Questions to ponder about Abacha
From Nigeria’s independence in 1960 to the fall of General Babangida in 1993, Nigeria experienced four successful coups. Abacha not only backed, but helped organize all four, including both the pro-Igbo coup of 1966, and the pro-northern counter-coup that occurred a few months later. Abacha also refused to participate in any of the many, many unsuccessful and abortive coups throughout the 33 years. He never missed.
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As of 2023, Nigeria has not had a coup since Abacha’s in 1993. This begs a logical question… did Nigeria ever really have a coup problem, or did it just have an Abacha problem?
That genuinely made me laugh out loud.
As far as I can tell, Matt Lakeman is an anonymous travel blogger who goes around the world and then writes very long and detailed posts about the countries he visits. He visited Nigeria just before this year’s elections and has now written down his thoughts. The post is very very long and contains several factual errors. It is not for the faint hearted if you’re a Nigerian but go ahead if you want to see how an outsider views the country.
He also talked about why Nigerians seem to carry things on their head but I thought he missed what should have been an obvious answer:
In Nigeria, lots of people carry stuff on their heads. I understand this is an Africa-wide phenomenon, and Wikipedia highlights a few other places where it is common, including parts of India. Some people use little cushions, others put trays or bags or whatever directly on their heads and manage to balance it all with remarkable skill. I most certainly can’t carry much on my head, nor do I intuitively feel it’s a better option than using my arms and hands.
The obvious question — why does this phenomenon only occur in a few places on earth? Why, as an American, is the idea of carrying things on my head something I probably haven’t thought about since I was a child?
There is undoubtedly a cultural element at play, but why is this cultural thing only present in a few places? We all need to carry things, we all have heads.
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Maybe the answer is biological. Wikipedia says that Luo women in East Africa can carry 70% of their body weight on top of their heads, which sounds extremely impressive. I’m sure they build up the strength to do so by practicing throughout their childhood, but still, I’m not sure the average Western female (or even male) neck is equipped for such strain. Wikipedia also cites observers in the Antebellum United States noting that black women were skilled at head-carrying, even generations removed from life in Africa (though the practice was probably also culturally transmitted).
One more hypothesis from a random Redditor: the wheelbarrow is an obviously superior way to carry material than head or hand carrying. China and Mediterranean Europe seemed to have developed the wheelbarrow sometime around 500–400 BC, though it didn’t become commonplace in Europe until the Middle Ages. I can’t find exactly when the wheelbarrow became widespread in Africa, but Wikipedia says that even by the 18th century, the wheel was only used for ceremonial purposes and scarce transportation in a few African nations. So presumably, the vast majority of Sub-Saharan didn’t have the wheelbarrow or anything like it until the 20th century, and therefore the norm of head carrying has remained prevalent to the modern day.
One of the things we learnt while researching Formation: The Making of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation was how the Nupe elite used to send their horses annually to Kano and other parts of the north during certain seasons for safekeeping. The trigger was the tse-tse fly which made it incredibly difficult and expensive to keep horses or any animals for that matter.
As I never tire of telling people, the tse-tse fly has been one of the most destructive forces in African history. Especially in Nigeria’s middle belt (or tse-tse fly belt if you prefer), it made less than zero sense to invest in animals or beasts of burden which would be easily taken out by Nagana (Animal Trypanosomiasis). This showed up in other ways too: long after the international slave trade had been ended, internal slave trade in Nigeria continued (I often tell people that my father had already been born before internal slavery in Nigeria ended). One of the biggest sources of demand for slaves that kept the internal trade going was porterage. That is, porters to carry goods from one part of the country to the other — this was where most of the slaves who could no longer be sold abroad ended up.
I don’t think the answer is more complex than the fact that the relationship between humans and beasts of burden was violently severed by that ghastly fly and people evolved to carrying things they would otherwise put on an animal on their own heads. You can follow this logic to why the wheel was slow in coming as well.
Anyway that is my story and I’m sticking to it.