Nigeria’s Northern Elders Forum: Keeping The Igbo Is Not Worth A Civil War

BY JOHN CAMPBELL

On June 9, following a closed-door meeting, the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) issued a public statement that the Igbo-dominated southeast should be allowed to secede from the Federal Republic of Nigeria if it was necessary to avoid a civil war. NEF spokesman Hakeem Baba-Ahmed said “the Forum has arrived at the difficult conclusion that if support for secession among the Igbo is as widespread as it is being made to look, and Igbo leadership appears to be in support of it, then the country should be advised not to stand in the way.” His statement continued that secession was not in the best interest of the Igbos or of Nigerians. Rather, all should work to rebuild Nigeria. But, blocking secession “will not help a country already burdened with failures on its knees to fight another war to keep the Igbo in Nigeria.” The statement also suggested that northerners subject to harassment in the southeast should return to the north. There was no reference to secessionist sentiment in Yorubaland, in southwest Nigeria, to which former President Olusegun Obasanjo has referred. The former president said that Yoruba secession, too, would be unwise, but that maintaining unity should not come “at any cost.”

Though there is no specific reference to it, clearly animating the NEF statement is the memory of Nigeria’s 1967-70 civil war, successfully fought by Nigerian nationalists to keep Igbo-dominated Biafra in the federation; it left up to two million dead. It, too, involved massive population movements, with Igbos fleeing to the south a northern pogrom and fewer northerners leaving the southeast. In the civil war, northern elites strongly supported the nationalists. Current Igbo disgruntlement has its roots in defeat in the civil war and the belief that they are marginalized from the upper reaches of the Nigerian state. (There has never been an Igbo president of Nigeria.) Such feelings of marginalization are exacerbated by Nigeria’s nationwide epidemic of violence and economic malaise. The NEF, for its part, has responded to rising insecurity in Nigeria by calling for President Buhari to resign or to be impeached. Resignation or impeachment is a reversal of the NEF’s support of Muhammadu Buhari’s presidential candidacy in 2015.

It should be noted that the NEF statement in support of allowing secession had two caveats: that there be widespread support for it among the Igbo but also among their “leadership” (not further defined). While secessionist advocates will argue to the contrary, prima facie evidence for both either way is thin.

Do the views of the NEF matter? How representative is it of northern elite opinion? Buhari’s Special Adviser on Media Femi Adesina responded to its June 9 statement by dismissing the NEF as “a mere irritant” that hardly exists beyond its convener, Ango Abdullahi—a distinguished, former vice chancellor (president) of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. According to Adesina, the former vice chancellor is a general with no troops. Indeed, the influence of the NEF is hard to judge. But, its public statements attract widespread media attention. As with former President Obasanjo’s comments on Yoruba separatism, at the very least the NEF statements is an indication that rising insecurity is leading at least some of Nigeria’s elites to rethink the basis of the Nigerian state—and of the consequences of its civil war.

The Legacies Of Slavery In Nigeria’s Igboland

Two people walk along the route taken by slaves to the "point of no return" , from where they were shipped west, at the historic slave port of Badagry. Image Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters

BY JOHN CAMPBELL

The year 2019 marks four hundred years since the beginning of African slavery in America, when Dutch privateers sold the first African slaves to the fledgling English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. The anniversary has been the occasion for much reflection on how slavery still impacts America. The New York Times’s “1619 Project” has dedicated a number of essays on slavery’s legacy in American society. Also to be welcomed is the increased attention by African scholars and journalists to the role that domestic slavery and the international slave trade has had on African cultures. Igboland was a major source of slaves for Virginia and the American south.

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, a journalist and novelist of Igbo heritage, has reported and written recently about Africa’s role in the slave trade and on the legacy of slavery in her native Nigeria, specifically among the Igbo. In the New Yorker, she shows that slavery was integral to Igbo culture even prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, though such commerce created new incentives for slave-catching.

In her New Yorker article, Nwaubani draws useful distinctions between slavery as practiced in the United States and among the Igbo. Notably, Igbo slavery was not based on race, and there was no visible, physical difference between slave and freeperson. Rather, slavery was shaped by culture, their beliefs about the importance of lineage, and their spirituality. She explains that slaves usually came from outside the all-important local community, captured in raids or warfare, or enslaved because of a criminal act. It is estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of Igbos—amounting to many millions of people—are descendants of slaves, and she shows that they are subject to discrimination.

The Igbo emphasis on purity of lineage goes hand-in-hand with a belief that marriage between the descendants of the free with the descendants of slaves can bring about divine retribution. She notes that Igbo slaves shared similarities of status with the dalits (untouchables) in India and burakumin in Japan.

While slavery became illegal in both the United States and Nigeria, Nwaubani notes that the abolition of slavery in the United States was a result of internal agitation that gradually brought about a (incomplete) change in the popular view of slavery and of race. In Nigeria, however, slavery, which she sees as continuing in some forms among the Igbo into the 1940s, was abolished by British fiat, not as the result of an internal, indigenous process. Hence, abolition of slavery was a colonial initiative.

However, Nwaubani reports that now underway is the internal agitation against slavery that Nigeria’s story had hitherto lacked. The focus is on community-led initiatives, often in conjunction with traditional rulers, to end discrimination against those Igbos whose ancestors were slaves.

SOURCE: COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS