Although identities are not wholly interest-begotten and instrumentalist – after all things like pride play a crucial part in the adoption of identities by individuals – it is imperative for the analyst to interrogate the circumstances under which particular identities and not others become salient. Similarly, identities do not by themselves lead to conflicts. In other words, the fact that a country has several ethnic or religious groups does not make conflicts inevitable. It is only when mobilization around identities occurs or they are politicized that they
constitute the bases for conflicts. The task, therefore, is to examine the conversion process by which identity diversity is transformed into conflicts, what scholars of ethnicity call ‘ethno-genesis’. This is what we attempt to do in this section from a historical perspective.
It is helpful, as a backdrop, to identify the various types of identity-based conflicts that have ensued over the years in Nigeria. Broadly, these include ethnic conflicts, religious conflicts, regional conflicts, communal (sub-ethnic) conflicts, and the more complex conflicts involving more than one identity, namely, ethno-regional conflicts, ethno-religious conflicts, and ethno-cultural conflicts. What distinguishes these conflicts and underlies the characterization of Nigeria as a deeply divided state is the tendency of these conflicts to be violent because they often involve territorial claims in a context of (i) sharp and often overlapping cultural cleavages (ii) historical (pre-colonial and colonial)conflict legacies (iii) competition for highly valued, but relatively scarce, resources, including land, new administrative boundaries and headquarters, bureaucratic and political placement, infrastructures, trading opportunities, and other goods (iv) actual and perceived horizontal inequalities in access to diverse resources and (v) state failure or mismanagement of inter-ethnic relations.
Although it is generally agreed that colonialism is the ‘cradle’ of ethnicity in Nigeria and, more specifically, that the politically salient identities evolved within the context of the contemporary Nigerian state, some of the conflicts that have ensued in the country have remote origins in the patterns of pre-colonial migration, conquest, and control. For example, the contemporary ethno-religious turbulence in Kaduna state, including the February-May 2002 Sharia mayhem, can be traced back to at least the mid-nineteenth century when Kaduna’s southern non-Muslim communities were raided, enslaved and eventually inequitably incorporated into the emirate structure by the Hausa-Fulani Muslims (Kazah-Toure 1995). This history has focused current attempts to alleviate ethno-religious conflict in Kaduna state on the establishment of separate chiefdoms, autonomous of the Hausa-Fulani emirates, for the southern Kaduna peoples. Pre-colonial migratory patterns were perhaps even more important than pre-colonial conquest and control in shaping the cotemporary contours of identities and identity conflicts in Nigeria.
There are numerous examples of pre-colonial migration, usually stimulated by wars or natural disasters, which have continued to generate bitter conflicts today owing to continuing discrimination against the immigrants by the original settlers. These include the eighteenth century mass migration of Oyo Modakeke into Ife in search of a safe haven from the internecine wars of the Oyo empire; the movement of Urhobo and Ijaw into Warri, where the Itsekiri claim to have been the original settlers; the migration of the Jukun-Chamba from Cameroon to parts of the present Taraba state, originally settled by the Kuteb; and the sixteenth century settlement of Hausa merchants in Zangon Kataf within a territory occupied by the Kataf.
The advent of colonialism in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent amalgamation of northern and southern Nigeria in 1914 witnessed more migration in response largely to modern economic opportunities in emerging colonial urban centres. A phenomenal instance of such colonial economic migration was the early twentieth century influx of southern Nigerian immigrants, especially the Igbo and Yoruba, into northern cities like Kano, Kaduna, Zaria and Jos. This migration did not however, lead to greater integration as might have been expected. This was partly due to the continuing strands of state consolidation by the Muslim overlords in the core North in the aftermath of the Fulani jihad of 1804 that produced an acute sense of territoriality, and partly to the response of the British colonizers to this situation. The British response was basically to preserve the Islamic Puritanism of the north and avoid potential inter-group tensions by discouraging movement of non-Muslim migrants into the core Muslim areas, and to ‘quarantine’, as it were, the migrants in sabon gari or strangers’ quarters. This territorial demarcation, which was to be extended to most Northern cities and southern cities like Ibadan and Lagos where sabon gari were also created (in the south to house Northern migrants who were mostly Muslim), became one of the strong bases for conflictual identity formation and discriminatory practices.
Indeed, colonialism was the single most important factor in the crystallization of contemporary identities and identity conflicts in Nigeria. By cobbling the different Nigerian groups into a culturally artificial political entity for instance, the British stimulated inter-group competition and mobilization for power and resources in the new state, thereby fostering ethnic conflicts. The colonial urban settings were particularly key in the development of ethnic contact, competition, consciousness and organization. Experts characterized these new colonial cities and mining, commercial and administrative centres as “aggregations of tribal unions” because the urban centres encouraged the formation of kinship, lineage or ethnic associations as a means to cushion the insecurity, instability, alienation and competitiveness of colonial urban life. In addition, the British policy of ruling indirectly through indigenous political institutions or native authorities led to the reification of local tribal political institutions and loyalties.
More important, British colonial policy fostered the uneven socioeconomic and political development and mal-integration of the various Nigerian peoples. The more damaging aspects of the British colonial policy of uneven development included the exclusion of Christian missionary activity and the highly prized mission-sponsored schools from the predominantly Muslim areas of the north, thereby creating a huge imbalance in westernization between north and south, which continues to haunt the federation; the discouragement of any official political contact between north and south until 1947, when politicians from the two regions sat together for the first time in the central legislative council; the official promotion of segregated residential settlement patterns – the so-called sabon gari or strangers’ quarters to which reference has already been made – and, inflexible land tenure systems, both of which reinforced discrimination against migrant communities; and, the lopsided recruitment of Nigerians into the army and police.
The single most divisive policy of the British, however, involved the establishment during the late colonial era in 1954 of a federal structure of three units, namely, the northern, western, and eastern regions. Although it reflected the historic patterns by which the British acquired and administered Nigeria as well as the country’s tripartite major ethnic configuration, the three-region federal structure was inherently divisive, disintegrative and unstable. The tripartite federal structure, in particular, promoted the invidious political hegemony of the Hausa-Fulani-dominated northern region, which officially contained over half of the country’s population and two-thirds of its territory; fostered ethnic majority chauvinism and secessionism by erecting the boundaries of the northern, western and eastern regions around the identities of the major ethnic formations of Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo, respectively; fuelled ethnic minority agitations because it denied the country’s non-Hausa-Fulani, non-Yoruba and non-Igbo groups the security of their own regions; and encouraged an enormous degree of ethno-regional polarization as the imbalanced tripartite ethno-regional structure (which became even more structurally lopsided with the creation of the Mid-west region in the south in 1963) inexorably collapsed into a bi-polar north-south confrontation.
Given the multiple cumulative ethnic contradictions and tensions built into the colonial experience in Nigeria, it is not surprising that this period actually witnessed the initial major instances of inter-ethnic violence in the country. In 1945, for instance, amidst a general strike and food shortages that the British colonial authorities blamed on Igbo nationalist politicians, violence erupted in the mining town of Jos between Igbo and Hausa migrants over residential and trading opportunities in the city. The violence, which lasted for two days, left two persons dead, many others injured, and considerable amounts of property damaged. In 1953, the Hausa and Igbo again clashed in the northern city of Kano over the attempts by southern parties to hold rallies in the city in support of their anti-colonial campaign for Nigerian independence. The riot officially left at least 36 people dead (21 of them of Igbo ethnicity) and more than 200 people injured. The violence reflected the bitter opposition to the independence campaign by northern politicians, who feared that an end to British rule would mean domination of the north by the more developed south (for a good account of the xenophobic tone by which the northern elite mobilized the masses. The riot also reflected the resentment of Ibo domination of socioeconomic opportunities in Kano by the city’s indigenous Muslim Hausa population. Most important, the 1953 Kano riot presaged subsequent large-scale ethnic violence in Nigeria, including the 1966 anti-Igbo massacre in Kano and other northern cities that would accelerate the country’s descent into catastrophic civil war. In essence, colonialism effectively set the stage for the explosion of violent identity conflicts in post-independence Nigeria and for the huge challenge of national restructuring that would be required to hold the country’s multiple identity constituencies together in a single political community.
