By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Nigeria will be 60 years old as a formally independent
country next Thursday, but the divisibility and tiresomely endless feuding that
have emerged as some of its defining features since its forced birth more than
a century ago show no sign of abating.
The immobilizing factiousness of the past five years have
particularly conduced to the growing sentiment that Nigeria won’t be around
much longer. Opinion leaders of major
ethnic groups are plotting exit strategies from the Nigerian union.
But as much as I respect the rights of any people to
dissociate from a toxic Nigerian union that seems to hold everybody back, I
think that news of Nigeria’s imminent dismemberment is greatly exaggerated.
What I foresee happening—bits of which are actually already
manifest—is that Nigeria would use its current ethnographic resources to evolve
into a completely different country. And here’s my admittedly imperfect ethnographic
forecast of an evolved Nigeria.
Let me begin from northern Nigeria, Lugardian northern
Nigeria, that is. Home to more than half of Nigeria’s over 500 ethnic groups,
northern Nigeria is Nigeria’s most diverse region. Even the two major ethnic
groups from Southern Nigeria are represented in the North.
There are Yoruba people who are native to Kwara and Kogi
states and there are Igbo people—of the Ezza, Izzi and Effium sub-groups, who
are also found in Ebonyi State—who are native to at least four of Benue State’s
23 local governments. That makes northern Nigeria the microcosm of Nigeria.
But I prognosticate that an evolved northern Nigeria would
be monolingual with a few holdouts. The Hausa language already predominates in
16 of northern Nigeria’s 19 states. Only Benue, Kogi and Kwara states have so
far resisted the linguistic hegemony of the Hausa language.
Every subsequent generation in the 16 Hausaphone northern
Nigerian states internalizes the logic and desirability of Hausa-inflected
linguistic uniformity and a corresponding abandonment of the plethora of native
languages that dot the region’s linguistic map.
Even Fulfulde (as the language Fulani people speak is
called) is dying in such northeastern states as Adamawa, Taraba, Gombe and
Bauchi, and the resistance to Hausa in Kanuri-speaking Borno and Yobe weakens
every generation.
The relentless march of the Hausa language in Northern
Nigeria will ensure that a somewhat unified mega identity, riven only by
religion, would emerge, and memories of previous ethnic and linguistic
identities would recede or disappear—in the same way that many Hausa-speaking
communities in northwest Nigeria have no memory that their distant ancestors
were not Hausa-speaking people.
So two dominant identities would emerge from northern
Nigeria: Hausaphone Muslim northerners and Hausaphone Christian northerners. The
Tiv, Idoma, Igede, Igbo, etc. people of Benue State who have historically
resisted the Hausa language would share more in common with the emergent ethnic
alchemies of southern Nigeria than they would with Hausaphone northern
Christians.
The Yoruba-speaking people of Kwara and Kogi states would
also fit more easily with their kith in the Southwest, with Ilorin Emirate
being a holdout even though its sociolinguistic and geographic singularities
would not permit its seamless fusion into the Hausaphone northern Muslim
identity.
The people of what has been called Kwara North—the Baatonu
and Boko people of Baruten and Kaiama local governments and the Nupe people of
Pategi and Edu local governments— who are culturally more similar to other
Muslim northerners than they are to the Yoruba-speaking parts of Kwara State would
easily meld well into the Hausaphone Muslim identity. Both the Igala and the
Ebira of Kogi have cultural and linguistic kith in southern Nigeria and are easily
amenable to Hausaphone Muslim/Christian identities.
The former Eastern and Midwestern Nigeria are already
witnessing the incipience of an alchemic ethnic fusion of disparate groups enabled
largely by the enormous creolization of Nigerian Pidgin English and the Pentecostalization
of the Christianity of the regions.
By creolization, I mean the transformation of Nigerian
Pidgin English from an anarchic, emergency contact language for episodic
encounters to a stable, rule-governed, self-sufficient native language that
millions of people speak and identify with on an emotional and cultural level
such as is the case with the Krio of Sierra Leone.
The creolization of Nigerian Pidgin English seems
unstoppable and appears primed to play the role Hausa is playing in northern
Nigeria as an ethnographic glue to coalesce otherwise historically disparate
people. The shared Christian identity of the people of the regions, which is
now increasingly Pentecostal Christianity, would accentuate this process.
As anyone who pays attention to Edo State would testify, the
new identity formation among southern Nigerian minorities is already killing
Islam in Edo North where it has existed for decades. There is a mass
Christianization of Muslims in northern Edo, and this would only intensify in
the coming generations.
As I’ve shown previously, Islam is a strong building block
for identity formation in Northern Nigeria, so that “Hausa” and “Muslim” have
become misleadingly synonymous in the Nigerian popular imagination. That is why
people of northern Edo used to be erroneously called “Bendel Hausa” even though
they speak an Edoid language that is almost mutually intelligible with the Bini
language.
The association of Islam with Hausa—or, to use the trendiest
hyphenated identity formation, Hausa-Fulani—is leading to its repudiation in
even historically Muslim polities in southern Nigeria such as Yorubaland. Stories
of Yoruba Imams who aren’t allowed to lead prayers in the North and of the
distrust of the authenticity of the Islam of Yoruba people by Hausa Muslims
help to solidify resistance to Islam. Today, overtly Muslim Yoruba people are
seen by the non-Muslim Yoruba as perfidious toadies of the Muslim North.
If this attitude persists—and I don’t see any reason why it
wouldn’t—it means southern Nigeria would become wholly Christian a few
generations from now.
It is not clear to me now if Pidgin English in the former
Western Nigeria would be creolized like it is becoming among southern minorities
because of the social prestige of the Yoruba language and the numerical power
of its native speaker base, but there are already signs that this is happening
among the Igbo people.
The Igbo language is the only Nigerian language with
millions of native speakers which is nonetheless classified as an “endangered
language” because of the tendency toward what Professor Chukuwma Azuonye has called
“the fetishization of English” among the Igbo, including code-mixing and code switching, assimilation of Pidgin English
into the Igbo language, among other factors he identified in his article titled
“Igbo as an Endangered Language.”
I have a personal encounter with this. In 2000 when news
filtered through that there were retaliatory mass slaughters of northerners in
the southeast, the editor-in-chief of Weekly Trust where I worked
requested that I travel there to cover it.
He said I could easily pass for an Igbo man and that my linguistic
handicap in the Igbo language wouldn’t be an issue since Igbo people actually
revere their kith who are monolingual in English. What he said turned out to be
accurate. Throughout the five days I traveled all over the region, not once was
I suspected to be anything but an Igbo.
I got along with a mixture of Pidgin English, Standard
English, and a strategic sprinkling of “nna” and other popular Igbo
intensifiers in my speech. In fact, when I was returning to Kaduna, someone in
Onitsha actually asked why I was going to “where they are killing our people.”
“Nna, na my business,” I said.
In other words, generations from now, the fissiparity that
drives Nigeria’s current ethnic tensions will dissipate and the fresh
contradictions of an evolved Nigeria would frustrate its dismemberment.
For instance, Hausaphone northern Christians, who are a huge
chunk, would be invested in a united Nigeria for their self-survival. Although
they would share linguistic affinities with the Hausaphone Muslim North, their
apprehensions about religious domination would connect them to a creolized
Christian South.
More than that, though, Nigeria has generated an enormous
repertoire of collective national identity symbols that the upcoming
generations, who won’t be moored to the same identities as us, would find hard
to throw away.
Of course, as the example of Somalia shows, nations don’t
endure merely because of the similarities and shared memories of the people that constitute it. That was why Steve
Goodier once said, “We don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note.
Only notes that are different can harmonize. The same is true with
people.”
Oshiomhole and His Lizard and Lion Hyperbole
I watched a video clip of Oshiomhole's interview with ChannnelsTV a day before the Edo governorship election where he characterized Obaseki's promise to extirpate his "godfatherly" tentacles in Edo as the threats of a "lizard" to a "lion." (Obaseki is the "lizard" and he is the "lion.")
That's an unusually over-dramatic hyperbole, which aggrandizes the enormity of Oshiomhole's defeat--and the deep psychic rupture he must be nursing now.
The defeat of a lion by a lizard is the stuff of legends. The Bible's "David and Goliath" story pales miserably in comparison!
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