By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. It is dangerous to be a Nigerian in a part of India called Goa, described by Wikipedia as India’s smalles...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
It is dangerous to be a Nigerian in a part of India
called Goa, described by Wikipedia
as India’s smallest but richest state. It is also probably one
of India’s most xenophobic states.
On October 30 this year, a Nigerian by the name of
Obodo Uzoma Simon was murdered in cold blood by a gang of Indian brutes for no
apparent reason. But the Indian press, taking cues from their local
politicians, immediately associated the murder with a drug deal gone bad. Well,
this turned out to be false, as you will see shortly.
A day after the murder, about 200 Nigerians in Goa
staged a raucous protest to register their outrage. They wanted the murderer of
their compatriot to be brought to justice and for Nigerian consular officers in
India to supervise an autopsy of his corpse. While I admit that the manner of
the protest (smashing road dividers, threatening police officers, dumping
Simon’s corpse in the middle of the highway and halting traffic for hours on
end, etc.) was condemnable and unacceptable, the reaction of Indians to the
protest has been even more disconcerting.
First, after the protest, scores of Nigerians were
arbitrarily arrested and clamped in jail. After this string of arrests, on the
instruction of the police and politicians in Goa, landlords ejected all “black”
people, not just Nigerians, from their apartments. According to the Times of India,
“a resolution [was] passed by a local panchayat headed by the wife of a BJP
legislator, Michael Lobo, banning Nigerians” from living in Goa.
“My landlord said all the 'blacks' had to be evicted
on police instructions,” a 24-year-old Nigerian by the name of Chioma Ghansoli
told the Times of India. “I have
nowhere to go in Goa. Me and my friends
will spend the night at the beach tonight with our luggage." Talk of guilt
by association.
In justifying the onslaught on Nigerians, an Indian
minister by the name of Dayanand Mandrekar told local Indian media that “Nigerians
are like cancer” that must be eradicated from India. In
the wake of this thinly veiled call to mass murder, a video
surfaced on YouTube of a Nigerian being savagely clobbered
with unspeakable barbarity by a bloodthirsty Indian mob. (See the video below).
We have no idea how
many other Nigerians have been lynched in Goa because, well, there are almost
no Nigerians in Goa now. But when a government minister describes an entire
nationality as a “cancer,” it is reasonable that the vulgar herd will interpret
him as giving them the license to cut off (read: slaughter) the “cancerous”
people. The only thing cancer is good for is total annihilation.
 |
| Dayanand Mandrekar: "Nigerians are like cancer." |
When Indians are not lynching “cancerous” Nigerians
physically in Goa, they turn to the Internet to accomplish this. The comments
on news articles involving Nigerians on Indian websites are some of the most
nakedly negrophobic hate-fest I’ve ever seen in my life. Nigerians are called
monkeys, niggers, wild animals, sub-humans, Third World scum (as if India isn’t
the leader of the Third World), and such other dehumanizing and unmentionable
epithets.
The undiluted racist hate against Nigerians in India
isn’t merely spewed under the pseudonymic cover of the Internet; even
billboards revile and demean Nigerians. A particularly jarring billboard
prominently displayed in a Goa town, which a Nigerian living in India called to
my attention to, has the following inscription: “Say No To Nigerian (sic), Say
No to Drugs.”
Apparently, because a few Nigerians living in India
engage in drug trafficking, all Nigerians have been tarred with the same
xenophobic broad brush. Well, it turned out, as I said earlier, that the
Nigerian whose murder is the trigger for the rash of racist assaults against
Nigerians in India was never involved in drugs, contrary to the claims of the
Indian press, local police and politicians.
According to the November
11 edition of the Times of India,
investigations have concluded that “There is not a single drug related case
filed against Nigerian national Obado [sic] Uzoma Simeon who was murdered on
the intervening night of October 30 to 31 at Parra.” Yet, Indians still repeat
the canard that Simon (or is it Simeon?), who was ferociously stabbed more than
25 times, was murdered by rival Indian drug lords. (Oh, so Indians also do
drugs? I thought only Nigerians did!)
All this doesn’t surprise me, frankly. India is an
inexorably racist society. According to
a global survey conducted in October this year, India ranks as the
most racist country on earth. The survey measured
racial intolerance by how “frequently people in a given country said they don't
want neighbors from other races.” India’s
racial intolerance, according to the survey, is equaled only by Jordan. (The
most racially tolerant societies, the survey found, are the United States,
Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Britain, Sweden, Norway,
Latvia, Australia, and New Zealand.)
The current anti-Nigerian hysteria in India is
fueled by two strains of bigotry in the Indian society: a lethal mixture of
visceral negrophobia and Islamaphobia. India has a well-known, age-old problem
with dark skin, a problem that is congealed in the country’s invidious caste
system. Even dark-skinned Indians from
the country’s south are often the victims of racist taunts and denigration, and
Africans, according to many Indians who spoke frankly with me, are considered
ugly, undesirable, and worthy only of ice-cold disdain.
India is, without a doubt, a terrible place for a
black person to call home.
It’s even more terrible if the black person is also
a Muslim. As a consequence of India’s continuing bitter animosities with
Pakistan, many, perhaps most, Indians gaze at Muslims from the jaundiced lenses
of their troubled relations with Pakistanis and instinctively assume that every
Muslim is a Hindu-hating enemy. Of course, this is not true of all Indians, but
it is true of most of them.
For anecdotal evidence, look at the comment sections
of India’s English-language news websites about Nigerians. (I hear that the
local-language websites are way worse). You will find a disproportionate
percentage of commenters claiming that Nigerians are doing drugs to fund
terrorism against Indians. Many commenters on TimesofIndia.com and other Indian
websites also described Nigerians in Goa, including the late Simeon, as “Boko
Haram terrorists”! Yet others called them “muzzies,” apparently a pejorative
term for Muslims in India.
The Indians couldn’t be bothered that the people
they call “Boko Haram terrorists” and “muzzies” are Christian Nigerians. You
would think that a name like “Simon” would at least make that clear to them. Well,
as I pointed out in a previous article three years ago, stereotyping is a great
time saver; it enables ignorant and bigoted people to rush to quick judgment
without the pesky encumbrance of nuance and factual information.
From what I can gather, it is now open season on
Nigerians in Goa. Unspeakable atrocities are being committed against innocent
Nigerians there. The Indian and Nigerian governments must act expeditiously to
halt this madness.
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