₦airaland Forum

InyinyaAgbaOku:
Not true. It is not the colonials that told me I have more in common with Nsukka, Nnewi than Oyo or Hausa. Back in the days , people know where similarities in customs stopped.

But knowing that you had more in common with Nsukka than Oyo would not necessarily make you align with Nsukka to fight Oyo town if Oyo town attacked your town, in the old days, would it?

You would do that TODAY automatically because you have been told that you and Nsukka are of ''one people''. ''Igbos''.

Plus you would despise not just the the town of Oyo which attacked you (as would be the case in pre-colonial times). You would despise ''Yoruba people'' as a 'whole', seeing it as a ''Yoruba attack'', or ''an attack by Yorubas''.

In fact, you might even go and retaliate, NOT against Oyo town, but against Ijebu, or Owo, or Oshogbo, or even Ilorin, since to you (by virtue of colonial indoctrination) they are all culpable, and they're all the same, being ''Yorubas''.

Any where in 'Yorubaland' would qualify as a legitimate target for reprisals in your eyes.

That is why language-based ethnicization is evil and alien to us. It actually turns logic on its head.

Sure, the above scenario is simplified, but the point should be pretty clear.

0m0nnakoda:
You are an intellectual lightweight with an inflated sense of yourself.

You are a disgruntled scatterbrain who falsely thinks himself a judge of intellect.

Make up your mind are you talking of Nigeria or Africa
All over the world and throughout history identities have changed and been created under the influence of internal and external forces whether it be the US or Pakistan.

SO the hell what? We are are not talking of ''around the world'', you scatterbrain. We are talking of AFRICA. NIGERIA to be specific.
WE want to know where the rain began to beat us, to use the old Igbo proverb. Don't give us this trash that just because something happened in America or Europe, we should take its occurrence for granted in AFRICA, and simply accept it. Do those people use Africa or Nigeria as a yardstick, reference or paradigm when discussing their own societies? Hell no they don't. So face your own, Mr Scatterbrain follow follow.

Ekiti was not a " lineage" but a kingdom, ditto for Ijebus or Edos. If that evolves into new groupings in Nigeria how is that unAfrican?

It is UnAFRICAN that ''Ekiti'', ''Ijebu'', ''Oyo'', ''Ife'', all transformed into simply ''Yoruba people'' by virtue of deliberate COLONIAL disruption of our sense of identity designed to cause DIVISION, RIVALRY, and HATRED among our constituent regions, with such frictions having caused countless MILLIONS of lives since the inception of this country.

The modern nation state as we know it evolved from tiny groups which coalesced by force and other influences
The role of jihad in the Middle East,the Roman Empire,Christianity etc is well documented

Scatterbrain, this is not a debate on the ''evolution'' of the modern nation-state, or ''Jihad''. You have a desperation to display your ''intellect'' which makes you try to make this debate far more complex than it needs to be. FOCUS on the issue at hand and leave foreign lands and developments alone!!!

Are we to say then when large states started to emerge like France,Germany etc that they were unEuropean?
Even the English were Germanic in origin as are the Dutch,Flemish, Austrians and many other...

If the impulses that drove European monarchies/empires to become nation states arose from within Europe, or arose under European direction, then they are not UnEuropean.

The impulses that drove African communities, cities, towns, and lineages to coalesce into huge language blocs, termed ''ethnic groups'' were EUROPEAN. Hence they are UnAfrican.

Peoples are forced to form larger groups when their neighbours do the same.
Failure to do so leads to extinction.

''Igbos'', ''Yorubas'', and ''Hausas'' arose as ''ethnic groups'' because the COLONIALISTS named them as such and enforced policies that differentiated those peoples on the basis of language. It didn't happen by accident or by ''evolution'', or by one region being ''forced'' to self identify as 'Yoruba' because another region had identified itself as 'Igbo'. That is pure garbage. Ethnic groups arose as a direct result of colonial policy and declaration.


THE RECORD, ONCE AGAIN:

''Before European colonization, the Igbo were not united as a single people but lived in autonomous local communities.''

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Igbo


''The Yoruba have shared a common language and culture for centuries but were probably never a single political unit. They seem to have migrated from the east to their present lands west of the lower Niger River more than a millennium ago.''

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yoruba


''Because of their wide geographical distribution and intermarriage and interaction with different peoples, the Hausa are a heterogeneous people, with a variety of cultural and physical features as well as diverse histories.'' [In plain English, they are not One people]

https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/anthropology-and-archaeology/people/hausa


''Edo-speaking peoples include not only the Edo proper but also the Ishan, the Etsako, the Ivbiosakon, the Akoko Edo, the Ineme, the Urhobo, and the Isoko.'' [in plain English, there's nothing like an ''Edo ethnic group'' or ''Edo tribe''. What we have are ''Edo-speaking peoples'']

https://www.encyclopedia.com/places/asia/japanese-political-geography/edo

roskiki,we dey your matter for shrine,by fire by force you must appear.The ezemuo is ready.The gods must be appeased with your head.

maiunguwar:
roskiki,we dey your matter for shrine,by fire by force you must appear.The ezemuo is ready.The gods must be appeased with your head.

The gods do not support lies and lying to yourself, so your juju could backfire on you. Beware.

I'm surprised you haven't eliminated Buhari and his cabinet with your unearthly powers.

Here is an amazing article by a Kenyan academic which supports my position 100%.
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AFRICAN ARGUMENTS.ORG
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Colonialists didn’t fail to root out Africa’s tribal politics. They created it.

...In the West, rulers used notions of race to subjugate black people. In Africa, they used ethnicity.



By Kamau Muiga

https://africanarguments.org/2019/08/06/colonialism-tribal-ethnic-politics-africa/


Standing in line at a Nairobi polling station to cast my ballot in Kenya’s 2017 presidential election, I struck up a conversation with fellow voters in the queue. The result was a foregone conclusion, said one of the gentlemen proudly. We had the numbers and our candidate was going to win. Everyone else agreed.

No one needed to ask which candidate we would be voting for. That was another foregone conclusion. We were speaking in Kikuyu, and the Kikuyus were voting for President Uhuru Kenyatta.

In the end, Kenyatta was indeed re-elected, winning almost the entire Kikuyu vote. His running mate did the same with the Kalenjin votes, the two men garnering over 95% in counties where their ethnic groups are the overwhelming majority. Their main challenger, Raila Odinga, got over 90% in counties where the Luo dominate.

In countries across Africa, similar patterns emerge in elections. From Kenya, to Sierra Leone, to Malawi, many votes cut heavily across ethnic or regional lines. Ethnic politics in Africa is commonplace.

This fact is often framed as a continent-wide struggle between the ancient and the modern, between Africa’s age-old tribal allegiances and its modern political institutions inherited from Europe. According to this narrative, African societies are yet to be fully reformed by modern life. When faced with elections therefore, voters continue to express old tribal solidarities rather than deciding based on ideology or policy.

This argument presents European colonialism as a civilising mission against the customary order, albeit one which failed to fully de-tribalise its subjects. The 1884 Berlin Conference, far from dividing Africa among European powers, becomes seen as a unifying exercise that brought tribes together into modern political entities. As foreign affairs commentator Jonathan Power wrote in a 2006 article for The New York Times:

“On Africa’s left it has been a common jibe that the Europeans ‘divided’ Africa. In fact they brought Africa together. Indeed – as in Nigeria, where Lord Lugard forced more than 250 ethnic groups involving today’s 130 million people into one political unit – you could argue that the colonialists went overboard in the quest for unity.”

African tribalism is contrasted with the ideal standard of Western modernity. This received narrative is deeply questionable.


Making race

To begin with, Africa is hardly the only place where ethnic or racial groups vote in blocs. In the US, for instance, African Americans have voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party for half a century. In the 2016 presidential election, 88% of African Americans voted for the Democratic candidate along with 65% of Hispanics and Asian Americans.

By contrast, however, these kinds of voting patterns in the West are examined differently to those in Africa. They are explained through the lens of modern political forces rather than by recourse to ancient cultural ones. Racial politics in the US, for instance, is usually tied to its modern history of racial discrimination and the ensuing struggle for civil rights.

The story goes as follows: America was a colony built on slave labour yet this fact contradicted its founding ideology that all human beings are “endowed by their creator” with an “inalienable right” to freedom. In the face of this, and with the South still deeply reliant on slavery, scientific racism stepped in claiming that black people are biologically inferior and distinct from white people. An alliance between this scientific authority and political power essentially invented biological race, codified it in law, and enforced it. In 1857, the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott v Sandford, declared that black people are “of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race”. It declared that black people have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”.

This history, which still reverberates today, shows politicised race in America to be a product of a deliberate political project aimed at subjugating and exploiting a social minority. The fatal flaw in the current understanding of politicised ethnicity in Africa today is the failure to recognise the same hand at work, only acting against the social majority.


Making tribe

In Africa, as in the US, the ruling powers faced the challenge of subjugating black people. Here, however, racial strategies were unsuited for the task at hand since a black majority with a united race consciousness would pose a threat to white minority control. European powers therefore turned towards a tribal strategy of creating and enforcing divisions in the majority. They entrenched the “tribe” as the basis of social, economic and political life through a policy known as indirect rule.

Before the colonial era, African ethnicities had been highly fluid and malleable phenomena. They did not exist as corporate entities. Boundaries were really shades of grey. People switched back and forth between groups. And, for the most part, no central authority enforced a shared set of laws through a monopoly of violence.

As historian Terence Ranger writes in The Invention of Tradition:

“Almost all recent studies of nineteenth-century pre-colonial Africa have emphasized that far from there being a single ‘tribal’ identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult, at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild… the boundaries of the ‘tribal’ polity and the hierarchies of authority within them did not define conceptual horizons of Africans.”

Tribe, in other words, was not an exclusive political category before the onset of colonial rule. Ethnolinguistic groups – people who shared a language and ethnicity – did not necessarily constitute a political grouping known as tribe.

As the eminent scholar Mahmood Mamdani puts it in Define and Rule:

“Did tribe exist [in Africa] before colonialism? If we understand by tribe an ethnic group with a common language, it did. But tribe as an administrative entity that distinguishes between natives and non-natives and systematically discriminates in favor of the former against the latter – defining access to land and participation in local governance and rules for settling disputes according to tribal identity – certainly did not exist before colonialism.”

This messy and fluid picture was untenable to European intentions. What followed then was a process of legally defining and enforcing tribes, identities and customary laws. An alliance between scientific authority and political power, as in America, was needed for the task. What the biologist did for the racialisation project in the US, the anthropologist did for the tribalisation project in Africa.

Ethnolinguistic groups were legally defined as tribes, becoming legal and administrative categories for the first time. Disparate communities were collapsed into new creations of Shona, Yoruba, Luhya, Igbo. Even multiethnic states such as Ndebele in southern Africa were defined as a tribe, while some groups, like the Yaaku of East Africa, were simply left out and forced to integrate into adjacent demarcations.

Colonies were divided into administrative units that approximated boundaries between the defined tribes, and a “native authority” was put in charge to enforce customary law by force. Where a chief was identifiable, the British brought them into the colonial administrative structure and gave them absolute autocratic power. Where no chiefs existed, they invented them. The French, by contrast, destroyed all indigenous authorities and planted new administrative cadres but with the same function: to enforce customary law by brute force. Customary law was also a continuously creative definition; the customary was tweaked and nurtured to conform to European objectives of domination.

Far from “going overboard in their quest for unity”, Europe was very deliberate in its cultivation of divisive tribal nationalisms in Africa. Cross-group interaction and freedom of movement across “homelands” was heavily controlled. Any attempt to build cross-ethnic political movements or socioeconomic organisations was met with swift repression.


Ethnic politics post-independence

As colonial history progressed, an elite stratum emerged in each tribal enclave. This group’s basis of power was the tribal group and it helped reproduce political ethnicity. The “nationalist movements” that emerged as independence approached were not cross-tribal and grassroots, but rather coalitions of elites from their respective groups.

Upon independence in many African countries, the victorious ethnic coalition established a centralised state, creating a system of ethnic winners and losers. Colonial rule had been maintained by force, leaving behind no institutions; post-independence, the state’s only links to the collective were therefore also through sticks and carrots. The new rulers offered patronage to ethnic leaders in exchange for mobilising their group behind the ruling coalition.

Many of those left out expressed their grievances in terms of ignored ethnic interests and were suppressed by force. Under multi-party democracy, ethnic groups have had to form coalitions and vote together to install a common leader, a trend sustained and reinforced in each electoral cycle.

Kenya and certain other countries exemplify these trends to a staggering level, but not every nation in Africa met the same fate. In some places, colonisation took a different form, which did not create and emphasise tribal politics.

In mainland Tanzania, for instance, German authorities utilised the literate Swahili community along the coast to administer the colony. This led to a more unified Swahili culture across the territory and, after independence, a truly non-ethnic political movement in TANU found space to flourish. To this day, ethnic politics has never predominated in Tanzania.

Another example is Senegal. There, colonialists may have wished to impose tribal nationalisms, but ran up against the dominance of the marabouts, the religious leaders of the Sufi brotherhoods to which most of the population belong. Faced with this reality, the French authorities appeased the marabouts and drew on their support to consolidate control. This impeded the entrenchment of ethnic politics and, today, voters in Senegal do not vote along ethnic lines either.


Winners and losers

This history shows how both race politics (in the US and Europe) and ethnic politics (in Africa) are the result of politically-enforced orders. They were both the result of brutal attempts to control subjugated populations. In the West, black people were racialised. In Africa, they were tribalised.

The notion that ethnic politics are a result of “ancient” tribal affiliations in Africa that have resisted modernisation is therefore wrong-headed. It also suggests that the usual solutions put forward for fixing ethnic voting – such as increased literacy, urbanisation or voter education – are as misguided as recommending that racial politics in the US can be wiped out by “modernising” the American electorate.

The truth is that both electorates are similarly “modernised”. The problem is that this modernity created and politicised certain identities and built systems of privilege and deprivation based on those divisions. These systems affect the university-educated urban-dweller in Africa as much as it does the rural subsistence farmer. Ethnic tensions in Kenya flare up even in universities and among well-paid professionals.

In the US, race inequality and racism cannot be solved by teaching the electorate that race is a construct. Similarly, Africa cannot tackle ethnic divisions by enlightening individual minds. Rather, to tackle the problems of ethnic politics, countries where this dominates must reimagine the political system in such as a way as to dismantle ethnic privilege and deprivation and build a new system no longer based on winners and losers.

You know what that article above is saying?

It is saying that each day you wake up and consider yourself ''an Igbo man'', or ''a Hausa man'', or ''a Yoruba man'', especially in opposition/rivalry to other 'ethnic groups', you are being UnAfrican. You are playing the role assigned to you by the European colonizers. You are being a slave to European colonial machinations and social engineering. You are being, in short, stupid, ignorant, brainwashed, manipulated, bamboozled, and DUMB.

Thank you.

Rossinnki:
But knowing that you had more in common with Nsukka than Oyo would not necessarily make you align with Nsukka to fight Oyo town if Oyo town attacked your town, in the old days, would it?

You would do that TODAY automatically because you have been told that you and Nsukka are of ''one people''. ''Igbos''.

Plus you would despise not just the the town of Oyo which attacked you (as would be the case in pre-colonial times). You would despise ''Yoruba people'' as a 'whole', seeing it as a ''Yoruba attack'', or ''an attack by Yorubas''.

In fact, you might even go and retaliate, NOT against Oyo town, but against Ijebu, or Owo, or Oshogbo, or even Ilorin, since to you (by virtue of colonial indoctrination) they are all culpable, and they're all the same, being ''Yorubas''.

Any where in 'Yorubaland' would qualify as a legitimate target for reprisals in your eyes.

That is why language-based ethnicization is evil and alien to us. It actually turns logic on its head.

Sure, the above scenario is simplified, but the point should be pretty clear.

Yes I will attack Oyo if that happens. Nigeria even after colonially forces together didn't give the same effect as ethnic affiliation have to us which means the latter is deeper than you postulate. Buhari will remain more loyal to Fulani elsewhere than the rest of Nigerians. Me too.

Oga, throw this crap into the dustbin. Secession is a must

It's African. God made Languages, Tribes and Time in the beginning and at Babel. ODUDUWA YORUBA meaning ANOINTED SAVIOUR was made at BABEL.


THE WORD THAT WAS WITH GOD IN THE BEGINNING WAS LANGUAGE, ANOTHER WORD FOR WORD.

This man is preaching RIFA.

orisa37:
This man is preaching RIFA.

What's that?

InyinyaAgbaOku:
Yes I will attack Oyo if that happens. Nigeria even after colonially forces together didn't give the same effect as ethnic affiliation have to us which means the latter is deeper than you postulate. Buhari will remain more loyal to Fulani elsewhere than the rest of Nigerians. Me too.

Oga, throw this crap into the dustbin. Secession is a must

This thread is not about whether secession is ''a must'' or nor ''a must''.

Please take that elsewhere. If you have no points to counter the winning arguments I've made here, admit defeat and move on instead of reacting like a spoilt brat.

Rossinnki:
You're the one who reasons like a drunkard.

The Chinese are not an ethnic group, but an amalgamation of peoples.

Ethnic groups did not arise in Africa ''out of necessity''.

It was the white man that came in and told YOU that you were ''an Igbo man''. And separated you through stroke of a pen, from a ''Yoruba man''. and an ''Hausa man'', many of whom were hitherto your known blood relatives!

Comparing it to using a phone is ignorant. A phone is helpful. Tribalism is the opposite.

You don't have to use EVERY import they send you. You have the ability to decide which to discard, based on their impact on your society.

TRIBALISM IS UNAFRICAN

DE-TRIBALIZATION is AFRICAN.

Living as a detribalized person means going back to the ways of our ancestors, who judged a man not by the language he spoke, but by the content of his character.

Seeing yourself as a ''Yoruba man'' or an ''Igbo man'' is playing out the Divide and Rule agenda of colonizers, whose aim was always to bring disunity among previously integrated peoples, in order to exploit the continent.

Fool, is Tribalism, the only element in your focus mix. is it actually the most important element?.
What about the religion?.

Rossinnki:
What's that?

RUGA ISLAMISATION FULANISATION and ANARCHY.


Ethnicism is Tribalism is Language is Time is Space is Delay is Speed is Security is Safety is Success etcetera etcetera. God launched them all at the beginning and at BABEL

Rossinnki:
This thread is not about whether secession is ''a must'' or nor ''a must''.

Please take that elsewhere. If you have no points to counter the winning arguments I've made here, admit defeat and move on instead of reacting like a spoilt brat.

You are the one to admit the defeat that Nigeria is a worse colonial concept than Igbohood can ever be.
I have asked you why Igbo hood, yorubahood, etc have been more seamless than Nigerianhood but you can't defend that. The majority of us prefer our ethnicity than your more colonial Nigeria. At least, the things that bind ethnic groups have been there before the Whites came. Till today , Nigwrianhood is sth people can't seem to comprehend . I have been reading comments here and people are putting you in your place.

InyinyaAgbaOku:
You are the one to admit the defeat that Nigeria is a worse colonial concept than Igbohood can ever be.
I have asked you why Igbo hood, yorubahood, etc have been more seamless than Nigerianhood but you can't defend that. The majority of us prefer our ethnicity than your more colonial Nigeria. At least, the things that bind ethnic groups have been there before the Whites came. Till today , Nigwrianhood is sth people can't seem to comprehend . I have been reading comments here and people are putting you in your place.

The very fact that Nigeria continues to exist despite the protestations of a few illiterate wannabe secessionists, and that Nigerians fought and died to keep the nation one flies in the face of this bull crap you typed. And yes, MY PLACE is as a NIGERIAN, and this is supported by the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of NIGERIANS, who do NOT want a balkanisation of this mighty federation. AFRICA'S LARGEST ECONOMY.

NIGERIA is more in keeping with the African tradition of large EMPIRES comprising various groupings brought together by conquest, such as the great empires of Mali, Ghana, Songhai, Egypt, and Nubia. THOSE existed before colonialism. ''Ethnic groups'' DID NOT.

''Before European colonization, the Igbo were not united as a single people but lived in autonomous local communities.''

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Igbo

Funny how the white man knows your own history better than you.

YOU can go form your own little colonial-generated tribal republic and become another Sierra Leone or South Sudan - without the Delta of course since THAT is not ''Igbo land''.

i agree