I'm in that long and arduous process of moving house. As anyone who has ever tried to do it in this city knows, it is back breaking work.
There are all sorts of con artists masquerading as agents, and that is just the start. In looking for a place, one has to fill agency forms, and I noticed that in most of the forms, BEFORE nationality, there is a section for tribe.
I never filled it because I do not consider myself to be from any tribe per se. One of the agents took exception to my not filling that section of the form, so I asked his reason, and he said that the landlord does not want Igbo tenants.
I have heard about that a lot, but it shocked me nevertheless. For me, it is a problem, after all, I am Igbo...
I am not going to go into why there is apparently so much (take your pick from apathy, disdain, hatred and mistrust) for Igbo people.
Personally I think that any man who would judge another solely based on where that person's ancestors first came down from trees is a genuine idiot.
However, the whole conversation with the agent got me thinking about the issue of nationality versus ethnicity.
This question of nation versus tribe is one of the thorny issues that we face in Nigeria. Far too many people have failed to take the leap from identifying themselves as members of their ethnic groups to seeing themselves as Nigerians.
The common argument you hear is that Nigeria is an artificial creation and if it disintegrates tomorrow, the tribes would still be there. I think that view is a historical anachronism.
It is an over-flogged point that change is t the only constant thing in life, and that is what people still holding on to the tribal identity, have either forgotten, or are not aware of.
I want to tell you two stories...
Eight hundred and ten years ago, the people of a small village called Igodomigodo sent a message to the great city of Ife. There was a power vacuum and they needed a king to rule them. The Ooni of Ife sent back a strange message.
He sent some lice, and asked that if Igodomigodo could send back the same louse in three years, he would send them a king. One of the high chiefs, Oliha, put the lice in the hair of one of his slaves with instructions to the effect that the slave could not have a hair cut for three years.
That way, he was able to send back the (fattened) lice to Ife. The Ooni as a result sent his son, Oranmiyan to rule them. Oranmiyan never got to rule.
He left in annoyance and renamed the village Ile Ibinu which was corrupted to Benin. However, his son, Owomika grew up to become Eweka, the first Oba of Benin.
At the time, the people of the village still saw themselves as people of Igodomigodo. Two and a half centuries later, one of Eweka's descendants, Ewuare, began a conquest of the outlying areas.
By the time his great great grandson, Esigie was sitting on the throne in 1504, the entire region west of Benin City up to today's Port Novo, east of Benin City up to today's Ogwashi Uku, North of Benin City up to today's Okpella, and south to today's Warri were paying tribute to the Oba in Benin. The natives of that region were part of the kingdom of the Edo.
We must note that the subjects of this kingdom, especially those who were indigenous to Benin City itself and its immediate outlying towns and villages considered themselves to be Edo people. Thus an insult to one was an insult to another.
This behaviour is nationalistic, and it meant that in the late nineteenth century when the British began their conquest of the region, a British landing at Ughoton was viewed as an attack on the kingdom, and Oba Ovonramwen sent troops to quell that nuisance...
My second, shorter story is about a collection of villages most of which were situated to the east of what was to become known as the River Niger. My own ancestors came from that area.
You see, unlike the Edo to their west, these people did not set out for empire. They were content with living in settled city states as it were. The only people amongst them who showed any imperial tendencies were the people of Arochukwu who probably began their bid for dominance as a result of the slave trade.
The Aros subjugated the people in their immediate vicinity, and on occasion used to launch slave raids as far north as Enugu. But, unlike the Edo, they never attempted to bring the entire region under their control.
The result was that when the British came in the late nineteenth century, they faced a major war in Edo. But in Igbo land, they did not have to fight a sustained conflict.
The man in Abakaliki more than likely celebrated when Arochukwu fell to the invaders. The man in Obosi did not give a toss when Onitsha fell, neither did the man in Nri feel bad when Obosi's turn came around.
The Igbo identity began to evolve during the colonial era, and since the colonists had picked Enugu as their regional capital, it became the de facto Igbo capital.
Thus it was that in 1914, the British by fiat and without consulting the people in that space, created the country called Nigeria. Like almost all countries on the planet, Nigeria was created without consulting the people.
Unlike most other countries though, it would appear that Nigerians are yet to learn to live with each other.
We have also not accepted that the evolution of national identity takes time, a lot of intermarriage, a lot of resettlement, and a lot of infighting.
One of the fondest claims of the 'break Nigeria up' brigade is that having ethnically homogeneous nations would hasten development. Such a claim is terribly erroneous.
The most successful country on the planet at the moment is undoubtedly the United States of America, and that country is in no way ethnically homogeneous.
If you look at the five biggest economies in the world right now (after the US), Germany, Japan, China and the UK, only Japan can lay some claim to being an ethnically homogeneous country. At the same time, these people forget that probably the best example of a failed state on God's green earth at the moment, Somalia, is largely ethnically (and religiously) homogeneous.
Breaking Nigeria into nations with single tribes will not make the current problems disappear. People like Ibori, Taminu, Dora and Daniels would still have their mortgages to pay in the West, and would continue as is usual.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I would say that most of the advocates of break up are either semi-literate, or have simply failed to think things through.
To be honest, aside from the cry 'break up', I have never heard any one of them ever put forward a plan as to how he would make his new country successful if such a break up should occur...
Nigeria may well be a "contraption", an amalgam of various ethnicities but so is the US - a colonial contraption that was acquired through genocide against Native Americans, conquest and theft of land from Mexico, etc. Germany is a "contraption" that was brought together by Otto von Bismarck's hand of iron in various wars during the mid nineteenth century.
Italy is also a "contraption" of city-states brought together by Garibaldi, and sacrificing their sovereignty to become part of a bigger entity. So is Spain with Andalucians, Basques, Castilians and Catalans.
Spain still has its own separatist groups, part of the legacy of Franco's regime. The UK is a country whose constituent countries were all conquered by the English. India has at least 25 active separatist groups, some of them with governments in exile!
Our people should stop trying to rewrite history by suggesting the existence of nations of antiquity to which Igbos, Ijaws, Yoruba, etc can return to. Yes, the Soviet Union failed and broke up, but that was a case of the constituent republics returning to their pre-Soviet existence.
As the Soviet Union was breaking up, "contraptions" like Italy, Spain, the UK, etc, were subsuming their sovereignty into an even bigger "contraption" - a European super-state. We are still waiting for the "contraption" of the US to return California, Nevada and Arizona to Mexico. While all these peoples are consolidating their strength, many of our people in their myopia and selfishness are calling for division.
Reader Comments (34)
post a comment
* = Required information