Archaeology of a Reflex (I)

By Ahmed Yahaya Joe

“Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.” – Georg Hegel (1770-1831)

What is the moral for Nigeria from the Sudanese conundrum?
The question is pertinent because neither Sudan nor Sudan Sudan have known sustainable peace, significant progress, or any meaningful development ever since those nations parted ways in 2011;

“With its people deeply divided along ethno-geographic and religious fault lines, under a tense socio-political atmosphere arising from heightened insecurity, the situation in Nigeria today reads like a tragic plot from the Sudanese playbook. Like Nigeria, Sudan was a British colonial creation, in which the colonials lumped ethnic and religiously diverse peoples together in a self-serving scheme of nation-building experimentation. Nigeria, like Sudan, is almost evenly split into predominately Muslim North and Christian South.”
– Nigeria: On the Road to Sudan by Majeed Dahiru posted 5/28/2021

Yet, here we are in a protracted battle for the soul of our nation, of which according to Ignatius Kaigama, Prelate of Abuja, “God has nothing to do with it.” It has always been about power and control he opines on the recurrent strife bedevilling the presumptive capital of the Middle Belt, “No crisis in Jos is religious. The real issue is the competition for who owns Jos.”
The insight of then Archbishop of Jos and more are contained in the 2016 book by Tom Burgis entitled The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers, and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth pp.175-187

Using Jos as a microcosm for Nigeria, irrespective of our polarized opinions on the “Christian genocide” thesis and the “religion is not the key driver in the attacks” antithesis, it is noteworthy that one of ours, senior fellow & Africa program director, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Oge Onubogu presented what Hegel describes as “sublation” – a synthesis.
In her must-watch presentation to the Africa Subcommittee of the US House of Representatives, Ms. Onubogu carefully reconciled the truths in the thesis with the shortcomings of the antithesis by transcending the limitations in both entrenched positions asserting;
“In Nigeria today, ethnicity, religion and language – not nationality – remain the benchmarks for identity for the country’s highly diverse population.”

While she warned against reducing the prevailing thesis to “a single story” she nonetheless admitted that the antithesis is laced with “religious extremism,” but she still deliberately glossed over the virulent marginalization and systematic oppression by Muslims against non-Muslims and vice versa as the case may be.
Overtly her testimony was a conciliatory beacon for a way forward. It is still however afflicted the selective amnesia on how the fallout of Muslim-Muslim rhetoric of 2023 had deepened the political fault lines still reverberating to date.
Regardless, every discerning Nigerian knows that the root cause of the very challenged inter-communal relations in our nation is variously the “politicization of religion,” and “religionization of politics,” across the board.
Here, The Manipulation of Religion in Nigeria Today: Its Social and Political Basis, published in New Nigerian newspaper edition of 13th- 14th January, 1978 by Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman remains instructive after 47 years and still counting.

Ms. Onubugo was probably not even born when, in the mid-1960s – twenty years prior to the heated Organization of Islamic Controversy (OIC) controversy of 1986 under General Ibrahim Babangida, when religion was on the front burner.
But she grew up “In Jos, Plateau State, an area that has been plagued by ethno-religious violence. Her upbringing in this complex environment profoundly shaped her understanding of conflict dynamics. Growing up in Jos during periods of recurring violence gave young Oge a front-row seat to the devastating impact of governance failures on ordinary communities.”

In looking back, the must-read memoirs of John Mamman Garba (1918-1989) entitled The Time Has Come: Reminiscences and Reflections of a Nigerian Pioneer Diplomat (1989) is collector’s item for us particularly for us in the present-day.
A book full of painstaking details drawn from his personal diaries spanning nearly a 60-year period is included a minutiae of when then military governor of the Eastern regional government in 1967 wrote the Italian Prime Minister and the Vatican City horrendously claiming that;

“Weapons and planes manufactured by Catholic Italy, were being sent to Muslim Northern Nigeria to be used in killing the Catholic Ibos of Eastern Nigeria….
In the beginning, a good number of Italians had been led to believe that the conflict between the federal government and Colonel Ojukwu was based on religious differences.” – pp. 291-293

As the babel of voices on “Christian genocide” continue to divisively rage in our polity the need to reflect upon Churchill’s maxim of “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see” cannot be overemphasized particularly with a man in the middle of sorts who introducing his recollections writes;
“Dedicated to my grandfather, Muhammadu Sarkin Hako, who died at Maisandari on the outskirts of Maiduguri town in July 1931, and had vowed, I would never attend the Whiteman’s school while he lived.”

Ambassador Garba then goes on to give a glimpse on how the worst fears of Sarkin Hako were processed in the overall context;

“My father did not receive the news of my having embraced Christianity in good spirit. This was as expected. When he and his friend, retired Regimental Sergeant Major Sule Gumsuri took me along to the Church Missionary Society (CMS) bookshop school at Kano in 1926, such an eventuality of turning a Christian had never crossed their minds even for a moment.
They were then solely preoccupied with the thought of placing me in an institution that would prepare me for a better place than they themselves had had the privilege of attaining in our society.
No more, no less.
There was a serious rift between me and the family, or rather my father, for some years after my conversion. But neither of us wanted to see this as the permanent parting of ways. My father eventually accepted the situation as ‘Kaddara’ (fate, already predetermined by God).
He did not die until forty years after I had been baptized into Christianity, and he, as well as my mother, two brothers and one sister, and all their children and grand-children were and have remained today, professed Muslims.” – pp. 384-385

This writer encounters in Garba and Onubogu (even Kaigama) not only unique perspectives but what Bernard-Henri Levy describes as the “archaeology of reflex” which in the trio is neither “an immutable automatism,” nor “immune to learning,” in the Nigerian project as that French public intellectual puts it in 2021 book entitled The Will To See: Dispatches From A World of Misery and Hope.
Outstanding is how Ambassador Garba was able to reclaim the Nigerian story in Italy and Vatican City. This hugely contrasts present-day diplomatic vacuum during the gestation period of the “Christian genocide” more so that quite recently Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy has become the second G7 leader to internationally subscribe to that thesis as Mallam Garba goes on in retrospect;

“The Italians were made to believe that Colonel Ojukwu’s succession attempt and declaration of total war on his fatherland represented the manifestation of the determination of ‘the very progressive, intelligent, Westernized and hardworking Roman Catholic Ibos to live their own existence in peace and prosperity, free from domination and annihilation by the backward Hausa/Fulani Moslems of the North.’” – p.293

Ambassador Garba, a scion of al-Barnawi and al-Kashinawi, “that is a Bornoan and also a Bakatsine, at one and the same time,” not unlike Abu Abdullahi b. Masanih b. Nuh also known as Dan Masani (1595-1667), further puts it;

“As part of the counter for the expressed suspicion that the civil war had a religious undertone, the federal government decided to send to Rome from time to time some leading members of our government who were of the Catholic congregation so that these highly-placed persons could speak to the Holy Father as one Catholic adherent to his Pontiff.
Amongst those who came to Rome for this purpose may be mentioned Louis Orok Edet, first Nigerian inspector-general of police; Federal Commissioner Joseph Serwuan Tarka; Federal Commissioner Anthony K. Enahoro; Admiral Joseph E. Akinwale Wey; and the military padre, Monsignor Colonel Pedro Martins.
As I had the duty of arranging the audiences for these senior representatives of our government with the Holy Father, I had opened a corridor of communication with the Vatican. I found the Papal Secretary of State – the Pope’s prime minister, as it were – Cardinal Amleto Cicognani, a man of friendly disposition and charming personality.” – p.294

The veteran diplomat whose fluency in Latin eased Nigeria’s access in the Vatican kick-started the acquisition after a 21-day trek from Maiduguri to Kano. He then attended middle school in Zaria before proceeding to CMS Grammar School Lagos, where he picked Greek. He was eventually admitted into Igbobi College, where he fine-tuned his French and bagged the Latin prize sitting for his Senior Cambridge in 1934 but not before attending the World Scout Jamboree in the United Kingdom in 1929.
After an extensive training and brief working career in the British colonial agricultural value chain, he proceeded to the London School of Economics, graduating in 1950.
Ambassador Garba rose to the position of Executive Director at the World Bank in 1963 when Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was still in primary school, a good 44 years before she became Managing Director there in 2007.
Ambassador Garba became Nigeria’s envoy to Italy with accreditation to Vatican City, Spain, Greece and Cyprus in succession eventually the United States in 1972 from where he eventually retired from public service in 1975 living out the rest of his idyllic days in quiet contemplation in Kano.

Ambassador Garba’s tour of duty based in the “Eternal City” between 1966 and 1970 was peculiarly challenged against the background that;

“Immediately after the military incidence of July 29, 1966, Colonel Ojukwu’s agents had launched an extensive propaganda campaign in Italy as they did in other places. Because of the understandable sensitivity of the Italians to religious matters, this wicked and erroneous interpretation of our crisis was accepted even in some responsible circles. The rebel camp had certain advantages in this regard in Italy.
As the late Dr. Nabo Graham-Douglas, onetime Attorney-General of the Eastern Region, and later of the federation as a whole, had pointed out in his well-written pamphlet: Ojukwu’s Rebellion and World Opinion, the intention of the Catholic church was to constitute the Eastern Region into a Catholic state.” – p.293

While this writer has not been able to actually go through any copy of the erstwhile Biafra insider’s 1968 publication to independently verify the details on the reported clamour for a faith-based breakaway entity from Nigeria, the following under the title Clandestine Role of Religious Bodies in the Nigerian Civil War 1967-1970, beggars the question: if history is apparently repeating itself currently?

“In a bid to attract sympathy and support of the international community, the Biafran government hired Markpress, a Geneva-based public relations firm. The public relations firm constantly used genocide and religion as its propaganda themes.” – pp. 78-85 American Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research (AJHSSR) Vol. 3, Issue 12, 2019

It, therefore, remains to be seen if there are any lessons for the recent ambassadorial nominees of President Tinubu from Ambassador Garba’s capacity and cognition.
One thing fundamentally remains;
“There was once a country.”- Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)

Continued in Part II