One of the few advantages of living in Nigeria as opposed to those
that have fled to look for better lives elsewhere is that Nigerians
never have to directly and consciously come into contact with raw
pervasive racism, and even if they do at their workplace, or in a very
rare instance with the few and far between tourists/exploiters
expatriates that come to Nigeria, it never is the same as laying your
head in a country, for example, whose very existence (or prosperity) is
as a solid result of the degradation (and continued one at that),
ridicule and enslavement of people that look(ed) like you.
90%+
of Nigerians have absolutely no clue what a white person is, what a
white person likes to drink, what a white person washes their hair with,
what a white person likes to read, how a white person looks at you when
they want to make you feel unwelcome, how a white person walks, how a
white person smiles at you because you're black and don't know anything,
how a white person turns yellow when they bruise, what it feels like to
be asked very condescendingly and cruelly "what?" when talking to a
white person because of your accent when you were first in your English
class back in Nigeria, what blushing is, what 'medium rare' really
means.
They don't know white people, so in such an instance, the
imagination is left to go climbing Zuma Rock because we obviously have
to fill that void with information, something to gives us at least some
meaning. We have very basic information of what a whiteness is in
Nigeria. Nigeria is a country that's very fleeting and ungrounded.
There's no sense of history, there's no respect for history, unless it
somehow relates to politics and ethnocentrism, and ethnocentrism in the
sense of remembering whose village owned which part of what stream, not
ethnocentrism in the sense of understanding how one group came to be
destitute and another prosperous or any other deep reflection (in most
cases). This fleeting attitude means that things happened 20 years ago
are blurry already, and events of the 40s? Nah. To tie this quickly to
the point, Nigerians only know very roughly that whiteness is as a
source of the creation of Nigeria, and with the psychological power of
English language Western education, the power of whiteness is emphasised
in our minds along with visual evidence of infrastructure/technology
that sprung up in what we believe is in relation with rule by whiteness.
All this means that we hear Nigerians call technological marvels 'beke'
and say things like 'before civilisation' to refer to the time before
British colonisation (to be clear, this is only roughly the 1890s, there
are people born in the 1890s that are still living).
Events that
included conflict with whiteness, like the burning down of several
Nigerian cities by the British, is a very blurry and unrelated event for
most Nigerians, coupled with the shaming of Africans that point to
colonisers as at least having something to do with African problems past
and present, yeah, even Atlantic slavery.
To remove the detail
from the previous paragraph, Nigerians only know of whiteness as this
benevolent, dreamy, blurry, ancient force that came sometime in ancient
times (the 19th century) to uplift their ancestors from bush life.
This
is a response to the Nigerian posters I've seen on this topic, which
apparently quotes some former Apartheid era South African president
doing the whole unwarranted analysis of the 'black race' thing that a
few white men have been doing over the last 500 years, in fact 3000
years. There is an overwhelming support for this dictator on that thread
and his apparent views on the waste of space dark skinned people are.
Whether this quote is legitimate is not really interesting, what is is
how that complete lack of knowledge of history can bring a population
down to its knees.
Yes, I'm suggesting that Nigerians and their
lack of comprehension for history is one of the reasons the country is
where it is. There was no reason to burn down Benin City in the sense
that the British had already captured power and looted it, but if Benin
was left standing then the narrative that Nigerians have bought, which
can be seen through the linked thread, would have been harder to drill
in when we have ancient indigenous thriving cities all over the country.
History is part of nationalism, and Nigerians do not see a country
worthy. A country that is not worthy means that it is a free for all.
When this very strategically designed chain of command has run through,
the perpetrators become the wise ones that speak the bitter, but clear
truth about the inferiority of the same people they have set on and
leashed. It legitimises colonisation in the first place.Perfect little
example is the gay issue (if you don't get it I'm not explaining it).
British people have had 2000+ years of history being colonised, they
knew what they were doing.
These posters are reacting as a result
of the completion of a chain of command that becomes self sustaining,
whether this can be changed is for another thread. All I can say is at
least Nigeria was populated enough to withstand going through what a
Kenya or South Africa went through.
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