SOMEWHAT ARTIFICIALLY CREATED

by

Aliyuh Ekineh

Introducing a new book titled Somewhat Artificially Created An Essay on Nigeria and Africa's inherited burden. To be published later in the summer by Southern Solidarity press. Author Aliyi Ekineh

PREFACE.

This is not an apology for tyranny in Africa or for instability, or poverty or the never ending bloody conflicts and problems that have plagued Nigeria and many other countries in Africa. It is a discussion that traces the
history and mode of the never ending bloody conflicts in Nigeria, and in
some other countries in Africa to their root causes, as a medical doctor
would diagnose an illness, to the genetic and other aspects of the patient's origin, in order to know its true causes. So the relevance of the origin of these countries to their common problems - ethnic conflicts, is examined.

In this way, with due sincerity, a permanent cure or remedy or solution ~
however difficult ~ can be found and applied. It is only then, that like in
Europe, in Africa too, democracy, rule of law, respect for human rights and the lot of other civilised observances, can take firm root and develop to benefit the people. Then too, poverty and misery can be eradicated, and also refugee problems solved, as much as Africa is concerned.




Introduction

If you look at a map of Africa in the period before the nineteenth century,
you will see that there were no names of countries, particularly south of
the Arabs - only deserts, mountains, rivers and other such features. In
other words, countries such as Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Liberia, Uganda and the Ivory Coast had not been mapped. This is because they didn’t exist, though there were humans and territories occupying those places. Albeit, in the nineteenth century, after the slave trade, the European colonial system changed the face of Africa completely. It catapulted Africa into the modern world.

In this essay, I regret that, I totally disregard the legendary
achievements which some historians usually credit to Africa past. Besides
the Arabs of the North, in almost every case, those achievements do not
have much bearings on the technological and social development or
advancement that were attained by Africa up to the advent of the colonial system.

Any way, now we have modern nations with all the paraphernalia of
twenty-first-century administration - government offices, social
institutions, hospitals and clinics, roads and railways, magnificent law
court buildings, and religious edifices such as cathedrals. In many of these
African countries, including Nigeria, the number of concrete storied
buildings that are over a hundred years old is not that high. This is a
clear indication of how new or young the countries are, and how fast they
have progressed. Yet in many cases the colonial system lasted only from
Bismarck to Hitler - very much less than a hundred years.

Unfortunately, after the colonial system, it has been impossible for many of these new African nations to continue in the same degree of peace that our forebears “enjoyed” during that period. Although there was peace, there was no real freedom. And as freedom is more valuable to mankind than practically anything else, it was impossible that the colonial system would last forever.

Then we got independence. That meant freedom for the country, and for the individual. But, this freedom allowed each ethnic community or tribe to
promote its own aspirations in politics and religion. In Nigeria, where
there are over 200 different and unrelated ethnic communities - each with
its own language, culture, aspiration and distinct geographical location -
that means chaos. It is like a madhouse, or the whole of Dartmoor prison
let loose without any warders.

We inherited the rough and the smooth of the colonial system, and it is the rough that has come to be dominant.

Nigeria shares some of its burden with many other ex-colonial countries in
Africa, and since 1945 there have been never-ending conflicts, brutal and
bloody, all over the continent, just as there were boundary wars and ethnic conflicts and differences , revolutions and stormy upheavals all over Europe for the thousand or so years up to 1945. (That residual outbursts started up again about ten years ago is by no means a consolation for Africa.)

With a bit of understanding and attention, the conflicts in Africa - which
in some respect are like those in Europe of earlier centuries - must be
settled before there can be any meaningful talk of democracy and respect for human rights. Like in Europe, even in Africa, a civilised system cannot
develop under belligerent conditions.

It is important for Africans themselves, as well as their critics, to
realise that many of the boundaries created (in 1884-5) must be revised
completely. This is in order that Tutsis and Hutus, who suddenly found
themselves in five different countries, are better and sensibly settled;
that north and south Sudan, - territories of five hundred disparate tribes
and more complicated in conflicts than Nigeria, enjoy separate existence,
enabling each to develop democratically. Also that Fulani, Urhobo, Beriberi, Efik, Bauchi, Ijaw, Yoruba, Igbo, Bornu, Shawshaw, Abakpa, Obudu and about 200 others, all lumped together to form Nigeria (under a rigid political structure, in a single administration, and all by military force), are regrouped conveniently into separate countries.

That this hasn’t happened explains Africa’s “elusive dawn”, where, according to The Economist (24th February 2001) ~Seven or eight of its countries are convulsed by insurgencies, half a dozen more are involved in the Congo, several others suffer recurrent ethnic clashes, and another pair, Ethiopia and Eritrea, are licking their wounds after an old-fashioned, and very bloody border war…”

Many of these ethnic communities, when they were merged, hardly knew of one another’s existence, so it doesn’t seem quite right to expect democracy and respect for human rights to flourish, which is all the European press can ever hammer on about.

In some countries, like the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and
Mozambique, the manumission or independence wasn’t voluntary. The slaves or subject peoples had to fight long periods of bloody wars for their freedom, in a hostile world where Portugal could call on the support of many powerful countries. In Nigeria, the period of gestation from colony to independence (forty-six years) was simply too short, given the number of disparate tribes that were merged. On top of this, independence was granted in circumstances that favoured one section more than it did the others. And because the Cold War was at its hottest period, with the Korean war in progress, the clouds of suspicion and distrust between the imperial powers and their colonial subjects didn’t disperse - even at independence. Few critics commentating on post-colonial Africa ever touch on these matters. Most seem to overlook the fact that the Greeks, the Romans and the Church - those who gave Europe her early civilisation - made no inroads into Africa south of the Arabs. Africa was totally cut off from the early civilisations, and even within itself. by jungles deserts and beasts. It was the European colonial system that saved it, though in a way it did not intend.

As soon as the African nations have settled peacefully, and are blessed with wise leaders, they owe it as a duty to apologise to the millions of
descendants of those who were sold into slavery - and they must pay
compensation. Although slavery has gone on through history, Africans were the first to sell their own kith and kin to foreigners, on a huge scale and as a massive industry. They themselves did nothing whatsoever to end this trade, and instead fought against the abolitionists. Many Nigerians still alive today can remember how the notorious Arochukwu Long Juju fought the British colonial government there, before it was successfully destroyed as a powerful syndicate, for both the international and the internal slave trade.

Africa does not deserves the sympathy you’d accord a beggar, only the
understanding you’d show an injured. To solve our problems, the world
must help us to eradicate their causes. We need to revise the boundaries
created by the colonial system, not only in Nigeria, but everywhere where
this is convenient. These boundaries are choking us. The divisions they have caused only intensify the never ending bloody conflicts. In this way the whole of the last century was lost to us. Now as in Nigeria we have begun this brand new century with greater and wider conflicts of ethnic
aspiration aggravated by Islamic Sharia. As the only people being left
behind; when will we have peace and start to move into the new world of
breath taking technology ?

Separation, and revision of our boundaries, form the one and only solution. Fortunately God did not create Nigeria, and in that sense we seek the understanding and support of the international community. We do not need aid other than in education. Aid of other kinds are detriment to our salvation. Financial aid, as well as trade aid, help only our blood-thirsty and ignorant leaders, who are far more repressive than their colonial predecessors. In this respect, Nigeria is again a typical example.

Here in Nigeria we are visited by foreign businesses, some of which go
hand-in-glove with corrupt, repressive and satanic regimes - regimes that
kill, rape and intimidate our people with weapons provided by these unGodly businesses, so that our God given resources can be more brutally exploited. Not quite fully recovered from the experiences of the slave trade and the colonial system, most African communities, particularly in Southern Nigeria, are still too weak, simple and timid in the face of powerful and ruthless foreign commercial adventurers. Also, many African elite are for ever suspicious that some big nations are interested in our backwardness; and they use our leaders to promote their own aspirations and interests, even in the midst of our internal conflicts and messy conditions. .

We pray to Almighty God to grant understanding to the leaders of the liberal world to come to our aid.

I do not know of any world leader that has ever written about Nigeria in a
way that shows a proper appreciation of its problems, other than Baroness Thatcher, the former prime minister of Great Britain. In 1985 she visited our country, took one look at it, and later wrote in her book The Downing Street Years, published by Harper Collins in 1993:“It is never easy to govern a country like Nigeria - it is somewhat artificially created -
divided between the Muslim north and the Christian and pagan south…” When I requested permission to use part of this statement as the title of my own book, it was granted.. I am therefore very grateful to her, to her agent and to her publishers. Each of the two sections of Nigeria she referred to was created as a colony by earlier British governments, at different times, and under different circumstances. In 1914 without the knowledge of our fore fathers, they amalgamated the two. Of this amalgamation, Mr Awolowo, who was at some time, the most liked leader in Southern Nigeria said ~ “That amalgamation will for ever remain as the most painful injury a British government inflicted on Southern Nigerians”. Also a professor of history in Cambridge, the late Michael Crowder wrote: ~ “When Lugard amalgamated Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria in 1914, it might have seemed to him that he was lumping together under the same administration, groups of mutually - incompatible peoples” Faber & Faber 1966. Since the end of the colonial system in 1960, more than four million people have lost their lives in the never ending bloody conflicts arising from the amalgamation.

It is necessary to explain (as I have said earlier) that Nigeria comprises
more than 200 different and unrelated ethnic communities (not even the
colonial administration seemed to know the exact number). Some were
acquired by treaty, others by conquest. They were merged - bit by bit; that is - one after the other, from the Niger Delta and other parts of the
Atlantic coast, through mangrove forests, heavy jungles, savannah, velds and other different types of vegetation hundreds and hundreds of miles right to the fringes of the Sahara Desert. Some of the peoples continued as Islam that were already deeply Arab orientated, others were pagans recently converted to Christianity. Many of them did not know and had never heard of the very existence of many of the others. At the end,. all of them and their respective territories were given one name, and a foreign language as one people in one country. And they were governed under one single administration by the British colonial office for only 46 years from the completion of the merging. Then, in the aftermath of the Second World War, they were left to govern themselves - independence..

It seems grossly unfair to revile them and their country as being
ungovernable and in a never ending bloody conflicts; because that implies
that other peoples and communities in other parts of the world in similar
circumstances, could ever make such a country a success. In fact the other country Sudan, very much like Nigeria is as bad.

In our struggle for separation, as the permanent solution to this never
ending bloody conflicts, we appeal to the present government of Great
Britain and the good people of this great British nation, to give us their
moral support that will ease this burden bequeathed to us as a legacy
of the dark ages.

I like to thank my very valued young friends Dr. N.B.C Ineneji, C Ikeajor
,Alex Ajala, Ademola Afolabi, Godfrey Arumoh and Harrison Neenwi who very kindly contributed to my knowledge and idea by feeding me with up to date ideas, press cuttings and stories and events in Nigeria and Africa.
Earlier some of them have kindly invited me to be the patron of their
radical movements for the separation of Southern Nigeria. Fortunately their organisations do not conflict with one another; their purpose being to work hard and convince our compatriots and friends in Southern Nigeria at home and abroad as well as the world, that separation of the two Nigeria's is the solution; and also, that Southern Nigerians can form separate nations based on groups that have common historical back ground, common ethnic affinity, and a common desire to live together . These nations will cooperate in a way similar to the European Union.

As I wrote my mind often drifted to my childhood days in the idyllic island
port of Abonnema in the Niger Delta; and I dedicate this work to my mother and my maternal grand parents Mbawotu Omenuka and Ine Dalla Omenuka. They were devoted Christians. And with infinite gratitude to my adorable wife, Florence.