“Ordinarily, you should be a housemaid somewhere in Lagos. Your parents must have really worked hard to be able to send you to the university.”
This was said to me by a friend’s roommate, in my second year in the university. We weren’t fighting at the time or anything; she was making what she believed to be a statement of fact.
I’ve not forgotten those words. I was so hurt and at the same time, stunned by her arrogant ignorance and meanness. I’m from Akwa Ibom and if you’re familiar with the tribal narrative, as far as the rest of the country knows, people from my state are only good as security men and housemaids.
It’s like those days on Yahoo messenger, before I met any actual Americans. Each time I chatted with one, I heard something stupid. Questions like, “How does it feel like, living on trees? Where did you learn to speak/write such good English?”
When I was applying to universities for admission, one of the things my parents were very emphatic about was choosing an institution that was nowhere near home. My mother talked about Jos; my father preferred that I attend his alma mater, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Well, I wanted to go further, somewhere there were no relatives. I didn’t want anyone looking over my shoulder and report to my parents. This was my chance at freedom.
Well, I finally got the admission to attend the UNN, just like my father had hoped.
“I know you’d have preferred to stay close to home,” my father said to me. “But I want you to go out there. I need you to go to someplace else and learn about their culture, their people, and their language. It’ll make you see things differently. If you stay home, you’re going to be narrow-minded and I don’t want that.”
Even though I badly wanted to prove myself as an adult at the age of seventeen, what a huge part of me really wanted was to stay home and attend a nearby university. I didn’t understand what my father meant by going out there and learning new things. Especially after I arrived in Enugu and almost died from homesickness.
You know, this country is riddled with falsehoods when it comes to tribal narratives. Many of us were preconditioned or taught to see people from other tribes in a certain way. If we’re not checked, we go through life believing those lies. Igbo people like money; as if the rest of us are allergic and contented. Argue with the people from all the tribes looting the national treasury. Yoruba people are untidy and know very little about personal hygiene. Hausa people are all bloodthirsty.
So, imagine the misconceptions with which I left home. Coupled with the fact that I’d had a few bad experiences with some people from those other tribes I’d heard bad things about. After eight years in Enugu, I knew better. When I was leaving for Kano, so many people back home lamented.
After a year in Kano, I learned so many things—my social studies lessons in primary school had been very inadequate.
For instance, I was stunned to find out that not every northerner speaks or is Hausa and that there are over fifty languages in Kaduna state. I learned about Plateau state and my closest friend in law school, who was Yoruba, was one of the neatest persons I know. I learned that yes, there may be attributes that are common in certain tribes but by no means peculiar to them. Meaning, they’re just human things.
I also experienced tribalism on a much larger scale than I had in Enugu.
A bus conductor once asked me, “Why I no dey speak am for Hausa? I sure say I be Nigerian?”
I asked him why he didn’t speak Ibibio; if he was Nigerian. I was constantly mistaken for an Igbo girl because of my light skin; being called ‘nyamiri’ became something I stopped protesting. Because even when I said I am from Akwa Ibom, they’d reply that we’re all the same. Their prejudices were no different from the ones I my previously held.
I wish that more Nigerians would take up the practice of travelling to and living in different places in this country and be open-minded when they reach those new places. It’d broaden our horizons and help us be less hateful and bitter towards strangers. But more than that, I wish that within our immediate environment, we’d stop clustering ourselves according to tribes and be more inclusive.
In doing this, there are invaluable lessons to be learned about ourselves and others.