“The partition of Africa was, as we all recognize, due primarily to the economic necessity of increasing the supplies of raw materials and food to meet the needs of the industrialised nations of Europe.”

- Lord Lugard, The Dual Mandate

"A Paramount Chief was not an autocrat as British Governors had been, but resembled much more closely a constitutional monarch, being obliged to act in accordance with the advice of the Elders of his Council, and liable to be deposed or "de-stooled" if he failed to carry out his constitutional duties. The members of his Council consulted the village Elders, and the village Elders had their ears close to the ground and knew what their people wanted. With this firm foundation in public opinion African traditional rule in Ghana had been more genuinely democratic than British colonial rule."

- William Francis Hare, 5th Earl of Listowel, British Minister of State for Colonial Affairs (Labour), Deputy Leader of the House of Lords

Introduction

In recent years, where ever you go in the world from Cape Town to the North Pole, the word “Nigerians” always seem to evoke a predictable negative image. This negative image manifests itself in several ways: in the treatment of Nigerians in almost all countries on the face of the planet; in the way “Nigerians” present and project themselves to the so called outside world and in those various ways “Nigerians” imagine, deploy and experience their “Nigerian-ness” within and amongst themselves. But, “Nigeria” and the “outside world” are not neutral entities in a cocoon, devoid of historical or political forces. The projected images many associate with “Nigerians” are, in many ways, vestiges of the colonial racial classifications hitherto internalised, transformed and “normalised” in the minds of the descendants of the colonisers and colonised. This is why, despite the complaints, some of those projected images and self representation are seen as “positive” in that ironic “Nigerian” buccaneering “money miss road” sense. The totality of those images are however the inevitable reflection of a homogenised fictional “national character” usually taken for granted by “outsiders” and even “Nigerians” themselves. Eric Wolf alluded to this when he declared in the initial chapter of his book Europe and the People Without History (1982:3, 5, 76) that: “The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected process, and inquiries that disassemble this reality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality...turns history into a moral success story, a race in time…a story of how the winners prove that they are virtuous and good by winning… it is a major argument of this book that most of the societies studied by anthropologists are an outgrowth of the expansion of Europe and not the pristine precipitates of past evolutionary stages” Bearing Wolf’s above thesis in mind, when we say “Nigerians”, what or who are we actually taking about in terms of what exists on the ground? Some times, the phrase “ordinary Nigerians” is used to internally differentiate the so called neo-colonial feudal “owners of Nigeria” from the “commoners”, hence the word “ordinary” before “Nigerians”. The latter point tells us clearly that this issue is not as simple as the “cheerleaders” of the “north/south” binary debates like to think.

 Whichever side one takes in the “Nigerians” image debate, the overwhelming impression suggests that the dominant image of both “Nigeria” and “Nigerians” is a negative one. A good evidence of this can be seen in the fact that “Nigerians” themselves always complain about the way they are treated as soon as they present a Nigerian passport. Many “Nigerians” blame this trend on the stereotypical “image” of Nigerians “abroad”, especially, the “bad ones amongst us”. They relentlessly lament about the callous indifference of successive Nigerian governments towards their “citizens” or the Nigerian “image” as if there has ever been a “Nigerian” government (British or “Évolué”) that deviated from that cause of action. Others blame the array of crooked Nigerians that engage in “crime” and, in doing so, create the impressions projected on the “Nation” as a whole. Those that make the latter case reduce the problem to “public relations” and image improvement. However, the question is: what is really going on here? Why this particular country “Nigeria” for example, when all the often cited “problems” with Nigeria are typical of those classified as “third world” countries? Is there any factual basis for this “bad image”? Do “Nigerians” really exist or is the word “Nigerian” just an empty signifier for a moving target that can be used for any purpose? If this is so, where is the evidence that “Nigeria” is ever used in a positive light? Let us for one minute suspend all we think we “know” about “Nigeria” and “Nigerians”. Let us, for argument sake, try to imagine the first questions we will ask if we are confronted with that word “Nigeria”. The logical questions should be: what does “Nigeria” mean? Says who? Why?

African “Cake” and the “Sharing” Internal Colonialists

An adequate answer to the questions posed in the above introduction will require a book length analysis. But luckily, one phrase “Nigerians” often use gives us an encapsulating glimpse into the core of the “image” problem. The phrase is the figurative “national cake” that everyone in Nigeria wants to “share”. “National cake” and its “sharing” is not only the raison d'être and raison d'État of the Nigerian state and its “citizenship” hierarchy, it is even at the core of the so called “minority” ethnic groups agitation for “justice” and “self determination” in Nigeria. In short, “national cake” defines “Nigeria” as a political project and “Nigerians” as socio-cultural images of that political project. How? The “successful Nigerians” are usually those with a larger “share” of the “national cake”. The “others” or “ordinary” Nigerians are then those clamouring to “substitute” the “successful” ones on top of the cake scramble hierarchy. Clearly, “success” is defined by the access to, and share of, the “national cake”. -

Whenever you hear “Nigerians” rant and rave about “south south presidency” and “our turn to rule”, they are actually talking about “sharing” Lugard’s “national cake”. We all know the origin of this imperial consumptionist phrase and its deeper implication – “the politics of the belly”. Those that don’t know the origin of that phrase should ask themselves what else they do not know. More importantly, they should also ask themselves, why nobody talks about baking the “cake” only its consumption. The consumption emphasis gives us a clue as to who and what is behind the mindless “scramble” for the “cake” and the corresponding binary “partition” that logically follows the “scramble”. “Nigerians”, therefore are the parallel embodiment of the “scramble” and “partition” mentality formalised by the “Berlin conference”. That widely used phrase “national cake” is in fact the corner stone of not only what this article is about but also the specific rationality that encapsulates Lugard’s “Dual Mandate”. According to a short piece on one website, African “Cake” refers to the fact that: “A Berlin Conference was able to tear Africa into shreds and divide her up between three or four imperial flags” -Fanon. In 1884, European imperialists met at the Berlin Conference to “carve the African cake”. These imperialists had an agenda to not only lay the boundaries and rules for the occupation of the African “motherland”, but to also bring civilization to the African natives.

This great African cake, as it is metaphorically described, was a delightful taste in the mouths of the colonizer. The “cake“, with its abundance of natural resources and raw materials, was decisively cut and partitioned to various European nations. The diplomats drew lines on maps relinquishing foreign lands, mountains, and rivers to one another. The plan was for the colonizers to rule these designated areas as if there were no inhabitants, with no respect for the claims and rights of the native Africans”)http://www.exampleessays.com/viewpaper/83049.html) To unveil the underpinnings of the “national cake” as the ideological raison d'être of the Nigerian state we need to add the imperial thinking that serve as the nucleus of that ideology into the equation. Rather than simply maundering within the “interfaces” of the problem, we must ask much deeper questions beyond Lugard’s binary kernel code. What is the relationship between the view of Africa as a “cake” to “share”, negative images of “Nigerians” and Lugard’s “dual mandate” state and personality (mal) formation? All of the aforementioned involve the subjugation and denigration of “Africa” and “Africans” by imperialists and their Lugardian “dual” extensions of all guises – including “Nigerians” as the avatars of the “national cake” ideology. But why Nigeria? Because the area “whitewashed” as Nigeria or “Nigger-Area” is the largest concentration of those invisible “native Africans” thus, its share of colonial negative images reflects its size and importance in relation to imperial global classifications and subliminal disseminations – the African “cake” project embodies.

Fela Kuti, that true African and misunderstood Yoruba luminary, once said that “all Nigerians are criminals, except those Nigerians who are Africans”. Fela understood better than most that the Westphalian “craze world” ruled by Abacha, Obasanjo and other “successful” Nigerians is not African but an imperial masquerade that is cannibalizing Africa and supplanting Africans. Fela equally understood that true Africans will rather “bake” the “cake”, nurture and preserve it for the next generation. But the Lugardians, true to the “scorched earth” principles of their formative “Berlin conference”, are only concerned with scrambling and partitioning it. As I have written somewhere (see Ikeotuonye 2007) “As noted by Denis Kwek (2002), European imperial and colonial powers were able to conquer, dominate, and rule “colonies”, “protectorates” and “dominions” in far away continents not only by territorial or overt conquest but also through a covert epistemological and ontological conquest. This conquest was characterized by the displacement and replacement of indigenous knowledge and thought systems by European macro-narratives based on historiography, taxonomies, sensibilities, social theories, concepts, categories, and classifications constructed in Europe. The most important and durable legacy of this epistemic and geo-historical conquest, accomplished through the prism of 'colonial knowledge', is the notion that the Westphalian nation-state is the natural embodiment of history and society.” In this article, my argument complements Fela’s reasoning in the sense that I am trying to link the Lugardian default (National cake “criminality”) to the forms or masks of coloniality entangled in the name, personality structure, and image of the “Nigerian”. What is a “Nigerian”, if not a de-Africanized “African” cultural stem cell that is then seen as a docile body; an empty container, or raw material forever shaped by the “injections” and vicissitudes of imperial global designs – the human form of the great “African cake”. While on this particular “African cake” and bad image point, it is important to bear in mind that it is extremely difficult to find a Nigerian with a “positive” image of Nigeria or other Nigerians. By “positive” image, I am not referring to the perverted “chop make I chop, God dey” jingoism; or the apathetic “hope” and “pray” contradictory fatalism of contemporary “Nigerians” who go “abroad” for medical treatments while “ministers” of “health” in Nigeria; or the so called patriotic “leaders” who are “reforming” Nigerian Banks while the bulk of their stolen loot is in the UK, Germany and Switzerland.

Nigeria’s feudal “leaders” are largely negative about “Nigerians” and their documented mistreatment of Nigerians and Nigeria itself is there for all to see. A clear evidence of this is the fact that the Nigerian “president” lives in a fortress called “Aso Rock” – a fortress reminiscent of the American “green zone” in Baghdad. I have seen a poster with “Beware of Nigerians” in bold prints in a Nigerian embassy some where in North Western Europe. Nigerians have told me in no uncertain terms that: “our people are crooks, we are cursed”. I have heard a senior Nigerian politician defend corruption by saying that “there is a way, we “Nigerians” do things in Nigeria”, thereby implying that corruption is written into the kernel of Nigerian DNA. Nigerians claim “Asylum” in Western countries by telling fantastic stories about “Juju”, “human Sacrifice”, “genital mutilation”, or “blood sucking Witches” reminiscent of the European witch hunts of centuries ago. Nigerians are always eager to tell stories about one bloody armed robbery after another; stories about headless bodies in Oshodi; imaginary “hard” men prowling state university campuses; “big men” with sordid connections and immoral earnings, to mention but a few. All these negative images form the core of what passes for plot and storyline in the Nigerian “home” movies that are made in Nigeria by “Nigerians”. The so called “Nollywood” movies, in spite of their nauseating mimicry of Western “action movies”, can be used as a snap shot of “Nigerian” image making projected to the outside world. Even within West Africa itself, the word “Nigerians” is a generic hold-all for all kinds of negative qualities from “prostitution”, crass materialism, “armed robbery”, “419” to “Kidnapping” and other such social ills. During a visit to Ghana recently, I was told that nearly all the crimes committed in Ghana urban areas are committed by “Nigerians”. A good way to illustrate how bad and widespread this soiled “image” of “Nigerians” can be is an experience I had with a woman from South America. As soon as I uttered the word “Nigeria”, she smiled and gave me a knowing wink and said “Mafioso”. Even in South America! I muttered in surprise. We have all heard or read books, articles, or mass media commentary on the “problem with Nigeria”. “Nigerians” discuss this issue on a daily basis. However, the overwhelming number of these analyses and commentary focus on the generalised structural and functional problems associated with “weak”, “quasi” or “fictive” states in the southern hemisphere not just Nigeria. The lazier analysis favoured by “mainstream” Nigerian elites and their ideological guardians in the “US Enterprise Institute” (who are now quiet about their “free market” god since Obama-nomics), the World Bank and IMF, presents these structural and symbolic problems as merely technical problems demanding technical solutions.

 In the fore of these debates and analysis many forget a more potent and fundamental issue – the question of the basis of these “images” we all take-for-granted. Rather than assuming that “Nigeria” or “Nigerians” exist out there; or basking in all these illusions of “Northerners” and “South South West” “interests”; let us instead ask what these words actually mean in practice – in the real world. If we are able to actually establish what those words mean in practice then we will be able to understand not only the processes that generate and concentrate those stereotypical “negative” images but more importantly, the underpinning geo-politics on which everything else at issue here hangs. “Trickle Down” Travesty So, are ordinary Nigerians any different if we compare them to their colonial military and “civil” society ruling class? “Ordinary” Nigerians are not so different, in terms of their image of Nigeria and Nigerians, from their internal colonialist and pseudo European feudal rulers. A typical Nigerian “big man” humiliated by British border police will “yes sir” his way through Britain but come back to Nigeria to slap his elderly uncle for “disrespecting” him.

In Nigeria, I have come across many “ordinary Nigerians” with the same thrash and burn tyrannical mind set and consciousness many people ascribe to Abacha, “IBB” or other “bogie men” of the World Bank Berg report speak – the people who heap up and bandy around empty phrases like “best practice”, “leadership”, “capacity building”, “transparency”, “accountability” and all those silly terms. I have seen poor Nigerian “gate men” that act like Mugabe; police and military men with Babangida’s delusions of grandeur and post office clerks that think they are God. The important point however is not the individuals we focus on but the diachronic contradictions they embody in their role as the extensions of colonial monopolisation of African public power. Basil Davidson, a member of the British military formation that produced the “Nigerian” military ruling class of today, analysed this process very well in his book, “The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation State”. Franz Fanon (1963:52) identified the same colonial augmented consciousness in the false “national” consciousness of the early African state builders who never really understood the implications of “methodological nationalism” or even the French “republican” model they became enthusiastic vectors of: “The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people…We have seen that the native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler – not of becoming the settler but of substituting himself for the settler”. The delusions of grandeur most see in the “queen’s rifle man” like Idi Amin, Joseph- Désiré Mobutu, Sani Abacha, and Paul Biya are frankly interchangeable with the endless supply of such imperial personalities from Lugard to Leopold. Lady Lugard herself had so much to say about those she informed us that “think imperially”. But more importantly, these personalities did not spring up from nowhere neither did they rule in a vacuum. They had fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, sisters, “assistants”, “secret police men”, “torturers”, “lovers”, “supporters”, “cheerleaders” and the net work of structural and functional support that enabled them to inflict the sort of plundering and murder many decry. To paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, delusions of grandeur as it is the case with madness “is rare in individuals but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule”.

In other words, what we are ultimately dealing with here is not about single individuals but the diachronic outgrowths of coloniality which of course enlists the “muddled thinking”, “insecurities”, anxieties, clannishness, nepotism, opportunistic tendencies, “speech impediments”, pettiness and contradictions of individuals born into that collective madness or Fela’s “craze world”. It is by viewing these processes from a broad point of view that we are able to see these things for what they actually are. Many people today seem to forget that the dysfunctional colonial apparatus or image we call “Nigeria” or “Nigerians” was not created “internally” by “natives” or even by internal colonialists like Obasanjo and co. Rather, both the material and symbolic entities and images we refer to as “Nigeria” or “Nigerians” have always been defined and generated from “abroad”. The evidence for this is overwhelmingly clear. In his book UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (1998), Tunde Adeleke showed how Delany, Crummell, Turner and other “Black nationalists” were enlisted as collaborators in the 19th century imperialist ideas and policies that led to the colonization of Africa. Those who followed their foot steps in the processes of Nigerian state formation were also “foreign born” and “educated”; those Mary Kingsley described in her Travels in West Africa (1897) as “excellent pure-blooded Negroes in European clothes, and with European culture”. As Michael Echeruo put it in the Education of the Lagosians: “Most of the illustrious men in early Nigerian history were foreign born and educated: the Rev. Babington Macaulay, Samuel Crowther, Henry Robbin and James Johnson, as well as Rev. S. Johnson.”

 Those among these “illustrious men” who were not foreign born, were foreign educated and explicitly saw state building in Africa as a European project which it was and still is. So, whether we call those images, “enemies of progress”, “SAP”, “austerity measure”, “Nigerians” or “home movies”, they are dots in a trajectory that goes back to the Victorians. Everything from the Nigerian British “native council format” of local government to the British unitary system we call “federal” government, to Oliver Cromwell’s “military trusteeship” and the Anglo-Saxon mixing of court, God and “commerce” to Lugard’s “one Nigeria” unionism goes back to the Victorians. “Nigerians” only internalise and half digest the images and apparatuses like goats, bring them up again, repackage them, and re-project them outside because the intended audience are actually not within the borders of Nigeria. My mother always used to say, ignore the masquerade and focus on the rhythm maker – the men beating the drums.

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Foundational Contradictions and Colonial Difference

The problem with many of the “Nigerian” explanations I outlined in the introduction of this article for the bad image of “Nigeria” and “Nigerians” is that they, as usual, reek of that typical colonial collective amnesia and dissimulation often associated with “successful colonial subjects”. Did those now labelled as “Nigerians” have a good image in the 18th and 19th century? Of course in the 18th and 19th century, the multiplicities we now describe as “Nigerians” still had their own relative cultural and geo-political autonomy therefore they were not particularly concerned with their “image” within the emerging Western “world system”. The fact that we are now concerned with our “image” is a good indication of our current “location” in the global classifications integral and firmly anchored to that “world system”. In the early modern periods we were referred to as “heathens”, “torrid zones”, “savages” (whether noble or ignoble) or “natives”. Today, we are the “debt ridden”, “third world”, "under-developed ”,“emerging markets", and “diseased”. In other words, within the expanding Western sphere of interest and conquest, Africans have always had a bad “image”, at least, from the 16th century onwards. The 16th century brought with it the opening of the transatlantic trade circuit and the invention of the idea of “race”. “Race”, a uniquely modern European invention is simply the global bio-cultural classifications that accompanied the birth of modernity and the international division of labour at the core of global capitalism. What many call “modernization” highlights the incremental intensification of that binary racial project. The “modernization” program actually has two sides: a “bright” side and a “dark” side. “Nigerians” often attribute the “bright” side of modernization to Europe and blame the “dark” side on their ancestral culture as we all learnt in the “import substitution” European schools that “brought us up”. However, those at the nerve centre of “modernity” know that the dark side of modernity is as modern and European as the symmetry of “sliced breads and vibrators”. Michel Foucault, a French philosopher (bearing in mind that French is the ‘geo-culture’ of modernity) described modernity as a “binary system” subsumed by “dividing practices” and “bio-politics”.

In his own words: “Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines.” (Foucault 1975: 222) The mixture of “egalitarian” and “non-egalitarian”, “noble”, and “ignoble” principles is a dominant feature of not only modernity but also its dark side – coloniality. We see this clearly in the British concept of “winning hearts and minds” that follows military “punitive expeditions”. This of course is the basis of the theory of “trusteeship” that not only underpins the civilising missions of the 18th and 19th century but also the World Bank and IMF’s “development” missions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The “trusteeship” theories of Say, Saint-Simon, Robert Chambers, John Henry Newman, Auguste Comte, Friedrick List or John Stuart Mill were indicative of the mix of noble principles and ignoble interventionist practices. Many of those that embodied the biopolitics of “The Spirit of Victorian Expansion” in Britain rehashed these contradictory colonial themes many “Nigerians” are parroting today. Gladstone, Chamberlain, Cromer and Salisbury all exhibited, in one form or another, the vestiges of Foucault’s “indirect murder” of the “savage states” as the basis of the “care” of the chosen or “elect”, “civilised” “population” Lugard outlined in the “Dual Mandate”. The Marquis of Salisbury was quoted in The Times (UK), 5th May 1898, where he said that:

 “You may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying.. . .In these [dying] states, disorganization and decay are advancing almost as fast as concentration and increasing power are advancing in the living nations that stand beside them.. . the weak states are becoming weaker and the strong states are becoming stronger.. . .For one reason or another-from the necessities of politics or under the pretence of philanthropy, the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying, and the seeds and causes of conflict among civilized nations will speedily appear.” Salisbury is not only linking the death of the dying “states” in Africa with the strength of the living nations of Europe, he also sees the territorial encroachment and cannibalisation of the dying “weak states” as the seed of the “conflict” among “civilized” nations. The notion of the lights that “beam from feeding on the ones too weak” is a constant theme of colonization that helped to shape those we refer to as “Nigerians” today. The context of Salisbury’s above statement was of course the “partition” of Africa that produced “Nigeria”, “national cake” and the scrambling “Nigerians”. Nevertheless, what is important for the point I am trying to make here is that; that same mixing of noble and ignoble principles that people like Salisbury (who actually made the decisions) clearly articulated above is the central plot of Lugard’s “Dual Mandate”. And, Lugard’s “dual mandate” is the doctrine behind the conditions that made both the material and symbolic image of “Nigeria” and “Nigerians” possible. “Nigerians” are not Hausa, Igbo, Higi, ibibio, idoma, lsekiri (Itsekiri) etc. Rather “Nigerians” is the Victorian mask that has colonised the Hausa, Igbo, Tiv persons; homogenised them into a fictional outer layer that mirrors the Victorian disparaging representations of their ancestors; and warped their minds to the extent they now see themselves through the prism of colonial anthropology. However these “Nigerians” present themselves, whether as “Muslims” or “Christians” is irrelevant because each wears a slightly different colour of the same colonial mask.

Avatars of the “Scramble and Partition” of Africa

Lady Lugard, in her book, A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan, with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1902), outlined quite succinctly the trans-national ideological foundations of the Nigerian state/personality (mal) formations. According to Mrs Lugard, the “Lugardian system” in Nigeria is based on the pax Britannica principle of ruling “as far as possible, through the existing Fulani and Bornuese machinary, modified and controlled by the advice of British residents”. This “Fulani and Bornuese machinary” is still the “machinery” of “rule” in the Nigerian state today. Lady Lugard’s “whitewashed” mask is the condition of possibility of those that now refer to themselves as “northerners”. It is important to once again emphasize that “northerners” are not an ethnic group in the Northern region of what we call “Nigeria”. “Fulani and Bornuese machinery” have absolutely nothing to do with the Fula or the Kanuri. It is a colonial self referential description of the “other” as an empty referent that can be signified or branded in the service of “colonial relations”. Therefore the “northerner” is an English idea of the Scots superimposed indelibly on the various ethnic groups in the North of Nigeria cleaved from their own history and genealogy. What results from this cleaving or “whitewashing” is the “ontologically defenceless negroes” Franz Fanon referred to. Now here is a brief extrinsic description of the “northerner” as an avatar of “the spirit of Victorian expansion” and Lugard’s “dual mandate”. Lady Lugard’s ideal type Nigerian “northerner” sees himself through the lenses of Edward Said’s “orientalism” i.e. – the Western projections of its own inner beast on the walls of the “middle” East – but “east” of where, Kafanchan?

He sees himself within the “mixed negro” category of European racial classification no matter what population genetics says about his true origins. He not only buys into Lugard’s “north/south” binary but sees himself as the natural political heir of Lugard’s political empire. He confuses the “jihad” of Usman dan Fodio with British colonialism. The fact that the “radicalisation” of Muslims generally (again, not Islam) in the 18th and 19th century was linked to British and French imperial activities not any doctrinal changes in Islam is completely outside his radar. When he looks around he does not see Jaba, Jahuna (Jahunawa) Jaku, Jere, Jero, he only sees Lugard’s binary map that became the “northern” territory. How many of the so called “northerners” know any thing about the “Zaria flogging” or the Colonel Grogan’s “disciplinary model” that helped to produce the “koboko” bearing “northerner” – the binary “head” of the “national cake”. Those so called “northern” leaders who never fail to use Islam as a cloak of convenience should show us where in the Koran “northern” leadership is enshrined. They always talk as if there are no Muslims in the so called “south” mainly because Lugard’s binary map will not allow them to see the reality. Many of them echo Obasanjo’s “God created Nigeria” mantra without realizing that that god can not be any other than Lugard, his wife and the Royal Niger Company. Is this compatible with any doctrine in any of the denominations of Islam? Did the great prophet whose moral conducts inspired over a billion people world wide steal his own people’s money and deposit it with the Goths or Celts? It is clear Islam, is not the moral compass of the kleptocratic “northerner”.

 The ideal type “national false consciousness” “southerner” on the other hand is even more of a joke, because frankly speaking, as igbos say, bad things are very funny. The Lugardian “southerner” is the “Jones report for Negro Education” type tortured by W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness”. He is too quick to embrace the brand of SUV Christianity or “Joromi Pentecostalism” that emerged out of the United States’ slave owning “South”. He claims he is “Jew” but needs “visa” to go to Israel. He blames the “Hausa” and “Fulani” “tribe” for his woes yet his house and his children are watch over by an Hausa “gate man”. His whole conception of the “northerner” is informed by Lugard’s binary map. He constantly talks about how all Lugard’s “national cake” is monopolised by the “northerners” yet he will never pause to ask what is obviously in front of him: why it is that those same “northerners” are the largest internally displaced persons in his Lugardian “national cake”. Like the “northerner”, Lugard’s “southerner” also uses European Christianity as a cloak of convenience. And like his “northern” brother, 19th century European words like “enemies of progress”, “God”, “born again” and “tribalism” spew out of his mouth like flood water. If you ask him, what is wrong with Nigeria, words like “leadership”, “capacity building”, and “globalisation” will fly out of him mouth along side bits of cheap imported chicken from Europe. If you question his reasoning his immediate reaction is threaten you with: “do you know who I am” or, to flex his “Greco-Latin Negro” Occidentalism credential by remind you he has read Aristotle, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. However, in his essay, “Of National Characters” (1741:213), David Hume finds: “Negroes to be naturally inferior to whites” and even when the Negro is “educated” like the Nigerian “southerner” I described above, Hume argues that he is only “admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly”. Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to this same tendency when he stated in the preface of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963:7) that: “In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with cloths on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved. The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of Western culture; they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country the were sent home, whitewashed” The “branded”, “whitewashed” or “pure blooded Negroes with European cloths” identity model became the dominant model of the image of the African mainly because it fits the -

colonial bio-cultural classifications that are globally hegemonic. The fictive modern state in Africa is a parallel process to the “whitewashed” “northerner/southerner” identity formation. Both the modern African state and personality (mal)-formations are obviously vectors and vehicles for the global designs “cannibalizing” African local histories to “meet the needs” of the industrialized countries of Europe. In other words, for us to understand the image, state, and personality (mal)-formations we call “Nigeria” and “Nigerians” we need to go back to its Victorian source. The Victorian roots can help to explain everything from, Umaru Yar'Adua’s yearning for the self admitted racist British police to reform their older Nigerian “accidental discharge” police force; to the typical “Nigerian” confused and hypocritical Victorian sexuality on display in the various Nigerian online forums. Even that very thing “Nigerians” call “tribalism” has its roots in Western Europe. The processes of Westphalian state formation imposed on Africa by the Berlin Conference, along with other interventionist vestiges of imperialist design (especially linked to Land grab and mineral resources) produced the morass we see in Africa today. After all, these same problems featured prominently in the history of European state formation itself. The point I am making is that the West is the primary source of even the “security” problems which supposedly impede “foreign investment” in Africa. I heard from a Nigerian Journalist recently that Anglo Dutch Shell is arming some of the youth groups that supposedly constitute the “security” problems that drive foreign investment away. Interestingly, this “security” risk does not really impede ‘investment’ in relation to diamonds or mineral extraction in the Congo or the “black gold” in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Shell’s “investment” may be seen in the flying of its “insecure” workers from “Victoria Island” in Lagos to the “oil rigs” but that sort of investment is never directed at the “natives” on the grounds around the “rigs”. But of course such perennial historical amnesia is a necessary part of both state formation and colonialism bearing in mind that what we call “colonialism” and “imperialism” are mostly enactments of modern Westphalian states and their resource hungry “economies”. According to Andreas Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002:307) "…what we nowadays call ethnic cleansing or ethnocide, and observe with disgust in the ‘ever troublesome Balkans’ or in ‘tribalistic Africa’ have been constants of the European history of nation building and state formation, from the expulsion of gypsies under Henry VIII or of Muslim and Jews under Ferdinand and Isabella…many of these histories have disappeared from popular consciousness – and maybe have to be forgotten, if nation building is to be successful, as Ernest Renan suggested over a hundred years ago"

 The Renanian amnesia driven talk on “good governance”, “blame culture” and “leadership” is just part of that attempt to cover up the past as Ernest Renan suggested. This is a “past” we all know mostly nothing about because the imperialists either “classified” or destroyed much of the evidence through their scorched earth policy. But also this “past” is not simply a past that passes with our Western inherited linear understanding of time and duration. Ancient Africans realized more than most that the “past” is always present despite some people’s attempt to shoo it away. The two books “Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire” by David Anderson and Caroline Elkins “Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya”, are a definitive reminder of that fact. We do not know how many people were killed by the British during the sacking of Benin or the details of the Herero holocaust do we? Yet we know what is wrong with an ahistorical Africa invented by Western colonial discourses. Colonialism is designed to shape the future, this is why those lands that were stolen from Africans did not snap back to default (African communal ownership) when the direct Western international thief thiefs (ITT) that stole the land “stepped aside”. There are good sources of information on how the Victorian Imperial designs, debates, and “anthropology” are at the root of what we now call “Nigeria” and “Nigerians”. All those words, phrases and frames of reference that “Nigerians” bandy about both in relation to themselves or in relation to their collective images of “three tribes”, “northerners” and “Christian south” all have their roots in the “dual mandate”. There are so many of these sources but a few can be cited here: see for example “Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism” by R. E. Robinson; J. Gallagher; A. Denny; “Prelude to the Partition of West Africa by J. D. Hargreaves, or Ronald Hyam The Historical Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1. (1964), pp. 154-169.

Conclusion

Professor Omo Omoruyi (2002), a “Nigerian”, once pointed that: “I once had the occasion to challenge the assertion of President Olusegun Obasanjo on the origin of Nigeria in my essay published by Vanguard. In the essay, I reviewed the

 contribution of Chief Richard Akinjide on the same subject. While President Obasanjo attributed the creation of Nigeria to God, Chief Akinjide called what the British did in Nigeria as a colossal fraud…Arising from the way Nigeria was put together by Britain, the literature on Nigeria is replete with such terms as "Nigeria is a geographical entity" or "Nigeria is a geographical expression" or "Nigeria is an artificial creation" or "Nigeria is a colonial creation". Let us examine two issues that arose from the foregoing. One, at independence, there was nothing original to the term, Nigeria as that term was conferred on the British "amalgamated real estate" by the wife of the first colonial Governor General, Lady Lugard. Second, at independence, Nigeria was born but Nigerians were still to be born even up till today. What we needed since independence was a plan by her leaders, civilian or military to make Nigeria command the loyalty of her citizens from all the ethnic nationalities. Nigerians never did. Did the leaders who succeeded the British succeed in building a "self-sufficient system of action" or "a more perfect union" or "a nation state" since October 1, 1960? The answer to these issues should be obvious by now. They failed to create Nigerians up till today.” Professor Omo Omoruyi’s minor oversight in the above quotation is the fact that he unconsciously ignored Chief Richard Akinjide’s “colossal fraud” allegation. This is of course the “colossal fraud” that reproduced and mutated into other variants of frauds we see in our “import substitution” leadership” and minion “lords of the manors”. Of course, such “leadership” begets what Western anthropologists describe as the “occult economy”; including hangovers like “Yah-woo-sie”, “419”, “thugs”, “pimps” and “hos”. In such tense and convoluted social environment the “bottom” cannot hold for very long. Such situation is a fertile site for apocalyptic visions and European medieval mindsets. Given this, it is no surprise that lots of people are doing all kinds of perverse stuff “in the name of God” – this is God not in the sense of a humbling metaphysical force but as a catalyst for sanctifying injustice, unfairness, and downright criminality. In the foreword to the English-language translation of Pierre Bourdieu’s, The State Nobility (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1997), Bourdieu’s disciple Loïc Wacquant informs us that: “As Weber noted well, in every structure of domination, those privileged through existing political, social, and economic orders are never content to wield their power unvarnished and to impose their prerogatives naked. Rather, they wish to see their positions transformed from purely factual power relations into a cosmos of acquired rights, and to know that they are thus sanctified. In feudal society, the Church was the institution entrusted with transmuting the lord's might, founded as it was upon control of weaponry, land, and riches, into divine right; ecclesiastical authority was deployed to justify and thereby solidify the rule of the new warrior class.”

 How is it possible to build a “self-sufficient system of action” on a “colossal fraud” transformed into sanctified “divine rights of kings”? A renamed “amalgamated real estate” is still a renamed amalgamated real estate by a different name. Therefore to understand “Nigerians”, we need to look at the generalised cultural environment that produced those classified as such. To understand the cultural environment or the social conditions that made “Nigerians” possible, we need to look at the formative incident that made “Nigeria” itself possible. The simple fact that most “Nigerians” do not realise this is a good indication of the sort of indoctrination that produce both the serial fiction or “colossal fraud” we call the modern state of “Nigeria” and its corresponding fictive personality incarnation we call “Nigerians”. As I have argued in many cases, the word “fiction” or “fraud” are often interpreted as having the quality of unreality but the contrary argument is actually more accurate. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary “fiction” originated from the Latin words fictionem, fictio, fictus, fingere, ficticius etc. Fiction denotes “something invented…a fashioning or feigning…to shape, form, devise, feign…to knead, form out of clay”. In other words, fiction is more about the moulding, shaping, or representation of reality not unreality. In this sense, the “Nigerian” and the “Nigeria” entity are mutual reinforcing fictions whose material existence and pattern maintenance depends on their embodiment of the specific axis of power Lugard delineated in his book the “Dual Mandate”. On a recent visit to Nigeria, I came across a big banner in the MM airport, Ikeja, with the slogan “Welcome to Nigeria”. Beneath the slogan are the monogamous “Kingsway super market” image of what is commonly assumed to be the three big “tribes” of Nigeria – Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. Even if we ignore the disparaging Victorian anthropology that conflates complicated multifaceted ethnic formations like the Hausas (now split between Francophone and Anglophone “countries”), Yorubas, or Igbos, how can we also ignore the imperial Victorian territorial logic behind the three major “tribes” idea? Hausa (always paired with Fulani “machinery”) is favoured over other ethnic groups and represented as the “north”. The Yoruba (excluding those in “Benin Republic” and the Ga in Ghana) corresponds to Lugard’s “South West” and the Igbos are ascribed the “South East” with their British native council “isi Agu” fleece made in Sweden. Today many Nigerians absent-mindedly refer to themselves as “northerners” or “southerners” with Christian or Muslim pre-fixes without realising that these geographical or territorial imaginaries have nothing to do with Islam, Christianity or the pre-existing multiplicities many sheepishly call “tribes”. Lugard’s British “regional model” now appears to many of us as natural pre-existing division between peoples and cultures in Nigeria. Lugard’s “north” and “south” binary imperial geography was also replicated in the other places Britain colonised. Sudan and Ireland are good examples. The images in that airport banner were also at best revealing. The so called Hausa man and woman in the banner were dead ringers for the 19th century “orientalism” of the Royal African Society. It is incredible that Africans are depicting themselves in the disparaging images that evolved out of their own domination. The “Ajayi-Crowther” Yoruba man and woman’s image in the banner will bring tears to the eyes of ancient Yorubas because they look like those pictures of “natives” in the colonial family “album”. The igbo one was straight out of “colonial chiefs in chiefless societies”. The colonial dead ringer images in the airport are however an indication of a deeper problem that I have no time to get into here. They are also mirrors of the larger structural problems some try to wish away with that silly word, “leadership”. It is important nevertheless to point out that these images have nothing to do with Hausa, Igbo, or Yoruba as ethnic constellations and configurations. There is nothing in igbo culture that promotes hatred of Hausa, Yoruba people or any other people. There is nothing in the Hausa concept of “duniya” that is directed against the Yorubas or igbos or any one for that matter. However, these divisions have everything to do with the scramble for the “national cake” spawn by imperial or Victorian domination of the “natives” they knew absolutely nothing about. So, what about the Tiv, the Efik etc? My point is that what is been represented as the make up of Nigeria or Nigerians are not what exists on the ground but hangovers of the disparaging imperial representation of our respective ancestors. Franz Fanon describes such inverting as part of the convoluted consciousness involved in the making and re-making of “Greco-Latin” Negroes. This convoluted consciousness is cleverly depicted by the ingenious classical Nigerian sit-com “The Masquerade”. The Masquerade was a popular and long-running sitcom in Nigeria that satirizes the dominant Nigerian colonial personality types and tendencies like the spurious love for bombastic titles and statuses aka – the Lugardian “warrant chief” personality; or the three big “tribes” format and the other fallouts of Lugard’s twin “mandate”. Nonetheless, the choice of the name “the masquerade” for the programme is interesting given the main thrust of the programme. Masquerades mask not only identities, but also realities. The act of putting on a mask is an attempt to divert attention from what is underneath the mask. What is masked remains unknown even though it is the sole reason why the mask assumes the form of an animate being. In one of the seminal episodes of the masquerade, a “white” man visited Chief Zebrudiah Okoroigwe Nwogbe alias 4:30 and Zebrudiah enquired: “whiteman, where did you just come from”. The “white” man replied that he just came from “heaven” and

 Zebrudiah enquired if he saw any “black” people in heaven to which the “white” man answered, “I did not visit the kitchen”. Even in Zebrudiah’s “white” man’s “heaven”, “Nigerians” apparently still do not have a good “image”. In nutshell, if we want to understand the “dual mandate” of the Nigerian state and personality (mal) formation, we need to visit the proverbial “kitchen” and thus, unmask the Lugardian masquerades fronting as “Hausa”, “Igbo”, “Yoruba” or “Nigerian” harbingers of “tribalism”.

Robot  # 1 | 24.12.2008 14:43

In recent years, where ever you go in the world from Cape Town to the North Pole, the word “Nigerians” always seem to evoke a predictable negative image. This negative image manifests itself in several ways: in the treatment of Nigerians in almost all countries on the face of the planet; in the way “Nigerians” present and project themselves to the so called outside world and in those various ways “Nigerians” imagine, deploy and experience their “Nigerian-ness” within and amongst themselves ...Read the full article.