By Kayode Emola
Throughout history, the greatest weapon an enemy nation or government has used to subdue another nation or people is the imposition of fear. Fear has a way of demoralizing and destabilizing, leading people not to ask for what rightfully belongs to them. One of the commonest means of employing this tactic of fear is by making examples of a few members to scare the rest of the group into submission.
However, if a people are resilient in their pursuit of justice, equity, and freedom, then no force on earth can take them down. Take, for instance, the story of Kunta Kinte, a young boy from the Mandinka tribe of Gambia during the Trans-Atlantic slave period. He was captured in his native homeland and sold into slavery to John Waller during his teenage years circa 1767.
It is widely known that one of the tactics the slave masters employed during that period was to brand their slaves, giving them a new name in order to erase all knowledge of their very existence prior to their enslavement. Kunta was given the name Toby which he vehemently rejected, and this, predictably, was not well received by his slave master. Thus, he was made an example of, as a warning to the rest of the group. Yet the question one may be inclined to ask is: why invest so much effort in breaking just one man?
Perhaps, this was to reinforce the dominance of the master and the subservient position of the slaves: to ensure the people know that they can never and must never look their masters in the eyes, that they do not even have the worth to do that. Whatever their masters said was final and no slave had the power to make it otherwise; any form of disobedience or insubordination would be met with harshest punishments. While Kunta’s life was marred with pain and hardship for standing for what was right, his bravery blazed a place in history, ensuring that his name and story are still remembered today, giving hope that when a people are resilient in the face of oppression, their voices will be heard in the end.
Kunta may not have succeeded in preventing the wickedness of his master, but he did not disappoint in his persistent tenacity in fighting for freedom. His story is one that will continue to resonate in the hearts and minds of African people, especially those in West Africa where slavery was endemic in those days.
Today, we are witnessing wholesale oppression of the Yoruba, Igbos, Hausas, and other indigenous tribes of Nigeria perpetrated by the Fulani people. This leads one to ask, how did the Fulani people, a minority group with the lowest education and experience of governance, manage to subdue the knowledgeable Yoruba, Igbos, and other peoples of Nigeria? The answer is not far removed from those methods seen in Kunta’s life: they use the practice of instilling fear in the hearts of those they seek to dominate. This was the method handed down to them by their masters, the British before they left Nigeria.
Many people may not be aware that the British government tactically placed the Fulani tribe over the rest of the Nigerian ethnic people so that they would do their bidding once they stepped away from direct rule. The British government, in order to continue their perpetual control of Nigeria, placed the least educated people at the helm of affairs. This ensured that the British government’s benefit from the resources of Nigeria was not diminished, whilst deploying their usual fear factor as a weapon to maintain capitulation.
In today’s Nigeria, when our elected official from the southern part speaks, it is for the fear of the almighty unknown Fulani cabal that has decided to hold the indigenous peoples of Nigeria to ransom. Not many people know that the former Sardauna of Sokoto Ahmadu Bello, Balewa, and three others were specifically taken to Britain in 1946 after the second world war to learn this skillful act of oppression. The British government already knowing that their days were numbered in Nigeria after the second world war devised this evil plan to continue to cage the Nigerian people, all for the sake of free resources they desire to extract from Nigeria.
Whilst this seed of fear was being sown in the hearts of the unsuspecting indigenous peoples of Nigeria, the Fulani was being emboldened by their own slave master the British government. No wonder the British government was insistent that the Fulani people be given the mandate to form a government in 1960 despite the north having the least popular vote. The British government had pretended they will not grant independence if the north were not incorporated in the scheme of things in the newly independent Nigeria.
One would then wonder, why the Yoruba people whose land which is bigger than England and Wales put together not able to stand as an independent nation. Maybe it was the fear of the unknown, whatever this unknown would have been. I see a lot of people today being afraid of whether the Yoruba people would be allowed to go and form a country of their own. Many are of the opinion that if perhaps we get a restructured Nigeria, then maybe we may at some point ask for our own nation.
My message to such people is, keep to your fears but do not pollute the minds of the rest of us committed to the total liberation of our people from perpetual servitude and bondage. Like Kunta, we are not prepared to negotiate our freedom even if it means paying the ultimate price. We will even be more determined this time around and work assiduously hard to gain our freedom. We do this not because we are the bravest but because we know that this is the only option our people have to free themselves from perpetual servitude. We would like to send a message to our oppressors that we will never buckle in the face of oppression.
I make bold to say that the majority of the Yorubas and Igbos have made up their mind to leave the contraption called Nigeria and this we will do in the no distant future. My plea to those who are still afraid is to look inward and build the kind of resilience Kunta built in the eighteenth century. He endured the temporary pain and shame inflicted by his slave master to write his name in gold in the history of mankind. This goes to show that if we faint not, nor allow fear to rule our hearts, this will embolden many more to confront this monster of fear that is put before us. Then like Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, I earnestly believe that the freedom of the Yoruba Nation is Now and not later.
