Why Nigerians hate Igbo, by Chinua Achebe
Nigeria’s
foremost novelist Chinua Achebe has claimed that Nigerians, especially
of the Hausa/Fulani and the Yoruba stocks, do not like his Igbo ethnic
group because of the southeast’s cultural advantage.
He made this claim in his new book,
There was a Country, which has generated controversy for his onslaught
on the role of Obafemi Awolowo as the federal commissioner of finance
during the Nigeria civil war.
He accused Awolowo of genocide and
imposition of food blockade on Biafra, a claim that has drawn rebuttals
and contradictions of emotional intensity from some southwest leaders
and commentators.
“I have written in my small book
entitled The Trouble with Nigeria that Nigerians will probably achieve
consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo,”
he wrote under the heading, A History of Ethnic Tension and Resentment.
He traced the origin of “the national resentment of the Igbo” to its
culture that “gave the Igbo man an unquestioned advantage over his
compatriots in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian colonial
society.”
He observed that the Igbo culture’s
emphasis on change, individualism and competitiveness gave his ethnic
group an edge over the Hausa/Fulani man who was hindered by a “wary
religion” and the Yoruba man who was hampered by” traditional
hierarchies.”
He therefore described the Igbo, who are
predominantly Catholic, as “fearing no god or man, was “custom-made to
grasp the opportunities, such as they were, of the white man’s
dispensations. And the Igbo did so with both hands.”
He delved into history with his claim,
asserting that the Igbo overcame the earlier Yoruba advantage within two
decades earlier in the twentieth century.
“Although the Yoruba had a huge
historical and geographical head start, the Igbo wiped out their
handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between
1930 and 1950.”
He narrated the earlier advantage of
Yoruba as contingent on their location on the coastline, but once the
missionaries crossed the Niger, the Igbo took advantage of the
opportunity and overtook the Yoruba.
‘The increase was so exponential in such
a short time that within three short decades the Igbos had closed the
gap and quickly moved ahead as the group with the highest literacy rate,
the highest standard of living, and the greatest of citizens with
postsecondary education in Nigeria,” he contended.
He said Nigerian leadership should have
taken advantage of the gbo talent and this failure was partly
responsible for the failure of the Nigerian state, explaining further
that competitive individualism and the adventurous spirit of the Igbo
was a boon Nigerian leaders failed to recognize and harness for
modernization.
“Nigeria’s pathetic attempt to crush
these idiosyncrasies rather than celebrate them is one of the
fundamental reasons the country has not developed as it should and has
emerged as a laughingstock,” he claimed.
He noted that the ousting of prominent
Igbos from top offices was a ploy to achieve a simple and crude goal. He
said what the Nigerians wanted was to “get the achievers out and
replace them with less qualified individuals from the desired ethnic
background so as to gain access to the resources of the state.”
Achebe, however, saved some criticisms
for his kinsmen. He criticised them for what he described as “hubris,
overweening pride and thoughtlessness, which invite envy and hatred or
even worse that can obsess the mind with material success and dispose it
to all kinds of crude showiness.”
He added that “contemporary Igbo behavior(that) cab offend by its noisy exhibitionism and disregard for humility and quietness.
No comments