ABSTRACT
The chapter analyzes how youth in the religious and ethnically divided city of Jos, Nigeria understand and interpret the history of the 20-year-old conflict in their city. It is based on a two-year youth history and culture study conducted between 2019 and 2020, using ethnographic and participatory methods to engage 42 youth between the ages of 18 and 22 from four urban communities. Despite having little or no formal history education, youth developed a sense of historical consciousness through knowledge passed on to them by parents and community members. While the youth participants imbibed some negative ideas about other religious and ethnic groups, these ideas can be disrupted through transformative education experiences such as collaborative history-making. The chapter highlights a transformative process where young people interrogated their own understandings of this history of conflict, documented community histories, and then came together with youth from other communities across ethnic and religious lines, to form friendships and collective and individual civic identities that were more tolerant, and respectful. The study highlights the potential for critical historical consciousness as a vehicle for national unification and conflict resolution in the fragile nation-state, with the potential for application in different national contexts.
