From Jesus Sermon on the Mount :
" Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt has lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men."
Michael Afolayan has just intimated his brother Nimi Wariboko,
"Your words are divine! Thanks for doing this. You spoke the truth without hurting anyone; your language of dissent seems polite and quite soothing."
True. He spoke the truth and shamed the devil, but I'm not sure what Michael Afolayan has in mind and exactly what he means quite literally by telling Nimi Wariboko, "Your words are divine".
I don't suppose he's thereby elevating Professor Wariboko to some kind of prophetic status, or on a lesser scale, the Chair of Prophecy at Boston University. If anything, hopefully, what he has in mind is more in line with the saying, "To err is human, to forgive divine "
I guess it's OK to be morally agitated and morally incensed without breaking anyone's bones - a stronger word yet - morally outraged about the state of affairs in Nigeria, if not ever since time began, then at least for the past couple of years. Some unhappy citizens - of all ethnicities without exception could even take a dim and more short-sighted view as they keep on reminding us that e.g. the security situation in the country has only gone from bad to worse since Brother Buhari took over after winning a landslide election victory in 2015 and 2019 and that the deterioration in the country's security situation is perhaps understandable after all the two-termer did tell us from the very beginning, " Don't expect miracles !"
Then the question is when you don't expect miracles when you entertain no great expectations, what then do you expect, and what are you liable to get?
Sometimes, what you expect is what you get.
Unfortunately, some people get what they least expect and believe that they have to take it stoically.
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
The way I see it - sometimes, enough is enough - and I was there with the suffering masses and welcomed Brother Buhari's military take-over on 31/12/1983 to usher in the beginning of the Happy New Year, before, during, and after which I could see inequalities all over the place - everywhere - perhaps, starting with the hierarchies that you find in the military from exalted Brigadier-General down to the lowly Sargeant - such is the reality - all men are created equal but some are more equal than others. I . you, Neem Karoli Baba, we all know this and that's why I couldn't and didn't complain then - nor did most Nigerian civil servants at my neck of the creek, because they didn't get paid for Christmas - although every working day they had gone to work faithfully, and Praise the Lord, when Brothers Muhammadu Buhari & Tunde Idiagbon took over, within days of their declaring a War Against Indiscipline, without exception, everybody had got paid their several months arrears in salary - that was a very desirable type of equalisation and that was the best way to begin a happy New Year.
Friday, November 4, 2022. Naturally, like the people's poet, Nimi Wariboko the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University would like to remedy the situation, would like to right each and every wrong. He can cry unto the Lord, like Iyov / Job he can cry and complain all he wants, but as a man of the cloth, he already knows that as things are, the world is not fair - mainstream Christian doctrine, its ethics, theologies, and stories would have us believe that Satan is currently in charge of planet Earth.
No evidence has been presented to show that anyone is guilty of breaking the law or violating the nation's constitution. In my view, the essay reads like a preamble that should justify the convening of a national sovereign conference to discuss the best way forward to creating the United States of Nigeria in which power devolves to the people, through majority rule…
More seriously, to be continued by addressing the issue of "Majority-tribe Privilege in Nigeria"Fifty-something years ago, mention the word "tribe " thinking associatively, for me it was Sierra Leone tribalism that would have popped up: Temnes, Mendes, Limbas, Creoles (some of the tribes in Sierra Leone).
You know the Tom Lehrer song - National Brotherhood Week where it goes
" Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews. " -
You meet a Sierra Leonean out of the country or even in the country, and he asks you, what's your name, you tell him, it's Cornelius, he asks you which part of Sierra Leone do you come from, you tell him Freetown and he wants to make sure so he asks, are you Creole?
Telling him that in fact what you really are is an Honourable Yoruba man doesn't help much.
The Creoles love Abner Cohen's Politics of Elite Culture, a whole chapter featuring the Sierra Leone and Leo Spitzer's The Creoles of Sierra Leone, Akintola Wyse's The Krio of Sierra Leone - An Interpretive History and relish Arthur Porter's Creoledom
During the Sierra Leone Civil War which I still prefer to label as the RUF War (23 Mar 1991 – 18 Jan 2002) - the RUF only came to town ( Freetown) on 6th January 1999, and up to that point some of the Creoles had been content to go on with their day to day activities without any worries, gossiping, sharing news of atrocities being committed in the provinces, ( "the bush", " the jungle", still calling it the protectorate, the hinterland, and in a superior manner saying to their neighbours, " let the savages keep on exterminating one another, as long as they don't bring their barbarism here" ( here= the Capital) - and then as if from nowhere the RUF guerrillas struck Freetown on 6th of January 1999 with the lightning RUF Operation Spare No Living Thing, purportedly aimed at wiping out the Creoles, the airport having been taken over after a bloody battle and nowehere for the Creoles to run, Mr. Raymond Abioseh Johnson issuing instructions to the nightwtachman to barricade the garage and the rest of his dwelling and hiding his wife and daughters unbder the bed or in the kitchen wasn't going fo offer much reistance, the blood-curdling name of the operation is enough to make you realize that but for the ECOMORG under Nigerian Military command which had to bomb the rebels in Freetown, if their operation had succeeed it would have made the 100 days of the Rwanda Genocide look like a school picnic…
O how I wish that I was not so easily identifiable as a so-called Creole, a very tiny and fragile minority for that matter, and transposing those lyrics to the everlasting Sierra Leone reality Lehrer would have been singing
"O the Mendes hate the Temnes
And the Temnes hate the Mendes
And today's Limbas also hate the Mendes
And everybody hates the Creoles!"
And my impression is that it's a bit of that - vengeance is mine saith the Lord and payback that's being visited on the brave, long-suffering, and dedicated Mayor of Freetown, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, even as you read this.
In early 1970 a Fulani elder here in Sweden told me that at school he had been whipped by a Creole classmate called Cornelius Williams, who had taken off his leather belt and whipped him, and told him Kotoh Muhammadu, " That is the price you must pay for your civilization " I asked the Kotoh, and then what did you do, didn't you break his rotten ess? Kotoh replied , "What could I do?" Shiooor. I begged him to consider that I am not at all like the scoundrel Cornelius Williams and that I hope that that Cornelius does not remind him of me...
In 1970, I find myself in Ghana, I felt at home in Accra - I have a first cousin Paul Tunde Tagoe - my mother's sister's son, whose father was Ga - and his large family, other family people in Takoradi, you mention "tribe" and I think " The Ashanti Confederacy" which Kwame Arhin was forever going on about.
A little earlier when studying US history, you mention tribes, and one would think of various Native American Tribes and e.g. the Northwestern Confederacy, the later Indian reservations…
Fast forward to these days we are being told that " The White Man" in the United States is having nightmares, that one of the most fearful problems facing the White Man is not only the for him the very unpleasant idea that the Yellow Man - CHINA - is soon to become the World's Super Economic Power Numero Uno but that he ( The Oyibo) is on a sure path to losing his White Privilege Majority Status in the United States of America and that there's precious little he can do about it, such as reversing the population trends ( supporting abortion certainly won't help) nor does stopping immigration or effete attempts such as President Rumpo's the last time around thumping on about the Wal, the wall. The wall along the US-Mexico border to keep Mexicans out - and that " Mexico is going to pay for the wall"...
To be continued with, more relevance to the theme "Majority-tribe Privilege in Nigeria"
On Sunday, 6 November 2022 at 20:58:30 UTC+1 Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:Out on a limb here:
There are features that are typically Nigerian and as regular as the clockwork phenomenon of " two Jews, three opinions "
Wherever two Nigerians, e.g. a Hausa/Fulani-man from the Muslim North (Allah) and an Igboman from the Holy Trinity Enclave in the East, or an Igbo-man (Chukwu) from Eastern Nigeria and a Yoruba-man (Olorun) from Western Nigeria meet, it could be as friends and compatriots over a cup of coffee in the most cosmopolitan London or New York City, and when the fortunate or unfortunate subject matter happens to be politics or is political that pops up they will most readily agree with fundamentals such as that "Africa Must Unite" agreed - no problem, and they will agree about the scourge of corruption that's wrecking the country but further into causes and where and how it all began, some heavy if not ominous disagreements are more than likely to erupt and they are liable to generate at least three opinions even on matters of common ground, common knowledge, common interest…
As Kipling the most famous poet of British Imperial History puts it at the very beginning of his The Ballad of East and West
"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! "
(As far as religious and ethnic differences go, sadly, inevitably, with the new political realities of this world's superpowers' involvement in the Middle East, the quarrel between Israel and the Pals portends a more volatile armed conflict erupting very soon. Hopefully, with so much identity politics and religious fervour at play, it will not be ditto in Nigeria, at least, as of yet, there is no military solution on the horizon in Nigeria. )
The erudite quibbling now @ ad nauseam, about the correct word that applies in His Majesty's English, whether it's a bloody shame, unsound, unjust, inappropriate and illiterate and that anthropologically or sociologically and maybe politically speaking too, "Nigerian ethnicities" should be substituted for the downright, outdated idea of "Nigerian tribes" is beside the point, when no matter what it's being properly or improperly called, the damage is being done on a daily basis. For example, recently when Professor Agbaje was kidnapped on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the initial reaction from my source of information was that as usual the dastardly act had been perpetrated by the Fulani boys, the criminals, highway robbers, "hoodlums"...
It's equally disingenuous to opine, "tribalism no dae" or "don't exaggerate". If that should be even remotely the case, then why is everybody talking about it ( TRIBALISM) non-stop?
If tribalism no dae, or tribalism is not as bad as it is being made out to be, and "don't exaggerate" were remotely the case, then the painful reminder has to be, then, what were the pogroms in Northern Nigeria and what was and is the Biafra idea all about?
One answer could be that things are much, much better now and the causes of that tragedy are now dissipated/ vanished into thin air and are only a thing of the past, IPOB, Operation Python Dance 1, 2. 3. 4, and the court's final verdict on upstart Nnamdi Kanu still pending, notwithstanding…
It was more than ten years after the Biafra tragedy that Prince Nico Mbarga himself a victim of distinctively Igbo ethnicity was busy highlighting the perennial Nigerian dilemma in his 1981 hit: Tribalism
I was in Nigeria from 1981-84, unbiased and unaligned but not an impartial first-hand eye witness, observing what I understood was happening and my testimony is reliable
All that it takes is some goodwill from all sides and then the problem under review would not be insurmountable, although we have been burdened by it for many centuries and it is this ethnic element that has been contributing so viciously to disunity, the " divide and rule" policy was used by the impies, has been and is continuously being exploited by local politicians and the ethnic card is, of course, being played ( as always) and not only by some no good doers particularly in the runup to the 2023 Nigerian Presidential Elections.
Where is the centre of gravity of the three main contestants to be found if not at where and what they consider to be their ethnic bases? ( In the recently concluded Swedish Elections, it's reported that the Sweden Democrats, said to be extreme right and anti-immigration, did not bother to campaign in the strongly immigrant neighbourhoods such as Rinkeby and Tensta.
"We are all Africans " she said to me, and "We are all Nigerians" may be true but it's unlikely that Brer Tinubu will be wasting any time campaigning in the heartlands/ ethnic strongholds of Oga Obi's home territories
When the question of Democracy in Africa was being discussed, I was tempted to chip in with the Divine concept of "The Twelve Tribes of Israel'' - each tribe endowed with special propensities and specific workloads, therefore ideally knowing the role of complementary part they have to contribute to the whole harmonious, smooth-running of The nation Israel - so that for instance, when a census was to be conducted each Israelite had to contribute half a shekel - "the rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less." - the idea being that "The half-shekel, therefore, emphasises the importance of the commandment, "Love your fellow as yourself."A Jew himself is only a half, incomplete; he becomes whole only when united with another Jew. "
And there begins the difference between Nigeria and the rest of the world, namely that the Twelve Tribes of Isreal claim a common ancestor in Aba Abraham and his wife Sarah whereas although the Christian and Muslim world as Prophet Muhammad salallahu alaihi wa salaam made clear in his farewell sermon - all mankind, "We are all descendants of Adam and Eve", yet it could be difficult for the 371 tribes of Nigeria to come together and agree about a common ancestor according to recent history/within living memory/ passed down from generation to generation through any of the various oral traditions…
As has already been pointed out, after looking at the centuries of wars in Europe, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the First World War, the Second World War, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, NATO's proxy war against Russia, the war clouds hanging over Iran, it's not only Africa, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Somalia, that has tribe & clan problems, other international dimensions, India and Pakistan, North and South Korea, and back over there where so many of the contributors to this series, men and women of colour are surviving ``Exactly how would an article entitled "Majority White Privilege in America" read?
On Saturday, 5 November 2022 at 23:44:08 UTC+1 Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:Is it tribalizing or trailblazing?
One step forward two steps backward
Is it head following tail or could it be the tail
Between his legs following his tribal head?
When Nimi Wariboko the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston tells some uncomfortable truths, some people, especially those who are feeling most guilty, just can't take it.
Notes For A Speech from Amiri Baraka : S.O.SThere's the racist White-Black tribalism in which apart from a few uncle tom/house negroes who have never, not even once complained about racism in their new habitat, perhaps in their own eyes seeing themselves in their very elevated new status as the boss white man's new African mascot - like Man Friday and thereby an extension of White privilege - Big English & bowtie etc, while at the other Black tribalist abroad ( not a tom) conveniently takes a position similar to Malcolm X at that Oxford Union Debate, Dec. 3 1964
Is there tribalism among African-Americans - as distinct from. e.g. johnny-come-lately first and second-generation Nigerian-Americans who only recently arrived in the United States, some of whom I suppose still retain some of the old cultural affinities, loyalties, food habits, traditional animosities/ hostilities, etc towards those they believe to be lower than the vermin they left behind them in s-hole country?
I ask because of this Richard Pryor joke :
"I think that niggers are the best of people who were slaves, and that's how they got to be niggers 'cause they stole the cream-of-the-crop from Africa and brought them over here. And God, as they say, works in mysterious ways, so he made everybody a nigger…he brought us all over here — the best — the kings and queens, the princesses, the
Invocation To Mr. ParkerOn Saturday, 5 November 2022 at 15:33:12 UTC+1 ibdu...@gmail.com wrote:Still tribalising Nigeria/Africa?On Sat, 5 Nov 2022 at 1:57 PM, Nimi Wariboko <nimi...@msn.com> wrote:Dear Colleagues:
This is an article I published in Punch Newspapers Nigeria yesterday, Friday, November 4, 2022. It is about majority-tribe privilege in Nigeria.
Wazobia Republic: The majority-tribe privilege in Nigeria
Majority-tribe privilege is the advantage the Hausa-Fulani, Igbo, and Yoruba enjoy as members of the three big ethnic groups in the country. The mighty advantage of belonging to one of the Big Three, the Wa-Zo-Bia groups, is both unconscious and conscious. For those who enjoy being part of the big tribes, the advantage is unseen to (majority of) them, but it is highly visible to the rest of us that belong to the minority tribes. When national public officials and the media list ethnicities in Nigeria and routinely name Hausa-Fulani, Igbo, and Yoruba, without bothering to mention even one minority tribe, you are reminded that Nigeria is wazobia and the country does not regard your existence. Minority-tribe persons grate under their skin when they hear Wazobia, a portfolio word that reminds them of their exclusion, marginalisation, and irrelevance in the general description of what Nigerian citizenship means. With the way the 2023 elections have become a three-tribe affair, you would be forgiven for thinking they are the only ones in the country.
For more, please click the link below:
https://punchng.com/wazobia-republic-the-majority-tribe-privilege-in-nigeria/
Nimi Wariboko
Boston University
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