Every mum is a historian of some sorts, including mine. Mum's account of the stories related to my birth and early childhood is often so lucid that it already carved a pictorial embossment on my memory - no thanks to her opportunistic repetitions. Ordinarily, I, like every other person, am not able to delineate when exactly my memory got awakened from it developmental lull, to be able to register every event related to me.

Prior to this time of 'memory awakening', I definitely lived my infantile life virtually oblivious of everything around me. I could have been pampered, I don't know. I could have been manipulated, I don't know. And It would have been a blank page in the history of my life, but my mum ensured a continuum, as her succinct account filled in the gap.

Well, I grew up to know my mum as the woman that went through the excruciating pains of labour to extricate me from her uterine confinement, after about 10 months of gravidity. I don't know when I sucked and nibbled at her breasts, but I was told I gluttonously did that for more than one year. Could she be lying? I think I believe her. After all, she and my dad have the monopoly of that story!

And my siblings, I discovered I 'co-owned' the same parents with them. I'm not sure when that partnership deal was sealed, because I can't remember haven seen their faces before in heaven, where I purportedly came from!

Oh my! my siblings could be so loving at times, and at other times, I wished I could 'exchange' them for 'better' siblings. I later grew up to know that they were supposed to be 'permanent' and I learnt to enjoy the good moments with them, love them -just as they love me- and also tolerate their excesses. After all, just like I never had to choose my parents, I had to accept my siblings as well. Nobody ever gave me a chance to choose. Could I have chosen better? I don't know.

There got to a point in my life where I could understand what everybody around me was saying, just as I could express myself. The consequence of this was that I had to run tiresome errands for my parents and older siblings. Those were some of the times I wish I could 'exchange' them! But again, I had no choice.

Did I say I understood what everybody was saying? Well, everybody but two.

Those two were our neighbours. In my childish mindedness, I was initially confused. Why couldn't I understand those two? Try as I may, I couldn't just make sense of whatever they were saying, especially when some 'strange' people came around to visit them and they seemed to speak similarly. Funny enough, the two neighbours lived in separate apartments and they 'sounded' differently when they spoke. That made me even more confused.

As I grew in age and thankfully, knowledge, I also met people outside our neighbourhood who I couldn't understand their..........now I knew I they called it LANGUAGE. Naturally, I got to understand that they were from different tribes. In other words, another groups of people different my own group, who spoke different languages. Interesting!

So again, nobody gave me a chance to choose my own tribe.

When I asked my dad if he was the one that chose our tribe, he burst into a tearful guffaw. After which he told me NOBODY HAS A CHANCE TO CHOOSE WHERE OR SHE COMES FROM. He was the one that later told me that those two neighbours, who had left our neighbourhood by then, were from different tribes namely, Urhobo and Tiv.

That statement stuck with me: nobody has a chance to choose where he comes from. I never had a chance to choose my gender, my parents, my siblings and now my tribe. And by extension, my country. It means I could have been female, come from the tiv tribe or been a Liberian. Right? Life has indeed left us with few but still very many choices.

May be if everybody had a chance to choose, I would have been justified to challenge my erstwhile neighbours on why they chose to be Urhobo and tiv. May be if we all had a chance to choose, I would have the moral licence to abuse and villify other tribes with gusto, and in extreme cases, shed their blood on the platter tribalism and sectionalism. May be, just may be. But of course, just like me, they had no such chances!

But while depriving me of many chances, life has also bestowed me with several choices. Chief among them is the choice and the chance to realise that I have a common denominator with every other person from another tribe. And that denominator is that we are all human beings, irrespective of the tribe. After all, I could have come from that tribe I hate with so much passion. Would I defect? No, it's not a political party!

But as an adult, I think am more confused now than I was in my childhood. I am Confused at the disposition of many people, many of them educated, who go about promoting tribal bigotry and sectional hate campaigns, even sponsoring the killings of other tribes men on the platter of tribal jingoism.

I weep for these shallow minds.

I need to ask myself this simple question-before I treat that man from another tribe with utter disdain; before I accord him the punishment of the alleged 'sins' of his long-dead tribes men; before I come on social media to unduly defend my tribes men when they err and downplay the achievements of others from different tribes and ultimately, before I put his neck to my sword- DID I HAVE A CHANCE TO CHOOSE?


If my answer is yes, then I have some 'morbid rationale' to be a tribal bigot.

NB: Even in an instance where we have a choice, there is no reason whatsoever to condemn others for their innocuous choices. The hallmark of humanity is mutual tolerance. Anything less is subhuman and animalistic.