By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Since writing about the tensile stress in the relations between Nigeria and India consequent upon the co...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Since writing about the tensile stress in the relations between Nigeria and India consequent upon the coldblooded murder of a Nigerian
in the Indian state of Goa, I continue to receive a steady stream of emails
from Indians and Nigerians, and feel compelled to share more thoughts on the
issue.
First, it was not I who called India the most racist
society on earth; it was a study by two Swedish economists that reached that
conclusion. I should perhaps add that I have many
Indian friends here in the United States who are some of the most tolerant and
benign people anyone can ever wish to meet. Many of them, in fact, wrote to
express outrage that Nigerians are at the receiving end of racist brutality in
a part of their country. I certainly didn’t intend to be understood as implying
that all Indians are xenophobic brutes.
Second, when I called India the “leader of the Third
World,” I used “Third Word” not as an economic or developmental category
(although that’s the term’s dominant signification in contemporary usage), but
as a political category to refer to countries that were neither ideologically affiliated
with the West nor with the East in the heyday of the Cold War. That’s the
original meaning of the term, and India was at the vanguard of the Third World
movement in the Cold War era. So I was bemused that Indians would throw around
the term “Third World” as an insult.
Third, although irrational resentment against
dark-skinned Africans is a worldwide scourge, many Africans have an expectation
of hospitality—or at the very least tolerance— in India for at least two
reasons. The first reason is that India has more dark-skinned people than any
country on earth. There are over 200 million dark-skinned people in the country.
That is more than the population of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.
But
dark-skinned Indians are despised and consigned to the bottom of the totem
pole. That perhaps explains why Africans
get short shrift from Indians. (Aljazeera recently did an in-depth report
titled “Africans
decry ‘discrimination’ in India” on the widespread
anti-African bigotry in India). Africans are considered no different from—or
maybe even inferior to— the over 200 million dark-skinned Indians that the dominant
Indian culture has treated as sub-humans for millennia. Thankfully, I am told that this attitude is
changing slowly in urban India.
Nonetheless, in India, “white” is still not only
might, but also always right. That’s why, although even the Indian
news media habitually report that Israelis and
Russians dominate drug trafficking in Goa, India, citizens of Israel and Russia
have never been called “cancers,” and there have never been xenophobic
billboards condemning everybody from these countries. In fact, a December 29, 2012 report in the
Times of India said “Russian, Israeli and local drug lords apparently [enjoy]
immunity [from prosecution], allegedly due to a police-drug mafia nexus.”
Now, this is not by any means a defense or
extenuation of the involvement of Nigerians in drug trafficking and other scams
in India and elsewhere. I am troubled by and acknowledge the fact that few
Nigerians are indeed involved in drug trafficking and Internet scams India, but
it would be nice if the crimes committed by these few Nigerians are not used as
a basis to judge the rest of us—the same way that Indians don’t condemn all
Israelis and Russians because few people from these countries dominate the
narcotic trade in their country.
The second reason that Nigerians, especially some
northern Nigerians, were disillusioned by the blanket ill-treatment of
Nigerians in India, particularly the rhetorical violence directed at Nigerians
in online comments, is that northern Nigerians feel a deep, if unrequited,
cultural affinity with India. A lot of us grew up watching Bollywood movies and
found many cultural convergences between the portrayals of Hindu culture in
Bollywood movies and northern Nigerian culture. That is why Kanywood, the
northern Nigerian movie industry that sprang forth from Kano, is little more
than an inept, dewy-eyed mimicry of Bollywood.
In addition to the wild popularity of Indian movies
in northern Nigeria, many Nigerians have related with Indians in Nigeria as
high school teachers (in the 1970s and 1980s), classmates, etc.
I encountered my first Indian when I was only 5. His
name was Job, and he was my classmate in Baptist Primary School in my home town
of Okuta in the Baruten Local Government area of Kwara State (which was then
called Borgu Local Government). Job’s father was a Baptist missionary who lived
in the same missionary quarters with a Paul Burkwall, an American Baptist
missionary whose son, David, was also my classmate.
As children, we couldn’t tell Job from David. We
called both of them “bature bibu,”
Baatonu for “white children.” One day, Job told me he wasn’t a “bature bii,” that is, a “white child”;
he said he was “Indian.” It didn’t make any sense to me at the time because I
couldn’t tell him apart from David, a white American kid. It was not until I
advanced to primary six and started watching Indian films that it all came
together for me.
The point of this recollection is to show the
cultural and emotional affinity many Nigerians, especially northern Nigerians,
feel toward Indians. (Although my part of Nigeria is in Kwara State in
north-central Nigeria, it is actually culturally indistinguishable from the far
north). Until fairly recently, Indian movie stars—and by extension Indians in
general—were the standard for measuring or talking about beauty in northern
Nigeria. Expressions like “she is so beautiful you would think she’s an Indian”
were common when I was growing up, and they were informed by the exaggeratedly
sanitized portrayals of India and Indians in the Bollywood movies we consumed.
(Many northerners often feel a deep cognitive dissonance when they see everyday
Indians in international TV news looking radically different from the notion of
the perfect Indian that they had been led to internalize by Bollywood).
So I wasn’t surprised by the ambivalent reactions
that my article elicited from my northern Nigerian readers. Some of my readers were
indifferent to the hostility against Nigerians in Goa because the Nigerians
that were brutalized are from the south whom they said deserved what they got.
But, then, many Indian commenters called these “southern Nigerians” Boko Haram
muzzie terrorists who are involved in drug trade and Internet scam to fund
terrorism in the service of Islam. Uh-oh! And, of course, southern Nigerians
who like to malign northerners as Boko Haram terrorists saw that Indian
commenters called southern Nigerians with names like “Simon” Boko Haram
terrorists.
Lesson: non-Nigerians who want to stereotype us
don’t care a tinker’s damn which part of Nigeria we come from. Outside Nigeria,
a Christian southerner is as likely to be stereotyped as a Boko Haram terrorist
as a northern Muslim is likely to be tagged a drug trafficker or an Internet
scammer.
If this is not enough reason to put our house in
order and overcome our own internal bigotry, I don’t know what is.
Related Articles:
Nigerians as Endangered Species in India
Re: Nigerians as Endangered Species in India
Related Articles:
Nigerians as Endangered Species in India
Re: Nigerians as Endangered Species in India
The last sentence is unity-begging. The way to deal with people who glorify and tolerate terrorism because it is their religious duty is to separate from them. That is the only rational solution.
ReplyDeleteHow about people who do drugs and internet scams as a business strategy, which this article is about? What do you do with them? No one is begging for unity with scammers.
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