Samuel Fury Childs Daly

Articles by: Samuel Fury Childs Daly

Nigerians got their abusive SARS police force abolished – but elation soon turned to frustration

8th January 2021

Assistant Professor Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Duke University

OPINION: Nigerian public protests against the country's notorious SARS police, led largely by young people, seemed to secure a victory when President Buhari agreed to disband the unit; but any sense of celebration has turned sour, with the Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT) appearing to be a new label for an old institution, says Duke University Assistant Professor Samuel Fury Childs Daly.

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Samuel Fury Childs Daly
Assistant Professor

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Samuel Fury Childs Daly is an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University, North Carolina, and is a historian of 20th century Africa. His research bridges East and West Africa, combining the methods of legal, military, and social history to understand the period after independence. His current project considers the history of the Biafra War (1967-1970). This book, entitled A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020), connects the crisis conditions of the war and the forms of crime that came to be associated with Nigeria in its wake. Using an original body of legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra, it traces how technologies, survival practices, and moral ideologies that emerged in the context of the fighting shaped how crime was practiced and perceived after Biafra’s defeat. By connecting the violence of the battlefield to violent crime, it provides a new perspective on law and politics in Africa after colonialism. His other areas of interest include the global history of drug trading, customary law in the British Empire, and the history of policing and prisons.