University of Cambridge [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 119, Issue 476, July 2020, Pages 493–497, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaa006 Published: 29 May 2020 Article history Received: 12 August 2019 Accepted: 12 December 2019 Revision received: 13 December 2019 Published: 29 May 2020
World War II and West African Soldiers in Asia, 1943–1947
Collateral Damage
Drone warfare is only the most prominent of a series of social and technological developments leading to remote and abstracted forms of injury and death. In response to Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir K. Puar’s connecting of queer theory with “permanent war” in “Queer Theory and Permanent War,” the present article examines the way in which queer scholarship can productively engage with non-Western bodies and sexualities. Considering sub-Saharan Africa a…
Nigeria and the World: War, Nationalism, and Politics, 1914–60
The years 1914–60 witnessed an acceleration and intensification of contacts between Nigerians and the wider world. While some impacts are familiar—global depression of the 1930s, two World Wars, and the emergence of anticolonial nationalism after 1945—other relationships remain obscure. This chapter outlines key developments in Nigerian politics during the colonial period and identifies key political actors. It demonstrates the recurrent importan…
The War, like the Wicked Wand of a Wizard, Strikes Me and Carry Away All that I Have Loved: ” Soldiers’ Family Lives and Petition Writing in Ijebu, Southwestern Nigeria, 1943–1945
The social isolation of the African soldiery is a recurrent assumption in the historiography of the Second World War in Anglophone Africa; such factors as the experience of Hausa soldiers within a cohesive barracks community, a strong sense of warrior identity, and few ties to civilian life are too often generalized into an account of the soldiery as necessarily isolated. Focusing on Ijebu in southwestern Nigeria, an area with little history of c…
African Voices and the Historical Memory of the Firs World War in Nigeria, 1918-1939
La mémoire historique de la Première Guerre mondiale en Afrique de l'Ouest anglophone est encore mal comprise. Cet article, utilisant la presse nigérianne et la philosophie politique développée par Nnamdi Azikiwe, particulièrement dans son ouvrage bien connu Renascent Africa, démontre l'importance de ce conflit dans les consciences africaines jusque les premiers mois de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. S'opposant à certains récits soutenant que la mém…
Between Image and Erasure
Approximately 73,290 West Africans traveled to South Asia during World War II, but relatively little is known about their activities on the subcontinent. The photographs of African soldiers in India published in the British Army's RWAFF News, a Bombay-printed newspaper specifically designed for West African troops overseas, provide a rare and little-known insight into the lives of African soldiers in India. Existing accounts of African military s…
His telegrams appear to be hysterical, but he is very astute: Azikiwe's spectacular self and the 1945 General Strike in Nigeria
Nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe won international acclaim through his support of Nigerian workers during the 1945 General Strike, but the important role of Azikiwe’s sophisticated textuality has rarely been acknowledged. Although he was already an accomplished writer and poet, Azikiwe’s success in 1945 is instead vaguely assigned to his charisma and oratory; this refusal to analyse Azikiwe’s textuality leads to the unsatisfactory contention that Aziki…
The War, like the Wicked Wand of a Wizard, Strikes Me and Carry Away All that I Have Loved: ” Soldiers’ Family Lives and Petition Writing in Ijebu, Southwestern Nigeria, 1943–1945
The social isolation of the African soldiery is a recurrent assumption in the historiography of the Second World War in Anglophone Africa; such factors as the experience of Hausa soldiers within a cohesive barracks community, a strong sense of warrior identity, and few ties to civilian life are too often generalized into an account of the soldiery as necessarily isolated. Focusing on Ijebu in southwestern Nigeria, an area with little history of c…
Narrative, time, and the archive in an African Second World War memoir: Isaac Fadoyebo’s A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck
This article will argue that Isaac Fadoyebo’s memoir A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck deserves recognition as a work of life-writing and a unique literary account of an African soldier’s military service in Nigeria, Sierra Lone, India, and Burma. While previous discussions of Fadoyebo’s memoir have approached it either as historical source material or as a documentary proof of an otherwise lost history, this article will demonstrate that Fadoyebo’s …
His telegrams appear to be hysterical, but he is very astute: Azikiwe's spectacular self and the 1945 General Strike in Nigeria
Nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe won international acclaim through his support of Nigerian workers during the 1945 General Strike, but the important role of Azikiwe’s sophisticated textuality has rarely been acknowledged. Although he was already an accomplished writer and poet, Azikiwe’s success in 1945 is instead vaguely assigned to his charisma and oratory; this refusal to analyse Azikiwe’s textuality leads to the unsatisfactory contention that Aziki…
The Threat of Aerial Bombing in World War Two Lagos, 1938–1943
The spectre of air bombing attacks on West African cities during World War Two remains an unexplored dimension of World War Two history. Lagos had long been perceived as vulnerable to attack from neighbouring Dahomey (Benin), and the Fall of France in June 1940 intensified these threats, while increasing anxiety concerning potential Axis raids. Focusing on air-raid planning in Lagos particularly, this article will argue that the possibility of ae…
New Perspectives on West Africa and World War Two: Introduction
Focusing on Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria and the Gold Coast (Ghana), this article analyses the historiography of World War Two, examining recruitment, civil defence, intelligence gathering, combat, demobilisation, and the predicament of ex-servicemen. It argues that we must avoid an overly homogeneous notion of African participation in the war, and that we should instead attempt to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants…
Collateral Damage
Drone warfare is only the most prominent of a series of social and technological developments leading to remote and abstracted forms of injury and death. In response to Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir K. Puar’s connecting of queer theory with “permanent war” in “Queer Theory and Permanent War,” the present article examines the way in which queer scholarship can productively engage with non-Western bodies and sexualities. Considering sub-Saharan Africa a…
African Voices and the Historical Memory of the Firs World War in Nigeria, 1918-1939
La mémoire historique de la Première Guerre mondiale en Afrique de l'Ouest anglophone est encore mal comprise. Cet article, utilisant la presse nigérianne et la philosophie politique développée par Nnamdi Azikiwe, particulièrement dans son ouvrage bien connu Renascent Africa, démontre l'importance de ce conflit dans les consciences africaines jusque les premiers mois de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. S'opposant à certains récits soutenant que la mém…
Narrative, time, and the archive in an African Second World War memoir: Isaac Fadoyebo’s A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck
This article will argue that Isaac Fadoyebo’s memoir A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck deserves recognition as a work of life-writing and a unique literary account of an African soldier’s military service in Nigeria, Sierra Lone, India, and Burma. While previous discussions of Fadoyebo’s memoir have approached it either as historical source material or as a documentary proof of an otherwise lost history, this article will demonstrate that Fadoyebo’s …
Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria By Brandon Kendhammer
Nigeria is home to around 85 million Muslims, the same size as the population of Egypt, and since 2000 the country has become embroiled in a public debate around 12 states’ decision to enact Shariʿa law provision for their citizens following the nation’s return to democracy in 2000 (p. 2). For many Western observers, there remains a paradox between increasing support for democracy throughout the Islamic world, and the enduring commitment of many …
Hubert Ogunde's Strike and Hunger and the 1945 General Strike in Lagos: Labor and Reciprocity in the Kingdom of Ọba Yéjídé
Hubert Ogunde's little-known 1945 opera Strike and Hunger provides a unique opportunity to examine the ways in which late colonial politics were reimagined in drama. Strike and Hunger was inspired by the 1945 General Strike in Lagos and offers an allegorical dramatization of these events. This article will suggest that we move beyond previous accounts of the opera, which understood Strike and Hunger as emblematizing nationalist resistance to colo…
Nigeria and the World: War, Nationalism, and Politics, 1914–60
The years 1914–60 witnessed an acceleration and intensification of contacts between Nigerians and the wider world. While some impacts are familiar—global depression of the 1930s, two World Wars, and the emergence of anticolonial nationalism after 1945—other relationships remain obscure. This chapter outlines key developments in Nigerian politics during the colonial period and identifies key political actors. It demonstrates the recurrent importan…
The War, like the Wicked Wand of a Wizard, Strikes Me and Carry Away All that I Have Loved: ” Soldiers’ Family Lives and Petition Writing in Ijebu, Southwestern Nigeria, 1943–1945
The social isolation of the African soldiery is a recurrent assumption in the historiography of the Second World War in Anglophone Africa; such factors as the experience of Hausa soldiers within a cohesive barracks community, a strong sense of warrior identity, and few ties to civilian life are too often generalized into an account of the soldiery as necessarily isolated. Focusing on Ijebu in southwestern Nigeria, an area with little history of c…
African Voices and the Historical Memory of the Firs World War in Nigeria, 1918-1939
La mémoire historique de la Première Guerre mondiale en Afrique de l'Ouest anglophone est encore mal comprise. Cet article, utilisant la presse nigérianne et la philosophie politique développée par Nnamdi Azikiwe, particulièrement dans son ouvrage bien connu Renascent Africa, démontre l'importance de ce conflit dans les consciences africaines jusque les premiers mois de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. S'opposant à certains récits soutenant que la mém…
Between Image and Erasure
Approximately 73,290 West Africans traveled to South Asia during World War II, but relatively little is known about their activities on the subcontinent. The photographs of African soldiers in India published in the British Army's RWAFF News, a Bombay-printed newspaper specifically designed for West African troops overseas, provide a rare and little-known insight into the lives of African soldiers in India. Existing accounts of African military s…
His telegrams appear to be hysterical, but he is very astute: Azikiwe's spectacular self and the 1945 General Strike in Nigeria
Nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe won international acclaim through his support of Nigerian workers during the 1945 General Strike, but the important role of Azikiwe’s sophisticated textuality has rarely been acknowledged. Although he was already an accomplished writer and poet, Azikiwe’s success in 1945 is instead vaguely assigned to his charisma and oratory; this refusal to analyse Azikiwe’s textuality leads to the unsatisfactory contention that Aziki…
World War II and West African Soldiers in Asia, 1943–1947
Collateral Damage
Drone warfare is only the most prominent of a series of social and technological developments leading to remote and abstracted forms of injury and death. In response to Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir K. Puar’s connecting of queer theory with “permanent war” in “Queer Theory and Permanent War,” the present article examines the way in which queer scholarship can productively engage with non-Western bodies and sexualities. Considering sub-Saharan Africa a…
Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement By Alexander ThurstonSearching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa By Scott MacEachern
Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement By Alexander ThurstonSearching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa By Scott MacEachern Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement By Alexander Thurston (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics), viii + 333 pp. Price HB £24.00. EAN 978–0691172248.Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa By …
The Threat of Aerial Bombing in World War Two Lagos, 1938–1943
The spectre of air bombing attacks on West African cities during World War Two remains an unexplored dimension of World War Two history. Lagos had long been perceived as vulnerable to attack from neighbouring Dahomey (Benin), and the Fall of France in June 1940 intensified these threats, while increasing anxiety concerning potential Axis raids. Focusing on air-raid planning in Lagos particularly, this article will argue that the possibility of ae…
New Perspectives on West Africa and World War Two: Introduction
Focusing on Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria and the Gold Coast (Ghana), this article analyses the historiography of World War Two, examining recruitment, civil defence, intelligence gathering, combat, demobilisation, and the predicament of ex-servicemen. It argues that we must avoid an overly homogeneous notion of African participation in the war, and that we should instead attempt to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants…
Understanding Boko Haram
Understanding Boko Haram Coates Oliver Coates Oliver University of Cambridge [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 119, Issue 476, July 2020, Pages 493–497, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaa006 Published: 29 May 2020 Article history Received: 12 August 2019 Accepted: 12 December 2019 Revision received: 13 December 2019 Published: 29 May 2020
Jihadists of North Africa and the Sahel: Local Politics and Rebel Groups, by Alexander Thurston
Alexander Thurston, Jihadists of North Africa and the Sahel: Local Politics and Rebel Groups. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 360 pages, £ 22.99. ISBN: 978-1108726863.Thurston’s ‘Jihadists’ focuses on the political alliance building of Salafi-Jihadist groups across north-western Africa. Far from being the ‘delocalized roving predators’ of the popular imagination, Thurston shows how these groups pursue localised alliances and accommodation …
Nigeria and the World Wars
The First and Second World Wars marked a turning point in Nigeria’s history. The unprecedented speed and intensity of social and cultural change in Nigeria during the Second World War were accompanied by military service transformations that saw more Nigerians traveling to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East than ever before. Nigerian elites experienced an intensified engagement with African American politics while soldiers were exposed to Asian cu…
Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa . By Mauro Nobili
This book reveals the existence of a distinct nineteenth-century text within the body of a well-known source for pre-colonial West African history: the Tārīkh al-fattāsh. Nobili shows (p. 121) how the latter text, written by Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir partly to legitimize the rule of Aḥmad Lobbo in the Hamdallahi Caliphate on the Middle Niger, was embedded within a seventeenth-century work by Ibn al-Mukhtār: the Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār. Peeling away multiple …
African American Journalists in World War II West Africa: The NNPA Commission Tour of 1944-1945
The National Negro Publishers Association (NNPA) Commission to West Africa in 1944-1945 represents a major episode in the history of World War II Africa, as well as in American-West Africa relations. Three African American reporters toured the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and the Congo between November 1944 and February 1945, before returning to Washington, DC to report to President Roosevelt. They documented their tour in the page…
Symposium Introduction: The Pedagogical Potential of Exemplar Narratives in Moral Development and Moral Education
This symposium engages the important question of how exemplars might shape the character of learners, focusing on the pedagogical potential of exemplar narratives. In recent years there has been growing interest in the topic of moral exemplars, from educational, philosophical, and psychological perspectives. The pedagogical potential of learning by example has been known since antiquity, though the respect accorded to emulating heroes or saints w…
The Oxford Handbook of the African Sahel Edited by Leonardo A. Villalón
The use of biographical narratives in exemplarist moral education
This article examines the use of biographical narratives in contemporary moral education, with particular reference to the exemplarist moral theory (EMT) of Linda Zagzebski. It distinguishes between classical and modern versions of exemplarist moral education, highlighting the seminal contribution of Augustine’s Confessions. Itself an autobiography, Confessions presents a new way to read a life, highlighting a transition from the conformist patte…
The 1943 West African Editors’ Press Delegation to the United Kingdom: Mediating the Metropole from World War II Nigeria
The 1943 Tour of Eight West African editors to London formed a major event in World War II United Kingdom–West Africa relations. The tour is often understood in terms of the symbolic importance of Azikiwe's landmark Memorandum on the Atlantic Charter. This article argues that we should reappraise our understandings of the tour and pay closer attention to African actors and networks beyond the Colonial Office. We must understand Britain as a perip…
Beyond Anonymity: Nigerian Participation in World War One Commemoration: 1919–1939
African Correspondents in the Second World War in Burma: Reporting on Soldiers’ Experiences of Conflict, June–August 1945
The four pioneering African war correspondents who travelled to Asia in 1945 develop our understanding of Africa and the Second World War. This article argues that their tour challenges the existing scholarship on the conflict in two ways. Firstly, it bridges the common divide between “home” and fighting fronts in our understanding of wartime Africa. Secondly, due to the correspondents’ own positionality as colonial African newspapermen, it offer…
African Objects and Restitution
Within wider debates surrounding the restitution of African objects, Achille Mbembe's thought has not yet received full exploration. Compared to major contributions by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Mbembe's work on the matter remains relatively marginal. This article argues that Mbembe's writings on restitution merit greater visibility and centrality. It demonstrates how his views on restitution are distinguished by their unusually broad phil…
African history and culture studies (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · History (13 works) · Law (13 works) · History (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Colonialism (8 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (8 works)