A few weeks ago I came across this article about the growing militarism and nationalism among a few ethnic groups in Nigeria. With all that has happened in Nigeria's past (concerning the civil war), I find this development very troubling.
For those of you who know nothing of the civil war, this is a very very very condensed History.
The Nigerian civil war was one of the most horrible events to happen in Africa. Long before the genocide in Rwanda, Nigeria had its own large scale ethnic cleansing. The cause of civil war was the murder of the religious leader of the Hausas(one the big three ethnic groups)and the murder of a number of elected leaders.
Although, all of the corrupt older leaders were supposed to be murdered a number of Ibo leaders were not killed. The fact that many of the Ibo leaders marked for execution were not killed and many(not all) Igbos celebrated that their ethnic brothers managed to survive. This along with the execution of the Hausa religious leader, led to Nigeria's full scale civil war. Many Igbos were murdered, tortured, raped etc(read more). One of the most important things that is overlooked or downplayed about this atrocity is the Yoruba involvement. Many Youruba want to sweep their involvement under the rug.
One of the things I notice in the blogworld is that among those of us with some percentage of Nigerian blood in our veins there is very little talk of triablism. Sure some Naija folk may write posts in their ethnic language (I applaud) or pidgin English but overall there seems to be cohesion among Nigerians in blogland. Is the pride of the younger generation of Nigerians the result of many of us living throughout the world and bing exposed to different ideas or the fact that many of us in blogland are a mix of Nigerian ethnic groups, black ethnic groups outside of Nigeria, and races or maybe it is because most of us are the children of elites and educated middle class Nigerians. Should Nigeria spilt into four parts(Igbo, Hausa, Youruba, and minority land). Is Nigeria in danger of having another civil war?
5 years ago