₦airaland Forum

KingSango:
There are different bloodlines and if you mix with them and produce offspring then your children will be raised up in that tradition. Say you are Yoruba man and you marry an Igbo woman, and that woman has twins, well in her culture she and the twins are an abomination and can't go home. Your children will be abused by angry relatives who see the twins as an abomination. Now twins are worshiped in Yoruba culture so no issue.

Misinformation. This is 2017, not 1817. Twins are not abused in 21st century Igboland by 'angry relatives who see the twins as an abomination.' A lot of Igbos want them now, and they are everywhere in Igboland treated with great fondness.

This is what happens when one's source of information about a people are books and films set in a very different age and time.

Mysselff2:
Obama has no value. I would rather take a selfie with Mugabe than with that arse called Barack Hussein Osama Bin Obama

Now Obama is seeking to use made men like Tony Elumelu to get relevance ,only Tony doesn't realize

I wonder why this same anti nature and anti God goat called Obama was not available for selfies with Tony or any other Nigerian all through the 8 disastrous years he was unfortunately the president of the USA ??

Wait...using Tony Elumelu to get relevance? A man who served two full terms as the president of the most powerful nation on earth taking selfies with Tony Elumelu because he wants relevance Shey you know there are Nigerians who have never heard of Mr Elumelu but know who Obama is?

Chai. The things I read on nairaland eh!

Cuddlebugie:
Virtually all pictures of his[b] have him looking sad[/b]. One can only imagine the tragic life the young prince lived.

It does seem like he was a sad lad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Alemayehu

Olu317:
That is a new identity adopted by all of you in the new era but truthfully, you were referred as Ibos, even though you chose the recent name identification . In the olden days. After all, Samuel Ajayi crowther was one of the helping hands in helping the you people in standardising your language's alphabetical order.

Ignorance isn't something to revel in.

Kachifo3:
Not again. The kingship is not hereditary..

I didn't say it was hereditary - most Eastern Igbo kingship are not hereditary. I just didn't know it had been wrestled from the Amobis, that's all.

The Amobi family are no longer ruling in Ogidi?

PS: What is Igwe (Pharm)? There are some titles that supercede other titles. A king should never put a professional title next to his kingly designation - it reads like a joke.

Ifeoluwa17:
Exactly that. No concrete evidence to support the fact that our ancestors actually were clothed without the help of white people.

I am actually having a hard time believing you couldn't find scholarly papers/articles online about pre-colonial clothing.

Any relation of Osi Umenyiora, the former American football player?

The Portuguese and the Dutch bought cloth from the Ijebu, the Bini and the Itsekiri.

The Igbo-Ukwu finds prove that the people had woven cloth as early as the 9th century.

In my part of Delta State (Anioma), we had towns that were widely famed for cloth-making long before the Europeans figured out how to sail a ship into West African waters, e.g., Ubulu-Uku and Ewuru, among others. The earliest Europeans to visit Ubulu-Uku were much impressed with the skill and the quality of the cloth of its weavers.

And of course up north, the clothes made in Kano were exported north as far as Morocco.

With the exception of a few isolated tribes here and there, there were no Nigerian ethnic group where woven cloth was completely absent in 1800. In some places, custom may dictate that children and unmarried women should not put on cloth, but this was a matter of custom - not that they had no idea of cloth.

What ignorant idiot says Africans were too stupid/lazy to figure out how clothes were made.

Why was the woman all shocked? Had she not been living in America Before that? Oh had she been blind and just gained her sight?

Old video, btw.

WeissBarlow:
As long as the same principles keep being instilled in the upcoming generation and this process continues as it is in the north then the society will continue to adhere to these standards.

This quote is everything. As long as. Only "as long as."

Turkey has not always been this liberal, you know. It was the heart of the Ottoman Caliphate, the most powerful Islamic state of its time, until the early 20th century. The liberalism and secularisation we see in Turkey today is the fruit of the work of young Turkish revolutionaries led by Mustafa Kemal in the 1900s.

I am sure no one living under the Ottoman caliphs in the 1700s and 1800s would have predicted the rise of Kemal and the effect his policies would have on Turkish society.

WeissBarlow:
And which Nigeria are you talking about? Like someone above pointed out, maybe in the south but the north is a completely different story.

They have gay prides in Turkey which is like 82% Muslim.

Look I am not necessarily pro-LGBT or anything; I just find it very short-sighted and ahistorical when people assume that a certain status quo will persist ad infinitum. Who is to say that a great wave of secularisation will not sweep through the north 150 years from now? If history has thought me anything it is that nothing is fixed or permanent.

BTW, isn't the dan daudu thing in the north partly a homosexual thing (yea, I know they are pimps too)? How strongly have they been persecuted throughout history in the north?

We are not more homophobic today than the West was less than 100 years ago. If it happened in the west, it will happen here.

They are in every motor park in the east.

Your example with three Pidgin speakers fails to take one thing into consideration that is common with translations. If I give the same English passage to three Yoruba-speakers to translate, they will give me three different translations. I don't even have to do this with different Yoruba regions and dialects to get a rich variety of translations. Just three speakers and writers of the same dialect will give different results. Does this mean Yoruba has no structure?

See the links and screenshots below. Their verdict: Pidgin has a grammatical structure, albeit a simplified one. Broken has no grammatical structure.

Although they also include that Pidgin at its worse could be called broken. So Pidgin-Creole-Broken exist in some kind of continuum. But they aren't synonyms.


http://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/pidgin

http://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/art-and-architecture/architecture/broken#1O29BROKEN

scholes0:
Pidgin has no structure abeg. A creole has a structure but a pidgin does not. That is why Pidgin in Nigeria differs from place to place and is constantly changing and evolving to include new forms and convoluted ways of expressing the same things that already had a previous form. In short, no rules.

The way someone in Jos will speak pidgin (structure, grammar and all) might significantly differ from what you may hear in Benin.

What makes pidgin not broken English?

Because Pidgin has variants doesn't mean it has no structure. Which language doesn't have variants. Because it evolves doesn't mean it doesn't have structure. Which language doesn't evolve?

A Pidgin only has a simplified structure relative to standard languages.

Do you realise that there are linguists who study Pidgin and compile lexicons of Pidgin words and grammar? You cannot study the grammar of pidgins if they do not have structure.

The same cannot be said of Broken (which is just the terrible English spoken by people who don't have a mastery of English) because no two people even speak the same broken - two Italian brothers speaking broken English to the same English tourist won't even speak the same way, that's how formless broken is.

scholes0:
So what is pidgin??

Does “Make I come dey go” sound like rich use of English (either spoken or written) with perfect grammatical tenses and lexis?


Pidgin= Brokin abeg.

She knows what she is saying. Pidgin actually has structure and all those things. Just that it is widely different from what obtains in Standard English.

Broken English is the sort of thing you hear from someone who only knows a few English words trying to speak the language.

Like: "Me inside plane, fly." "You pay banana, no."

Nigerians use Broken and Pidgin interchangeably though. But, yea, they are different things.

Posts like this are part of the problem.

centboy123456:
really how do u know this

There are quite a number of research papers published on indentured servitude on the plantations of Fernando Po/Bioko. This is the Information Age, sir. Use that gadget in your hands.

Mpesa81:
I I’m from Bioko Island originally but grow up in Spain. I know my people history good and is true that Igbo people live in Bioko but they’re not the first habitan of the island. Bioko first know as Etula Eria is the land of my ancestors the Bööbe tribe know this days as The Bubi people. During the slave trade This Portugal people used our land as a port to introduce a lot of slave from different places to take them to the new world.

Many of this slave they return back to Africa in the period of the abolistion. Wen the Spanish take the island as well bring a lot of slave from Cuba, Enmancipados,Calabar , Sierra Leona, etc krios. So my family is Rio from Sierra Leona mixed with the truly people of Bioko The Bubi people. My mother is from Sierra Leone and my dad y Bubi. I know my Culture very well. The Spanish government it’s made a lot of crime with people that they take over and take them to Bioko and punnish them in the farms and treat them like slaves. The Fangs they’re from the continental island but now they all migrate to our land and force us to the exile. Please is important to understand that The Bubi tribe they’re kind people they loved they land. Thanks

Nobody said Igbos got there first, dude. As has been said by many people already, they started coming there in the 20th century.

Afam4eva:
The stories i heard about the Igbos in Fernando Po (Now Bioko) is that they were Igbos who ran to Equatorial Guinea during the civil war and stayed there. If this is the case then the Igbo shouldn't be that different from what is spoken in Nigeria.

Actually they have been there long before the Civil War.

They started arriving there in the 1920s, if not earlier, to work as labourers on the Spanish Cocoa Plantations.

It is similar to an in-joke. You and your friends call each other 'fools', but could get mad if someone from outside your crew comes up to say it to you.

Not very likely.

Wow. Talk about taking a sharp detour.

Ekealterego:
Dialect! Have you come across the phenomenon before?

Adding 'r' or 'h' at the end of words like Udo and Uzo has nothing to do with dialect.

NafeesaAA:
If you are a Christian and you think that Muslims criticising Aisha's dress are wrong, you are the one who is wrong, not because you have no business in the discourse but because you probably do not know how Islam asks Muslims to dress.

Indeed, Aisha's home ( Alh. Umaru Ndanusa) is a Muslim home. Now, what I am not sure of is if Aisha is still a Muslim. If she is a Muslim, those dresses are not the way of Muslims and Muslims have the right to complain about them. At that point, your duty as a Christian is to seek explanation as to how wrong they are on a Muslim's neck. If she is a Christian, Muslims have no right to complain. And their duty would be to continue with the business of living together in a mixed society like Nigeria.

The hypocrisy of all our complaints reside in the fact that before Aisha's case, Muslims have lived and transacted businesses with Christians whose dresses are worse than Aisha's, perhaps, because those people didn't call themselves Muslims. Also, Christians have lived successfully with Muslims putting on what could pass for deep Islamic dresses without qualms. Any muslim who says Aisha's dressing is not wrong is only being hypocritical. Allah says hypocrites exist among Muslims. He warned that they are terrible to be with. They can conjure misleading thesis to cause confusion. Muslims take their injunctions from the Qur'an and Hadith plus conclusions from their scholars, only.

Some of us who are Muslims know that Christianity forbids dressing that reveals the crevices of a woman; we know that Christianity promotes decency in dressing. Once upon a Sunday morning at ABU, behind Ribadu hall(girls hostel), a girl in her fullness of life was walking past, ahead of us to a church within the campus. Suddenly, we started hearing shouts and boos from atop the hostel: 'ashawo, seducer, sit not in front...' some Christian girls booed the badly dressed girl with a Bible in hand...instead of being remorseful, she stopped and began shaking her buttocks in the direction of her accusers. 'you don't have this', she replied. A Christian friend from Gombe who was with me simply concluded: 'wancan yar wuta ce'.

So, both Islam and Christianity, I know, preache decency in dressing. Perhaps, more than proclamation, Islam has gone further to describe the ways in which men and women should dress. Therefore, if any Christian must reach a conclusion on this matter, he must have the knowledge of how Islam prescribes her dress code. It doesn't have to be like Arabs. It could be a Nupe or Igbo or Idoma type of dressing but it has to be according to Islamic specification. A person's first responsibility to a group is to observe her codes.

Muslims who seek to correct any deviations must apply wisdom, diplomacy and persuasion either to a differing Muslims or a Christian needing education about what they know not in Islam. That's how the prophet of Islam did it. In fact, Christians are not the problem of Muslims in this matter but Muslims who know the truth and are pretending that her dressing is correct.

On the whole, the major problem is that Muslims think Islam is theirs only, when Allah says it is a package for mankind. If you take it all, how do others who are not Muslims access it. Nigerian Christians are no better; they also think Christianity is theirs. So, every little thing goes for war between these two groups.

I wonder if the Jordanians are having this debate about their queen. Or the Syrians about their First Lady...

I don't think Chidinma and Brymo should be there. They may not be releasing singles anyhow like Olamide, but they still deliver.

Probz:
I’m the same. It’s more of a cultural thing for us negroes whether you believe or not.

We’re more Anglican-influenced in Awka but we switched to Deeper Life and my experience of social obligations to turn up and show face in that holy holy church is something that’s stuck with me since. I go Redeemed whenever I feel like showing face at church though. Unless I’m at my mum’s house.

Redeemed. I attended Redeemed for a bit, because of this girl I had an interest in back in school.

Despite being non-religious, I really enjoyed the praise-and-worship session.

Probz:
I’m quite surprised that you subscribe to organised religion Redbone. Aren’t you a scientist?

To be honest, it is more of a social obligation for me than an exercise of faith.

You'll be surprised at how many people show up to church on Sundays to avoid Auntie X or Friend Y or Father Z (who is a close friend of the family's) asking a barrage of questions.

Fulaman198:
By your nonsensical logic then, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Persians, etc are all Arab worshippers.

That's bull. Also there are many Northerners that do not carry Arab based names. I for one, my middle and last name are not Arabised at all.

We do not use Arabic in the North unless if it pertains to the Qur'an, that's absurd. The lingua franca is Hausa followed by my Fulani tongue called Fulfulde. Hausa is an Afro-Asiatic language Just like Arabic, Tigriniya, Tigray, Somalia, Tamashaq, etc. All Afro-Asiatic languages have their root in Africa!

I advise that you learn more about the continent and also about the history of your people. I'm astounded about how little Africans know about other African cultures. It would be an even bigger shame if you know more about Western culture than African cultures.

No. The nonsensical logic I was using is actually yours. Remember, you are the one who have always used the presence of European-derived names in Southern Nigeria among other elements European culture to castigate Southerners as 'white worshippers'. Thank God that when someone makes the same argument about you and your people you realise how nonsensical it sounds.

So you have only one Arabic name (your middle and last names, being Fulani). Well, congratulations. That means you have one foreign name MORE than me, a Southern Christian 'white-worshipper'. My first name, middle name and surname are all ethnic names. And I have met many Southern Christians who are like me in having only Yoruba or Igbo names; no European-derived or Biblical names at all. So next time you want to use Jennifer as a prop to pontificate to Southerners, you might do yourself the favour of remembering this, if you don't want me to use Umar and Abdul to pontificate to your own people.

So you learn Arabic for religious purposes only. What difference does it make if it is for secular or religious reasons? The fact is your children spend years in school learning and perfecting their Arabic, a language that is not theirs. If you want to call kids in Lagos speaking Pidgin or domesticated Nigerian English 'white worship', then you have to allow that children in Qu'ranic school reciting verses in Arabic is 'Arab worship'. Worship na worship - whether done full time or only when reciting certain texts. You are also a part-time white worshipper because we are using English now. You realise how ridiculous this kind of thinking is, don't you?

By the way, as a Roman Catholic from the south, I do not even need any foreign languages to learn about my religion. I learnt Catechism in my native tongue, I pray in my native tongue, there are Bibles and prayer books in my native tongue, and on Sundays I attend service (mass) in my native tongue - although there are also masses in English or a mixture of English and Latin, for those who fancy that.

It is always funny to me how some people in the north will want to speak about a Southern Nigeria they do not really know but the second you say one thing about the north, they get agitated and tell you you don't know anything about the north and Africa. Well, guess what? You don't know anything about the South either. And FYI, you told me nothing about the north I already didn't know.

Final word: Stop condescending to Southerners. If you think calling you up north 'Arab worshippers' is nonsensical [and I don't think you lot are - I was only making a point, but look at how animated that got you!], it should also be pretty easy for you to understand that calling us 'white worshippers' is also nonsensical.

Fulaman198:
Since when have Northern people worshipped Arabs. If you knew your research, Islam has been in the North since the 1100s. It was not brought there by Arabs.

Who brought it doesn't matter. The facts are: it originated among the Arabs, not Northern Nigerians; when you adopted it, you adopted it alongside a whole trough of Arab cultural baggage - Arabic names, the Arabic language (which you used to study the Koran and the law), the Arabic script, etc. You cannot walk through the city of Kano or any other historical city in the north and not get that oriental feel.

If you don't think that makes you 'Arab worshippers', then you need to stop calling Southerners 'White worshippers'.

Fulaman198:
I don't understand how a black man can be a supremacist to another black man, that does not make any sense to me, but ok. No worries man, I don't take attacks on NL seriously. In all honesty, sometimes I actually laugh at them. I think it's good to have this sort off discourse.

I am not trying to present other blacks like idiots, I just hate it when I see Nigerians with names like "Jennifer" I mean what is that...That's not even an old British name. It's an American white lady name. Or when Nigerians can't speak their native tongues and do not know how to act traditional. It's not healthy for the nation as whole.

You are right that when we are abroad that we come as one (that I guess is more for survival as the Average American Joe can not distinguish between a Hausa, Yoruba, Fulani, Igbo, Igala, Tiv, Beri, Touareg, etc. person).

LOL. You can be funny eh.

You hate when Nigerians answer Jennifer. Do you also hate it when Northerners answer Abdul and Umar and Idris? What do you even mean Jennifer isn't British? Jennifer is a modernization of the Old Briton name Guinevere.