By Prof. Iyorwuese Hagher –
Personal Journey as Ethnic Racist
I was born here at Mkar, I was born a human being for all I cared. It was later I learned to be Tiv and was happy to be Tiv. To be Tiv feels so good. It is so good. I became a Tiv ethnic racist, knowing the Tiv creation story of the Tiv God who created Takuruku the father of Tiv and Uke the non-Tiv, and that, Tiv were the original inhabitants of the Tiv nation, while the others the sons of Uke were the others scattered across the farmlands of Tiv nation. This creation story and folklore emphasized Tiv excellence and exceptionalism as against the picture of ignorant others whose yams, dances, and even appearance, was sub-standard. I did not
realize then that I was being molded in consciousness to be an ethnic racist.
As I entered primary school and came in contact with Christianity, I came across white racism forcefully in the theology of the Anglo-Saxon creation story in the “Bible” where the Blacks were the cursed race. I believed this and assimilated my inferiority complex before the white pastors and followed my parents to genuflect before white missionaries. Soon enough I was removed from my parents into the indulgent hands of my uncle, then into the primary school boarding school, situated twenty miles away from Gbagir my father’s missionary outpost. The boarding school at Zaki-Biam was a detribalization process to turn us away from the folktales and witchcraft and traditional world-views and to instill in us the dominance of Christianity and white supremacy. My father was supplied with American comics, cartoons, and literature for the young. I read voraciously. My reading list comprised “Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn,” “She” and “Alan Quatermain” by Rider Haggard, and “Tarzan of the Apes” series by Edgar Rice Burrough. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” stunned me. I was reading about slavery for the first time and it was so humiliating. I had never heard about slavery but I read about shameful things done to the slaves. Yet I didn’t want to die like Uncle Tom. I wondered why he didn’t escape and die fighting?
Reading through these books became a detribalization machine and at the same time, an ethnic racist consciousness crept over me. I was white. I identified with the white hero and looked down on the black. I systematically became detribalized but became a white racist through the power of literature. It is the same racist device employed in the Cowboy films where the lone
white hero takes the world of Indians and Mexicans and these identify with the white hero than their people who were always being defeated by the gringo. Literature and media are powerful weapons for subjugating consciousness and at the same time the ultimate weapons for liberation.
In Nigeria today, ethnic racism encroaches on us relentlessly like the harmattan dust from the north. Ethnic racism, creates new forms of power. The power to categorize, judge, elevate, downgrade, include, and exclude. We face this on a daily basis when we go to complain to the police or are facing a case in court, there is a small space on that complainants or defendants form where we are asked to fill what tribe we belong to? Once this form is filled, you have been branded for good or ill. You have permanently made or spoilt your case. Ethnic racist officers and the judiciary can prejudge you and determine your guilt even before you open your mouth to speak.
I faced a similar situation in January 2021 recently, at the time I registered to take the COVID vaccine in the United States. The form asked me if I was White, African American, Caucasian, Black, Asian or other. I did not waste time to fill I was “other”. I then realized I had categorized myself as alien, of whom Nobel laureate Toni Morrison questions: “Why should we want to
know a stranger when it’s easier to estrange another? Why should we want to close the distance when we can close the gate.?”
We are told that the term race was first used in 1481 by a French Poet, Jacques De Beze. In human history, this is a significant fact to show that race is a mythical invention, a fallacy but insidiously dangerous myth. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus in his book, “The Racial Hierarchy of Human Kind”, named the races as white, yellow Red, and Black and created a hierarchy where white was on top and black was in the bottom ring. This set the tone for unscientific hierarchization and categorization. Racist ideas are necessary to perpetuate racism. White intellectuals in order to justify racism advanced the monogenesis or curse theory. This theory states that we are all descended from Adam but the black race was the cursed one. Others advanced another atrocious theory of polygenesis which stated that while the white man originated from Adam the black people originated elsewhere and indeed may be a species of
non-humans. This gave the license to enslave the black people. Even western enlightenment arose as the slave trade flourished.
In Nigeria, very often the ethnic racist in the south glibly cast all northerners as inferior by European cultural standards, values, and traits. All northerners are often cast as uneducated illiterates and beggars, not minding high literacy in the Arabic script of some Fulani and Hausa intellectuals. When I first attended my African literature class at the Ahmadu Bello University in 1971, I was shocked to discover that writers in Nigeria made little effort to develop national literature. Writers are ethnic champions and Nigerian literature is full of ethnic racism. The existential challenges faced by the nation are bypassed for mythical forms and consciousness or couched in unrealistic de-cosmopolitanized settings. The reality is vastly different because the various ethnic groups of Nigeria have migrated from different regions to others and from rural to urban settings. Ethnic plays or novels are still engaged in ethnic racist mongering.
T
he Lugardian agenda in Nigeria was to force feed ethnic racism to the colonized in his racist indirect rule, which spawned apartheid in South Africa. In Nigeria, the colonial government set out to partner with the Sokoto Caliphate, and in order to do this, had to invent racist ideas, historiographers, ethnographers, and anthropologists were recruited to write the history of the indigenous Nigerian people. They immediately categorized the ethnicities into those who must rule and those who must obey. Ever since then these racist ideas have dominated the history department of Universities as ethnic racism is on the rise.
Post-Colonial Ethnic Racism 1966 coup where the majors claimed they were waging a revolution but in reality, the results
of the killings were ethnic racist and consequently countered by anti-racist middle belt officers who were neither Igbo nor Hausa-Fulani.
Even though Nigeria’s independence was won through concerted nationalist groups from 1861- 1960 by pan-Nigeria and Pan Africanists, Ethnic racism took over soon after independence. The issue of “indigenes” “settlers” and “native” become constructs of ethno-racism, by the power elite to dominate, exclude, define and otherize.
Nigeria is becoming more complex with the rapid urbanization of rural to urban areas and a great majority of Nigerians do not live in places where their ancestors were born. Surprisingly many Nigerians are denied citizenship of the Nigerian state through subterfuge, in the growth of the traditional chiefs and local governments where the traditional rulers continue to refer to the citizens as their subjects. Citizenship is defined as a special status granted by the state to its members and expresses the equality of all before the state. But ethnic racism has invented indigene/setter dichotomy as an exclusion device. Indigeneity is exclusive to members of a particular local ethnic community.
Nigeria has over 470 ethnic groups. This complicates the ethnic racist issues to the dominant groups that give orders in their hegemonic enclaves and the subordinated ethnicities that obey them. The Hausa-Fulani, Zango-Kataf crises between the Hausa and the Bujju and Katab, the Banjo and Kamba in Mambilla Plateau, the Kuteb and Chamba, the Jukun and Chamba, the Tiv and the Jukun, the Ebirra, Bass and Gbagiji the Ife/Modakeke the Aguleri Umuleri conflict in Igbo land over the ownership of Otucha land, where the colonial policy favored the Umuleri against the Aguleri. The Mango-Bokkos feud in Plateau between the Mwangavul and the Ron people.
The Nigeria constitution is ambiguous on the issue of citizenship and indigeneship. There is a fierce contest among the Nigeria political elite to acquire political power, acquire property and accumulate capital. This has blurred the ruling class from transcending ethnicity and building a united Nigeria as a pan-ethnic entity. One thing is clear, any idea that suggests one ethnic group is in any way inferior or superior to another is an ethnic racist idea. The present ethnic racist policies of our governments are first preceded by theoretical assumptions embedded in these ideas that some ethnicities are superior and ought to command while the others are to obey.
Today’s cyber space is inundated by ethnic racists whose constant verbal and non-verbal rants send degrading messages to people of other ethnicities. This micro-aggression leads to insurgency, kidnapping, and ultimately to genocide. We must consider national and transnational ethnic groups as equal in all differences. White racism has affected Nigeria in diverse ways, one of the ways has been through “colorism” a terminology invented by Alice walker, an American Novelist. Colorism has become a pathetic racial form in Nigeria, where light-skinned people are promoted by the policy of colorism in the business sector in Nigerian banks and other commercial institutions through a collection of policies causing inequalities between light-skinned people and dark-skinned people. A multibillion naira industry has emerged to promote this policy through the aggressive marketing of skin-lightening creams in every corner of the country according to Kendi. “Today skin lighteners are used by 70% of women in Nigeria, 35% in south Africa: 59% in Togo and 40% in China, Malaysia, the Philippines and south Korea.”
Skin bleaching is a racial death wish, akin to making whitening a destination or dying in the attempt to become white. Just like skin lightening creams have blossomed so also have dermatological clinics to repair the damage of abused black skin in which cancer of the skin is often the prognosis. I remember during the Benue Cement heydays skin lightening Ambi creams were used literally to enhance colorism by the fashionable women of Gboko, despite the unfortunate name of the cream “ambi” which is translated as human excreta in Tiv.
The land-grabbing policies of the present administration are ethnic racist policies. They promote the singular interest of a particular ethnicity the Fulani herders at the expense of the inconsequential others who must be expropriated or killed by the herdsmen while the presidency blatantly looks the other way or expresses a pathetic public bias goading the pillage, plunder, and incremental genocide, that has left many homeless. Of all the ethnic racist policies of this administration, the absolutely worst is the abandoning of displaced persons whose lands have been taken over by militias of a favored ethnic group.
The administration has unwittingly provoked reverse ethnic racism against the Fulani. This is unfortunate because many Fulani opposes the ethnic racist land grabbing policies. The country must not however abandon the real Nigerian cattle herders the “Bororo”Fulani, who have continued to suffer an outcast status that has made them pathological people. We must face and
counter their pathology through inclusive policies. The Fulani Bororo like the Osu of the Igbo must be equal to all of us as citizens. They have suffered far too much from ethnic racism, that profiling them merely adds insult to injury.
The Benue Fulani are indigenous Fulani who have lived in Benue for decades. They speak Benue Languages and have inter married with venue clans. This is the category that should be helped to ranch their cattle in accordance with the Benue anti-open grazing law which disproportionally affected them. This category of Benue Fulani is torn between the support of the Benue Government or the militancy of the Miyetti Allah – a Fulani ethnic racist group that parodies the white supremacist KKK of the US. In modern civilized society, any group that wants or needs something should negotiate instead of taking up arms against the large swath
of other ethnic nationalities. All the Fulani who are from other countries seeking to forcefully enter and occupy space in Nigeria should be shown the way out as illegal immigrants. To do less is to instigate a racial war the end of which is best left imagined. The president should mdisavow and condemn Fulani terrorism as such; without equivocation, and give all Nigerians the confidence that he is not a Fulani supremacist ethnic racist, but the president of all Nigerians.
Contemporary ethnic racism is on the rise due to the policies of successive governments since 1999. We have watched the worsening crash of the naira which has collapsed totally in value against the dollar. This collapse is certainly anticipated because those who sit at the apex of the national economy have no sympathy for the nation. These ethnic racists and class racists are
acting true to type they are destroying the only nation with the largest number of blacks to appease the racist policies of white supremacists who control the UN with veto power and sit on the boards of IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Center. Even if such occupants are black skins, they wear the white racist masquerades; western capitalism and its most
dangerous evolution – neoliberalism.
The economic chaos in Nigeria is a neoliberal paradise. Through this chaos, we will birth new dollar billionaires but send the ninety-nine precent into economic pain and ruin. Capitalism is racist. It produces inequality and subservient and dominant classes. No wonder Karl Max observed that The turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalized the rosy era of capitalist production. Ask those advising the president against the re-valuing of the naira and be told of capitalist market forces, young whites and Asians with sleek laptops in suits, meet with our government officials and the central bank and talk endlessly of removing a non-existent subsidy, and ask for the pump price of petrol and demand for more tariffs for electricity. They are practicing neoliberal capitalism, which they define as the freedom to exploit the people to economic bankruptcy, to extract taxes on the poor, and grant tariff exemption to the rich who are “sold” government assets for next to nothing.
Capitalism is designed to make the poor poorer and the rich richer. To invoke the culture of neoliberal capitalism in Nigeria is to stifle the breath out of the poor and wretched. Capitalism has produced wars, slave trade, colonies, and depressing wages. Neoliberalism has become a funnel where highly skilled manpower in Nigeria like Doctors and Nurses is taken away and
relocated in the western nation because our neoliberalism pays depressing wages that do not support a decent lifestyle for these professionals. Capitalism in Nigeria is the capitalist’s gold standard. Ethnic racists have sat at the apex of power and brought out policies that enable the Western nations to benefit at the expense of Nigeria when I talk about Western nations, I do not direct my gaze at white faces rather to the percent that own half of the World’s wealth around 42.5 precent while the 70% the 3.5 billion
poorest adults (most of who live in Africa) own 2.7 percent. Martin Luther King Jr. understood that capitalism is co-joined with racism, exploitation, and wars. He concluded that these are the three evils that are interrelated.
Nigeria’s unprecedented capitalist growth and the richness of its hydro carbons have enriched Western Nations and China, and a handful of Nigerians who have killed the national economy through the taking of loans from Banks that they had no intention of paying. These unpayable bad debts are passed on to depositors.
TO BE CONTINUED
Being a Distinguished Public Lecture by Prof. Iyorwuese Hagher, President, African Leadership Institute, USA, Presented @ University of Mkar, Nigeria