By Obi Nwakanma

Last week, Sam Momoh a reader of the “orbit,” posed a number of questions to me in reaction to my column. The most poignant of his four posers speaks directly to the rest, and in summary, to the so-called “national question.” Sam Momoh asked, “Which other country in the world has been created by a colonial authority that contains more than 200 nations having their own languages and cultures?” I think I owe him some answers as a foreground to my thoughts today.

I will start by noting what other theorists of the modern nation have already noted that the nation by its very nature is an artificial construct. It is indeed artifice. There is no single coherent, organic nation formed out of a single, linear ethnic and historical formation.

As I said, a nation by its very nature is a composite system of affiliation; it is artifice – that is put together from a matrix of sources into an ordered and aesthetic ideal. Nation and nation formation is, in the modern sense, an assimilation of all once organic communities into a broader social, economic and political affiliation.

Now, Benedict Anderson calls the nation an “imagined community,” and to put that simply, such a community is an abstraction held together by ritual and symbolic capacities – the flag, the post office, the railways and road networks, and so on, which constitute the central nervous system of this essentially economic and political unity, which eventually evolves towards a clear cultural unity.

The fractality of nation is essential to its composition as a modern system and a center of human organizing and production. I should get off this high horse of theory, certainly, and simply say this, and it is true, that until Nnamdi Azikiwe’s network of newspapers in 1937, there was no discourse called “national discourse” in Nigeria.

It was the Zik group of newspapers that opened the dialogue of nation and first rendered the idea of Nigeria possible, immediate and organic textually. That is, it was the West African Pilot that first imagined Nigeria into being. This in itself was equally made possible only because of the Nigerian Railways that by 1927, only a decade earlier, with the final construction of the East-North Rails, completed and created a possible network of movements of people and goods in a cross-national manner, and made the distribution of the ideas of the nation as shared affiliation and destiny, through the Pilot possible.

The long and short of it is that as nations go, Nigeria is a very, very young nation, going through the first phases of its growth pangs. The amalgamation of the North, the South and the Colony of Lagos, made Nigeria administratively less complex and in fact, more productive.

The question of course, and this has been the argument of critics of the continuity of Nigeria as a single nation is that such an act of colonial will forged upon the anvil, an inchoate people of diverse affiliations; too divers in fact as to make it unwieldy and impossible to govern or come together.

I think that there is a valid argument in this, but only in the terns that three powerful dominant ethnic categories seem to want to shape Nigeria to their very image. Two powerful religions – Islam and Christianity – also seem powerfully opposed and seek to shape, through their adherents, the soul of Nigeria.

These are clear truths and grounds for potential and unresolvable conflicts. But my argument and the argument of those who see the Nigerian possibility is that these factors will meld only in time, and that such a thing as a “Nigerian culture” is already forming through a hybrid and osmotic process.

It is clear in the music, in the art, in the literature, the language, the culinary forms, that an essentially Nigerian culture is emergent from a spool of redundant and affiliate cultures. Part of the current crisis of nation is to be understood as the anguished cries of these redundant cultures – the dead kingdoms, sultanates and city states – and their romantic defenders clinging to the past.

As for examples, there is no Nigerian ethnicity that is in itself one organic whole and made of one organic past: take the Igbo for instance, which was historically a federation of five essential but interlocking groups – the Agbaja, the Isu, the Nri, the Oru and the Idu.

The Idu, which we now call the Benin, over a period moved so apart, that it is itself a hybrid culture formalized between the Igbo and the Yoruba, which themselves were never one organic group historically, but comprising the Oyo, the Ijesha, the Ekiti, the Iseri, and the Ijesha.

At the time of the arrival of the British, these different Yoruba states were involved in a deadly civil war, so much so that it was the Yoruba rulers themselves that asked the British in the 19th century to come and establish governance over them. One would be shocked by the close cultural genetic relationship between say the Igbo and the Jukun and the Tiv and the Kanuri, or the fact that some of the returnees from Portugal and Freetown that made up the modern Lagos elite came from Hausa stock. Beyond Nigeria, I will draw the example of two currently powerful nations: China and India, with vast ethnic and religious diversities.

Each of these modern nations is a product of colonial formation. India of the Murgals and the Rajs was finally fashioned into a republic, and with the laws in 1975 abolished the ancient kingdoms and their claimants. The Chinese Cultural Revolution led by Mao Tse Tong, restored China into a modern republic, particularly after the British “opium colonialism” over it.

Nigeria cannot compare with the vast demographic and territorial diversity of either India or China. I have been traveling in Italy for the last two weeks, and familiarity with Italian history indicates that the modern nation of Italy is itself the product of the amalgamation of an ethnically diverse group of city states through war and conquest. Almost every country in Africa is the product of colonialism. In fact, almost every country in the world, at one point or the other, was the product of colonialism and conquest. And so, Nigeria is neither unique nor impossible.

Its greatest problem is self-definition. Government in Nigeria is like the Alarinjo traveling theatre – comic and farcical. That is why institutions of government rig population census figures and election results. The rupturing of the controls that ought to make Nigeria possible happened because Nigerians tolerated the hijack of their government by people who had very little ideas about what it means to run a modern democratic and secular republic.

We still have all kinds of “gbanjo” monarchies and royal high arses contending with the nation as the epicenter of affiliation and guarantor of citizenship. Governments have spent public resources funding religious pilgrimages and ethnic and “ancient” monarchies, in a supposedly modern, democratic and secular republic, in which individual rights, rather than ethnic rights ought to be the basis of the social contract.

That is the problem. If every Nigerian as an individual feels equal access to the resources and privileges of Nigerian citizenship, there’d be no contention. Breaking up Nigeria, without resolving these contradictions will only metastize the problem.