Review: <i>Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria</i>, by Saheed Aderinto

Over the last few years, environmental historians have been treated to a score of outstanding works on animals, empire, and colonialism.Saheed Aderinto's excellent Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa is the latest addition to this burgeoning subfield.Focusing primarily on 20th-century colonial Nigeria, Aderinto argues that colonialism produced modern animal subjects through integrating animals into colonial legal, economic, veterinary, and conservation regimes.In this way, not only were humans colonial subjects-so too were animals-something that has been overlooked by most historians of Africa.Aderinto's research is impressive, comprising a vast array of archives, periodicals, books, radio programs, photography, and other sources in multiple languages.Focusing primarily on the colonial period, the book outlines and analyzes both colonial and Indigenous Nigerian perspectives on animals, including their roles in commerce, religion, nationalism, politics, colonial power, public health, conservation, and nutrition.Through focusing on animals, Aderinto successfully integrates environmental history, social history, political history, visual history, food history, and the history of science and medicine in a compelling way.The book breaks new empirical and theoretical ground and is likely to become a field-defining study for Africanists with interests in animals.The first chapter focuses on cattle and how the colonial state turned "precolonial livestock into modern beasts" (p.34) through veterinary medicine, the enclosure of 91