“Awusa for that matter!”, Bartholomew boasted to Rhoda. He pronounced his name as Batromi, twisting his tongue and lips, in a curious funky style, to produce the same sound as the English word “Harmony”. An Igbo from Enugu, it wasn’t clear that he completed elementary school. Crude by every standard, Bartholomew was your ideal village boy who came to Lagos to, as every young person puts it, hustle. On this occasion I’m narrating, he had an argument with Rhoda, a girl from Birom in Plataeu state. By then, Rhoda already had her Senior Secondary School certificate; she needed a stop-gap job from which to raise money to further her education. Decent with a calm beauty, I met her in a business one of my senior cousins was running then. She was a clerk and Bartholomew a vendor. I asked Bato (everybody called him that for short) why he made that statement. He told me, voice thunderous and eyes haughty, that an Hausa girl shouldn’t talk when he – Batromi – is talking. Now by comparison, Bato wasn’t a match for Rhoda in education, exposure or civility. Rhoda knew. She simply laughed and walked away. I hushed him up and pointed to him the two dangerous mistakes he made with his supremacist comment. One, every Northerner isn’t Hausa. Two, Hausas aren’t inferior to the Igbos or anybody for that matter. Actually, no tribe in this world is inferior to another. I told him that one of the top three students in my class in secondary school was Mohammed Suleiman, an Hausa/Fulani boy who played a lot. I broadened it further, naming the top ten academic performers in the class and their tribes; many were from tribes Bato had never heard of. Segun was Yoruba, Innocent was Idoma, Suleiman was Hausa, Nansel was Langtan, Ojochide was Igala, Collins was Igbo, Justin was Igbo, Mwuese was Tiv, Patience was Igbo, Chinedu was Igbo. As I named them and their tribes, I watched his jaw drop. His eyes told me the message: I’ve been wrong all this while. For the remaining period I stayed with them, I never heard him condescend on Rhoda again. That was some years back. Now, it must be said that there are so many Bartholomews scattered all over Nigeria; the unlettered unexposed,intolerant citizens who can’t understand why other tribes don’t come worshipping them in recognition of their superiority. I sincerely don’t get angry with such people, or even if I unconsciously give in to anger when they incite hate, I still try to educate them on the lies and dangers of stereotyping. Now enters Femi Fani-Kayode, an alumnus of Cambridge University, a former minister of the Federal government, in 2013 almost thundering in the crude tone and ignorance of Bartholomew: Igbo for that matter! Femi, in an article (the third of a series of lies he called truth and history) laced with bile and hate against the Igbos, described an entire ethnic tribe as “collectively unlettered, uncouth, uncultured, unrestrained and crude in all their ways”. His reason for publishing such destructive thoughts was because, as he claimed, Orji Uzor Kalu, said Lagos was a ‘no-man’s land’. And then he went ahead to affirm that Orji Kalu was his personal friend with whom he is close. Rather than address Kalu’s claim, which I do not subscribe to anyway, he zoomed off to his pastime: hate-stoking. The real danger in allowing that happen is that a set of people, this time not the Batholomews, but those who have enough education to be able to read Mr Femi, will erroneously pick up his hate messages and run with them, going into their daily interactions with the Igbos (and other tribes when finally he writes about them) with minds long prejudiced by the lies of a pseudo-intellectual. Here’s one effect of such messages. I met a girl during my youth service days in Ibadan who told me she influenced her NYSC posting to the South West because her parents told her to avoid the North and the Igbos. She explained that the Northerners are religious extremists while the Igbos eat human flesh. She therefore made efforts to be posted to just Lagos, or, if Lagos failed, Oyo state. She got her request. Now you’d think her parents weren’t educated. Well, they both were. The last time I was in Abuja, the person who dropped me at the airport (he lives closer to the airport and insisted I was going to pass the night in his house so he would drop me the next morning) was an Hausa man. His wife treated me to a sumptuous meal that night, and before I slept, I had an exciting time playing with his two little beautiful daughters who instantly took to me. He even showed me some verses in the Quran as he complained how Boko Haram has been working hard to bring Islam to disrepute. Yet in some quarters, the Hausas are aliens who shouldn’t ever be related with by those from the South. But the ethnic supremacists have got a lot more work to do than just derogate other ethnic groups. Even within our tribes, that nagging human challenge, conflict, persists. During my NYSC orientation at Iseyin, Oyo state, a prominent figure in the town, while addressing the corps members, told those of us who would be posted to Ibadan for our primary assignment to beware of the Ibadan man’s incredible capacity for deceit. He said the Ibadan man will smile with you now and kill you the next minute. And yes, that’s a Yoruba man talking about another Yoruba man. Femi Fani-Kayode, whose vision of becoming the next Yoruba leader is centered around reducing other ethnic groups to pieces of shit, has got a lot of work to do. His ‘people’ first need to be in unity. Does he still remember Ife and Modakeke bloodshed? Many Igbo versions of Femi abound: they want to become Igbo leaders by denigrating other ethnic groups. Yet I’ve seen marriages in Igboland crumble simply because the families of the couples involved didn’t approve of their children marrying somebody from “that side” or “that state”, all in Igboland. Who remembers Aguleri and Umuleri war? The two villages (or towns, if you like) are in Anambra state. Today, in 2013, Igbo, the tribe peopled by mostly Christians, still battles with the ‘Osu’ (outcast) and ‘Di ala’ (freeborn) discrimination. What am I even saying? They aren’t battling with it. It is just a law: you must not marry an Osu, period! And we also still hear, “don’t marry Mbaise” admonition from parents in other parts of Igboland. As for the lies from Femi, I initially promised myself to never write about them. This piece is to give explanations to the reason why I went for his jugular on twitter. The entirety of the clap-trap he scribbled has been rubbished by two people who wrote on two sides of the matter: Igbo contribution to Lagos State and the choice narrative that Igbos aren’t educated. On the contribution of the Igbo to the development of Lagos, Obi Nwakanma wrote this in the Vanguard. And on the sweeping generalization that the Igbos are grossly unlettered, Dr Samuel Okafor writes this. I think we are glorying in what should shame us. We should educate every Nigerian, not go about gloating about how educationally disadvantaged others are. Yet as I write this, I am aware that the Fani-Kayodes and Bartholomews of this world will need such shameful glorification to make themselves excited. Bartholomew’s limitations I can fathom, but pray, what is Femi Fani-Kayode’s? CHINEDU Ekeke
Posted on: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 06:11:21 +0000
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