THE FULL TEXT OF THE 12TH UNIZIK CONVOCATION LECTURE: “THE IGBOS IN THE POLITICS OF NIGERIA”, DELIVERED BY HIS EXCELLENCY, RT. HON. CHIBUIKE ROTIMI AMAECHI, HON. MINISTER OF TRANSPORTATION Let me acknowledge without any reservation whatsoever, that I am honored by the invitation to deliver this year’s convocation lecture from an outstanding institution named after the great Zik of Africa. In the course of this lecture, with the topic in mind, we shall hear a lot more about The Right Honorable Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe but not about this university and I hope you will all forgive me. I will trace the history of the Igbo people from the middle years to the era of the Trans Atlantic slave trade, the colonial and post-colonial era, relying chiefly on the works of renowned historians, Professor Kenneth Dike, first Nigerian Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan and Professor Elizabeth Isichei. I will also deal with the issue of Igbo identity and Igbo emotionalism, the two main issues that may have impeded Igbo political advancement in Nigeria. Professor Elizabeth Isichei in her book, The History of The Igbo People, is of the view that in the pre-colonial times, The Igbo people had no real sense of ‘pan-Igbo identity’. “The villagers’ view of external reality was a sharp dichotomy, ‘them and us’, with the sense of attachment to ‘us’ growing weaker as the unit grew larger – the family, the lineage, the village, the village group. Invariably, he [the Igbo] felt a strong local patriotism”. She makes the point that a sense of pan-Igbo identity came only when the Igbo finds himself outside Igboland as was the case during the slave trade and “when colonial conquest and rule violently extended the categories through which the Igbo perceived the world.” Prof Isichei also referenced the work of Dr. William Balfour Baikie, a British Naval doctor and explorer who visited the Niger and the Delta in the 1850’s and made enquiries about the Igbo whenever he could. Baikie described the Igbo conceptualization of themselves in words that are still true today. “In Igbo, each person hails from the particular district where he was born, but when away from home all are Igbos”. A question of change and continuity is an interesting subtitle in chapter two of Isichei’s work. Please permit me to quote extensively from it.“The question of whether the Igbo saw themselves as a people in pre-colonial times is, of course, quite distinct from the question as to whether they could be existentially described as such. But the process of describing the distinctive characteristics of Igbo society – what made them a people – involves us in two difficulties. The first is that of generalization. The many local differences in Igbo culture make it difficult to describe them accurately in a book of this length. Each statement should be qualified, and one is in danger of describing the average of all Igbo societies, which does not correspond with any actual Igbo society. This is a difficulty that is implicit, however, in all historical writing. The second difficulty is more serious. It is necessary to describe the society, in order to understand the nature of the changes it was to undergo. But nothing is more repugnant to a historian than to describe a society in, as it were, a temporal vacuum. Societies undergo constant change; the historian, inevitably, focuses on changes rather than on continuities. One’s description of Igboland should be rooted in a particular moment in time, because the society was constantly changing. A description of Igboland, once upon a time, in the mgbendichie, is bound to do violence to a constantly mutable reality”. That is a crucial point because what is true of the Igbo in the past may not be true today. How people respond to issues today may be different from how they responded in the past. But the one that has remained true is the issue of Igbo emotionalism. The Igbo historical past is very important and at certain times it has been quite tragic. But we cannot remain trapped in our past and as someone once said, we cannot wish away the war that took place but we cannot continue to move forward with our heads slightly inclined backward. You will either trip or not move fast enough. Don’t forget that you are in a race with other groups. Nigeria of the sixties is markedly different from Nigeria of today and the Igbo nation would have to adjust to that reality and strategize accordingly. The Portuguese were the first European visitors to South East Nigeria at about 1472 in their search for a sea route to India. They were soon followed by other Europeans who were in desperate need of labour to work on their vast farmlands and to help exploit new discoveries of mineral deposits in the new world. In 1518, Isichei recounted, “the first load of African prisoners was taken directly from West Africa to the West Indies, ushering in over three centuries of the infamous triangular trade. The triangular trade contributed vastly to the wealth of Europe.” Triangular trade is a multilateral system of trading in which a country pays for its import from one country with exports to another country. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain shipped goods to West Africa in exchange for slaves that will now be shipped to the West Indies in exchange for sugar, rum and other items which will then be shipped back to Britain. Not all the slaves were taken to West Indies, some were taken to Gabon and Sao Tome and most of them were Igbo. In the 18th century, the slave trade then dominated by the British rose to its climax in Igboland. In 1882, Captain John Adams, who made ten voyages to the area between 1786 and 1800 wrote: “This place [Bonny] is the wholesale market for slaves, as no fewer than 20,000 are annually sold; 16,000 of whom are members of one nation, called Heebo