By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi I normally don’t respond to responses to my column if the responses do no more t...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
I normally don’t respond to responses to my column if the
responses do no more than disagree with me. But when a response drips wet with
pitiful ignorance and willful misrepresentations, such as Obadiah Mailafia’s
(see his June 7, 2018 response titled “Re: El-Rufai’s hypocritical xenophobia
and Obadiah Mailafia’s Fulaniphobia”), I have a duty to set the record straight
in the interest of knowledge.
I will ignore his juvenile ad hominem attacks on me. It bespeaks
the barrenness of his intellect that he chose to descend to unprovoked
sophomoric name-calling. Ad hominem attacks are the rhetorical weapons of first
choice for the intellectually weak.
Mailafia’s original article in the BusinessDay of May 11, 2018 titled “Genocide,Hegemony and Power in Nigeria,” which inspired my June 2, 2018 column, is
an astonishingly ill-informed farrago of xenophobic and simplistic garbage that
masqueraded as serious thought. I encourage the reader to read the column
firsthand.
In the article’s very first paragraph, Mailafia deployed
what he understands to be Gramscian hegemony to explain “what is going on in
relation to the genocide being perpetrated by the Fulani militias in the Middle
Belt of our country today.” I actually let out a guffaw when I read this. It’s
an entirely illiterate misuse of the concept. Gramsci used hegemony to explain
how the ruling classes in capitalist society naturalize their dominance by
getting subordinate classes to accept ruling class values as “common sense”
values for all. This is achieved through artful consensus building, which
requires that the consent of the subordinate classes be perpetually won and
re-won voluntarily, “for people’s material social experiences constantly remind
them of the disadvantages of subordination and thus poses a threat to the
dominant class.”
The replacement of “Hausa” rulers with “Fulani” rulers in the
far north is certainly hegemonic now. No one questions it without coming across
as an extremist, anachronistic troublemaker. But by what logic can hegemony
explain “genocide”? Is Mailafia implying that people who are being murdered by
“Fulani militia in the Middle Belt” have accepted and internalized their
condition as “common sense” and that fighting the “genocide” would come across
as deviant and out-of-line?
Even when Gramsci extended his theory of hegemonic domination
to encapsulate physical violence, he used it exclusively to describe
totalitarian states such as Tsarist Russia. He recommended a "war of
maneuver," which is resistance against the state through physical violence,
in such circumstances. But Mailafia didn’t even reference this extension of
hegemony. He referenced ideational hegemony for which Gramsci recommended a
“war of position.” Mailafia obviously used the word only because it sounds
grand and intellectually fashionable, not because he understands it.
This is just one of several examples of Mailafia’s
self-indulgent wooliness and pedestrianism. He also, for instance, described
the racial admixture between black Africans and “North Africa and the Middle
East” that putatively produced the Fulani as “biological miscegenation.”
“Miscegenation” is a thoroughgoing racist term that only
white supremacists use—with a tone of violent disapproval— to describe
interracial marriage between white and black people. White racists hurled that
word at Obama throughout his presidency, and many of them suffered untoward
consequences for it. But Mailafia, a
hate-filled, self-aggrandizing dilettante, uses the word to describe how the
Fulani, his compatriots, evolved.
In both his BusinessDay
article and his response to me, he repeats the claim that “Guinea” is the
“ancestral homeland” of the Fulani. He got this information entirely from
Wikipedia. Well, here is why the claim is unacceptably ignorant. Linguistic evidence
shows that the provenance of the Fulani is traceable to what is now Senegal. In
his 1971 article titled "West Atlantic: An Inventory of the Languages,
their Noun-Class Systems and Consonant Alternation," Emeritus Professor David
Sapir, son of famous linguist Professor Edward Sapir, found that the closest
language to Fulfulde in the world is Serer, Senegal’s third largest ethnic
group after Wolof and Fulani. Serer is a Niger-Congo language like most
languages in West Africa. (Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president who
is famous for Negritude, was Serer).
Linguists have also found a smattering of Berber words in
Fulfulde, which gave rise to the theory that the Fulani are the product of the
ethnic fusion of Berber and Serer people around Senegambia. Only a
Wikipedia-reliant dilettante like Mailafia would describe Guinea as the
“ancestral home” of the Fulani. The fact that the Fulani enjoy relative
numerical dominion in Guinea doesn’t make the country, which was invented by
colonialists only a few decades ago, their “ancestral homeland,” whatever that
means.
In any case, ethnic identities and formations are
intrinsically labyrinthine and irreducible to Mailafia’s simple-minded, vulgar empiricist,
and essentialist formulations. And talking about the “ancestral homeland” of any
contemporary Nigerian group, not just the Fulani, whose ancestors have
populated this country centuries before the formation of Nigeria is textbook
case of “othering,” which is the intellectual precursor to genocide.
I strongly recommend
that Mailafia read Jean-Loup Amselle’s discipline-defining book, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in
Africa and Elsewhere, to understand the fluidity, dynamism, and originary syncretism
of ethnic formations in West Africa. The genetic ancestors of several people
who self-identify as Fulani today never did so several generations ago. For
instance, Amselle showed that thousands of people who were Senufo (an ethnic
group now found in parts of Ivory Coast, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Ghana)
generations ago became Fulani, and many people who were Fulani centuries ago
became Bambara or Mandinka, and so on and so forth.
Mailafia has no knowledge of this vast complexity in identity
scholarship and chooses to mask his ignorance with laughably infantile self-congratulation
and exhibitionistic preening of ill-digested, barely understood concepts.
When I said identity is fiction even though it’s an
emotionally valid, politically consequential fiction, which is a stale fact in
identify studies, Mailafia’s theoretically sterile mind couldn’t grasp it. He
wrote: “What he is really saying, in plain English, is this: If a madman from
Damaturu wakes up one morning and solemnly declares and earnestly believes himself,
to be the long-awaited ‘Mahdi’, we are, ipso facto, bound to believe him, ‘even
if that’s not necessarily who they are’. Our friend has clearly read too much
postmodernist trash for his own good.” I
was embarrassed on his behalf.
Let me explain this in a simpler, less convoluted way that
Mailafia’s a-theoretical mind can hopefully understand. Identity isn’t just
genetic or biological; it is also cultural, historical, emotional, and often
arbitrary and variable. For instance, many people who are called Hausas today merely
changed to that identity; a few decades ago, their ancestors were not Hausa.
Yet, this fact doesn’t invalidate their claim to being Hausa because, in any
case, all modern identity is syncretic and evolutionary. To understand this
point, read Frank A. Salamone’s 1975 article titled, “Becoming Hausa: Ethnic
Identity Change and Its Implications for the Study of Ethnic Pluralism and
Stratification.” When Arjun Appadurai talked of the “paradox of constructed
primordialism,” he was talking about the variability and artificialness of
identity, which nescient jingoists like Mailafia ironically choose to reify.
Interestingly, Mailafia admits that his “effort to explain”
whatever he wrote in his column “may not have been adequate” and that he is “prepared
to concede that” his “conclusions may have been inadequate,” yet he wasted his
energies to write a worthless, self-humiliating rejoinder that was high in juvenile
self-praise and ad hominem attacks and low in substance and nuance.
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