“In this brilliant and highly readable exploration of masculinity, Smith bores down into the lives of his Nigerian friends and informants to find out what makes them tick. Through his interest in and involvement with a local tennis club for a period of over twenty-five years, he has developed a depth of understanding that even for anthropologists is unusual. Couched within a national context where corruption is rife and living precarious, Smith’s narrative shows how men respond to the challenges they face. If Arlie Hochschild brought the burden of working women to the attention of the world in her book SecondShift, Smith brings to the fore the arduous lives of African men with To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job.”

Robert Morrell, University of Cape Town

“‘Money makes the man’, say Nigerians. In this vivid and gripping ethnography, Smith shows how true this adage is. He reveals the ambiguous and contradictory ways in which money seems at once to enable and to undermine the forms of sociality and intimacy on which the successful enactment of masculinity depends in Nigeria. Brimming with insightful observations and telling details, this book makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of a topic of enormous contemporary significance—in Africa and beyond.”

James Ferguson, Stanford University