The main aim of this paper is to illustrate civil society in action in with a view to examining the extent to which the picture that emerges either corroborates or departs from the dominant contentions in the existing literature on the subject1. While scholarship on civil society in African formations brims with conjectures and refutations, comparatively little has been done by way of empirical work to substantiate or rebut this rash of claims2. In this paper, I attempt partly to redress the situation by examining what might be called actually existing civil society, in this case the boycott of mobile telephone services on Friday September 19 2003 by subscribers in Nigeria. Although the boycott went largely unreported in the Western media, it remains, for many reasons, a watershed in the development of oppositional culture in the country.