By Okey Ndibe
I have been distressed beyond words by what has crystallized
as an agitation for Biafra’s divorce from Nigeria . I am disturbed that this
agitation has become another occasion for the Nigerian state to demonstrate its
disdain for the rule of law and the rights of citizens. I’m appalled by the
violence spawned by the actions of the agitators and the state’s reaction. The
immediate impetus for the violent turn is the continued detention of Nnamdi
Kanu, leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), indeed the rabble
rouser-in-chief of the neo-Biafran cause.
The
government ought to release Mr. Kanu immediately, both because that’s the
wisdom of the court and it’s the quickest way to defuse tension.
But Mr.
Kanu’s release will not, by itself, erase the frenzied propagation of Biafra , an idea that represents a nightmare to some, and
a fantasy to others. Sooner or later—sooner, one hopes, than later—Nigeria has to
confront the inescapable question of what it means to be called a Nigerian.
That
question (or the reluctance to engage it in any serious and sustained way) is
one reason Nigeria
has remained an alien and alienating idea, and susceptible to frequent acts of
rejection by its ostensible citizens. Periodically, those expressions of
everyday individual resentment and disaffection build into mass resistance.
It’s
important to put the agitation for Biafra in
the broader context of Nigerians’ longstanding disillusionment with their
country. For the avoidance of doubt, this is no new phenomenon. Nigeria ’s two literary giants, Wole Soyinka and
the late Chinua Achebe, have wrestled with the confounding matter of Nigeria . A few
years ago, Nobel laureate Soyinka asserted at a series of talks he gave at Harvard University
that there was no nation yet in the space called Nigeria . Years earlier, Achebe had
said to me in an interview that Nigeria
had not yet been founded.
Nothing
in the two writers’ claims amounted to a repudiation of Nigeria as
such. No, they were making what I’d call statements of fact. The fact that Nigeria had yet
to achieve a sense of national identity did not imply that such a prospect was
doomed. I’d say that the two writers were warning the rest of us about what
needed to be done in order to translate the abstract, ill-formed idea called Nigeria into a
concrete, organic, salutary and regenerative reality.
Owing to
the ahistorical mindset that shapes much discourse in Nigeria , some
people on both sides of the Biafran debate have proceeded as if there was something
unique or exceptionable about Mr. Kanu’s separatist advocacy. No, it is a
variant of rebellions that have periodically cropped up since the British
cobbled together the space called Nigeria . In more recent times, such
rebellions had baptized themselves with such names as the Odua Peoples Congress
(OPC), the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and—in its
religionist hue—Boko Haram.
If the
current agitation for Biafra has any claim to uniqueness at all, it lies in the
fact that, between 1967 and 1970, Nigeria
fought a thirty-month war to suppress the secession of Biafra .
I was a child during that war, shielded the best way my parents could, but I
experienced the Biafran War’s horrendousness and horrific cost. I saw firsthand
the devastation, on limbs, nerves, dreams and space, that war wrought. Some
historians estimated that more than two million people perished, most of them
children, most from starvation.
Anybody
who’s followed my writing for any length of time would know that, like Soyinka,
Achebe and many others, I am not enamored of the pathological state of Nigeria . I
believe Nigeria
has been an extremely prodigal construct, wedded to colossal squandering of
lives and other resources, with little or no positive result.
In June
2014, I published an essay titled “Biafra, the Ostrich Mentality and Nigeria ’s
Tragedy.” That essay embodied my sense of utter frustration with Nigeria , a country that could waste the lives of
millions of its people in pursuit of the idea that “to keep Nigeria one is
a task that must be done.”
Let me
quote from that essay at some length. I wrote, “There is a sense in which the
name of the malaise afflicting Nigeria
is Biafra . I have argued before—and I must do
so again—that Nigeria’s refusal to confront and address the sore of the Biafran
War is the chief reason no nation has been able to materialize out of the space
called Nigeria, no peace has been had in that space, and no real progress—much
less development—has been recorded. As the world watches, riveted, Nigeria is
spinning and spinning in a dizzying, ridiculous, violent dance, racing ever
closer to the edge of that jagged precipice we have all romanced for fifty-four
years—if not before.
“The
wound called Biafra haunts Nigeria precisely because Nigeria imagined that it
could get over Biafra through cheap sloganeering (no victor, no vanquished),
the mere invocation of the mantra of the Rs—reconstruction, rehabilitation and
reconciliation—through silence and willed forgetfulness—indeed, by playing the ostrich.”
“I’m not
going to be detained by contested, contending accounts of the Biafran struggle,
or even questions pertaining to whether the quest for secession was inevitable.
At minimum, we ought to agree that Nigeria, from the moment of its British conception,
was neither essential nor natural. It was, above all, convenient and profitable
for the British. And all the logic that informed its constitution made eminent
sense, finally, mostly from the prism of British interests.
“When
the British removed their bodies—but not necessarily their spirits and
ghosts—from the Nigerian space, we all had a historical duty. That duty was to
pause and ask the question, what does Nigeria mean? It was to determine whether
we all—the 400 odd ethnic collectivities that the British bracketed inside the
space called Nigeria—wished to maintain the shape of this British design. It
was to discern whether we all—the constituent elements of the space—felt
sufficiently animated by the prospect of living together, fraternizing as a
people with shared aspirations and common destiny. In the event that we all
found Nigeria an irreducible, compelling proposition, then we should have
hatched out the terms of our coexistence. We should have sketched out our
imagination of Nigeria and spelt out what it meant to be called a citizen of
Nigeria. In other words, we should have commenced the task of remaking the
British-delineated space called Nigeria into a veritable, vital, and robust
nation. Had we done this, we would have acquired some kind of compass for
navigating our self-fashioned nation towards the direction of our own
envisioning.
“We did
not as much as attempt to grapple with that arduous, messy, but inescapable
process of nation-formation. We settled for the British-made illusion. We were
content to take the British confection of a Nigerian idea and run with it. We
pretended that there was some inherent logic to Nigeria, that it was coherent
and organic, a full redemption of some promissory note, almost a divinely
designed imperative.
“Perhaps
we shirked this duty out of laziness, a sense of convenience, or a naïve faith
in the British. Perhaps, then, we believed that Nigeria was a nation just
because imperial Britain had seen fit to outfit the space with roads that
linked its different parts as well as such accouterments of the modern state as
postal and telegraph services, railways, the police, prisons, schools, and a
cadre of civil servants.
“We
neglected to pay attention to the fact that, at every opportunity—especially
when our ‘nationalist’ figures pressed the case for Independence—British
officials had insisted that Nigeria was not a nation but a collection of
‘nations.’ In retrospect, we should have paid attention to the British. They
owned the patent on Nigeria; they knew that they had not achieved a
nation—indeed, that they had not intended to achieve one—when they set out to
cobble together the space called Nigeria.”
Next
week, I will examine the current agitation for a renascent Biafra as a form of
ill-advised adventurism, one that is antithetical to core Igbo interests, and a
too-easy, but ultimately dubious, answer.
Please follow me on twitter @okeyndibe or email at okeyndibe@gmail.com.
Please follow me on twitter @okeyndibe or email at okeyndibe@gmail.com.
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