In the Shadow of the Bush

In the Shadow of the Bush, P. Amaury Talbot's 1912 ethnographic account from William Heinemann, London, documents the religion and social life of peoples in what is now southern Nigeria, drawn from Talbot's own colonial-era fieldwork. Its strength is direct firsthand observation recorded close to the time. Its limit is that Talbot wrote as a British colonial official, whose framing and categories reflect that era's colonial ethnography rather than the communities' own self-description; later Nigerian and independent scholarship should be read alongside it.