I have been reading some tribally-fuelled, self-aggrandising tribal commentaries through the highway of social media with a kind of dignified melancholy. Tribal triumphalists have spilled out bad blood like hot lava through cyberspace in the last few weeks. The full lunacy of the Igbo and Yoruba tribal gunfights in discussion forums is mind boggling. It is a genre of barbaric hatred and overjudgmental polemics. The gladiators, combatants, commentators, spectators and lay readers have had a bounty but cruel harvest of tribal assaults of the vilest variants.
Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola, the personable boss of Lagos State, ruffled the tribal feathers of a competing tribe of supposedly delicate humanity across the Niger. How? Fashola carried out a forced displacement of some Igbo people and returned them back to senders.
That seemingly innocuous action was enough catalyst for the fodder of unapologetic tribal merchants to turn the whole furore into personal crusade against the Yoruba people. The Fashola’s forced displacement saga and its aftermath quickly ballooned into the banalisation of the social and political space. His action, judging by the restive mood of his critics, further furrowed this nation’s creased brow of endemic tribal animosity.
In the heat of the rendition of the Igbo people back home, some Ndigbo leaders mounted the pinnacle like stentorian rebels and chaired the board of Yoruba condemnation to a chorus of applause and support from baleful sons and daughters of Ndigbo baying with bloodlust for the head of Bobo Fash and his fellow travellers. It was personally amusing to watch the combatants in the tribal trenches. It was jolly good to have seen foot soldiers in their barricade. Like Sereus Maximus, the Roman war general who taught his warriors the testudo, the Igbo troops quickly learned the art of joining shield together to form a roofed stronghold against flaming Yoruba arrows.
Week after shameful week, tribal innuendoes, name calling and hatred all came tumbling out of dark hearts. It started as a small mutiny. Then it morphed into a full scale theatre of absurd, tribal warfare. Stirred by subjective passion for his tribe, a personable Yoruba man, Femi Fani-Kayode had to wear the mantle of a prophet. He became the famed, lone voice crying for Yoruba redemption from shame and insult. FFK proved the bookies wrong of his antecedent as a fighter. He harboured no sentimentalism about his Yoruba identity. He understood how brutal authenticity could be and he wrote with awesome passion mixed with alarming pessimism of the imminent subjugation of his Yoruba tribe. The subtext of his deadly polemics was a timely repudiation of any Igbonification of Eko Akete in his lifetime.
Femi Fani-Kayode demonstrated his inner turmoil through his phenomenal, inimitable angry cadence and his take-no-prisoners attitude that was devoid of superficiality. The declarative register in his voice will not allow for any form of restraint. The arguments, the finger-wagging, the binary oppositions (Yoruba are cowards….Igbo are courageous) the threats, the erosion of nuanced conversation and the tribal assassinations have blown open the imagined harmony between the Yoruba and Igbo. The roof of hypocrisy of our love for one another has been exposed to reveal its truest face: a chimera.
Like all imperial powers, the Igbo possess the capacity to mythologise themselves with superlative convictions that will sweep up all but the sternest doubters. For instance, Igbo endless grandstanding of valour during the Biafran war had turned out to be a self monument of pride for the tribe. It had encouraged aggressive loyalty to the clan so much that triumphalists are having a field day. Igbo are quick to buy into the micronarratives of the horror of the Biafran struggle but always fail to buy into the self-healing narratives of no victor and no vanquished that offered honour at the end of the civil war. The undying ember of the war is rekindled each time Obafemi Awolowo’s name is remembered. And for not going into alliance with the Igbo during the war, the Yoruba people are forever perceived as modern day Judas, cowards and betrayers.
Going by the voices of the combatants in the tribal fray, the Igbo narrative was soundly dictated by a fight for hierarchy. Igbo’s territorial conceptions and the desire for concessions on Lagos State presupposes that Lagos had always been a virtual, virgin space. Of a truth, Yoruba lands have never for once stood empty for other mankind or tribes to pillage, plunder and appropriated. That was Femi Fani-Kayode scripts of history and that was why he had to come out fighting for his imperilled homeland of Yoruba Lagos. But his argument over the ownership of Lagos was enough to cause the death of reasoned and nuanced conversation.
So FFK’s tribally strident voice was to speak the truth albeit with vicious efficiency. He came out of hiding not only as a witness but also as the Yoruba mouthpiece. A hostile mouthpiece! He was like a fiery preacher thundering his sermon with both vulgar and vigour which would leave nobody in doubt as to where he stood between SW and SE. His instinct may be correct but the rational part of his mind relied much on unfounded paranoia. Femi Fani-Kayode’s anger was predicated on many personal grudges.
He is against Igbo overbearing attitude toward the Yoruba. He is not happy with Igbo assertion that Lagos is a no man’s land. He regards Igbo 45% of the population of Lagos as parochial generalisations. He believes that Igbo only take from the Yoruba but will not give to Yoruba. He is angered that Yoruba hospitality toward the Igbo is not appreciated or returned in respect and humility. Between Yoruba and Igbo there is this huge, yawning chasms, not thin fissures that can be papered over with mere titillating discussions. It is sad that we have allowed ourselves to fracture along tribally defined lines despite our shared commonalities. Tribal discourse has become rather like football.
We offer blind loyalty to our team only and ready for any gunfight when our team is criticised. When are we going to stop paying dearly for this state of perpetual, media-scripted war against often illusionary Yoruba as enemies of Igbo and vice versa? The assumption is that there is no common space shared between us but that rather we live in series of parallel private universe where we compete ferociously with one another to maximise available opportunities. Call it the issues of coexistence and sharing. In a world of Blackberry, boxer shorts, IPad and Samsung, we have to use the newfound consciousness of the relational nature of both the social and media global space to overcome our tribal paradoxes caused by the exerting personalities of both Obafemi Awolowo and Chukwuemeka Ojukwu and the damning effects we all suffer today.
The fierce urgency of now dictates that we should stop retreating into the old essentialisms of crude tribal vulgarities that had their root in hate, wilful myopia and misunderstanding. There should be a richer, social mixture between Igbo and Yoruba as I have always enjoyed with my pastor, Mrs. Good Imoh, friends like Albert Eze, Collins “champagne” Ezinwa, Chidi “software” Mgbedike, Ken “maritime” Imachuckwu, Emeka Ifeagwu, Friday Aboajah, Ogbonnaya “gbos” Nnamani, Sunday Okpalla, Ndubuisi Okafor, Bruce Malogo and many more from the Delta regions of Oguwashi-Ukwu, Ibusa and Asaba.
We have to retrieve back the deep-seated and almost forgotten memory of our 60’s and 70’s kinship and mutuality that long enabled the Igbo to live with relative ease and comfort in Lagos amidst its indigenous Yoruba population. In tribal argument, when one wins both lose. The need to be right will forever set the alarm of conflict in higher decibel. The Fashola’s forced displacement is a straightforward abuse of power and deprivation of liberty against fellow Nigerians. Such action and its aftermath could be a conduit that may usher us into the demonic realm of ugly tribal war. Thankfully, the governor has set aside his ego and like a true, blue blooded Omoluwabi from Eko Akete has apologised and re-embraced his brothers and sisters across the Niger.
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