By Hector Roosevelt Ukegbu
There are tribalists in every ethnic group, but there are tribalists and then there are tribalists. My late father Nnanna Ukegbu was a tribalist and I am also a tribalist. But more than that attribute, I am also a humanist and a nationalist. So also was my father. As a 36-year-old Member of [the Federal] Parliament and the Chief Whip of the NCNC, he stood up in Parliament in Lagos on Wednesday January 12, 1966 to call for a “Vote of No Confidence” on the Government of Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa. This was even though he was a parliamentary officer in the ruling coalition. Because of what? Because he was aggrieved by the mayhem and bloodshed happening in Western Nigeria. He gave his speech in Parliament just three days before the bloody military coup of January 15, 1966. Interestingly no Yoruba MP was willing to make that call despite the fact that it was their people who were being slaughtered and maimed, some burnt alive.
My father didn’t go to school in the West, he went to secondary school in Ikot Ansa, Calabar. So, growing up, he was not used to seeing or living among Yoruba. But as a politician in Lagos, many of his closest friends were Yoruba. And these included Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya, Chief Olu Akinfosile, Chief Richard Akinjide SAN. Mr. Tunji Braithwaite was his personal lawyer. But non was closer to him than High Chief Daniel Senu-Oke, MP for Badagry, whose first son briefly attended my father’s secondary school in Owerri and lived with us, before the Civil War broke out. Similarly Baba Senu was the guardian of my younger brother and I when we attended St. Gregory’s College, Ikoyi.
Later for many years, starting from 1985 or so, my father brought Hausa children, in turns, all the way from Malumfashi, Katsina State, to attend his new twin secondary schools TEDEM College and Dorothy College. They were 10-year-olds recommended by the Catholic Bishop of Malumfashi. They earned their secondary school certificates and returned home.
But in 1968, my father joined the Biafran military and fought in guerrilla battles as a BOFF commanding officer. Despite his former exalted position as a senior federal legislator he felt a duty to help safeguard the lives of Igbo and other Easterners, no matter how daunting the odds were.
Because I grew up partly in Lagos I have several Yoruba friends from my teenage years. I don’t even think of Yoruba as a different, separate people, just people who speak a different language.
Towards the end of the Civil War there were news accounts in the international media that a lot of fraternization had begun to go on between Biafran and Nigerian soldiers. True, but the fraternizing was mostly between Yoruba and Igbo soldiers. As Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, Commander of Nigeria’s 3rd Marine Commando, warned then Rivers State Military Governor Navy Lt. Commander Alfred Diete-Spiff and Chief of Army Staff Hassan Katsina, he was fighting to keep Nigeria one, not to maltreat Igbos or seize their properties in Port Harcourt. Many Biafran soldiers and civilians would tell you that Yoruba military officers were the ones who treated them the most humanely. Officers and infantry soldiers from Northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Mali and even nearby Akwai Ibom, treated them the most viciously.
In recent years while driving in Lagos I have had two run-ins with the authorities, once with the VIO/Tax People and once with LASTMA. On each occasion, the branch chief, a Yoruba man over the age of 45, laid down the hammer, ordered me to pay a hefty amount, which I thought grossly unfair, and each time, a younger officer about the age of 30, waited for the branch chief to leave, and then told me to go, pay nothing, and forget about the incident. What I have experienced in my life as an Igbo with Yoruba has been experienced by millions of others from the two tribes.
The point of this writing is to show that Igbo and Yoruba have lived together amicably for over a century. Many have intermarried, including very notable people from long ago. For instance First Republic federal minister Chief T. O. S. Benson married an Igbo woman; first indigenous Governor of the Eastern Region Sir Dr. Francis Akanu Ibiam, KCMG, KBE, was married to a Yoruba woman; and so were Prof. Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike, post-war Head of WAEC, and Chief Emeka Anyaoku, former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. We should not allow anyone now to damage or destroy this most ennobling of a harmonious relationship between.
As far as I am concerned, Igbo and Yoruba are cousins, same way the Igbo and the Bini are. The Igbo and Bini have similar sounding names for their market days, and they have the same name for the hen. The Yoruba city Abeokuta has the same meaning in Igbo as in Yoruba — the place of the rock. The Igbo would call it “Ebe-okwute.” [Peter Obi’s nickname is Okwute, which means stone.]
Indeed, Yoruba land lies just 200 or so miles from Igbo land. I can walk from my village to the first village in Yoruba land in about one month. Furthermore the two tribes have lived where they are now for over 2000 years. If I am able to live harmoniously here in America with people of other races and tribes thousands of miles across an ocean from my native land why wouldn’t I live harmoniously and peacefully with people who have lived next to my own indigenous people for thousands of years?
XXX