‘WE DO NOT HAVE TO BE THE SAME TO BELONG’
Culture needs heirs, not enemies, argues
K BOLANLE ATI-JOHN
There is a particular sadness in watching peoples who could enrich one another retreat behind walls of suspicion. They may live on the same street in Lagos, trade in the same market in Kano, or study in the same classroom in Jos, yet remain separated by inherited stories about who can be trusted and who must be feared. The tragedy is not that they are different. Difference is one of humanity’s great endowments. The tragedy begins when difference is taught as danger, when memory becomes a prison, and when belonging is defined by whom it excludes. We do not have to speak the same language or practise the same customs to recognise one another as members of a shared home.
The desire to belong is among the deepest of human needs. We draw strength from familiar names, languages, foods, faiths, and ceremonies. A Yoruba child learning the proverbs through which elders compress experience into wisdom, an Igbo apprentice discovering that enterprise carries obligations to community, a Hausa girl mastering an inherited craft, or an Ijaw boy learning the stories of the creeks is joined to a chain of memory beyond a single lifetime. But belonging becomes dangerous when it requires an outsider, when affection for our own community depends on contempt for another. We can love our ancestral home without despising the neighbour’s home. Culture needs heirs, not enemies.
Much of what Nigerians fear about one another is not discovered through encounter but inherited through narration. Children first meet other peoples in the words spoken around them: a joke about an accent, a warning about a surname, a story repeatedly told, long before personal experience begins. One person’s wrongdoing is then attributed to an entire people, while the same conduct by someone from our own community is treated as an individual failure. By the time the child meets the supposed stranger, imagination has already supplied a verdict. No child is born knowing which Nigerian name to fear; fear must first be placed there.
This suspicion is not inherited only in whispers; it can also be amplified in public, whenever communal wounds are turned into rivalries and belonging into a claim that one people must lose for another to gain. The categories of “indigene” and “settler,” often used to determine who fully belongs and who may access education, employment, or opportunity, show how easily an accident of ancestry becomes a permanent verdict. Genuine grievances deserve to be heard. Grievance ceases to serve justice, however, when it hardens into a standing instruction to distrust.
Not every inherited fear is imaginary. Nigerian communities carry memories of civil war, massacres, displacement, and moments when neighbours failed to protect one another. Such memories should not be erased; they preserve truth and warn against the return of cruelty. Yet memory betrays its purpose when descendants are assigned permanent guilt for acts they did not commit. No child enters the world answerable for crimes committed before birth; later generations inherit a responsibility to learn what happened and repair what lies within reach, but responsibility is not inherited guilt. Healing is not amnesia; it is the refusal to let yesterday’s injury govern every relationship tomorrow. Nigeria is not alone in this struggle: from Rwanda to South Africa, African societies have had to decide whether memory will serve as a teacher or become a jailer.
There is nothing noble in loving one’s heritage only by declaring another inferior. Healthy pride preserves language, craftsmanship, ceremony, and moral memory. The bronze traditions of Benin, the indigo dyeing of Kano, the uli artistry of the Igbo, and the boatbuilding knowledge of riverine communities do not compete for recognition; each enlarges what is available to all. Supremacy, by contrast, arranges people into a hierarchy with its own kind at the summit. Secure cultures do not fear encounter; insecure ones build walls and call them purity. Pride says, “This is what we bring.” Supremacy says, “Only what we bring has value.” Beyond Africa, the histories of Europe and Asia remind us that no civilisation is naturally immune to that temptation.
No single people in Nigeria contains the entire repertoire of human wisdom or beauty. Our foods carry histories of movement, our music crosses linguistic borders, and our cities are built by hands drawn from every region. Daily life quietly disproves the mythology of separation: a patient in Ibadan entrusts her life to a doctor from Borno, a trader in Kano depends on goods from Aba, and an engineer from Enugu works beside a technician from Sokoto. Shared labour reveals what stereotypes conceal; the stranger known only by an accent becomes a colleague, neighbour, and friend.
Peaceful coexistence asks more of us than the reluctant tolerance of people we have decided never to understand. Tolerance may mean merely enduring another’s presence; harmony requires curiosity, reciprocal respect, and the willingness to defend another community’s dignity. It permits disagreement without dehumanisation, cultural confidence without domination, and remembrance without collective condemnation. A Nigerian does not demonstrate loyalty to a community by remaining silent when one of its members wrongs another. Coexistence becomes genuine when another people’s safety matters to us even when our own is not threatened.
Every generation receives an inheritance of identity, but it must decide which parts deserve to be passed on. We transmit culture through language, names, ceremonies, and memory, and we decide whether our children inherit unresolved suspicions too. A child should know the beauty of an ancestral language without learning to mock another accent. A family can preserve the memory of past injury without assigning an enemy to a child not yet born. The highest form of ancestral fidelity is to preserve what gives life while refusing what causes injury. We do not honour our ancestors by inheriting their enemies.
A harmonious Nigeria is not one in which differences disappear, but one in which they can meet without fear. Unity is not uniformity. Our languages need not fall silent, our memories need not be erased, and our customs need not dissolve before we can belong together. The work begins in the stories told at home, the friendships permitted across boundaries, the words we refuse to use as insults, the choices in which conscience and the common good matter more than the accident of shared ancestry, and the humanity we choose to see before a surname tells us what to think. We do not have to become the same to share a home. We need only refuse the ancient lie that another people must be diminished before our own can stand with dignity. Our children will inherit our cultures. They need not inherit our walls.
Rear Admiral Ati-John (Rtd) psc(+) fdc(+) is a Distinguished Fellow of the National Defence College, Abuja, and writes from Lagos.
