Following characterisation of identity as the intersection between group and individual identity, we shall broadly define identity as any group attribute that provides recognition or definition, reference, affinity, coherence and meaning for individual members of the group, acting individually or collectively. There are at least two approaches that could be used to capture and analyse the nature of Nigeria’s identity diversity. One is to classify them on the basis of famous distinction between primordial ties which are basically ascriptive and based on the “givens” of life (tribe, kinship, and ethnicity among others), and civil ties, which hinge on industrial
society-type aggregations like class, political party affiliation, interest group membership, and so on.
Primordial ties are prevalent in the ‘new states’ of Africa and Asia. Their resilience has made it difficult for the integrative revolution, which involves the erosion of primordial ties by civil ties, or what describes as the transition from exclusionary and inequality-generating ethnicity and nationality identities to inclusionary and equality-oriented citizenship, to take place. Many studies of identity-based conflicts in Nigeria, including those of contested citizenship and national cohesion, take their theoretical cues from this formulation. The problem with this scheme, however, is that by presenting civil ties and primordial ties as mutually exclusive categories, it creates a false dichotomy between them. In reality, there is no way the prevalence of supposedly primordial ties like ethnicity and kinship can be understood in isolation of class and other civil ties. This is because, as adherents of the constructivist school of ethnicity argue, identities based on the so-called “givens of life” are constructed and not natural. It is also not true that class and other civil ties are equality-oriented, especially where they are recursive with ethnicity and other supposedly primordial ties. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, distinction provides a useful schema for summarizing the complex of identities into manageable categories.
A second approach is provided by what is essentially a conflict-based perspective, in which only identities that form the basis of political demand, mobilization and action, or so-called politicized identities, may be regarded as salient are some of the leading proponents of ‘politicized ethnicity’. While this approach has the merit of focusing attention on active identities, it is mistaken in the exclusion of identities that are not politically active. This is first because by the nature of their invocation, identities tend to be situational, that is salient based on the situation at hand. As it were, the individual has an array of identities that s/he can decide to adopt or play up depending on the perception of the situation, including the identity adopted by competing actors.
Although the situationality thesis is more easily observed at the individual level, it also exists at the collective level. Thus, members of a group can decide to identify themselves as religious rather than ‘ethnic’ – as groups in Northern Nigeria do from time to time – depending on the level and scope of conflict. Indeed, as the adherents of the constructivist school of ethnicity have argued, identities are constructed. Second, like volcanoes, identities that are dormant today can become active tomorrow. For example, gender has certainly become an active identity marker in Nigeria today due to several local and global factors, yet three decades ago gender-based identity would have been considered dormant. Finally, identities have a way of being intricately inter-connected and mutually reinforcing, meaning it is unlikely that any one identity can exist in a pure form.
The exclusion of any identity from the ‘action-set,’ therefore, runs the risk of denying the active identities of their robustness. But the central point from the conflict-based perspective, which cannot really be disputed, is that different structures or configurations of identities do generate different levels or patterns of conflict. For example, ethnic and race based mobilization, which evoke nationalist claims and notions of territoriality strong enough to challenge the validity of extant states, tend to be more violent and dangerous than gender or generation-based identities like youth, which usually do not involve territorial claims. To this extent, it is possible to distinguish territory-based identities, supposedly more volatile and prone to violent mobilization, and non-territory based identities, which are benign and amenable to regulation. But this distinction is similar to that made by between primordial and civil ties, and as such can also be faulted on the grounds of creating a false dichotomy between identities.
What clearly emerges from the previous discussion is that any examination of Nigeria’s identity diversity would have to be inclusive of all identities – civil and primordial – and the ways in which they are intricately linked. This is necessary to enable us situate the various identities, especially the more active and politically salient identities, in their fuller, robust and recursive contexts. Hence, the following discussion of salient identities in the Nigerian context uses these parameters.
Nigeria presents a complex of individual as well as crisscrossing and recursive identities of which the ethnic, religious, regional and sub-ethnic (communal) are the most salient and the main bases for violent conflicts in the country. This is both from the point of view of the identities most commonly assumed by citizens especially for political purposes and the identities often implicated in day-to-day contestations over citizenship as well as competitions and conflicts over resources and privileges. To emphasize the inter-connectedness of ethnic, regional, and religious identities and the fact that they are often mutually reinforcing, they are sometimes compounded or hyphenated as ethno-regional and ethno-religious. The latter references have historical, geographical and political origins. They evolved from the old regional structures of the Nigerian federation, where identities were shaped by leaders of the dominant ethnic groups –Hausa/Fulani in the Northern region (predominately Muslim), Igbo in the Eastern region and Yoruba in the Western region – that exercised some form of hegemonic control over the regions. As a result, ethno-regional identities were, and continue to be, used as shorthand references to the dominant ethnic groups acting as regional ‘hegemons’. This is the sense in which conflicts among the three dominant groups are generally referred to as ethno-regional. With the division of the country into six semi-official geo-political zones in the late 1990s, which not only have ethnic referents but have also gained currency in the political lexicon, the usage of ethno-regional categories is likely to expand, but so far the old regional references remain dominant.
Similarly, the category of ethno-religious identities initially owed its origin to regional formations. It has been useful for differentiating the predominantly Muslim North from the predominantly Christian South. The category has also helped to differentiate the dominant Muslim group in the North from the non-Muslim minorities in the region. Indeed, unlike the south where majority groups are distinguished from minority groups on the basis of ethnicity, majority-minority distinctions in the north have been more religious than ethnic. Thus, a member of the Hausa/Fulani majority group in the north who is Christian is as much a minority in the overall scheme of things as say an Idoma or Igala,(both of which are northern minority groups) and is actually likely to enjoy lesser privileges than an ethnic minority person who is Muslim. Since the early 1980s when the Maitatsine riots ushered in a regime of religious fundamentalism in the Northern parts of the country, ethno-religious categories have been more frequently used to describe conflicts that involve an intersection of ethnic and religious identities. Again for partly historical reasons, this has been truer of the North where, as has been pointed out, religious differences play a major part in ethnic differentiation. Thus, conflicts between Hausa/Fulani and minority ethno-religious groups are described as ethno-religious. However, the increased politicisation of religion by the state, including the adoption of Islamic penal law by several Northern states in the Fourth Republic, has led to the generalisation of ethno-religious conflicts all over the country.
In the recent past, other ‘primordial’ identities that have gained wide currency and greater political significance, especially in contestations over citizenship, are those of ‘indigenes’, ‘non-indigenes’, ‘migrants’, and ‘settlers’. These categories have ethnic, communal, religious and regional origins, and have evolved from an entrenched system of discriminatory practices in which non-indigenes, migrants and settlers are shunted out or denied equal access to the resources, rights and privileges of a locality, community, town or state, to which ‘sons and daughters of the soil’ have first or exclusionary access. The system produces and sustains a hierarchical, unequal, and ranked system of citizenship that has provoked violent conflicts all over the country, and goes to the very heart of the ‘National Question’. Although these identities have grown in significance in the recent past, which obviously has to do with the aggravation of the ‘National Question’, they have deep historical roots in pre-colonial patterns of inter-group relations, and the discriminatory practices and ethnic inequalities entrenched by both the colonial regime and continued by post-independence administrations. These have cumulatively provoked various forms of self-determination agitation by different groups. All of these factors are further discussed in the next sections.
The final set of identities which fall under the category of civil ties, are those further distinguished by their non-territorial character. The main identities here include class, gender, and a host of generational identities, of which the most important is youth. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the modernization-radical political economy debate dominated the scene, an examination of identities in Nigeria would have been reduced to a debate of whether class or ethnicity was more real, but the matter has been resolved in terms of the acknowledgement that both have important consequences for each other. Class interests underlie supposedly ethnic mobilization and demands, but at the same time, ethnic divisions have stymied the process of class solidarity. Gender and youth have also emerged as critical and active identities, especially in the struggle for rights and privileges. What is more, gender and youth identities in many parts of the country have strong ethnic complexions, especially in the Niger Delta region where violent minority nationalism has been on the rise since the 1990s.
Having outlined the various functional identities in Nigeria, and the ways in which they are inter-connected, the next task is to further elaborate on them in terms of definition, prevalence and action trajectories. For this purpose, the focus will be on what may be called primary identities that provide the most basic divisions or cleavages from which other identities take their cues and are constructed. Broadly, the basic identities are ethnicity, religion, regionalism, class, gender and youth.
