There is a man who lived in a cabin by a pond in Massachusetts, and he wrote something that Nigerians need to read. Not because he knew anything about Nigeria — he died in 1862, long before the British drew their lines — but because he understood something about the relationship between the individual and the state that transcends geography and time.
His name was Henry David Thoreau. In 1849, he published an essay that would eventually be called Civil Disobedience. The circumstances were specific: he had refused to pay taxes to a government that supported slavery and was waging what he considered an unjust war against Mexico. He spent a night in jail. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him and asked: Henry, what are you doing in there? Thoreau replied: The question is, what are you doing out there?
The essay that emerged from this experience is not a manual for revolution. It is a meditation on conscience. Thoreau's central question is this: must the citizen ever resign his conscience to the legislation? Why has every man a conscience, then? He argues that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. That the only obligation any person has a right to assume is to do at any time what they think right.
This is dangerous writing. Every government that has ever existed would prefer that its citizens believe the opposite — that the law is sacred, that order is paramount, that obedience is virtue. Thoreau says: It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. He distinguishes between what is legal and what is just, and he argues that when the two conflict, the individual has not merely the right but the duty to follow justice rather than law.
The Aba women who refused to pay taxes in 1929 did not know Thoreau's essay. Most of them could not read English. But they understood what he understood: that a law which takes from the powerless to enrich the powerful is not a law worth obeying. They understood that when the colonial government sent men to count their goats and their children, what was being counted was not livestock — it was submission. They chose not to submit. They chose, in Thoreau's terms, to stop paying the tax that funded their own oppression.
The youth who gathered at the Lekki Toll Gate in October 2020 were not quoting Thoreau. They were singing the national anthem and waving the Nigerian flag, asking a government to stop killing them. They were exercising what the 1999 Constitution calls the right to peaceful assembly — Section 40 — which guarantees that every person shall be entitled to assemble freely and associate with other persons. They were doing what Thoreau said citizens must do: serving the state with their consciences, which necessarily means resisting it when it becomes the agent of injustice.
Thoreau asks a question that every Nigerian must eventually answer: Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? There are three choices, he says. You can obey and accept injustice. You can work to change the law while obeying it. Or you can break it immediately, as a matter of principle. He does not say which choice is right. He says only that the choice exists, and that pretending it does not exist is itself a choice — the choice of the machine that serves the state without conscience.
The Nigerian who reads Thoreau today must be careful. Thoreau is not a license for chaos. He is not saying that every law one disagrees with should be broken. He is saying that there is a boundary — a point where obedience becomes complicity, where the citizen becomes the tool of their own oppression. He is saying that this boundary exists, that it is different for every person, and that finding it is the work of a moral life.
The budget that allocates more to the presidency's travel than to all the universities combined. The police officer who demands bribes at checkpoints as if it were his salary. The politician who promises what he knows he will not deliver. These are not abstract injustices. They are concrete, daily experiences for millions of Nigerians. And Thoreau's question — shall we be content to obey? — is not an academic exercise. It is the question of whether one will participate in one's own diminishment.
Thoreau did not believe that breaking unjust laws would necessarily change them. He was not so naive. He believed only that the individual must preserve their integrity, even at cost. That there is a kind of violence in allowing oneself to be made into an instrument of wrong. That the tax paid to an unjust government is not just money — it is a signature on a contract one never read, consent given in silence.
The women of Aba broke that silence. The youth of Lekki broke that silence. They were not criminals. They were citizens who understood that citizenship includes the right to say no.
Thoreau's essay ends with no promise of victory. It offers only the certainty that a life lived according to conscience is preferable to a life lived according to fear. This is not a call to revolution. It is a call to honesty — to the willingness to look at the state as it is, to measure its actions against one's own sense of right, and to act accordingly.
The Nigerian who does this will find themselves in good company. The company of women who would not be counted. The company of youth who would not be silent. The company of everyone, across time and space, who has chosen to be a person first, and a subject only when the state earns the right to command their conscience.