Ahmed Yahaya-Joe
“Rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, oceans all have different names, but all contain water. So, do religions have different names, and they all contain truth, expressed in different ways, forms, and times. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew. When you believe in God, you should believe that all people are part of one family.” – Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)
While according to Chinweizu, a mononymously named compatriot of ours in 2016, “Nigeria is not a nation but a noyau,” Peter Enahoro paradoxically prescribed albeit in retrospect in his 1966 book for us on, “How to be a Nigerian.”
Hardly surprising since its highly unlikely that the writer of such stimulating treatises as The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite (1975) and Anatomy of Female Power: A Masculinist Dissection of Matriarchy has perhaps never traversed the Ikara axis of our nation’s agricultural value chain flanked by the Makarfi and Auchau rich agricultural plains as Chinweizu goes on to describe our noyau as, “a society of inward antagonism, one which could not carry on if its members had no fellow members to hate.”
Utter balderdash! In that part of Nigeria, it arguably produces the largest quantum of tomatoes, onions, and pepper including locally processed brown sugar cake.
We are talking about a part of Nigeria where the thin line between on and off-season is very blurred due to an all-year production of “Kayan Gwari” nonetheless with a tiny window.
Little wonder recreation, recuperation, and rejuvenation are always taken seriously there.
No less the 2024 Dauda@50 Unity Football Cup finals played out penultimate at Kurmin Kogi sponsored by Dauda Musa Namadi of nearby Rafin Tabo.
Ecstatic spectators came in droves from settlements in between distant escarpments far and nearby homesteads widely scattered around the main rocky outcrop of Dutsen Lungu, a historical hiding place against the marauding Jukuns who had extended their conquest beyond Zazzau even to far-flung Kano and Katsina but not before they had renamed that ancient Zaria’s riverine, Kubanni and its signature rock, Kufena.
Meanwhile, on the sidelines as 22 youngsters, agrarian participants at various levels, beating around a round leather ball across an undulating hard laterite friend less than FIFA regulation size.
I tried striking friendly conversations to find out from the potpourri of visiting dignitaries, rural aristocrats, farming tycoons, and gentrified, a sprinkling of hipsters including the usual hordes of hangers-on and praise entrepreneurs under a near rowdy hospitality canopy on such matters from President Tinubu’s proposed Tax Bill to the fallout of power shift under the present dispensation.
The reaction was unanimous by the “yan karkara” – rural folk their lackadaisical disdain so palpable – a very un-Nigerian mindset in Chinweizu-speak. Apparently, in the Arewa outback, it is entirely another ball game.
This is because in the hinterlands it’s all about “Kasuwa a kai miki dole,” – the alternative push and pull of market forces irrespective of the politically intense primordial fault lines afflicting the urban populace known in local parlance as “yan birni.”
We the concrete jungle inhabitants apparently have an unusually high propensity of always whipping up political sentiments into a frenzied storm. Bespoke noyau denizens are always characterized by religious zealotry or ethnic chauvinism. Or even both.
Gimi is a rustic railway station town straddled by a bygone remnant of mercantile warehouses such as those of UAC and G.B. Olivant stocking Shea butter, hides & skins, bales of cotton even a “Karamar dalan gyeda” – miniature groundnut pyramid. Canteens from which the modern Hausa word “kanti” evolved.
An adjunct of Makarfi off the artery to Ikara both prominent local government areas in Kaduna’s northernmost senatorial zone linking Anchau accessed at Tasha Yari less than 50 km from Zaria along the Kano-Abuja expressway.
This was where Mr. W.W. Opofou from Oruwaire, Patani in the mangrove heartland of the Niger Delta region first arrived in the mid-1930s gravitating back home to acquire a lovely wife also a scion of Ijaw but christened Laraba by locals in the savannah grassland.
Against the background of the atrocious events of 1966 with their growing brood of vivacious children caught between an identity rock and a hard place soon after the collapse of the Aburi talks they frighteningly gathered on the Gimi platform waiting to board any evacuating train from Kano to as Nigeria became increasingly polarized.
Long faces, palpable tension. Precarious situation. News of ambush and attack of the fleeing filling the air of uncertainty as elsewhere with disastrous consequences;
“a favored tactic was to halt southern-bound trains which were on occasion stoned as they were departing…Several innocent people were murdered based on mere suspicion or from regional/ethnic profiling of names, physical features, and accents.” – p.136 Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria’s Coup Culture 1966-1976 by Max Siollun
Then arrived Sarkin Gimi, a man of purpose. With his famed tenacity without the slightest iota of “no inward antagonism” against his fleeing compatriots passionately pleaded with departing families from the South to stay put assuring them of complete local protection.
All left. But the Opofous didn’t. Their total safety is guaranteed.
In the ensuing decades, Mama Laraba transformed into Maman Gimi to all. A matriarch par excellence until her demise in 2024 at the ripe age of a mid-nonagenarian there.
Dauda@50 Unity Cup has come and gone but its legacy of uniting in its own way the Makarfi-Ikara axis lives on.
The participating clubs?
“Young Professionals” and “Eleven Brothers” among others cut across ethnicity and religion for the love of the game.
Before Dauda Musa Namadi there was Sarkin Gimi reminiscent of the crucial intersection reached by Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) back in 1915;
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both……
And I, I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Why is it that such outstanding inter-communal harmony true-life stories like that of the Opofous never trend in Nigeria?
The question is pertinent because not even the writer of “How To Be A Nigeria” interestingly from the same former Mid-West Region right next to the defunct Eastern Region as the Opofous panicky refused to stay back on his editorial seat even in the relative safety of Lagos to help “salvage” his motherland he had so profitably benefitted book royalties from.
He was never a real Nigerian McCoy. Neither is Chinweizu. Apparently, both have never endeavored to travel by the Ikara road with what Bernard-Henri Levy describes as “the archaeology of a reflex,” that is neither “an immutable automatism,” nor “immune to learning.”
“An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
When Mahatma Gandhi enunciated his “eye for an eye” advisory it was against the background of a humongous diversity of peoples in a sub-continent of now nearly one and a half billion Indians belonging to 4 races scattered among separate and distinct 705 officially recognized ethnicities and 8 principal religions.
Imagine where we currently are in comparison to that BRICS nation.
The impetus for the road less traveled making all the difference cannot be overemphasized as Ali, a one-time world champion pugilist reminds us in his “rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, oceans” quote.
One key takeaway beyond sports being a unifier is that due to the exponential agricultural growth of recent times in the Ikara axis, we might as well witness a reverse urban-rural drift if the sustainability of that crucial economic engine house is further effectively managed.
Kudos, Ikara local government council chairman, Bashir Mamman Dogon Koli – “Raja for Ikara.”
