Who Are We?

To fully appreciate the question of our existence as a people, we really have to look back on the years preceding colonialism. We have been fed with fallacies about how our culture and traditions were barbaric, crude and primitive only because our history was not documented but always passed down by way of mouth. We have been led to believe that prior to the arrival of the Arabs and Europeans what we had was at best a dysfunctional sociopolitical structure   and uncivilized or animist religious practice. We were painted as a primitive people in desperate need of salvation.

 There are three major ways of preserving history and documenting civilizations: documentation by symbols, oral transfer and by writing. Speech, drawing and crafts have been an integral part of African civilization from time immemorial. The foreigners brought written documentation and compelled us to dispense with our own ways. They succeeded in bamboozling us with gunpowder, textiles and alcohol, and invited their mallams and missionaries to show us the light whilst at the same time enslaving us.

I am yet to be convinced as to why your way or my way should lose its validity and existence just because it has not followed a particular path. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans and Mongols preserved important pieces of their histories and traditions using symbols and objects. The answer is simple, conquest.  The foreigners marveled at the human and natural resources that were available to us. They did not come from a land of plenty and realized that to take what they needed would require enslaving by dominating and being seemingly superior. It would be difficult to conquer without conquering the fabric and beliefs, the make up of a society. Their goal therefore was not to erase “how” our story was told but to wipe out the story itself. The alternative would be genocide and assumption of ownership of land. 

We had complex and efficient socio-political structures before we were conquered.  We had clear-cut duchies and administrators entrusted with their running through popular participation. The Yoruba had a seamless centralized parliamentary federalism complete with the principle of checks and balances where the Alaafin and the Oyomesi (council members) shared powers. The Igbo had a sophisticated and decentralized unitary age-grade democracy. The Hausa/Fulani system of government was an organized and centralized presidential federal system, with ministers in charge of various departments of government. The same goes for the Bini Kingdom and all the other sizeable ethnic minorities that make up today’s Nigeria. The same is true for the rest of Africa.

Our identity has been buried beneath the earth, just like the lot of the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas of Central and South America, whose sophistication was such that their cities and pyramids, whilst smaller in scale, were more sophisticated than what you see in Egypt today. Their command of astrology and their 18-month calendar, made up of 20 days in each month, is still today more precise than the Gregorian calendar. The Spanish conquistadores razed their cities, killed their kings and leaders and built a new city on top of what they had built, to wipe out any memory of their ancestry.   What is modern-day Mexico City used to be the capital of the Aztec civilization. It disappeared along with their riches and religion and in their stead edifices of imperialist colonial mentality and lost identity. Some of their crafts and ‘documents’, like ours, are archived in museums in Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid and Lisbon.

Let me conclude by sharing this story. A traditional African King wanted more schools in his domain during the colonial era, but the colonial authority only allowed for one native authority school in each area. When the Anglican and Roman Catholic missionaries came with education, he quickly seized the opportunity by giving them plots of land to build their churches along with missionary schools and assisted them in building.  He was of the opinion that his people should get education, no matter wherefrom as he surmised that the key to development under this shrinking world was education. Pressure was later put on him to abolish the animist religion and popular traditional Ekwechi (masquerade) festival because it was pagan, fetish and ungodly.  His response was poignant: “Who was the God of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses and the people of Arabia before Judaism, Christianity and Islam came? Or weren’t they worshipping God then?”

We must find our own way or get lost following others blindly. We must take time to understand our history and antecedence, as we will never know where we are going, unless we appreciate where we are coming from.