Nwachukwu Egbunike

THE DIVERSITIES THAT UNIFIED MY HUMANITY

My parents are both from Onitsha. In the South-East Nigeria, denominational rivalry between Christian groups is etched like epitaphs carved into rocks. My father is Catholic while my mom is Anglican. However, this mattered nothing to them. Since ‘ife eji abu Onitsha erika’ (takes a lot to be from Onitsha) their creed was not an issue, love was paramount and nothing else. I therefore grew up in an environment devoid of the virulence of religious stereotypes, yet with a deep appreciation of the eternal glow of a supreme deity. No wonder, they named me Nwachukwu – son of God.

A Catholic in love with Anglicanism

My high school had a very Catholic history, the College of Immaculate Conception, (CIC) Enugu. Although CIC was treacherously stolen from the Marist Brothers by the dictators who ruined my country, the college refused to forget her history. As such, at 12.00 noon the bell intoned the Angelus and all of us (Catholics and non-Catholics) paused to reflect on the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God. We commemorated all Catholic feasts and even had Mass once a week in the school chapel. However, in 1992, fate flung me to another direction, this time to scoop from the fount of Anglicanism in Nigeria.

The creation of the new Enugu State from the old Anambra State was a gift to some and for many like me, a radical unsettling. Since most teachers in CIC were not from Enugu State, our school morphed instantly to a phantom. Things were so bad that we had only one English teacher in the college. My parents had to find another school and that’s how I ended up in Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DMGS) Onitsha.

DMGS was founded in 1928 by (Anglican) Church Missionary Society and named after Archdeacon T. J. Dennis, who translated the Bible from English to Ibo. Thus, my journey into the depths of Anglicanism and the treasures of traditional religion began. Like CIC, DMGS though a state school, still refers to the Anglican Bishop on the Niger as the proprietor. The old-boys are particular about their history and made sure it rubbed off on us. I still cherish with joy the lyrics of the Ancient and Modern, an Anglican hymn book. We had breakfast once with old students that were now Anglican Bishops. Despite the thick depth of their creed, I never felt out of place, on the contrary, I became the first Catholic in the school’s history to be made a Block Prefect III – fifth in the hierarchy of student functionaries.

I picked up writing from DMGS. Although I was a science student, our literature teacher, Mrs Okwosa (who we called Lady Macbeth) brought alive the words of authors like Shakespeare, Orwell, Achebe, Soyinka and Clark. Of course Mrs Okwosa was Anglican, and we really didn’t care! I am proud of my dual mandate: showing the light (Lux Fiat) and being ever faithful (Semper Fidelis); the two mottos of my respective high schools.

In Defence of Tradition

Yet I am an Onitsha man, know for our fastidiousness for tradition. Onitsha is one of the few Igbo towns that have a monarchy. The rites of Onitsha tradition are also peculiar as it dictates the entire span of a person’s existence – from cradle to the grave. Thus my high school days were an immersion into the unique ways of my people, an appreciation of their worldview and a profound respect of their creed. Perhaps that explains why till date, why I call on Egbunike nna m (Egbunike my father) in the face of danger. While superficially it may sound anachronistic for a Christian, but I find no contradiction in doing so. As a Catholic, I profess to the communion of saints. I see heaven as a family home and as such there must be more than one of my ancestors who currently contemplates the face of God.

To be alive means to grow and change. But how can Africans forge a distinctive response to a globalised world without losing what is most precious about their rich and proud heritage? The difference between men and animals is not just rationality but tradition; only human beings treasure traditions and pass them on[i]. It’s a difficult balance. A society that rushes to embrace any new wave will lose its roots. On the other hand, a society that clings to tradition without opening up to the positive aspects of modernity will become fossilised.

What started as an innocuous hobby soon turned me into a disciple of tradition. Iya Aduni, late Susan Wenger of Oshogbo Groove, priestess of Obatala (god of creation) was not at home when I visited her groove. Nonetheless as I wrote afterwards, “my visit to the groove was an attempt to link up with the past. Not merely as an academic exercise or a disjointed endeavour to justify tradition, arts or culture. The world has been divided into the West and the East for ages. What then happened to the others, including Africa? The Oshogbo Shrine shows that Africa was no ‘blank darkness.’”

An Igbo man in a Muslim dominated Yoruba land

In 2004, I was commissioned to compulsorily serve my country as a Youth Corper. That’s how nwa onye Onitsha Ado, aka n’abo (son of Onitsha, with two hands – since my lineage draws from both paternal and maternal sections of Onitsha), landed in Iwo a predominantly Muslim town. Islam before then was just an academic term one learnt in school. Though we had a Mosque in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, it never registered that there are people who are 100% Muslim. This shock broke my ethical and religious single story.

In the NYSC Orientation Camp, I realised for the first time that all northerners were not Muslims. Joel – from Zaria – dispelled this myth. Though he spoke fluent Hausa, I had mistaken it to translate that he was Muslim. It happened that I was edified seeing a Muslim corper doing his afternoon prayer and I mentioned my admiration to my friend who I naively assumed was also a Muslim. Joel smiled voiced his own awe at the guys piety and then gave me a crash course about Northern Nigeria.

I was assigned to teach Integrated Science in Papa (pronounced kpakpa), a town at the outskirts of Iwo. Like all rural areas, Papa stinks of the brutality of a total collapse of governance. Yet in the students were always cheerful. My hosts were ever ready to help this government pikin (child). In Iwo I touched and swam in hospitality. Our common humanity was never so expressed to one who was neither Yoruba nor Muslim. That experience forged my resolve to fight against injustice, using the only means I possess – words.

A Muslim-Christian Researcher

My Master’s thesis[ii] as a graduate student of the University of Ibadan was a comparison of Christian and Muslim student religious communities. This research entailed using ethnographic observation method. As such I had to sit-in at the meetings of both religious associations.

Nigeria has a roughly equal mix of both Christians and Muslims. The 2010 Pew Research Centre survey[iii] reveals that Muslims and Christians account for 52% and 46% of the size of African’s most populous nation. African Traditional Religions tag along with a mere 1%. Although Nigeria’s actual population size remains contentious, as at 2007, the World Bank[iv] placed it 148 million.

A major headache for any researcher is ‘entering’ the desired community to be studied. And many a times, an entire project is ruined because the so-called opinion leader is nothing but a farce. This was my utmost concern. As a Christian, I envisaged little or no problem with the Christian group but Islam was totally novel. As such I was particularly cautious not to bungle the entire research with a false move.

Like Virgil leading Dante, I got in contact with Selim, an opinion leader in Muslim Students Society of Nigeria (MSSN), through a mutual friend. That was my first time of visiting a Mosque. Selim was not the ‘typical’ Moslem that dominates the single story in the media. Here was a young man in his late twenties, very fluent and with an amazing command of English. He understood within a few minutes of conversation the essence of my thesis. As the outgoing President of MSSN, he was more than qualified to help me out. Selim took control and mapped out a rota. And I have been a welcome guest in UI Central Mosque since then.

One peculiar trait I noticed amongst the Muslims I interviewed was there tendency to be on the defensive. Further prodding revealed that this was their reaction to the way society perceives them. For many of them, they try as much as possible to integrate themselves as normal citizens but unfortunately, they only read ‘distrust’ in the eyes of their contemporaries. It seems that our society naturally perceives any man keeping a long beard and any lady wrapped up in a hijab as a potential terrorist.

However this had no basis in reality. Apart from the many Moslem friends I made during my work, it is public knowledge that all Nigerian Muslims are not jihadist. Unfortunately, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab Christmas terrorist attack in the US reinforced what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – at TED Global 2009 presentation in Oxford – called the danger of a single story. My position then has not changed[v]:

Umar Mutallab is certainly not the first Northern Nigerian Muslim to study abroad. Many before him have done so and they never ended up as terrorists. It is intrusive to break the stereotype that most Muslims are necessary by definition on a jihad. Two Nigerian Muslims are good examples of this.

Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, has a stirring testimonial. This Prince of Kano attended a Catholic primary school. He’s an economist and a Khartoum-trained Islamic scholar. Sanusi headed Nigeria’s 100-year old First Bank – while Mutallab’s father once chaired its board. He got his first introduction to Western philosophy in the Sudan, where he read Plato and Aristotle in Arabic and was introduced to post-modernism, Islamic mysticism, comparative religion and cultural studies.

Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, formerly minister and gadfly of the immediate past government is certainly no less Muslim than Mutallab. He is an alumnus of the University of London, Harvard Business School, Arthur D. Little School of Management in Massachusetts, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington, DC and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. 

My Agnostic Friends

It did not end there as I pursued a career in book publishing and writing in Ibadan afterwards. For an omo Igbo (Igbo man) it is certainly not the norm to relish amala, ewedu and gbegiri. I have since made a home in this Yoruba land where Moslems hold sway. Although I am yet to master the language, yet I have had my fill of their history.

My boss, a Dutch who fell in love with Nigeria, practically reinvented Nigeria for me. Joop dispelled my earlier misconception that every oyibo (white man) in Nigeria is necessarily on a mission of exploitation. The irritable refrain is to blame all the ills of the country on our colonial masters. What a putrid and horrid excuse! Nigeria is half a century old as an independent state, pray what have Nigerians done for Nigeria?

Joop knows Nigeria inside out; I really venerate his passion for this country. On our numerous book hunts – since I was the Commissioning Editor, I often accompanied him to solicit for manuscripts from authors – it was awesome to realise that this guy knows more about Nigeria than I. My colleague kept on repeating that he would never had been a success story in book publishing had he remained in Europe. At eighty, Joop has no plan to return to Holland, as he says; he does not want to end up in a home for the elderly.

We had only one commonality, which was a mutual passion for the written word, yet Joop is agnostic and I am Christian. On many occasions, we have argued for and against religion but always with mutual respect. Joop was thus a preparation for another deep friendship with Dee – a fellow writer.

Dee and I both write for and comment in an Australian online medium[vi]. Prior to our friendship, we were deep adversaries. I could not understand the liberal tendencies that Dee professed. As such, we were continually on each other’s jugular. However, his intellectual bias always fascinated me, since it’s a commodity quite scarce among many of my contemporaries. We started exchanging emails, trying to drive home our individual convictions and swapping book titles.

It was in another online Nigerian medium[vii] that our friendship was crystallised. Dee’s pen had written about the myth of population explosion in Nigeria[viii]. Basically he argued that African leaders hide under this ambiguous excuse rather than admitting that their cluelessness in administering their countries. Coincidentally I had earlier expounded along the same lines in a previous article[ix]. Basically we both agreed that corrupt and inept leadership has teetered the continent to the tree of poverty. Of course, Dee was vilified but I stood with my friend, defending his position. Yes I dare to call Dee a friend, though we are separated by conflicting beliefs, yet united by a common humanity, the triumph of reason and a passion for Nigeria.

Irawo: A Mini Nigeria

I currently run a residence for university students. Irawo University Centre has for the past forty years been a home to motley of advanced level, undergraduate and postgraduate students. With a capacity of over 36 residents and staff, the centre has been on the vanguard of breaking the monopoly of disunity through the diversity of friendship it stimulates amongst residents and other students that make use of her facilities.

Irawo in all sense can lay claim of being a mini-Nigeria. The ethnicity of residents features Yoruba, Igbo, Igala, Ibibio, Efik, Edo, etc. Their religious dispositions also are a rainbow collection of Catholics, Anglicans, Pentecostals, Moslems and Agnostics. These residents also come from different backgrounds as well. Besides, most of these students are from families that have intermarried across ethnic lines or even from different nationalities.

As a result, diversity has never been a hindrance, rather an advantage. The discussions which we have daily after dinner, is never boring as the various perspective of each resident counts. What I have over the years come to realise is that these youngsters care less about where you come from or what religion you profess. Year after year, it is evident that each resident has to earn his place through the depth of his intellect, and this is what really matters.

Part of my job in running the residence involves having regular chit-chats with each resident. This is an informal counselling to review their academics or any other personal problems with them. These discussions have never been tardy due to the artificial barriers we erect in our consciousness. Rather each student has always freely accepted whatever help I can give. Of course, it can be no less, because, the aim of the residence lies precisely in this.

We are one!

“Though tongues and tribe may differ, in unity we stand” goes a part of the old Nigerian National Anthem. My sojourn so far have demonstrated the age old wisdom that there are more than binds us together than those that separates us. Nigeria’s diversity is certainly her strength and this has unambiguously unified my humanity.

[i] Munoz L.J. (2007) The Past in the Present: Towards a Rehabilitation of Tradition. Ibadan: Spectrum Books Ltd.

[ii] Egbunike N. A (2010) A Comparison of the Communication Infrastructure of Two Students’ Religious Communities in the University of Ibadan. An unpublished Master of Communication and Language Arts Thesis of the Department of Communication and Language Arts of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Ibadan.

[iii] Pew Research Center (2010) “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, April, p 1-324.

[iv] World Bank (2008) World Bank Development Indicators 2008. Washington, DC.

[v] Egbunike N. A. (2009) We Nigerians are not Terrorists. http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/we_nigerians_are_not_terrorists/

[vi] Mercatornet.com

[vii] Nigeria Village Square.com

[viii] Oriku A (2009) The Myth of Nigeria’s Overpopulation. Nigeria Village Square, http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/adebowale-oriku/the-myth-of-nigerias-overpopulation.html

[ix] Egbunike N. A. (2009) Why African Economies are Teetering. Nigeria Village Square, http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/nwachukwu-egbunike/why-african-economies-are-teetering.html

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