Boko Haram and the politics of history: Why Moses Ochonu’s new book matters, By Osmund Agbo

Let me begin with something personal: Moses Ochonu is my friend. I met him through another friend, Farooq Kperogi. The three of us, all part of the Nigerian diaspora in the United States, formed a sort of intellectual alliance and fondly refer to ourselves as the Three Amigos. We share a fellowship in which conversation, contention, disagreement, and laughter coexist with the rare pleasure of intellectual companionship unencumbered by the demand for conformity. We have co-authored a book, Dis Life No Balance, and together host Diaspora Dialogues, a monthly conversation that provides a forum for interrogating Nigeria, its contradictions, and its contested histories.

Having read much of Mo’s work and listened to enough of his arguments, I sometimes feel I have reached that curious point at which eating, regurgitating, and eating again begin to resemble one continuous meal. Yet when he turned his formidable historical lens to a subject that has long fascinated me, namely political Islam, I found his latest book, Boko Haram: The Past of the Present Upheaval, quite unputdownable.

I make this disclosure not to stake a claim to objectivity, but to establish the context in which I approach the work under review. Neither Moses nor Farooq has been a mentor to me in the conventional sense. Rather, they have been interlocutors and intellectual companions whose scholarship, arguments, and dissenting perspectives have enriched my thinking in ways that are difficult to quantify.

As a Christian southerner, I have long been struck by the ease with which those of us in the South presume to understand Northern Nigeria while remaining only dimly acquainted with the historical currents, religious traditions, and intellectual ferment that have shaped its complex evolution. Too often, our understanding of the North is mediated through the fragments that break into national consciousness as headlines: Boko Haram’s insurgency, the scourge of banditry, the politics of Sharia, anxieties over political Islam, and the seemingly interminable cycle of religious tension and bloodshed. We encounter the North principally through the spectacle of its crises while remaining largely estranged from the deeper histories, ideas, and traditions that have given the region its distinctive character.

Within this narrow framing, we become familiar with the region’s wounds without fully understanding the history behind them. Societies cannot be understood solely through their tragedies. They must also be understood through the histories, ideas, institutions, religious traditions, and political struggles that precede those tragedies. This is where Ochonu’s book proves particularly valuable.

Ostensibly a study of Boko Haram, the book derives its deeper significance from its insistence that the insurgency cannot be adequately understood as an isolated contemporary phenomenon. Boko Haram emerged from a historical landscape marked by Islamic reform, religious contestation, struggles over authority, political transformation, and competing interpretations of legitimate governance. Such historical depth is often missing from public discourse.

Boko Haram has been variously explained through poverty, unemployment, political exclusion, corruption, state failure, climate pressures, religious extremism, and international jihadist networks. Each explanation illuminates part of the problem, but none, standing alone, is sufficient.

Ochonu’s contribution is to situate these contemporary realities within a much longer historical continuum while resisting the temptation to treat historical antecedents as inevitable causes. That distinction is crucial.

To explain is not to excuse. Understanding the intellectual and historical origins of violence does not diminish the culpability of those who murder civilians, abduct children, or terrorise communities. Condemnation is morally indispensable, but it cannot substitute for explanation. A society that understands only the symptoms of its crises will repeatedly find itself surprised by their recurrence.

One of the most compelling dimensions of Ochonu’s analysis is his treatment of the political uses of history. Boko Haram has invoked Usman dan Fodio, the nineteenth-century Islamic reformer whose jihad profoundly altered the political and religious architecture of much of what is now Northern Nigeria. Such invocations matter because history is not merely a record of what happened. It can become a reservoir of legitimacy, identity, grievance, and political aspiration. But invocation does not establish inheritance.

The fact that Boko Haram appeals to dan Fodio does not, by itself, establish a direct theological or ideological descent from him. Nor does the history of Islamic reform in Northern Nigeria lead inexorably to contemporary jihadism.

The intellectual task is more exacting: to determine what connects these historical moments, what separates them, and how contemporary actors selectively appropriate the past to legitimize present ambitions. Here, the politics of history becomes inseparable from the history of politics. The past is not inert. It is remembered, interpreted, contested, reconstructed, and sometimes weaponised.

Ochonu also helps preserve a distinction frequently lost in polemical discussions: religious reform is not synonymous with religious extremism. Similarities in language, symbolism, or doctrine may suggest intellectual affinities, but resemblance alone cannot establish causation or direct descent.

This distinction is particularly important in understanding Boko Haram’s hostility toward Western education and aspects of modern political life. Movements that denounce modernity can simultaneously exploit its technologies, communications systems, organizational structures, and political mechanisms. The more illuminating question, therefore, is not simply what Boko Haram rejects, but what it selectively appropriates, how its ideology has evolved, and why particular ideas resonate under specific political and social conditions.

This is precisely where history must engage with political economy, state conduct, local grievances, and international influences. Poverty does not automatically produce insurgency. Religious conviction does not inevitably lead to violence. Political exclusion does not mechanically generate radicalization. The challenge is to understand how these forces interact and the circumstances under which they become combustible.

Ochonu does not pretend to settle every question, nor should he. A single volume cannot exhaust the theological, historical, political, economic, and sociological dimensions of an insurgency whose roots and consequences span generations and national boundaries. Questions will inevitably remain about the precise relationship between earlier religious traditions and contemporary militancy, the role of state violence and international jihadism, the nature of local grievances, and the experiences of communities caught between insurgents and security forces.

But a book need not answer every question to change the quality of the questions we ask. That, ultimately, is Ochonu’s achievement. He restores historical depth to a conversation too often dominated by immediate security concerns. He reminds us that Boko Haram is not merely a security problem, but also an intellectual, historical, political, and cultural phenomenon. For me, however, the significance of the book extends beyond Boko Haram.

As someone from southern Nigeria, I consider it a valuable resource for anyone who wishes to understand Northern Nigeria beyond stereotype and political caricature. More importantly, it complicates assumptions about a region too often encountered through the shorthand of violence, religion, and political crisis. It invites readers to engage with the religious traditions, intellectual struggles, political formations, and historical experiences that have shaped a region whose destiny remains inseparable from that of the rest of Nigeria.

Ultimately, Boko Haram: The Past of the Present Upheaval reminds us that history is neither a mausoleum of dead events nor a deterministic script for the future. It is a contested inheritance from which contemporary actors draw symbols, identities, grievances, ideas, and claims to legitimacy.

For a country perpetually confronted by the consequences of an insufficiently examined past, that is an important lesson. A nation does itself a profound disservice when it buries its history rather than confronts it. History does not disappear because a society chooses not to speak about it. It persists in fractured identities, unresolved grievances, political suspicions, and the enduring consequences of decisions made in the past.

I know this not merely as an abstraction, but as a matter of personal experience. I am an Igbo man born during the Nigerian Civil War, a conflict that formally ended decades ago but whose consequences remain woven into the lives of people from my part of Nigeria. For many of us, the war is not a distant episode confined to textbooks and archives. Its effects remain visible in our families and communities, as does the enduring sense that an essential chapter of our national story remains incompletely told.

This is one of the deeper lessons of Ochonu’s book. His willingness to excavate the historical foundations of Boko Haram demonstrates what becomes possible when we resist the temptation to treat history as an inconvenience. Nigeria needs that same intellectual courage in confronting its own unresolved past. A nation cannot fully understand its present, much less build a more honest and cohesive future, while suppressing the difficult chapters that helped shape it. We do not heal historical wounds by refusing to name them; we merely allow their consequences to persist.

For anyone who wishes to understand Northern Nigeria, its culture, religious traditions, intellectual evolution, political formations, and historical encounters, Moses Ochonu’s book is an indispensable place to begin. Mo has been generous enough to make the book universally available. Read it. Engage with it. Allow it to complicate what you thought you already knew.

Osmund Agbo is a medical doctor, author, and the 2026 recipient of the Thabo Mbeki Prize for Scholarship and Public Service.