Nigeria, Ethnicity, AND Nationalism

Source: tourbrockersinternational.com

(Pius Adesanmi)--Pan-Nigeria does not ask you to forget your ethnic, religious or other identities. It asks you to sacrifice nothing. In fact, pan-Nigeria cannot even exist as a philosophical concept without those differences.

What I want you to know you cannot even be a good Nigerian if you are not a fantastic Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw, etc. So start by being very proud of your ethnic and cultural identity and specificity. Then, apply yourself to understanding the history and cultures of your ethnicity’s ancestors.

You see, ethnic hatred in Nigeria is borne out of crass ignorance of the humanism and philosophical generosity of the ancestors of the federating ethnicities.

I have studied the cultures of Africa long enough to understand their deep humanism which should form the basis of an extension of the self into others, a projection into them to respect them in their own distinction and specificity.

So, understanding the story of humanism in your Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani or Ogoni history and culture is the road to the pan-Nigerian humanism I envision. Go back to your folk tales and listen attentively to what happened to the tortoise whenever he undermined the dignity of his own people or of neighbouring peoples.

The fundamental humanism in our ancestral stories is what we have not been able to properly integrate into the modern project Nigeria.

Once we do that, nobody will be scared of genuine fiscal and political Federalism. Everybody will also remember that the Nigeria they don’t know that they have is what the rest of Africa sees even in their hostility to the Nigerian.

When you travel across the continent, what fuels the giant resentment you encounter, all the demonisation you encounter, especially in places like Ghana and South Africa, is not your Yorubatude or Igbotude or Hausa-Fulanitude. What Africa sees and resents unjustifiably is Nigeria and certain abstract qualities, which define us in relation to space, for instance. You enter a room and own the space. That’s Nigerian. Those are things we could forge into our collective self-imagining.