100 years of "Nigeria"

It has been 50 years since "Independence".

I like to think of it as 50 years since the restoration of self-rule.

Some people like to think of us as a "young" country. When you wonder why we haven't done things that other countries did in less than 20 years in the 19th century, they remind you that we are only 50, while China is 5,000 and USA is 225 and the United Kingdom is ....

We are not young. We've been around as long as anyone else. In fact, to the extent that the "United States" was a new thing constructed after the political destruction of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, we are older than the USA.

There are cities in Nigeria standing on locations that have been continously inhabited for at least more than a millennium (I say "at least", because our verifiable history only goes that far; for all we know, those areas, suited as they are to human settlement, were inhabited even longer than that).

We are the heirs of that history, the culmination of that history.

Borders change.

Borders change everywhere.

Study those parts of the world whose written, documented and (significantly) mapped history goes back thousands of years. You will see that borders changed frequently, incessantly. The 5,000-year-old "continuous" Chinese civilization has had more boundary-changes than it has had dynasties. The current borders of the Peoples Republic of China, which include Tibet but don't include Taiwan, date back only to the 1940s and 1950s. Come to think of it, the borders changed even later than that, with the reintegration of Hong-Kong.

Just because colonialism changed our borders, it doesn't mean that we stopped being who we are. Colonialism was a brief, 100-year interlude of foreign rule (Lagos Colony, 1860) amidst thousands of years of self-rule.

And if you think that "Nigeria" as a concept is something to celebrate ... then look instead to the 1st January, 1914 "Amalgamation" that created what became the Federal Republic. That event was far more influential to our present day than "Independence" in 1960.

No, no, no ... I am not a party-pooper.

If anything, I am quite pro-Nigeria.

I like the Federal Republic.

And I am looking forward (God willing) to the 100th anniversary of Amalgamation in 2014.

It is just 4 years away, and (like it or not) it is more important to me than celebrating the restoration of something (self-government) that we already had before the rude British interruption.

There was no "Nigeria" before Amalgamation.

I wonder if "Nigeria" will be around to celebrate 200 ....