#tribalist

So it’s common listening to Nigerian parents lament about an annoying neighbour, or a selfish co-worker, the rude sales attendant, the exploitative bus driver, and other fellow Nigerians put in positions to interact with them.

And sometimes I get the point; you shouldn’t play your music so loud that your neighbors heavily pregnant wife can’t sleep, or charge almost double the fee due to a little traffic, or throw a large party in a compound and not clean up after yourself, or air your dirty laundry out in public while simultaneously delaying other people from getting somewhere.

Now this could be anybody, it’s a pretty Universal problem. But after all these stories come the qualitication: that’s how “Yoruba people behave”, “Omo Igbo, Hmmm!”, “ngbati-ngbati” and along with this comes the stereotypes; “Hausa people are stupid”, “igbo people are money driven”, “Yoruba people are dirty”.

Common too is the marriage issue. You hear questions like, “Se Yoruba don finish?” parents don’t want their children to intermarry, because of these stereotypes, maybe created by them, or passed down from their parents, but nonetheless existent. And they transfer this logic to us.

We are born impartial, yet we become fighters in a war against each other that we didn’t begin, based on prejudices not our own, created for reasons we do not know. We are taught family first, and tribe second, everything else in between, and country last, because whatever has your country done for you? And it’s not like it’s only you, it’s everywhere. When you’re qualified for a job, and it’s given to someone less qualified who is of the same tribe as the HR manager. And if you hope to get somewhere in this country, the tribe card comes in pretty handy.

But what the essence of continually repeating a system that does not work, and expecting different results.

It starts at home then we see it in the government. The majority tribe in government varies with the Presidents. And then we say to ourselves, when I get there, my people will rule too.

But who are your people? Are we not all suffering from the same decisions made by our leaders previously, so why repeat them?

We lock others so tightly into these stereotypes; we refuse to see the beauty in other cultures existent within our state. They become “not-people”, because dehumanizing them makes it much easier to explain our otherwise unjustifiable bias.

And then we systematically dehumanize them. I once heard someone say that “Hausa” (FYI they’re not all “Hausa”) are like the cows they herd. And because of this perception We don’t really care that in the North infrastructure doesn’t exist, because if they wanted it they’d demand it instead of blindly following their leaders.

And when we realise that this bias has no basis, usually as we are explaining them to people; we begin to pepper them with exaggerated stories, just so our point is passed across, and our bias is accepted, maybe adopted.

What we forget, is that bias begets bias, so as you’ve created your own company full of your own band of fellow tribe members, to remedy the bias you experienced, the young graduate sees this bias and vows to create his own company that will accommodate his tribe members (this is really bad for business BTW).

And it’s not only private, it exists in government agencies, for who makes up the government if not people, and so government is seen as a thing to be seized, and used to maximum advantage when in power, to the benefit of your people, and then a young idealist applies to enter the system…and it starts all over again.

Little stereotypes and bias have caused many problems in our country. We’ve had a civil war, protests, threats of cessation, a corrupt government, a bad economy… *insert Nigerian problem*

We all have bad experiences. Sure it may lead to the creation of an impression about an individual, but limit it to such individuals, and even then, be human about it.

I’m not a tribalist, because though I recognize my roots and am allegiant to them, I also recognize that that single loyalty isn’t going to get us where we want to be. I want to stay in my country, there is after all, no place like home. You encounter even larger problems once you leave, problems you have smaller control over, and despite this, we thrive outside.

Tribalist worked 4 furlongs in 50.00.

Blake Heap’s Tribalist worked 5 furlongs Saturday morning in 1:02:00, under jockey Victor Espinoza.