HOW TO KILL A NATION BY DESTROYING ITS NATIONALITIES

Nigeria should tell its story with maturity and honesty, writes Francis Adewale

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism”- Professor Wole Soyinka.

Sometimes what others say about their experience rings home to me. I was particularly disillusioned about events happening in our dear country Nigeria when I read David Brooks most recent column in the New York Times and to my utter surprise and consternation, I found a lot of parallels between what he wrote about America and the ongoing troubles in Nigeria. He wrote, “Great nations thrive by constantly refreshing two great reservoirs of knowledge. The first contains the knowledge from the stories we tell about ourselves. This is the knowledge of who we are as a people, how we got here, what long conflicts bind us together, what we find admirable and dishonourable, what kind of world we hope to build together. This kind of knowledge is not merely factual knowledge. It is a moral framework from which to see the world.

Homer taught the ancient Greeks how to perceive their reality. Exodus teaches the Jews how to interpret their struggles and their journey.

For America, the dominant story has been filled with resonant characters — Irving Berlin and Woody Guthrie, Aaron Burr and Cesar Chavez, Sojourner Truth and Robert Gould Shaw.

For Nigeria, the Yorubas see their world through Oduduwa and Obatala who created the world and started from Ife, and thence to Oyo-Ile, Benin, etc. Oduduwa was the first divine king of the Yoruba people, and Obatala fashioned the first human beings out of clay. It is said the Yoruba people believe that their civilization began at Ile-Ife where the gods descended to earth. The Yorubas believe all civilizations can trace their roots to a quarter at Ile-Ife, the spiritual but not necessarily the political capital of the World. The stories Yorubas tell themselves help them cope with tragedy, such as the sacking of arguably the most advanced political city-state south of Sahara- Katanga and the internecine wars spurned thereafter. Therefore, the Yorubas honour elders and traditions, understand tragedy and see the need for a strategic long-term view of things compared to Pyrrhic victory.

In the Igbo creation myth, the God, Chineke, created man with part of Himself. Here, the God, Igwe, and the Goddess, Ala, (both components of the creator God, Chineke) met and formed human beings, male, and female. This is the root of Igbo individualism, if your chi is bound up in the Supreme Being, why should you bow to another chi?

According to the Bayajidda legend, the Hausa states were founded by the sons and grandsons of Bayajidda, a prince whose origin differs by tradition but official canon records him as the person who married Daurama, the last Kabara of Daura and heralded the end of the matriarchal monarchs that had erstwhile ruled the Hausa people. According to the most famous version of the story, the story of the Hausa states started with a prince from Baghdad called "Abu Yazid". When he got to Daura, he went to the house of an old woman and asked her to give him water, but she told him the predicament of the land, how the only well in Daura called kusugu was inhabited by a snake called Sarki, who allowed citizens of Daura to fetch water only on Fridays. Since "Sarki" is the Hausa word for "King", this may have been a metaphor for a powerful figure. Bayajidda killed Sarki and because of what he had done the queen married him for his bravery. After his marriage to the queen, the people started to call him Bayajidda which means "he didn't understand (the language) before. This myth helps the Hausas to seamlessly accept their Fulani conquerors in the 19th century and assimilate them.

The Fulani have a picturesque creation myth. The Fulani live and die by dairy farming. Not surprisingly, therefore, they believe that the world began as a great globule of milk. Then the god Doondari descended, and from the milk he created stone. In due course, the stone created iron, the iron created fire, the fire created water and the water created air. When this chain reaction was complete and the five elements were in place, Doondari came down a second time and shaped the elements into people.

But the people proved to be proud. So Doondari created blindness, and blindness defeated the people. When blindness itself became proud, Doondari created sleep, and sleep defeated blindness. And when sleep, in turn, became too proud, Doondari created worry. And worry defeated sleep. Worry. Like breathing and eating, it is something that all humans do. The Fulani will have their word for it. But they will never tell you what that word is, rather they as nomadic people will use other people’s terms and do things in the same way as people in their host community permit. They blend in easily even though they are constantly transitory in outlook. This myth explains why they value property and ownership far above all others, including human lives.

I draw on these small examples to illustrate the divergent perceptions of reality among the over 300 ethnic groups in Nigeria. Ordinarily, such disparities should not work against the creation and formation of a nation, as we see in the USA if they must face a common enemy together, be it, colonialism, war, plagues, or common religion.

Nigeria however got its independence from Britain without fighting a single battle. The original plan is for each of the major regions to move for independence at its or her own pace.

In the United States of America, the revolutionary wars, as a national experience invited all Americans to share what Walt Whitman calls the passion to contain “the whole vast carnival of stories, to see themselves in its themes and to feel themselves within this story”. This is further accentuated by the commonality in the Declaration of Independence - the quest for freedom, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

This emotional and moral knowledge gives Americans a sense of identity, a sense of ideals to live up to and an appreciation of the values that matter most to its people — equality or prosperity or freedom. Even though blacks and Native Americans were excluded. This shared knowledge helped Americans fighting slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow laws, the right to vote, housing, employment, the right to bear arms as members of a militia and other economic and human rights. Through this, they discover a shared destiny and shared affection for one another. It is a lot easier to rally around a George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr who can draw on this ethos to demand a higher elevation of liberty, prosperity, and a call to a “better angel of our nature.”

Compare that to Nigeria, where joint emotional and moral knowledge is lacking. And an appeal for the education of citizens by Chief Obafemi Awolowo can easily be demagogued by saying he only wants to emphasize the advantages gained by his race being among the first to be exposed to Western education.