Identity Questions in IBB’s Autobiography

By Farooq A. Kperogi The autobiography of former self-styled “President” Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida has already been parsed for its self-ser...

By Farooq A. Kperogi

The autobiography of former self-styled “President” Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida has already been parsed for its self-serving mendacity, moral spinelessness, maddening insensitivity, self-glorification, and cowardly posthumous smears of dead colleagues.

 I won’t revisit those points here. As someone who has a scholarly interest in—and is actually working on a book on—the rhetoric of collective identity construction in Nigeria, I was drawn to IBB’s self-definition of his identity in his autobiography.

It was Gimba Kakanda, SA to the Vice President and former newspaper columnist, who first quickened my appetite about this in his February 19 Facebook update.

 Kakanda had read an advance copy of IBB’s autobiography and wrote this intriguing summation of it: “It’s a journey that begins with his origins, as the son of a Gbagyi woman, and leads up to the June 12 questions—the answers to which you’ll have to read to discover for yourself.”

In a February 15, 2020, column titled "True Ethnic Origins of Nigeria’s Past Presidents and Heads of State,” I had observed that “IBB’s ethnic identity is surprisingly a magnet for controversy and speculation. He has been called Gbagyi (whom Hausa people call Gwari), Nupe, and even Yoruba from Ogbomoso or Osogbo. But he told journalists and his biographers at different times that his immediate ancestors were Hausas from Kano who migrated to what is now Niger State.”

I was curious if IBB admitted that his maternal filiation was Gbagyi (or Gwari). He actually did. But while he is very specific about his maternal line of descent, he was vague about the ethnic identity of his paternal ancestry.

This is how he describes his paternal ancestry, beginning from his grandfather: “Snippets of details I heard suggested that earlier on, he was a bit of a wanderer, migrating from Sokoto to Kano and Kontagora and settling in Wushishi.”

Contrast this with the specificity with which he describes his maternal heritage: “Apparently, [my grandfather] met his future wife, a young Gwari girl called Halima, in Wushishi, and since his future parents-in-law would only allow him to marry daughter if he agreed to make his home in Wushishi, he readily complied with their condition before settling down in Wushishi and marrying his pretty wife, Halima.”

In yet another description of his Gwari maternal descent, he is informatively direct and specific: “But before he left, my father met and married a beautiful light-skinned Gwari girl, Inna Aishatu, who would become my mother.”

His paternal grandmother was a pretty Gwari woman, and his own mother was a “beautiful light-skinned Gwari girl.” Why did he have a need to call attention to their pulchritude and complexion?

Why did he withhold such details about his grandfather and his father? Sokoto, which he says is the apparent root of his paternal ancestry, was populated by both the Fulani and the Hausa in the “later part of the 19th century” when his grandfather left it for Kano and later Wushishi.

 Although interethnic marriage between the Hausa and the Fulani began to intensify at this time, people still identified their heritage through their fathers. Ethnic identities or labels weren’t hyphenated. Was his father Hausa or Fulani?

Did he, perhaps, obliquely answer that question by gratuitously calling attention to the light skin of his Gwari mother in order to let it be known that his own light complexion is inherited from his mother since the Fulani are stereotypically light-skinned?

Well, IBB told a biographer that his great grandfather hailed from the village of Kumuria [Kumurya?] in Kano State from where he went to Sokoto. But in his autobiography, he only mentions his grandfather migrating from Sokoto to Kano and later to Wushishi. Is this intentional, strategic paternal ancestral ambiguity?

We see evidence of identitarian anxieties in IBB’s life after he left his Niger cultural cocoon. Up until age 23 when he returned from India as a Second Lieutenant, his name was Ibrahim Badamasi, Badamasi being his father’s first name.

“However,” he writes, “before I settled down to work at the First Brigade, a particular incident led me to add ‘Babangida’ to my name. During official engagements that led to my deployment to Kaduna, officers who confused the Yoruba name, Gbadamosi, with my last name, ‘Badamasi,’ repeatedly asked me whether I was Yoruba. That question had come up a few times during my enlisting interview for the military. Since that question persisted (and since I knew I wasn’t Yoruba!), I decided to take on my father’s other name as my last name.”

Three things jumped out at me after reading this part of the book. First, I find it intriguing that he had no hesitation telling us about his mother’s and paternal grandmother’s ethnic identity and even disclaiming a Yoruba identity that he knew would constrain him but chose to conceal his paternal ethnic identity.

Second, IBB didn’t mention Babangida as his father’s other name when the reader first encounters him in the book. He identifies his father as Muhammad Badamasi, not Babangida Badamasi. Maybe this oversight is attributable to sloppy (ghost) writing.

Third, Gbadamosi is not, strictly speaking, a Yoruba name. It’s the Yoruba domestication of Badamasi, which is understood to be a Muslim name in Nigeria. Many people in northwest Nigeria, where he says his paternal roots sprouted from, bear the name.

When I wrote about unusual Muslim names in Nigeria that don’t seem to have any links with the rest of the Muslim world, among which is “Badamasi,” readers who are familiar with the etymology of Badamasi told me that the name (which was probably originally some variant of Badmasi) belongs to an Arabic poet whose book advanced students in traditional Arabic schools,  called makarantun soro in Hausa land, study.

The book, a Sufi poem, is used as a resource for Arabic vocabulary lessons. Over time, it became popularly known as Badamasi, named after its author.

I haven’t found any scholarly corroboration for the claim that Badamasi is the name of an Arab poet, but there is a late nineteenth-century Ilorin Muslim scholar and poet by the name of Badamasi whose poems are often utilized to enhance Arabic vocabulary and are a staple in the curriculum of traditional Islamic schools. But it’s not clear if he is the original bearer of the name.

Badamasi was Yorubized to Gbadamosi and later anglicized to Badmus in Yoruba land.

Curiously, Muslim names, which should transcend, even neutralize, ethnicity, at least on the surface, can become the carriers of the weight of ethnicity in Nigeria. There are notions of “Yoruba Muslim names” not just because of their peculiar Yoruba domestication but because of their higher than usual frequency among Yoruba Muslims.

For example, many northern Muslims and Yoruba Muslims have concluded, without a shred of evidence, that House of Representatives Speaker Tajudeen Abbas is a Zaria man of Yoruba ancestry because “Tajudeen” occurs more frequently among Yoruba Muslims than it does among Hausa-speaking Muslims.

But Tajudeen Abbas is a Zaria prince. A Yoruba editor friend of mine pushed back when I said the Speaker was at least paternally Fulani by asking which Fulani or Hausa man I knew who bore the name Tajudeen.

 I mentioned Tajudeen Dantata. I then asked if he thought the Dantata family was Yoruba because they named one of their progenies Tajudeen. That ended the conversation.

Dr. Raji Bello, a Fulani man from Yola, also talks about how he is often mistaken for a Yoruba man because people assume that Raji is an exclusively Yoruba Muslim name even though it’s a Muslim name commonly born by South Asian and West African Muslims.

Dr. Bello resisted the type of urge that IBB succumbed to. He once said he was advised by an elder in Zaria to change his name to Rabiu. But he was named after one of his ancestors, a prominent nineteenth-century Muslim scholar in what is now Adamawa by the name of Modibbo Raji.

Finally, IBB described his father as a “messenger/interpreter” in the colonial district office but didn’t say what he interpreted. Since he had no Western education and didn’t speak English, did he translate Gbagyi, his mother’s language, to Hausa or vice versa?

Well, I am not done reading the book.