A Text of a Lecture Delivered by Dr. Sam Amadi, Director of Abuja School of Social and Political Thought at the Forum of South-East Academic Doctors (FOSAD) Lecture Series 01 at the NUJ Media Center on Friday, September 20, 2024
Let me start with greetings. Umu nne m na Umu nna m, ndewo oo. Ututu oma oo. Y diri Nwoke nma, diri Nwanyi nma. Udo na Onyu. Ndu nmiri, ndu azu; nmiri atala, azu anwula.
It is also important to start this conversation with a song. The reason is that as one of the most famous Igbo diasporan, Gustavus Vassal, told the world, the Igbos are a people of songs. He put it this way:
“ We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets. Thus every great event, such as a triumphant return from battle, or other cause of public rejoicing is celebrated in public dances, which are accompanied with songs and music suited to the occasion. The assembly is separated into four divisions, which dance either apart or in succession, and each with a character peculiar to itself. The first division contains the married men, who in their dances frequently exhibit feats of arms, and the representation of a battle. To these succeed the married women, who dance in the second division. The young men occupy the third; and the maidens the fourth. Each represents some interesting scene of real life, such as a great achievement, domestic employment, a pathetic story, or some rural sport; and as the subject is generally founded on some recent event, it is therefore ever new. This gives our dances a spirit and variety which I have scarcely seen elsewhere”
Anyone who grew up in Igboland with a grandmother or a grandfather, or even with aged relatives, would realize that songs accompany every task. We sing when we are rejoicing, we sing when we are mourning, and we sing when deal with arduous tasks. If it is true as Chinua Achebe said, that amongst the Igbos words are eaten with proverbs, it is also true that amongst the Igbos, tasks are accomplished with songs. So let us begin this difficult conversation with a legendary song by the Gentleman, Mike Ejeagha. This song came out in the 1980s but modern technologies and the culture of social media have kindly brought it to the notice of the Generation Z.
Now, stand up and sing along with me.
Gwo gwo gwo ngwo
Ka ana kpo chairman
Gwo gwo gwo ngwo x3
Nna m Eze akpata m enyi x2
Nwa mbe isi ni kpata onye?
Asi m ani ya dube enyi chebe enyi
Nwa mbe isi ni kpata onye?
Asi m ani ya dube enyi chebe enyi
Odi ka asi n’kpata m onye x2
Akwa enyi ga abu isi oche x2
Enyi n’aga na anyi so gi n’azu x2
It is a thing of delight that the skit maker, Brain Jotter, has made this song to go viral such that people from foreign cultures in faraway places like Tokyo and Beijing are dancing to its tune. Gentleman Mike Ejeagha is a special breed. Like the legendary teacher, Chinua Achebe, Mike Ejeagha helps to preserve for future generation both the wisdom of the Igbos and the beauties and elegance of Igbo literature, including its repertoire of folklores. Sometimes, I mourn that my children do not have access to the tremendous wisdom of Igbo worldviews because they do not listen to the folklores and music of yesteryears. Now, social media and its culture of content creations will one way or another bring these folklores to the contemporary Igbos, born and bred in many communities outside Igbo land.
We danced to ‘Gwo Gwo Gwo’ not because it is trending. We danced to it because it encodes a veritable truth for today’s world, a truth that is very relevant to the topic of our conversation this morning. That truth is that we should always keep our eyes open and our minds acute to decode deceptions and avoid harm. Just as individuals are often in competitive situations with one another, ethnic groups and political societies are in competitive situations. In such situations, what you need to survive is a particular kind of wisdom that is rooted in memory and remembrance. As our wise forebears put it in the names they give to their children: ‘Echezona’, Ezefula, Elozona, etc. To say it bluntly, remembering is surviving. I was once invited to deliver a lecture in 2001 at the Holocaust Memorial Museum at Washington DC. The lecture examined what was described as ‘near-genocide’. Biafra was one of the identified case studies where mass violence against an ethnic group led to near-genocide. One of the interesting facts to me is that the names of those who died in Hitler’s attack against Jews are written on a memorial wall for all to see. It is important for the Jews to keep afresh in their memory the fact of the genocide and the details of the tragedy they suffered at the hands of the Nazis government. For me, it is a lesson on the importance of remembering for the survival of a nation. If a people do not remember their history and keep proper perspectives, they could easily forget who they are and who are their enemies. Forgetting is dying. Self-awareness and other awareness are the most important aspect of existing. When we forget the events and the meanings of the past, we expose ourselves to deception by our competitors and enemies.
Gwo gwo gwo is a warning against deception. It is an awakening to the reality of the world of competitive pressure where one’s neighbour could be one’s enemy. It calls for vigilance. It calls for navigational intelligence, the ability to get through the world of hostility and deviousness. It is in this context that the Igbos value ‘ako na uche’, the intelligence or smartness that is rooted in prudence, in paying attention to the true nature of things, not the way they appear, because the bitter cola is not as sweet as it sounds. We should bear this truth in mind as we proceed on this conversation.
I presume that the immediate context of this lecture is the inaugural lecture recently delivered at the Usman Dan Fodio University, Sokoto by a professor of history at the University, Professor Ahmed Bako. Professor Bako used the occasion of an inaugural to sell a false and dangerous narrative against Igbo people and their activities in Kano. The narrative is false because it is based on false facts and embellishments that are not backed by any historical evidence. Professor Bako’s narrative about Igbos in diaspora is not just false, it is also dangerous. Apparently, it was timed at a period like this when Igbos faced great distress and persecution in some parts of Nigeria because an Igbo contested the 2023 presidential election and won in many important states of Nigeria, in some cases, defeating a local titan. So, the purpose of the narrative would seem to be to expose the Igbos to more resentment and rejection by the neighbours, to make the Igbos collectively appear as menace to justify a possible final solution.
I guess, the reason the leadership of the Forum of South-East Academic Doctors (FOSAD) chose this topic for its inaugural public lecture is to counter such audacious and pernicious lies about Igbos and their activities outside Igbo land. I think it is good to robustly rebut the presumptions and falsehoods in Professor Bako’s inaugural lecture. Many able scholars and intellectuals, including Professor Moses Ochonu, Professor Chidi Odinkalu and Dr. Okey Anueyiagu, have done a good job of putting Professor Musa’s contrived narrative to where it belongs: dustbin of intellectual dishonesty and hatchery. I will not dwell much on it. I will rather focus on the truth about Igbos and their activities in the Diaspora which Professor Bako could not bear to accept.
Before I move away from Professor Bako’s falsehood, I will make a few comments about it. Professor Moses Ochonu concedes that Professor Bako has a long career as a historian such that his inaugural deserves considerable respect and attention. He has taught many historians such that we should presume that he clearly understands that the most fundamental attribute of a historian is the ability to pay attention to facts and subject sentiments to some kind of evidential review. Sadly, he failed this most basic approach to a historical analysis of something as complex as Igbos in diaspora. Professor Ochonu captures this failure in clear terms:
“Professor Bako is a great historian who is an authority on migrant quarters, or Sabon Garuruwa, in urban Northern Nigeria. I read his dissertation and papers on the Sabon Gari in Kano as an undergrad and was thoroughly enlightened. However, the senior colleague goofed in his inaugural lecture. What he stated is a staple, popular anti-Igbo political rhetoric in Northern Nigeria. It has been circulating in various iterations and with fluctuating degrees of reception since the late colonial period when Northern political elites feared Igbo domination more than anything else and proceeded to structure both their politics and policies around that fear. Aguiyi-Ironsi’s unitary decree only solidified the paranoia, and the Nzeogwu coup’s perception in the north as an Igbo coup and the killing of Ahmadu Bello and other prominent Northern politicians further cemented this popular Igbophobic narrative of Igbo domination or intent to dominate. The Professor’s professional “crime” is to repackage this popular narrative as a historical argument or thesis, and in an inaugural lecture no less. The other error is to not consider or critique the logic and facticity of the claim, which is what we’re trained to do as historians.”
Professor Chid Odinkalu was unsparing in his critique of Professor Musa’s gibberish of an inaugural lecture. He pointed out many grammatical errors and sloppy reasonings that challenge the mental stability and presence of mind of the professor when he rushed to peddle falsehoods. Professor Odiinkalu showed that notwithstanding whatever academic laurels Professor Bako’s may possess, the methodological and grammatical sordidness of his lectures speaks to a disorganised mind further unbalanced by hatred.
Dr. Okey Anueyiagu feels personally hurt by Professor Bako’s mendacity with regards to activities of Igbos in Kano. His father lived and practiced journalism in Kano. He rose and became the editor of the Comet, one of the newspapers established by the great Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first president and its foremost nationalist. Dr Anueyiagu starts his review by noting that “ The cynicism imbedded in this Lecture, and the arrogance, or perhaps the ignorance of the facts in the history of that era, were grossly exposed in Bako’s lies and utter embellishment of half-truths in his widely advertised “academic work”, which embarrassingly, turned out to be a reprehensible tales-by-moonlight gloating of a revisionist with an imbued tribal sentimentalism, by a thorough-bred clannish apologist”. In his view, Professor’s lecture is a gross disservice to the academic profession and to the science of historical analysis. As he puts it, “ Professor Bako’s objective in writing and giving that Lecture must have been any thing other than to give the world a candid glimpse into the history of our country’s past; a past that is so checkered, and soaked in the blood of many of its citizens. Bako’s history had its story backward. He forgot that it is the duty, and the unequivocal right of Nigerians, historians or not, to investigate and interrogate his story, and to dissect what he has produced for the world to view as truths. Even as we must grant Bako his constitutional right of freedom of speech, this freedom does not warrant the telling and spreading of lies, as it constitutes as bad law and warped ethics to do so, and must worry us as being part of the unfortunate relic of the government dominated by Professor Bako’s kinsmen and allies who banned, banished and descended on the study of history in our schools after the rancid civil war”
These critiques should be enough to denounce and consign the gibberish by Professor Bako to the dustbin of history. It is not surprising that a scholar of such presumed pedigree could end up deliberately spreading pernicious falsehoods against fellow citizens. We have evidence throughout history of how academics and intellectual paved the way for racial slandering that ultimately led to massacres and genocides. It is noteworthy that racism was built on the false theories of evil minded scholars. Nothing new about scholars and prejudices, In my view, we should pay more attention to the lesson of the inaugural lecture and less to its falsification of historical facts. What lesson should we learn from the lecture? The lesson we should learn from the unfortunate lecture is the importance of narratives. Today, we hear a lot about misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is different from false narrative and less damaging that it. Misinformation relates to a piece of fact. So, if a man shoots someone in Wuse Market and a newspaper reports the shooter as a woman, it is misinformation. But if a newspaper reports the incident to present woman in the Wuse District as more violent than men, it is more than misinformation. It is a false narrative.
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The entire objective of Professor Bako’s laboured peddling of falsehood about Igbo activities in Kano is not to spread false information. It is to peddle a false narrative. It is to paint Igbos in bad light as a people who are selfish, mindless and domineering and deserves to be despised and resisted. His lecture was titled “The Igbo factor in the History of Inter-Group Relations and Commerce in Kano”. But he ended up saying just one thing: mark the Igbos; they are about to dominate you. In the narrow prism of Professor Bako’s narrative, all forms of Igbo entrepreneurship and the remarkable Igbo love of and accomplishment in educational pursuits are nothing but strategic actions to dominate others.
Professor Bako has done great injury by his lecture. He did not just retail incomplete and untrue facts. He painted a false generalized narrative of a people. The conclusory nature of his lecture without rigorous review of social patterns and conducts are part of the strategy of peddling dangerous narratives. Igbos go to school because they want to dominate others. But how is it that in communities outside Nigeria where Igbos have no chance of dominance they are still one of the most educated foreign ethnic groups? Recently, a leading commentator in the UK noted that the Igbos are the most educated foreign ethnics in the society. Are Igbo parents sending their children to school just to dominate other peoples in the UK? And what is the nature of the dominance? Is it political, social or economic? How about Igbos at home who are still sending their children to school? How about Igbo communities competing amongst themselves on number of medical doctors, professors and lawyers from their communities? Are they doing all these because they are striving on who will first dominate Kano people? Does the fact that some rich Igbo merchants can pay sherlock rents that Hausa landlords fixed for their stores which some small Hausa traders cannot pay mean these Igbo traders are acting out a scrip delivered from Igbo land to dominate northerners? How about fellow Igbo traders who cannot pay the rent and also lose use of their stores to richer Igbo traders? We cannot make sense of the logic and evidence behind Professor Bako’s categorical conclusion about Igbo activities in the diaspora without any evidential backing except we understand the power of narratives.
Narrative are not always logical or evidence-based. Narratives are designed to present diversities in such simplicity that people buy into a message and get motivated to act according to such message without bordering to crosscheck the logic or the facts. As Anthea Roberts and Nicols Lamp argues in their book, Six Faces of Globalization: Who wins, Who Losses and What Does it Matter, “narratives provide the story lines through which we perceive and communicate our understanding of reality and express our values. Political Scientists and policy analysts have long recognized that narratives not only reflect and affect our understanding of reality but also shape our reality”. Narratives are so important that there is now a branch of economics or set of economic discourses that are aggregated under the rubric of ‘Narrative Economics’. This is actually the title of a recent book by Professor Robert Schiller, a Nobel-Prize winning economist. Shiller argues that ‘An economic narrative is a contagious story that has the potential to change how people make economic decisions, such as the decision to hire a worker or to wait for better times, to stick one’s neck out or to be cautious in business, or launch a business venture, or to invest in a volatile speculative asset”. These narratives defines how people respond to trends and events in the political and economic spheres. Political or social narratives are urban legends nurtured to constitute a filter through which people receive information about a people or any event and conditions how they respond. In an age of social media, narratives could be dangerously effective. Just as an example, the diatribes against Igbos in the name of a university inaugural lecture has filtered into an English Literature classroom discourse in Nasarawa State University in the forms of scholarly remarks about how domineering Igbos are in commerce and unbearable in social life.
The important thing about narratives is that they may go against the weight of logic and evidence, just as Professor Bako’s lecture, yet successful in setting off major actions. The genocide against Igbos were procured, justified or supported by urban legends about Igbos selfishness and dominance. It is true as Roberts and Lamp argue that “Narratives are often resistant to change, even in the face of contradictory empirical evidence, because of their intuitive plausibility, the force of their metaphors, the emotions they provoke and channel, and the way they stabilize assumptions for decision-making. Accordingly, whether or not we think a narrative is factually correct, we need to understand its power in public discourse and in policy formulation”. The only effective action against a false narrative is to counter it with a true narrative. Pietistic silence or intellectual indifference would not deal with. In Nigeria’s street wisdom, you meet false narrative ‘bumper-to-bumper’.
If Igbo intellectuals would ordinarily dismiss the false and dangerous narrative of Professor Bako because of its lack of intellectual merits, they should consider the danger this narrative poses to the survival of Igbos in Nigeria and the Diaspora. We need to counter this sort of narrative. It is important to recall the boastful words of Winston Churchill that history will be kind to him because he intend to write it. Those who write history actually make history. We need to write the true history of Igbo activities in the Diaspora. Thankfully, we do not need to be academic historians to shape narratives. We are all able to remember and articulate. We can all tell stories. So, we should all be in the business of pushing he right narratives about Igbos in the Diaspora.
This paper is about historical truths about Igbos in Diaspora? I argue that we can sketch the history of Igbos in the Diaspora by recounting the lives notable Igbos who lived in the Diaspora. History is a record of past events. One of the best ways to know history is to observe the lives of people. This is the reason journalists and novelists have often offered good lens to know history. The lives of prominent Igbo diasporans are a good binoculars to perceive the truths about how Igbos have impacted their diaspora societies.
It should be pointed out that Igbos are a people who seem to be made for Diaspora. Igbos are at home wherever they live. Such adaptability has become a problem to economic and soc