The late Yusufu Bala Usman was an activist scholar, a radical, an anticolonial critic, and a public intellectual. His ideas, passion, and drive energized a young generation of students in the 1980s, and even offered a slight possibility that a campus-based social movement could emerge in Nigeria. He can be categorized as a member of the nationalist historiography school to the extent that his vision falls within it; however, he stands apart from the other examples in this book because of his adoption of a Marxist/socialist approach, his public-oriented service in defense of the poor (although sometimes only of the northern region), his consistently antiestablishment orientation, and his rejection of most things with the mark of Western capitalism. Yet he was also “Afrocentric,” with an aspiration to see Africa as the center of the world, as well as with an ambition to develop homegrown solutions to most of its problems. His scholarship is very critical of Eurocentric ideas, and of the colonial ways of life. On one side of the coin, he criticizes the colonial and postcolonial structures and institutions. On the other side, he exposes a radical, even revolutionary, vision of a new Africa. Like Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah, Usman believes in the struggle to liberate Nigerians—whether between the rich and the poor, the powerless and the powerful, tenants and landlords, subjects and rulers.