Some of my personal friends – the men who are close to me, whom I respect, and in whom I commonly confide – are members of the Igbo nation. I became close to these through university and my academic profession, through the church, and in the course of my participation in Nigerian politics.
Moreover, I have had a special interest in the Igbo nation, as a nation, since my undergraduate days in the University College Ibadan. In Ibadan, as a young undergraduate, I found myself among a unique group, the group that was being nurtured to spearhead a revolution in the study of African History. In our various secondary schools, we had all been fed only British Empire History, and some bits of European History. But now in Ibadan, we sat under intellectual icons like Kenneth Dike, Ade Ajayi, H.F.C Smith, J.D. Omer-Cooper, A.B. Aderibigbe and others, and learned that our own Black African peoples (Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Kanuri, Edo, Dahomey, Akhan, etc, across the face of Black Africa) have histories too. It was great enlightenment for us to see that the pseudo-scientific histories of some African countries that some European colonial agents had written were not the final words on the subject, and that it was our duty to begin to do proper histories of our continent. We were surprised to learn that the fact that our peoples had no writing did not mean that they had no history, and that it was our duty to learn the techniques of using our peoples’ oral traditions, plus inputs from such sciences as archaeology and historical linguistics, to reconstruct the histories of our peoples. It was, believe me, intoxicating. Naturally, as soon as UCI attained its own independence from London University and became Ibadan University in 1962, its History Department pulled some of us back to Ibadan as graduate students, and asked us to begin to do serious research in African History. We became the first generation of African Historians to be educated on the African continent.
Inevitably, we quickly found that the histories of those of our peoples (like the Yoruba, Edo, Hausa, Ashanti, etc) who had developed towns and kingdoms in their past were easier to research and reconstruct than the histories of our other peoples (like the Igbo) who had lived mostly in simpler – what was called acephalous – societies (peoples who had developed no towns or kingdoms), etc. None of our professors, not even Kenneth Dike, had dared to tackle Igbo history frontally. They had mostly worked on aspects of the British colonial experience as it had touched the Igbo nation. But, finally, thank God, a member of my own class, Adiele Afigbo, after taking his PH.D., sat down at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and brought the best of what we had learned at Ibadan into the task of reconstructing Igbo History. And he made a very impressive success of it. In fact, he was so successful that, a few years ago, one of the most eminent of the younger men whom we ourselves had taught, Professor Toyin Falola, respectfully collected together into one volume Professor Afigbo’s most important essays on Igbo history. Then Professor Falola proposed that we should all join hands to do a book in Adiele Afigbo’s honour. I was already retired, but I pulled myself together and wrote a chapter for that book. Unfortunately, soon after these things, Adiele Afigbo passed away. Because of the difficulties that it presented, reconstructing Igbo History is regarded among us, Nigerian historians, as one of our greatest victories.
I find it, therefore,mortifying that many members of the Igbo nation, including some of our most educated and eminent citizens, seem now absolutely determined to distort the history of the Igbo nation itself as well as the histories of many other Nigerian peoples. Some of what one reads from these Igbo men and women these days are very strange indeed – anddo nothing but harm to the history and image of the Blackman in the world.
Many Igbo citizens are now clamouring that the Igbo nation is one of the lost tribes of Israel! In short, they are now happily reasserting something that their Nigerian and other historians have fought and struck down in the course of the past 60 years – namely, the European claim that the Blackman is too primitive, and too immature, to develop any serious culture, and that any signs of cultural achievement found among any Black nation must have somehow come there from some culturally more capable Middle Eastern people. Many Igbo people are now saying something blatantly untrue – namely, that the art of Igbo Ukwu, the evidence of Igbo skills in metal fabrications, the Igbo capability as traders, etc, all came from the culture of the Jewish people, and that the Igbo people themselves could never have developed such high levels of culture or civilization. Why are we now engaging in self-denigration – why are we doing this harm and ignoring the best facts that the best in historical scholarship and various other sciences have established quite definitively in our times?
Some Igbo citizens also seem to find it fashionable to say that the Igbo are the only indigenous or autochthonous people in what is now Nigeria.A prominent Igbo citizen, Dr. Pius Ezeife, was reported recently as saying, “The only autochthonous Nigerians are the Igbo”.From where did these people get this piece of untruth? According to the very best in scholarship, the place where man first lived in the world was the Rift Valley area in East Africa (in modern Kenya and Ethiopia). From there man slowly spread out to all parts of the world. In Africa, some spread to the then large grassland territory that was later to become the Sahara Desert. There they developed Stone Age cultures. After millennia, as the area gradually dried up due to climatic change, some of the people spread slowly southwards into West Africa – and became the very first humans in West Africa. Most lived along the Middle Niger, down to the Niger-Benue confluence. By about the 10th century, they became farming folks and therefore began to live as settlers. That made it possible for a sort of proto-language to develop among them – a proto-language which then gradually split into various proto-languages. These proto-languages gradually developed into mature languages. The speakers of each language became an ethnic group. The ethnic groups are the Nupe, Gbagyi, Kakanda, Ebira, Igala, Idoma, Yoruba, Igbo, Edo etc. Over time, these groups spread out of the Niger Valley and occupied the territories that are now their homelands. Each of these peoples is indigenous to their homeland. None can claim to be the only indigenous or autochthonous people in Nigeria.
But there is another angle to this early history. There is no truth in the claims being made by some Igbo that every occurrence of the word Igbo in any place outside Igboland is evidence of some early presence or influence of the Igbo nation. Because of the common origin of the languages of our many peoples, many words are common to our different languages. The known fact, authenticated by no less a historian than Professor Afigbo, is that before the British creation of Nigeria, the Igbo had no contacts with peoples other than their immediate neighbours – Igala, Idoma, Efik, Ibibio, Ijaw, and Edo.
Many Igbo people are also saying of the Benin Empire that it was “a village empire”, and therefore inconsequential in our history. Well, they are very very wrong. With the exception of the Kanuri nation in the Northeast, we have more documentary information concerning Benin history than we have concerning the history of any other Nigerian people.By the time the first European explorers came to the West African coast in about 1480, Benin was already a prestigious kingdom. In the centuries that followed, Benin’s position in the coastal trade with Europeans helped it to grow into a rich and gorgeous empire. The Benin Empire is a source of pride to most Black Africans. Where did our Igbo brethren get their own disparaging opinions about the Benin Empire?
Many Igbo citizens have been saying also that Lagos is a no-man’s land – that Lagos only belonged to the lagoon; that the Igbo developed Lagos. It is shocking that members of one of our own nations should be so carelessly, and blatantly falsely, twisting and distorting the history of any of our peoples. I don’t think that Lagos needs any defence against this egregious falsehood. I don’t care what Igbo people want, and I am intervening only as one of the men who have spent whole adult lives studying the history of our peoples. I have stood up in many situations (in writing) against the views popularized by the European colonialists that the Igbo are not a people and have no culture and no history. According to the best scholarship on this subject, the Awori subgroup of the Yoruba people established typical Yoruba kingdoms in the Lagos coastlands and islands as early as the 12th century. By the 19th century, the island kingdom of Eko was so important in the coastal trade that it became a bone of contention among merchants of various European nations. The British, in order to control most of the trade, used brute force to establish dominance on the Lagos kingdom in 1851, and then signed a treaty of cession with the Lagos king in 1861. Fifty-three years later, in 1914, they made Lagos the capital of their new Protectorate of Nigeria, and many Nigerians, including the Igbo, first began to come to Lagos in the 1920s. What is the foundation, therefore, of the statement that Lagos belonged only to the lagoon until the Igbo came? And where is the evidence that the Igbo contributed more to the development of Lagos, as federal capital, than other peoples of Nigeria, or as much as the Lagos people themselves and the larger Yoruba nation to which Lagos belongs? What is the value of engaging in such obvious falsehood?
Again, I am not talking about what the Igbo may want. But I am certainly interested in the welfare and future of the Igbo nation. I am concerned therefore that if the Igbo continue to earn for themselves the image of a people who are easily given to falsehood and to needlessly disparaging other Nigerian peoples, they may be building a strong barrier against their prospects in Nigeria. I know that some Igbo citizens have been warning about this. I strongly urge that the Igbo people should listen seriously to them.
