Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0262/02628.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 30KB | 473 lines

$Unique_ID{COW02628}
$Pretitle{357}
$Title{Nigeria
Chapter 2C.   Ethnic Relations and Regionalism}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Robert Rinehart}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{ethnic
class
political
status
social
yoruba
groups
education
ibo
power}
$Date{1981}
$Log{}
Country:     Nigeria
Book:        Nigeria, A Country Study
Author:      Robert Rinehart
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1981

Chapter 2C.   Ethnic Relations and Regionalism

     Despite the common recourse to ethnicity in the search for support and
solace in difficult situations, neither the organization nor the aims of
entities defined as ethnic have usually been traditional. (In rural areas a
people may seek to preserve its way of life, but even so the group may be
forced to organize in new ways to hold off competitors.) Ethnic entities may
stress traditional elements as symbols of their cohesion and of their
difference from others. But they have often organized themselves in new ways
to seek access to political and economic resources and opportunities.

     Some Nigerians have seen the country's problems in terms other than that
of rivalry between ethnic groups, and some have sought to minimize its
importance. Some groupings, e.g., religious ones, were in principle
universalistic in orientation and sometimes succeeded in cutting across ethnic
or regional lines. Sometimes, however, such institutions came in fact to be
coterminous (or nearly so) with ethnic categories and therefore reinforced
them. In any case the combination of competition and insecurity characteristic
of Nigeria's changing society and economy, especially in the urban areas,
tended to generate reliance on the familiar, that is, on the ethnic community.
In such circumstances the unknown or poorly known-other ethnic
communities-became the source of one's problems. It is probable that the
establishment of states may mitigate or alter the nature of conflict on the
national level and on what used to be the regional level, but ethnic
competition is likely to continue for some time even if the terms are
different. Secession (like that attempted by the Ibo) as a solution to
conflict may have been obviated, however.

     Political scientists Robert Melson and Howard Wolpe have provided a set
of propositions in terms of which the Nigerian experience may be depicted. To
begin with, some peoples acquired an advantage as competitors in the emerging
economy early in the colonial era (or even before it) by virtue of the nature
of their contact with European influence, a fruitful physical environment, and
perhaps most important in the long run a cultural or psychocultural
predisposition to change. Precisely what enters into that predisposition is
difficult to pin down, but it does seem to have an effect. As a consequence of
that advantage, access to wealth, status, and power in the modern system
tended to coincide with ethnic groups or sections of them rather than cutting
across them. Sometimes, however, early access to European influence, (for
example among that segment of the Ibibio called the Efik) led to an early
advantage but resulted in a comfortable adaptation, thus making the people
resistant to further change. By the same token, a long period of separate
development in the north under a colonial regime that encouraged the
maintenance of traditional structures was, in a sense, an advantage to the
Hausa or at least to their Fulani rulers. But it can be argued that it put the
Hausa at a disadvantage when circumstances changed. The Hausa and the Kanuri
also faced a difficult physical environment. Some segments of the Yoruba near
the coast had advantages of early contact with Europeans and education similar
to those of the Efik and in addition had fertile land suitable for a valuable
cash crop-cocoa.

     The Ibo did not initially have the opportunities that stemmed from early
European contact, nor were they in a particularly good physical environment.
In some areas they lacked adequate amounts of land. Their predisposition to
seek aggressively the rewards gradually made available in a changing economy
and society led many of them to acquire the means (particularly education) to
gain those rewards. In the years after World War II, the Hausa were not only
culturally different from the Ibo, a situation reinforced by religious
differences between Muslim and Christian (or pagan), but they were often
poorer (although there were of course wealthy Hausa merchants). Moreover in
the quest for high status positions requiring education credentials, the
Hausa lagged far behind. It is in part for this reason that young Hausa,
beginning to oppose their elders and the conservative social and political
order in the mid-1960s, nevertheless made common cause with the northern
ruling class when Major General Johnson Aguiyi Ironsi proposed a unitary civil
service. They feared that they still lagged so far behind in education that
Ibo would dominate the civil service in the north.

     Similar patterns of relative advantage applied in the relations between
groups at the regional or provincial (roughly that would now be the state)
levels. Some of the coastal groups, such as the Ijaw and the Ibibio who had
moved ahead by virtue of their initial opportunities, were the object of envy
and dislike of smaller groups in the interior. For example, inland Ibo envied
the riverine Ibo of Onitsha, and inland Yoruba felt the same way about the
Ijebu (coastal Yoruba).

     The narrowing of the gap between two groups has not necessarily
diminished ethnic antagonism. As the conditions of interaction and competition
changed and as the later starting Ibo approached the Yoruba in numbers engaged
in and qualified for modern political and economic roles, the intensity of
their conflict increased. On the one hand the fast moving Ibo were still
uncertain of their status and were uncomfortable outside their home grounds
despite their willingness to go anywhere in search of opportunity. On the
other hand the Yoruba, long dominant in both public and private sectors of
developing Nigeria, found themselves hard pressed and came to perceive the
Ibo as a threat. Yoruba solidarity was sporadic and often depended upon the
presence of another ethnic group. As sociologist Pierre van den Berghe points
out in his study of the University of Ibadan, Yoruba-Ibo conflict was an
important element of student and faculty politics until the Ibo left at the
onset of the civil war, whereupon conflict then became characteristic of the
relation between Yoruba sections.

     Up to a point the relative segregation of one people from another
minimizes conflict if the groups involved are engaged in non-competitive tasks
rewarding in some sense to both. Anthropologist Onigu Otite describes the
relation between Yoruba landlords and migrant Urhobo tenants as having been
free of severe conflict. The Urhobo had the skills to exploit the taller palm
trees on Yoruba land and paid rent to do so, remaining apart from the Yoruba
otherwise. In a changing society and economy such as Nigeria's, however,
relations of this kind are likely to be unstable. In this case a rise in the
world price of palm oil led to the acquisition of the relevant skills by
Yoruba. Moreover other uses for the land diminished exploitable resources for
the Urhobo. What had been a symbiotic relationship became a competitive one in
which the Urhobo as tenants were at a disadvantage. The relations became
politicized and even more remote.

     Except in some rural areas, residential and social separation in
Nigeria, whether or not initially voluntary, has generally occurred when the
peoples involved competed for the same resources or related to each other
only as buyers and sellers in the marketplace. These conditions permit if
they do not generate reciprocally stereotyped and pejorative views. Hausa
cattle traders, self-segregated and organized to maintain a monopoly of their
role as cattle suppliers to Yoruba butchers in Ibadan, tended to speak of the
"mac