Nigeria’s foremost novelist Chinua Achebe has claimed that Nigerians, especially of the Hausa/Fulani and the Yoruba stocks, do not like his Igbo ethnic group because of the southeast’s cultural advantage.
He made this claim in his new book, There was a Country,
which has generated controversy for his onslaught on the role of Obafemi
Awolowo as the federal commissioner of finance during the Nigeria civil war. He
accused Awolowo of genocide and imposition of food blockade on Biafra, a claim
that has drawn rebuttals and contradictions of emotional intensity from some
southwest leaders and commentators.
“I have written in my small book entitled The Trouble with
Nigeria that Nigerians will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than
their common resentment of the Igbo,” he wrote under the heading, A History of
Ethnic Tension and Resentment. He traced the origin of “the national resentment
of the Igbo” to its culture that “gave the Igbo man an unquestioned advantage
over his compatriots in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian
colonial society.”
He observed that the Igbo culture’s emphasis on change,
individualism and competitiveness gave his ethnic group an edge over the
Hausa/Fulani man who was hindered by a “wary religion” and the Yoruba man who
was hampered by” traditional hierarchies.”
He therefore described the Igbo, who are predominantly
Catholic, as “fearing no god or man, was “custom-made to grasp the
opportunities, such as they were, of the white man’s dispensations. And the
Igbo did so with both hands.”
He delved into history with his claim, asserting that the
Igbo overcame the earlier Yoruba advantage within two decades earlier in the
twentieth century.
“Although the Yoruba had a huge historical and geographical
head start, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy
in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950.”
He narrated the earlier advantage of Yoruba as contingent on
their location on the coastline, but once the missionaries crossed the Niger,
the Igbo took advantage of the opportunity and overtook the Yoruba.
“The increase was so exponential in such a short time that
within three short decades the Igbos had closed the gap and quickly moved ahead
as the group with the highest literacy rate, the highest standard of living,
and the greatest of citizens with postsecondary education in Nigeria,” he contended.
He said Nigerian leadership should have taken advantage of
the gbo talent and this failure was partly responsible for the failure of the
Nigerian state, explaining further that competitive individualism and the
adventurous spirit of the Igbo was a boon Nigerian leaders failed to recognize
and harness for modernization.
“Nigeria’s pathetic attempt to crush these idiosyncrasies
rather than celebrate them is one of the fundamental reasons the country has
not developed as it should and has emerged as a laughingstock,” he claimed.
He noted that the ousting of prominent Igbos from top
offices was a ploy to achieve a simple and crude goal. He said what the
Nigerians wanted was to “get the achievers out and replace them with less
qualified individuals from the desired ethnic background so as to gain access
to the resources of the state.”
Achebe, however, saved some criticisms for his kinsmen. He
criticised them for what he described as “hubris, overweening pride and
thoughtlessness, which invite envy and hatred or even worse that can obsess the
mind with material success and dispose it to all kinds of crude showiness.”
He added that “contemporary Igbo behavior(that) cab offend
by its noisy exhibitionism and disregard for humility and quietness.
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