By Dan Amor
I would have loved to title our column this
week, 'Buhari And The Igbo Question', but in order not to reduce this very
important issue to mere verbalism by those who read banal political expediency
into all serious issues, I plead that we settle for the above title.
 |
| *President Buhari |
Multiculturalism
has been the subject of cover stories of most international magazines including
Time
and Newsweek,
as well as numerous articles in newspapers and magazines across the world. It
has sparked heated jeremiads by leading American columnists such as George
Will, Dinesh D'Sousa, and Roger Kimball. It moved William F. Buckley to rail
against Stanley Fish and Catherine Stimpson on "Firing Line."
It is arguably the most hotly debated topic in the civilised world today – and
justly so. For whether one speaks of tensions between Hasidim and
African-Americans in Crown Heights, or violent mass protests against Moscow in ethnic republics such as Armenia, or outright war between Serbs and
Croats in Yugoslavia,
it is clear that the clash of cultures is a worldwide problem, deeply felt,
passionately expressed, always on the verge of violent explosion. Problems of
this magnitude inevitably frame the discussion of multiculturalism and cultural
diversity even among leading intellectuals across the world. Yet, it is
unfortunate that, in Nigeria,
the vexed issues of racism, nationalism and cultural identity are downplayed by
our commentators and analysts because some think that they and their tribes are
not directly affected.
Few
commentators could have predicted that one of the issues that dominated
academic and popular discourse in the final decade of the twentieth century and
into the twenty-first century – concomitant with the fall of apartheid in South
Africa, communism in Russia, and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet
Union – would be the matter of cultural pluralism in our secondary school and
university curricula and its relation to the "Nigerian" national
identity. Repeated experience and routine violations of the rights of
minorities and the Igbo nation in Nigeria attest to the urgency of
the scattered, and often confused, debates over what is variously known as
cultural diversity, cultural pluralism, or multiculturalism.
The greatest
threat to the string that binds us together as a nation of diverse ethnic and
religious backgrounds and its social intercourse is not nationalistic cultural
passions but our collective failure to discuss our differences and the arrogant
manifestation of messianic impudence by our rulers who think that they possess
the sole authority to dictate what should be talked about and what not to
discuss in our country. Increasing incidents of violence are associated with
ethnic differences in very many places in the world: Koreans and
African-Americans in Flatbush, Brooklyn; Zulus and Xhosas in South Africa;
Poles and Gypsies in Poland; the Tutsis and Hutu in Rwanda; the Hausa/Fulani
and Igbo in Nigeria; and, of course, the fate of the Jews in Ethiopia and in
the old Soviet Union.
