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.
Source:
The Nation
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