That day in Gusau, the banker Olatunji accused the journalist Ibrahim of penis theft. All of a sudden, Ibrahim found himself in mortal danger from a crowd. They closed in on him with murderous intent, and only the presence of quick-thinking policemen saved him from a grisly death. But what made this case truly unusual, and makes it a textbook case of Nigeria's neuroses and its perplexed modernity, was that Ibrahim later sued Olatunji in a court of law for defamation and false accusation. His response to this intolerable threat to his life was the formalized idea of the law guaranteed by the state. He answered jungle justice with civil justice. And it was at this point that the story dropped out of the public view.

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Crowds are attractive because of their egalitarian promise. The mob is a form of utopia. Justice arrives now, to right what has for too long been wrong with the world. As Elias Canetti wrote in his masterful psychological study, Crowds and Power, "All who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal." In this sudden equality is part of the appeal of a lynching. But, it is a spurious appeal. As Canetti says of the equality that mobs feel, "it is based on an illusion; the people who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel equal forever."

When I asked my Nigerian friends to tell me about their own close calls with mob violence, I was surprised, and a little dismayed, by how many of them actually had stories to tell. Eghosa Imasuen, a sharp-minded and witty novelist, told me about his experience at Alaba, the main electronics market in Lagos. This was in 2003, and the salesboy, who had opened the cardboard box of a television, wishing to force a sale, began to loudly allege theft. It was a hustle. He had done it before. As Imasuen put it, "An expletive-filled denial saved me. It was scary. I had received a few slaps before the crowd noticed that my friend and I were too angry to be thieves." The crowd turned on the accuser instead, and gave him a severe beating before taking him to the chairman of the market, who in turn handed him to police.

In the case of Akin Ajayi, who writes on arts and culture for Nigerian and international publications, it happened one day when he was fifteen, playing truant from the elite boys boarding school, King's College. He had snuck off campus, in Obalende, on Lagos Island, to buy some suya, the spicy grilled meat popular all over the country. A misunderstanding over change, or perhaps, again, a deliberate hustle, from the suya seller, led to Ajayi being suddenly surrounded by violent merchants. He felt the danger, and broke into a run. For a hundred yards, he was pursued by them. It frightens him still, to think of that day.

Elnathan John, who is also a journalist and satirist for Nigerian newspapers, had been taking photos of a government raid on an illegal market in Abuja. The government officers, though armed, were beaten back; the situation became dangerous all of a sudden, even for onlookers. One man, a black-marketer of petroleum products, objected to John's camera, and tried to chase him down and hand him over to the angry crowd of traders. John was just barely able to run around a corner, jump into his car, and speed off. The memories are fresh in his mind: It happened just this year.

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Those of us who have lived a long time in Nigeria have heard, in the market places, the cries of, "Thief, thief!" We have seen chases that won't end well for the person being chased. We have all seen, at the very least, in some market square or busy intersection, the charred remains of what used to be a human being, what used to be some mother's son, some child's hapless father. Many of us remember hearing of how a boy of 11, accused of kidnapping a baby, was burned alive near the National Stadium in Lagos in 2005. In that case, as in the case of the Aluu 4, a video recording was made of the incident and circulated; part of it was broadcast on television. There can be little doubt that before the current year is through, several more people will be lynched in Nigeria, for petty crimes or on the basis of false accusations.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

When I'm in Nigeria, I find myself looking at the passive, placid faces of the people standing at the bus stops. They are tired after a day's work, and thinking perhaps of the long commute back home, or of what to make for dinner. I wonder to myself how these people, who surely love life, who surely love their own families, their own children, could be ready in an instant to exact a fatal violence on strangers. And even though I know that lynchings would largely disappear in a Nigeria with rule of law and strong institutions -- just as they have largely disappeared in other places where they were once common -- I still wonder what extreme traumas have brought us to this peculiar pass. I suppose it must be a blood knot, one that involves all the restless ghosts of our history-maddened country: the gap between rich and poor, the current corruption of the ruling class, the recent military dictatorships, the butchery of the Civil War in the late '60s, the humiliations of British colonialism, the internecine battles of the 19th century, and the horrors of the slaving past. We have, by means of a long steeping, been dyed all the way through with callousness.

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I was frightened out of my skin one Sunday morning last November. In Surulere, near the National Stadium in Lagos -- in other words, close to where the 11-year-old boy was lynched in 2005 -- I saw a van accidentally hit a motorcycle. Neither the motorcyclist nor his passenger appeared to be seriously injured, but the driver of the van, possessed by a sudden panic, didn't stop. He drove off in an attempt to escape. A cadre of motorcycles gave immediate chase, and there was no doubt that they would bring him to a rough form of justice. "They'll catch him," a man said loudly. "They'll certainly catch him." Already, I could see that the driver would soon run into traffic and have to face his tormentors. I was appalled, but not especially surprised. I understood well that this was part of what passed for normal in the troubled street life of present-day Nigeria.