Nigerian ethnic hostilities make Kenya look like a romp in the park

Kenyans love to obsess about ethnicity. But as with almost everything else, what goes on in our country is child’s play compared to what’s happening in Nigeria.

For weeks, there has been an unprecedented online civil war between bloggers from two of Nigeria’s biggest nations — the Yoruba and the Igbo. I can only call it the Second Nigerian Civil War.

It really is an extension of the First Civil War — the shooting one fought against the secessionist Biafra (Igbo) Republic from 1967 to 1970. At the epicentre of the second war is the book There Was A Country, the latest by Africa’s foremost novelist, Chinua Achebe, an ethnic Igbo.

It is a huge pity that readers in Europe and America are buying the book when we Africans can’t get a copy in our local bookshops. Blame that on the complicated economics of modern publishing and the scourge of piracy.

This long-awaited Achebe offering — a memoir, really — has been 40 years in the making. It is about his personal recollections of the Biafran conflict in which he was a key player as a roving ambassador for the doomed state.

What has sparked the online civil war is an excerpt in the book regarding the late Yoruba leader Obafemi Awolowo. Achebe contends that as vice-chairman and finance commissioner of the Federal Executive Council that prosecuted the war against Biafra, Awolowo was the architect of the Nigerian blockade of relief food supplies to Biafra that directly caused the deaths by starvation of two million Igbos.

That, by any other name, is a war crime. And, to the Igbo, Awolowo was a war criminal. What is peeving the Yoruba most is the undeniable fact of Achebe’s international stature. Cries of “Achebe is a tribalist” have rent the air all over Yorubaland. Achebe has been told to stick to writing fiction as opposed to “re-writing” history.

An impassioned defence of Achebe by the brilliant young author Chimamanda Adichie has been dismissed by the Yoruba because, well, she is Igbo, too.

Also dragged into the fray is former World Bank managing director and current finance minister of Nigeria, Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who earlier co-wrote a book raising similar issues about Awolowo.

The biggest mistake a foreigner can make is to get entangled in Nigeria’s poisonous quarrels.

Awolowo, who died in 1987, is a revered Yoruba political hero. It helps to draw parallels with Africa’s most populous country to make us see that the concept of untouchable ethnic saints is not peculiar to our country.

In Kenya, we like to talk of Luo-Kikuyu, or Bukusu-Maragoli, or Nandi-Kipsigis rivalries and so on.

That is baby talk in Nigeria. Let’s first get an idea of the ethnic numbers involved. The Yoruba number some 35 million; the Igbo just a bit less. And these two are not even the most populous “tribes” in Nigeria. That rank goes to the Hausa-Fulani of the northern half of the country.

The viciousness of the threeway competition makes Kenya look like a romp in the park.

Both the Yoruba and Hausa regard the Igbo as clannish, arrogant, money-loving termites who will colonise everybody given the chance. Igbos see Yorubas as two-timing watermelons without any msimamo.

One of Achebe’s explosive contentions in his book which has inflamed the Yoruba is that Awolowo initially struck a deal with Biafra to simultaneously lead the Yoruba to secede, only to be bought out by Gen Yakubu Gowon, who was leading the Federal side.

The Muslim Hausas must be smiling as they watch their ethnic rivals tear themselves apart – over a book. They know both the Igbo and Yoruba regard them as backward, lazy Al-Qaeda types who leech on the more resource-endowed, prosperous southerners. Real Hausa power rests on their numbers in the military.

Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka, who is Yoruba, once described the Hausa-Fulani in his inimitable style as a “militariat” that believes in the divine rule of the gun. True, staging coups is a Hausa pastime.

Do these Yoruba-Igbo-Hausa stereotypes ring a bell?

[email protected]