Creating a New Path

Several years ago, while living in New Zealand, I travelled to the Nigerian High Commission in Canberra, Australia to renew my passport. At the embassy, I ran into another Nigerian who, like me, had arrived from a different city in New Zealand. He was a PhD student at a university in New Zealand that was working with the Gombe State university on researching the unique ecology that existed in parts of the Nigerian Middle Belt. We swapped stories and bonded at the embassy waiting area. After a while, he suggested we go ‘greet’ the ambassador.

‘Greet ambassador ke,’ I responded, bewildered that a senior Nigerian government official would be open to meeting two random people from New Zealand. Turned out I shouldn’t have been surprised: Ambassador Ayoola Olukanni, Nigeria’s high commissioner to Australia at the time was the most gracious and welcoming Nigerian diplomat you could ever meet. He ushered us in and helped us feel welcome. He chatted with us and promised we’d get our passports the same day. As we left his office, he apologized that he couldn’t take us to lunch and proceeded to press some Aussie dollars into our hands. He then insisted we take a picture to preserve our memory of the day.

As my new acquaintance and I headed to lunch, I marvelled with him at how congenial the ambassador was and how good it felt to be welcomed as a Nigerian. At lunch, I inquired about my friend’s plans for the night. It turned out that he was looking for a place to stay before his flight back to New Zealand the following day. Still buzzing from the kindness and generosity of the high commissioner, I offered my new friend a share of my small motel room. After lunch, we returned to the high commission where, as promised, our new passports were waiting for us. The next day, I drove my friend to the airport before sightseeing in Sydney ahead of my flight back to New Zealand.

As I look back on the photo commemorating this episode, I realize that at no point did we distinguish ourselves based on ethnicity. I’m Ibibio, my PhD friend from Gombe State speaks Hausa and the high commissioner is a Yoruba man. None of that mattered in the moment; we were all Nigerians and the leader amongst us united us and made us feel like kin.

ETHNIC TENSION

As I write this, young urban Nigerians have been introduced to a political consciousness that promotes ethnic division, mistrust and hate. Following the 2023 elections, Nigeria’s electoral process has stoked significant ethnic tensions in a time where many young people identify first as Nigerians before our ethnicities. Citizens, from my generation and the following years, were born in urban areas to inter-ethnic families with friends and colleagues from all over the country. The persistence of ethnic sentiments seems like an anachronism that has no place in today’s modern and interconnected world; yet tribalism still exists. How can we explain this propensity for tribalism in today’s world? Is there room for us to evolve past it?

In the 1960s, British evolutionary biologist, William Hamilton, proposed the theory of kin selection to explain the gaps in Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but in relation to the existence of altruism. In Darwin’s theory, nature selects organisms that are only fit for survival. To reproduce and pass on one’s genes, selfishness is the best strategy. In a jungle race against a predator, the animal that ignores others and runs faster than the slowest animal survives to reproduce. In nature, however, many altruistic organisms exist that don’t reproduce but instead work in favour of the group. Worker bees are a classical example of this. These bees work to ensure the queen bee is more successful at reproduction than they are.

Hamilton, via his eponymous rule, demonstrated mathematically that family members who share the same gene are just as well served by protecting and serving their kin to increase the chances of the family gene persisting in the gene pool. In practical terms, this means that your contribution to the future gene pool is well served not just by having children but also by making sure your nieces and nephews survive to reproduce.

This is the origin of the word nepotism, derived from the Latin word ‘nepos’ for nephew, which described childless popes and bishops appointing their nephews into important positions. You and your siblings share about 50 per cent of your genes. Your siblings’ children, nephews and nieces, will thus share about 25 per cent of your genes. It’s thus a win for your family’s gene pool if the group work together to ensure more children in the group survive to reproduce in preference of others. So, nepotism, the act of granting favours based on kinship, makes evolutionary sense.

In Neolithic Africa, around 3,000 B.C.our ancestors battled with difficult terrains and were always at risk of death from hunger and the wiles of nature. Collecting and keeping resources for your kin was a vital undertaking. As such, expanding societies needed a way to identify kin and prefer them over others. With language as our main tool for communication, it would stand to reason that groups would alter their language, dialects and even accents to easily identify kin and discriminate against usurping outsiders. The most difficult terrains would likely spur more language diversity as hard-fought resources need to be reserved only for kin via mutually unintelligible languages.

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Creating a New Path

ETHNIC TENSION

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