YORUBAS SHOULD IGNORE THESE HATE-FILLED IGBOS

[Amiel Fagbulu]

THE BITTERNESS AGAINST THE YORUBA

In the last 24 months or so a lot of diatribe has been directed against the Yoruba. Unfortunately some Yoruba elements have taken time out to respond to some of the things they thought were untrue or undeserved. They made good reading all of them.

The pointless discuss for instance, about whether Zik was greater than Awolowo took much of the space that would have been better used to address pressing issues that have relevance for today. One would have thought that the contributions of Azikwe, Awolowo, and the Sarduana towards our independence are there for all to see and learn from. None of them was an angel but they each meant different things to different people. Anyone who assesses the contributions of these three with an open mind will learn to admire each of them for different reasons. It is a pity that some Yoruba elements thought they should rise to defend Awolowo. That would have been sensible if those attacking Awolowo were misinformed or denied access to the truth. There is no point wasting time responding to hate, deliberate falsehood, or the writings of deluded persons.

A few Igbo in the forums recklessly attack anything Yoruba and Hausa/Fulani and show their uncouth background by even attacking the person of Bianca Ojukwu in such language that should only be used in the gutter. Calling the wife of their Igbo hero a whore in an open forum, even if it is true, tells the rest of us how much space they deserve in response to their writings. Another has recently posted that Okonjo-Iweala’s 95-year old husband chases anything in skirts in condemning the poor woman’s policy. What her husband’s age or sexual activities has to do with oil subsidy in Nigeria beats me. It only goes to show why the Yoruba in particular should ignore the few Igbo who are just reckless in attacking anything and everything they don’t like or understand.

In the interest of the very many Igbos that are trying to proffer honest solutions to the problems of Nigeria these few cranky ones should be ignored. It is they who accuse the Yoruba as being the thieves and looters of Nigeria. It is they who preach that Igbos should buy guns to protect themselves. It is they who threaten to drive Hausa/Fulanis from the East. It is they who want Nigeria to break up now and to resuscitate Biafra. It is they who blame the Yoruba for all the ills and problems of the Igbo in Nigeria including the 200 payment; the starvation of the Igbo; the loss of the Biafra war  etc. The list is unending.

Have these people fathomed why it is the Igbo that are unjustifiably massacred in communities in which Igbos, Yoruba, and others concentrate? Have they examined the possibility that the reckless and unbridled lashing out at other tribes by the few irresponsible Igbos have something to do with it? I personally admire those who feel loyal to their tribe but when it is done at the expense of truth and to the detriment of others in such crude language, I beg to be excused.

My appeal here is to the Yoruba. Any other groups can use whatever they find agreeable in it.

1.     Do not rush to respond to professional hate merchants especially when they say the usual falsities against the Yoruba. You too should not be like them – do not hate; just say what you know to be truthful without bitterness if it is compelling that you should respond.

2.     We are not perfect and should be able to use every constructive criticism.

3.     Read everything they have to say and take out whatever is true and use it to improve the future of the Yoruba race. There is always some iota of sense in even the most senseless and atrocious ranting.

4.     As long as we are in Nigeria, whether it is perfect or not, our responsibility should be to find solutions to our problems. In doing so, we should respect the views and sensitivities of other tribes because we have to live with them even in a future in which there is no Nigeria as it is known today.

5.     We should go out to revive and strengthen our culture because there is so much in it that can stand us in good stead in the rough and unpredictable future we are heading to.

6.     The other tribes in Nigeria have much that we can learn from. We should respect their culture and honestly strive to live in harmony with them. War is a very wicked and needlessly destructive thing and should be avoided like poison. Seek peace; speak peace, live peace, even if others think you are weak. A bellicose, cutlass-wielding, or gun-stockpiling stance is bad for good neighborliness. By doing so you are attracting suspicion and hate to yourself.

7.     It is a fundamental tenet of Yoruba culture to protect strangers among us. We should not let that change and should assure Hausas, Igbos, and others among us that the barbarism that was unleashed on strangers in other parts of the country is not part of our culture and that they should feel safe. Communities should have arrangements to ensure the protection of lives and properties of strangers.

8.     We should begin NOW to wean ourselves as Yoruba of the oil money that is the curse of Nigeria. It should dry up in perhaps 30 years so we need to make a 20-year de-oiling plan during which we should be able to fund our states without recourse to the oil money that some states are claiming, rightly or wrongly, as their sole property. We should remember that once upon a time, cocoa and groundnuts funded most of the development of Nigeria. We should begin planning for that NOW. We can do it.

9.     Let us not compete with any tribe or group in Nigeria. If we must look for bench-marks, please let us look up to countries like South Africa, Malaysia, China, or Germany. Our institutions should target international standards.

10.   We must be harsh and honest in assessing ourselves as Yoruba people. One of our strengths is, in our parlance, ‘lying down and  not facing the same way’. We believe in diversity. Honest disagreements and the freedom to choose what individuals believe has led to a Rev. Ransome-Kuti being a chieftain of the AG political party while his wife Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti  was a chieftain in the NCNC party. Many multi-religious Yoruba families share the same family compound and live in harmony all their lives. Let them laugh at us but following our conviction is our great asset. We rejected Obasanjo, our own, because we did not see why we should embrace him. We accepted Abiola a Muslim who chose another Muslim as a running mate.  We had an Awolowo and at the same time embraced in part an Akintola.  That is a strength.

It is important to keep in focus that those bringing the Igbos into disrepute are a minority. It  is not therefore right to group all Igbos into the category of those who are reckless.  What the majority can do is to appeal to them as I am doing to the few Yoruba who trade insult and abuse with their Igbo type on the net. I think enough is enough of this nonsense of trading insults and wasting time on the incorrigible hate mongers of Igbo extraction.

Amiel M. Fagbulu

Monday, January 16, 2012

[toyin adepoju]

Thanks, Amiel, for warning against ethnic division.

Your suggestions about economic diversification and learning from one's own as well as other ethnicities is also most  vital.

Most people on this group might not have the background to fully grasp the gravity of the points you make because they don't belong to the Nigerian centred groups where these attacks take place.

I hope you will post this piece of yours on as many as possible of those groups.

If I might make a correction-I suspect you were alluding to the 20 pounds-not 200 pounds-ex gratia awards given to  Igbo people after the war regardless of their savings before then. Awolowo, Finance Minister during and shortly after the war has a logical explanation for that but I don't want to recapitulate it now so I don't make mistakes and misrepresent him.

Granted, some Igbos are reckless in criticism  of the Yoruba but a significant number of Igbos are likely to be unhappy with the Yoruba, and particularly the legendary Yoruba chieftain, Obafemi Awolowo,  and many of such Igbos do not express their displeasure in public. It would be helpful if such issues were to be publicly addressed. 

Some of these opinions  have been expressed to me privately by Igbo friends and non-Igbo friends, including Yoruba friends.  As one Igbo friend put it,  'I identify with individual Yoruba but not with the Yoruba as an ethnic group'. Another Igbo friend stated 'Its a pity the Yoruba did not have the courage to join the secession struggle of 1967'. Yet these friends of mine are among the most cultured people I know. Such opinions will not be expressed by them in public, and even if they are, not in the spirit of the people Amiel is criticising. Yet, it can be argued that such hidden perspectives share a topographic space with those other openly expressed and brashly  articulated positions.

These critics  might have in mind the in/famous carpet crossing episode in which Awo  allegedly deprived  the Igbo political luminary Nnamdi Azikiwe  of his electoral victory by having his  fellow Yoruba politicians decamp from Zik's  more nationalist  camp to Awo's weaker, more ethnically focused group, diluting Zik's electoral victory and leading him to flee back home to the East for relevance, thereby, according to some views, Awo bringing ethnicity into Nigerian politics. This story was brought to my attention by an Igbo and a Yoruba friend who share the same view on the story and whom I met at different points in my life and different places-one in Benin in the early 80s, another in England in the early 2000s.

Some, possibly a significant number of  Igbos are of the view that Awolowo was central to the failure  of Biafra, the secessionist  state which the Igbo were at the centre.  They refer to Awo's  famous and controversial  ' by omission or commission speech' stating that if the East were  allowed to secede, by acts of omission or commission, if I remember it well enough, the West, which Awo led,  would  go too. 

Then when it came to crunch time, with the East, and particularly the Igbos, taking their destiny into their hands and seceding, as this point of view presents there situation in 1967, not only did the West not join the Est as expected, they joined the North in fighting against Biafra.

One point of view suggests that the failure of Biafra might have begun when Victor Banjo, a Yoruba officer fighting for Biafra, failed to get the cooperation of the Yoruba elite as he advanced from the Midwest to Ibadan and Lagos, dallying mysteriously for a significant length of time  afar taking the Midwest, getting in touch with the military governor of the West  and informing the governor  of his plans to establish a foothold in the West, and as some think, negotiating with Yoruba leaders, a move that failed and cost him the time it  took for the federal government to create a new military division under a Northern leader, the 2nd Division under Murtala Muhammed and defeat Bajo's advance to Lagos at the battle of Ore. Banjo and his troops had to retreat  across the Niger into the East.

 At that point, it may be argued, the Biafran military  option was greatly imperilled and perhaps lost because Biafra was now reduced to a small geographical territory that could be easily sealed off, which is what eventually happened. Roy Samuel Doron's 2011 PhD Forging a Nation While Losing a Country : Igbo Nationalism, Ethnicity and Propaganda in the Nigerian Civil War 1968-1970 in its second chapter analyses this situation most poignantly. 

They are also most unhappy at Awo's advising successfully that the Nigerian government at one point disallow relief shipments into barricaded and beleaguered Biafra in the name of preventing food from reaching Biafran soldiers in the midst of horribly starving Biafran children.

They are convinced that Awo acted as a mastermind who  aggravated the horrors of Biafran suffering through the relief  blockade policy, an aspect of the starvation policy Peter  Enahoro is quoted as defending, by contributing to the failure of Biafra through the the illusion that  West would join Biafra in secession, and later alienating Biafra to fight alone what Biafra understood as a common war against Northern hegemony,  as well as the impoverishment of Igbos after the war through  Awo's central role in the 20 pound policy, effectively bankrupting Igbos  at a time when Nigerian corporations  were being being privatised thereby locking the Igbo out  of this strategic reorganisation of the nation's economy.

These aggrieved Igbo and those who share these views hold that this monetary policy, followed by the indigenisation of the corporations at a time when the Igbo were economically prostrate, allied to anti-Igbo discrimination by Yoruba, Northerners and perhaps others, plus losses during and after the war,  transformed some of the Igbo   technocratic elite into hustlers, some other members of the igbo population   into armed robbers and laying the foundations of the alleged Igbo dominance in 419, Advance Fee Fraud, and the loss of many Igbo youth to business rather than education in the name of recouping  losses sustained during the war and after, a situation that at one time is described created an imbalance in education among the Igbo, with women being more visible in education where the Igbo as a whole used to be  a formidable force in Nigeria intellectual culture, which they still are, but not at the level of the momentum  gathering force  from the 1960s.

In presenting these perspectives, while noting possible inadequacies in my  rendition of the  grievances , I am not arguing for these positions, simply stating that those more aggressive anti-Yoruba, anti-Awo  Igbo you refer to are a tip of an iceberg, , a good part of which is invisible, unspoken but real.

Its important the issues that bother them should be discussed. The Nigerian Village Square, recognising this need, has opened a discussion space on Awo for people to dialogue on  these contentious  matters. 

I would also like to state that while I acknowledge that the Yoruba can be very inclusive, it is also true that such inclusiveness might be less pronounced when certain boundaries are crossed. In crossing those boundaries, one could observe that the  Yoruba can also be ethnically parochial  in their perspectives of themselves in relation to  to other ethnicities in Nigeria, as evident, at times, in the online group, Omoodua. 

 Evidence of ethnic chauvinism in traditional culture, politics, marriage, to give some examples, still emerge  among them, as with other ethnic groups in Nigeria. 

My own ethnic group, for example, the Okpameri of Ako-ko Edo, used to or might still 'forbid' the neighbouring Uneme, because of one ancient story of betrayal the authenticity of or otherwise of which I know nothing about. Among the Igbo you have discrimination  against fellow Igbo in the name of observing anti-Osu cast rules. 

Are people less likely to be parochial depending on their  level of education and social  exposure?  Abiola Irele, a great African and Yoruba scholar  knew that I am not Yoruba, neither am I fluent  in Yoruba, yet he awarded me the contract to write the essays on Ifa/ Odu, Orisa and Ori, in the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought which he edited, even though these are concepts dealing with the penetralia, the essence  of Yoruba/Orisa tradition  esoteric knowledge. I would also have written the essay on 'ase', a conception of invisible creative force in Yoruba/Orisa thought, if not that some else had already been awarded the contract. I am not addressing here other opportunities Irele provided for me. 

Another illustrious Nigerian and  Yoruba scholar, Toyin Falola, also being aware of my non-Yoruba ethnicity and my non-fluency in Yoruba, got me a contract with an academic press to write a book on Ifa, even pledging and giving his own editorial assistance. Ademola da Sylva, another prominent Nigerian and Yoruba scholar,  at the University of Ibadan got me a place to do a PhD on Ifa at the University of Ibadan some years ago and is also giving me support on the book I  mentioned a while ago. 

In fact, it was on my posting my essay on Yoruba discourse which began with my acknowledgement of my limitations in relation to Yoruba Studies that Falola and another Nigerian/ Yoruba  scholar sent me copies of their books from their US addresses to my address in England. 

On the other hand, a significant number of critics of my writings on Ifa at the Omoodua group think that my not being Yoruba , not to talk of my not being traditionally trained in Ifa, disqualifies me from having anything relevant to say on Ifa. They are not aware that not only is Ifa increasingly documented, it can be learnt from adepts outside Yorubaland, including in other parts of Nigeria.

The theory based on education  is faulted by other experiences of mine with people of various ethnicities, such as the OPC ( Oodua People's Congress, one of the most prominent of Yoruba organisations) man on patrol a friend I met one night on the streets of Lagos when we were stranded because all commercial vehicles had stopped working. The man took us to his house, where, without any rancour from his wife, my friend, myself, his wife and himself shared the  floor of the couple's one room living space-one room meaning that room is all there is-  since that was the only sleeping space they had. That experience is one of the highlights of my life on account of its awesome level of charity. 

thanks

toyin

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[toyin adepoju]

On later looking up the records to be certain, please forgive my lamentable uncertainty on such a significant issue,its important I state the 20 pounds described as given as a  flat rate to Biafransa after the war was in exchange for Biafran currency, which was not legal tender in Nigeria. It seems Awo argued that converting the holdings in Biafran currency to their Nigerian equivalent would be disastrous for the Nigerian economy. He presents his case in the Sahara repeaters link I gave in my earlier post. 

I am curious, though, about the fate of the monies held by Biafrans before the war. Were they all converted to the Biafran currency?

thanks

toyin

[toyin adepoju]

APOLOGIES FOR REPOSTING. REPOSTED WITH A VITAL ADDITION ON THE 20 POUNDS ISSUE

Thanks, Amiel, for warning against ethnic division.

Your suggestions about economic diversification and learning from one's own as well as other ethnicities is also most  vital.

Most people on this group might not have the background to fully grasp the gravity of the points you make because they don't belong to the Nigerian centred groups where these attacks take place.

I hope you will post this piece of yours on as many as possible of those groups.

If I might make a correction-I suspect you were alluding to the 20 pounds-not 200 pounds-ex gratia awards given to  Igbo people after the war regardless of their savings before then.  The 20 pounds is described as given as a  flat rate to Biafransa after the war was in exchange for Biafran currency, which was not legal tender in Nigeria. It seems Awolowo, Finance Minister during and shortly after the war argued that converting the holdings in Biafran currency to their Nigerian equivalent would be disastrous for the Nigerian economy.

Granted, some Igbos are reckless in criticism  of the Yoruba but a significant number of Igbos are likely to be unhappy with the Yoruba, and particularly the legendary Yoruba chieftain, Obafemi Awolowo,  and many of such Igbos do not express their displeasure in public. It would be helpful if such issues were to be publicly addressed. 

Some of these opinions  have been expressed to me privately by Igbo friends and non-Igbo friends, including Yoruba friends.  As one Igbo friend put it,  'I identify with individual Yoruba but not with the Yoruba as an ethnic group'. Another Igbo friend stated 'Its a pity the Yoruba did not have the courage to join the secession struggle of 1967'. Yet these friends of mine are among the most cultured people I know. Such opinions will not be expressed by them in public, and even if they are, not in the spirit of the people Amiel is criticising. Yet, it can be argued that such hidden perspectives share a topographic space with those other openly expressed and brashly  articulated positions.

These critics  might have in mind the in/famous carpet crossing episode in which Awo  allegedly deprived  the Igbo political luminary Nnamdi Azikiwe  of his electoral victory by having his  fellow Yoruba politicians decamp from Zik's  more nationalist  camp to Awo's weaker, more ethnically focused group, diluting Zik's electoral victory and leading him to flee back home to the East for relevance, thereby, according to some views, Awo bringing ethnicity into Nigerian politics. This story was brought to my attention by an Igbo and a Yoruba friend who share the same view on the story and whom I met at different points in my life and different places-one in Benin in the early 80s, another in England in the early 2000s.

Some, possibly a significant number of  Igbos are of the view that Awolowo was central to the failure  of Biafra, the secessionist  state which the Igbo were at the centre.  They refer to Awo's  famous and controversial  ' by omission or commission speech' stating that if the East were  allowed to secede, by acts of omission or commission, if I remember it well enough, the West, which Awo led,  would  go too. 

Then when it came to crunch time, with the East, and particularly the Igbos, taking their destiny into their hands and seceding, as this point of view presents there situation in 1967, not only did the West not join the Est as expected, they joined the North in fighting against Biafra.

One point of view suggests that the failure of Biafra might have begun when Victor Banjo, a Yoruba officer fighting for Biafra, failed to get the cooperation of the Yoruba elite as he advanced from the Midwest to Ibadan and Lagos, dallying mysteriously for a significant length of time  afar taking the Midwest, getting in touch with the military governor of the West  and informing the governor  of his plans to establish a foothold in the West, and as some think, negotiating with Yoruba leaders, a move that failed and cost him the time it  took for the federal government to create a new military division under a Northern leader, the 2nd Division under Murtala Muhammed and defeat Bajo's advance to Lagos at the battle of Ore. Banjo and his troops had to retreat  across the Niger into the East.

 At that point, it may be argued, the Biafran military  option was greatly imperilled and perhaps lost because Biafra was now reduced to a small geographical territory that could be easily sealed off, which is what eventually happened. Roy Samuel Doron's 2011 PhD Forging a Nation While Losing a Country : Igbo Nationalism, Ethnicity and Propaganda in the Nigerian Civil War 1968-1970 in its second chapter analyses this situation most poignantly. 

They are also most unhappy at Awo's advising successfully that the Nigerian government at one point disallow relief shipments into barricaded and beleaguered Biafra in the name of preventing food from reaching Biafran soldiers in the midst of horribly starving Biafran children.

They are convinced that Awo acted as a mastermind who  aggravated the horrors of Biafran suffering through the relief  blockade policy, an aspect of the starvation policy Peter  Enahoro is quoted as defending, by contributing to the failure of Biafra through the the illusion that  West would join Biafra in secession, and later alienating Biafra to fight alone what Biafra understood as a common war against Northern hegemony,  as well as the impoverishment of Igbos after the war through  Awo's central role in the 20 pound policy,  the 20 pounds described as given as a  flat rate to Biafransa after the war was in exchange for Biafran currency, which was not legal tender in Nigeria. It seems Awo argued that converting the holdings in Biafran currency to their Nigerian equivalent would be disastrous for the Nigerian economy. One  argument is that this policy effectively bankrupting Igbos  at a time when Nigerian corporations  were being being privatised thereby locking the Igbo out  of this strategic reorganisation of the nation's economy.

These aggrieved Igbo and those who share these views hold that this monetary policy, followed by the indigenisation of the corporations at a time when the Igbo were economically prostrate, allied to anti-Igbo discrimination by Yoruba, Northerners and perhaps others, plus losses during and after the war,  transformed some of the Igbo   technocratic elite into hustlers, some other members of the igbo population   into armed robbers and laying the foundations of the alleged Igbo dominance in 419, Advance Fee Fraud, and the loss of many Igbo youth to business rather than education in the name of recouping  losses sustained during the war and after, a situation that at one time is described created an imbalance in education among the Igbo, with women being more visible in education where the Igbo as a whole used to be  a formidable force in Nigeria intellectual culture, which they still are, but not at the level of the momentum  gathering force  from the 1960s.

In presenting these perspectives, while noting possible inadequacies in my  rendition of the  grievances , I am not arguing for these positions, simply stating that those more aggressive anti-Yoruba, anti-Awo  Igbo you refer to are a tip of an iceberg, , a good part of which is invisible, unspoken but real.

Its important the issues that bother them should be discussed. The Nigerian Village Square, recognising this need, has opened a discussion space on Awo for people to dialogue on  these contentious  matters. 

I would also like to state that while I acknowledge that the Yoruba can be very inclusive, it is also true that such inclusiveness might be less pronounced when certain boundaries are crossed. In crossing those boundaries, one could observe that the  Yoruba can also be ethnically parochial  in their perspectives of themselves in relation to  to other ethnicities in Nigeria, as evident, at times, in the online group, Omoodua. 

 Evidence of ethnic chauvinism in traditional culture, politics, marriage, to give some examples, still emerge  among them, as with other ethnic groups in Nigeria. 

My own ethnic group, for example, the Okpameri of Ako-ko Edo, used to or might still 'forbid' the neighbouring Uneme, because of one ancient story of betrayal the authenticity of or otherwise of which I know nothing about. Among the Igbo you have discrimination  against fellow Igbo in the name of observing anti-Osu cast rules. 

Are people less likely to be parochial depending on their  level of education and social  exposure?  Abiola Irele, a great African and Yoruba scholar  knew that I am not Yoruba, neither am I fluent  in Yoruba, yet he awarded me the contract to write the essays on Ifa/ Odu, Orisa and Ori, in the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought which he edited, even though these are concepts dealing with the penetralia, the essence  of Yoruba/Orisa tradition  esoteric knowledge. I would also have written the essay on 'ase', a conception of invisible creative force in Yoruba/Orisa thought, if not that some else had already been awarded the contract. I am not addressing here other opportunities Irele provided for me. 

Another illustrious Nigerian and  Yoruba scholar, Toyin Falola, also being aware of my non-Yoruba ethnicity and my non-fluency in Yoruba, got me a contract with an academic press to write a book on Ifa, even pledging and giving his own editorial assistance. Ademola da Sylva, another prominent Nigerian and Yoruba scholar,  at the University of Ibadan got me a place to do a PhD on Ifa at the University of Ibadan some years ago and is also giving me support on the book I  mentioned a while ago. 

In fact, it was on my posting my essay on Yoruba discourse which began with my acknowledgement of my limitations in relation to Yoruba Studies that Falola and another Nigerian/ Yoruba  scholar sent me copies of their books from their US addresses to my address in England. 

On the other hand, a significant number of critics of my writings on Ifa at the Omoodua group think that my not being Yoruba , not to talk of my not being traditionally trained in Ifa, disqualifies me from having anything relevant to say on Ifa. They are not aware that not only is Ifa increasingly documented, it can be learnt from adepts outside Yorubaland, including in other parts of Nigeria.

The theory based on education  is faulted by other experiences of mine with people of various ethnicities, such as the OPC ( Oodua People's Congress, one of the most prominent of Yoruba organisations) man on patrol a friend I met one night on the streets of Lagos when we were stranded because all commercial vehicles had stopped working. The man took us to his house, where, without any rancour from his wife, my friend, myself, his wife and himself shared the  floor of the couple's one room living space-one room meaning that room is all there is-  since that was the only sleeping space they had. That experience is one of the highlights of my life on account of its awesome level of charity. 

thanks

toyin

On 16 January 2012 04:57, Amiel Fagbulu <amiel....@ymail.com> wrote:

--