Nigeria's turbulent and hamstrung history has plenty to tell us about the current malaise. And, as says writer Maya Angelou, "If you don't know where you have come from, you don't know where you are going." That is what Nigerian authors Feyi Fawehinmi and Fola Fagbule had in mind when they wrote Formation: The Making Of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation. Likewise the former US Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell, with a new book Nigeria and the Nation-State: Rethinking Diplomacy with the Post-Colonial World, says that if you want to reform Nigeria, you have to understand the forces that shape it. From the early 1800s, when Usman Dan Fodio created his Caliphate in Sokoto, through the flowering of city-states like Abeokuta -- famous for producing so many of Nigeria's elite politicians and cultural icons from Olusegun Obasanjo to Fela Kuti -- to the eventual hitching together of the Northern and Southern Protectorates into the formation that is now known as Nigeria. A conversation with the authors, Patrick Smith and Nicholas Norbrook.