From my grandmother, I learned there were two different kinds of people - those who migrated and came to settle in what was now their village (us), and those who had always been in the same place all their days (not us). I used to have such fantasies of having migrated from all the oyibo people I saw on TV.
Anyway, in Primary school social studies, I learned about being Igbo. Also learned about Hausas and Yoruba. But they were "the others" - beings you heard of but hardly ever saw. I was in Uni when I met my first it-sekiri person - to be honest, I didn't even know there were such as thing as that! That's how insular my life was.
Then I met a different kind of people - those who speak Igbo, have Igbo names, shared some common Igbo traditional, but who insisted they weren't Igbo. Like my one time neighbor, let's call her Ebere Aniobi.
Ebere and I used to converse in Igbo - living in Abuja then, I relished any opportunity to be with Igbo speakers.
I also sometimes overheard Ebere talking on the phone with her relatives. And she'd speak what I knew then as her dialect. I used to have a friend from Abia state, and by Joveh when I went to their house and her mom opens her mouth to speak Igbo, it was like Greek!
So, I took it as the same as Ebere. There'd be a few common Igbo words sprinkled here and there, enough to make sense of many of the sentences but overall, I'd need a translator if I'd need to converse with the speaker. I barely talk to my husband's grandmother self, cos she only speaks Udi and I don't understand it.
And so, one day, yarning with Ebere one day, I referred to her as an Igbo person. Ebere provoked. She's not Igbo oh, she's from Rivers State. You know that look of incredulity, yup, that's what I had that day. I was looking at her like, damn you could have fooled me.
But if Ebere says she's not Igbo, then she'd not Igbo. It is not like them they dash money. In fact, 5 years in FUTO, not one day did I collect one kobo in bursary! While Ebere with her non-Igbo Rivers a$$ was getting Bursary upon bursary. So, who Igbo don help.
So, to Nkechi and all the non-Igbos, you all will never get any argument from me. For all I know, my ancestors na from Australia them migrate come. So, me too, I'm not Igbo.
Nigerian Feminism Is Adulterated And A School Drop-Out
During Goodluck Ebere Jonathan election, I got a piss f!ight with my uncle for calling Jonathan an Igbo president. I couldn't wrap my head around it. Since when did Ijaw people become Igbos. But you know, politics makes anything so...
Speaking of which? What makes anybody an Igbo person? Look at my son now. Igbo he cannot speak or even understand. He's spent a huge chunk of his life outside Igbo land, he only visits.
He knows more Yoruba tradition, thanks to school than Igbo. Being Igbo is something he will become later on because now calling him Igbo is really in name alone.
During my master's program, I did this anthropology module and learned about self-identification. In one case study, in one American family, siblings decided on what they saw themselves as. Born of black and white parents, one sibling saw herself as black, another saw herself as mixed, another as white.
It's on this basis I say that this Igbo or no Igbo is actually a bit more complicated than you all may think.
As I asked before, how do you decide who is Igbo? What are the parameters? A lot of people have such mixed heritage, we can't decide which ethnicity has a greater claim on that person than the other (without DNA results of course).
How far back do you have to trace your lineage to squarely have a stake in the tribe you are claiming? With such little records, most people won't even know beyond their grandparents or great grandparents. So even the Igbo Israelites, who is to say they are wrong (they probably are).
And if we so rely solely on self-identification, well then we can have two brothers claiming two different tribes, as is the case study of the American family. Who is more right than the other?
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