Prince Justice Faloye
Social media has created a situation whereby Yoruba/Igbo irredentist agitators/politicians compete on tribal loyalty, and blackmail others as being incomplete Yoruba/Igbos with terms like Efulefu and Omoale Yoruba. They are colonially decivilized Tribalists, not knowing that their tribe belongs to a wider group of shared genetic and cultural origins and linkages. Decivilized Indigenous Africans are mentally enslaved not to be aware of the step between tribalism and universalism is civilizationism.
Due to the colonial epistemicide, killing of their traditional knowledge systems, they miss an essential level of human relations necessary to step on the world stage which is divided into four main civilizations – European Christian, Afroasiatic Islamic, Asiatic Buddhist and Indigneous Africans based on African Spiritual Sciences known as Ifa-Afa-Fa-Iha-Efa. Indigenous Africans jump from tribalism to universalism, failing to understand that a universalist perspective is influenced by civilizational philosophical foundations and perspectives, but unfortunately our universalism is based on Western Abrahamic civilization that colonized and decivilized us.
Human relations start from your biological family – your Mum whose breast you suckle, your Daddy that buys the food and siblings that you share with. Then as you grow up to leave home for school, you associate and identify with a wider circle of a clan/town. When you become an employable adult, you increase your socioeconomic network to geographically contiguous towns that speak the same dialect known as a Tribe. The dialects and cultural foundations of every tribe is part of a wider network known as a civilization that they share the same genetic and cultural origins, with similar philosophical and economic foundations.
Despite the much touted 500 plus ethnicities in Nigeria, there are only two civilizations – Afro-Arabic of the Core North and Indigenous Africans of the South and Middlebelt. The Afro-Arabic civilization that share mixed African and Arabic genetic and cultural origins and linkages is based on a Abrahamic Arabism narrative that articulates common origins to collective aspirations based on Islam, which states their shared philosophical and spiritual values, enabling various tribes to unite on civilizational foundations. However, they hide under a universalist terminology, ‘North’ to wrongly claim a wider geographic sphere of their civilization.
Unfortunately, the invading Afroasiatic and European civilizational imperialists attacked the Original African civilizational economic and knowledge systems that linked neighboring tribes across South and Middlebelt, and all the way to Southern Africa. This was done to break our civilizational unity that could economically and sociopolitically empower us to repel them.
They strategically bastardized the indigenous African civilization based on Ifa-Afa-Iha-Fa-Efa had its civilizational economic products like kolanuts, beads and iron tools, whose economy sustained the civilizational structures. Also, since Yorubas, Igbos and other groups don’t constitute more than 20% of Nigeria population, as long as they remain divided economically and politically, they will never have the collective numbers and power to challenge the neocolonial system.
The Northern Afro-Arabic civilization can unite at least two regions, Northwest and Northeast, while the more populous Indigenous African civilization can’t unite any two regions of the remaining four regions of South and Middlebelt. Therefore, the Afro-Arabic civilization has been able to develop a political hegemony by simply taking one or two of the Original African civilization regions.
Many African commentators claim that they are not tribes but nations like Europeans, who are not labelled tribes. Yes, Europeans belong to tribes but recognize, identify and act as a civilization, especially for economic survival and advancement. Due to their arid environments, the European tribes initially relied on Greece that relied on food and other sustenance from Africa that came down the Nile Valley to the Delta of Ancient Black Egypt, which they were directly situated opposite, and eventually took over.
When Romans replaced Greeks as the civilizational leaders and took over the larger portion of North Africa, which they used to produced 75% of their corn and grains, they attracted more Whites from their Caucasus mountains origins of Central Asia. The Romans used the food and gold from the African trade routes to develop Europe all the way to England. The Romans lost control of the African trade routes to Islamic Afroasians, who later invaded and ruled for 500 years all the way to Paris, until they were repelled with the invention of guns in 1270s. Portugal and Spain that repelled the Afro-Arabians became the Western Civilization leadership, as they took over the Morocco Ceuta trade port and followed the coast to West African coast where the economic goods came from.
However, unlike the Roman Empire that could control the land trade routes at the seaport terminals and therefore the civilizational economics and conformity, the sea routes couldn’t be barricaded and controlled. The British and French initially used sea pirates to grab African resources and later through Transatlantic Slavery and colonization, which enabled them to have standalone tribal nations. Naturally, when the European tribal nations lost their direct control of their African colonies in 1950s/1960s, they once again came together under a civilizational umbrella by forming the Common Market and European Union for economic sustenance. Therefore they can be identified as tribal civilizationists, who even though they are tribes recognize and use the economic and political benefits of their civilization. The British exited recently because they believe they could rely on their USA, India and Commonwealth investments – Empire 2.0 as labelled by their civil service.
The question is why after colonization, educated Indigenous Africans allowed the hopeless situation to continue? The ASHE Foundation scholar, Olusegun R Babalola defined Tribalism in the context of modern Africa as ”when Euro-American educated neo-colonial elites exploit the newly created post-colonial identities to gain power and wealth (from an external civilizational economy). They pay lip services to indigenous polities and the forms/symbols of such polities like language and dress codes. They are only concerned with the form and not the content. They are not concerned about the indigenous tradition/civilization nor the healthy continuity of that tradition/civilization in modernity. For example, most of them argue for the exclusion of the indigenous polities in the constitution. This is the case across the whole Africa”.
The new post-colonial ethnic identities for them is the tool for competition among other post-colonial identities for power and wealth within the post-colonial political economic architecture that is nothing but a continuity of the colonial regime. At other times, it’s also the tool for secession directed at creating a new political economic architecture, which, would more or less be another continuity of the colonial regime. So unlike the European tribes that broke away into nations due to foreign exploitation, African tribes don’t have avenues to external civilizational economic revenue therefore separatism is not only unachievable due to civilizational disunity but undesirable.
This short termist behavior of African elite reminds one of the Native American character characterization of human behavior into rats and Eagle. Rats never look far ahead but attempt to eat everything along the way in gutters and other unsavory sources, while Eagles take a long look and swoops down to carry its target.
