The British Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch’s uninformed criticisms of her ancestral country have caused a backlash in Nigeria and across its diaspora.
The American Professor John Paden described Nigeria as “the most complicated country in the world” with good reason. Nigeria has hundreds of different ethnic groups speaking over 500 different languages, and importantly is the only country in the world with its population split equally between Christians and Muslims.
Badenoch’s ethnically and religiously incendiary comments that she identifies more as a member of the Yoruba ethnic group than as a Nigerian, and that she has
“nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is. Those were our ethnic enemies and yet, you end up being lumped in with those people”,
was as helpful to Nigeria’s sectarian cleavages as pouring petrol on fire.
Unbeknown to Badenoch, the most numerous ethnic group in northern Nigeria (the Hausa) gave her Yoruba ancestors their ethnic name. “Yoruba” was originally a nickname that Hausas used to refer to the people of southwest Nigeria. Rather than being “ethnic enemies” of the Yoruba, prior to British colonisation, Hausas were one of many economic immigrant groups that lived in the Yoruba homeland in southwest Nigeria.
These Hausa migrants were critical to the economic and military empowerment of the Oyo Empire, the most powerful pre-colonial Yoruba kingdom. They rode horses for Oyo’s famed military cavalry, which helped it reign over large areas now in western Nigeria and northern Benin Republic. The Hausa immigrants assimilated so deeply in Yorubaland that some of them and their children spoke the Yoruba language more fluently than their native Hausa. The assimilation of these Hausa immigrants is a great irony given Badenoch’s anti-immigration stance.
Badenoch’s spectacular ignorance about the history of her own people is a microcosm of a widespread blind spot about African history. Beyond ancient Egypt and the pyramids, most history books about Africa are about colonialism or slavery. These are essentially histories of what Europeans did in Africa. In my new book, this led me to describe Africa’s pre-colonial era as “the forgotten era”.
Unfortunately, for many, Nigeria’s relevance only seems to extend from the colonial era to the present, and its importance in history and contemporary politics is often undersold. Due to its large size, when Nigeria became independent in 1960, the British Empire shrank by more than 50% and Africa’s independent population doubled. In the near future, Nigeria will become the country with the third-largest English-speaking population in the world (with more English speakers and Christians than Britain).
However, Britain’s century-long conquest and rule of Nigeria was but a fleeting moment in the country’s long history. 600-700 years ago, Badenoch’s Yoruba ancestors produced spectacular bronze sculptures that the British anthropologist Professor Frank Willett later claimed “would stand comparison with anything which ancient Egypt, classical Greece and Rome, or Renaissance Europe had to offer”. According to local lore, the Yoruba royal family loaned their master sculptor to teach the secrets of his art to the neighbouring Benin people. In the 15-16th centuries, the pupils of this legendary sculptor produced the famed Benin Bronzes – which now reside in the British Museum.
These bronze sculptures are so technically brilliant, visually striking, and the method used to make them so complex and laborious, that even a sceptical German archaeologist grudgingly conceded that “Benvenuto Cellini could not have made a better cast himself, and no one has before or since, even to the present day. These bronzes stand even at the summit of what can be technically achieved”.
Fortunately, Badenoch and other modern-day politicians are not subject to the extreme accountability that ancient Oyo’s emperor, the Alaafin, was. Although he had awe-inspiring titles such as “lieutenant to the gods”, he was no autocrat. In fact, the Alaafin’s councillors could sentence him to death if they judged him guilty of cruelty or misrule. Since one of the councillors had to die with him, they had excellent motivation to avoid abusing their power; in what was a Medieval equivalent to Mutually Assured Destruction.
Later, the people of northern Nigeria that Badenoch described as “our ethnic enemies” created the Sokoto Caliphate: Africa’s largest pre-colonial state during its 19th-century heyday. It extended for 180,000 square miles and it took 4 months to travel between its eastern and western borders. The Sokoto Caliphate’s leaders were extremely erudite scholars; some of whom could read, speak, and write in four different languages. Its first ruler Usman Dan Fodio wrote along with his brother, son and daughter, at least 300 different books, poems, and pamphlets.
Furthermore, Badenoch’s poor grasp of Nigerian history led her to spread Islamophobic tropes. 200 years ago northeast Nigeria (where the jihadists of Boko Haram started their insurgency), was one of the Muslim world’s intellectual capitals. However, their ideology is vastly different to that of the region’s pre-colonial leaders. When a jihad erupted in the area in the early 19th century, the Muslim scholar Mohammed al-Kanemi was so appalled that he confronted the jihadists on the battlefield, and sent a chastising letter to them in which he wrote: “We disapprove of raids, the granting of permission for homicide, the enslavement of free people, the burning of houses, and other violence…We are astonished that you should permit such things when you claim to be reforming our religion”.
A history of Nigeria is also a history of one in six Africans, and of its large diaspora – including the Leader of the Opposition in the Parliament of its former coloniser. Unfortunately, Badenoch is so blind to the forgotten era that she has spread ethnic division and Islamophobia through her misunderstanding of Nigeria’s intricate history, which has so much to teach Britain and its former colonies.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 