By Dan Amor
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.
