To those who want to unfollow me because of what I wrote about the dominance of the Bini in Precolonial Niger area, please be my guest. Do not delay. Do so now.
To all those who hate me because of that revelation, please accept my sympathies. I am a researcher and a meticulous record keeper. History is not always pleasant. If you want history to always glorify you, then you do not want history, you want story. Truth is the bitterest pill to swallow.
Let me even annoy you some more, many of the people in modern-day Onitsha are of Bini origin. In fact, the elite and titleholders of Onitsha have very close consanguinity to the Binis.
Let it not be said that if you want to hide anything from our people, you should put it in writing.
As long as you do not know your history, you will repeat it. And as long as you are angry when history is revealed because it does not glorify you enough, you will never fully know your history.
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Two things made the Igbo more susceptible to slave-raiding than other ethnicities.
The first was the Osu caste system, which made many Igbos sell their own kith and kin to others.
The second thing is that the Igbos never united under one king, neither were they willing to submit themselves unquestionably to one person. That made it possible for other smaller ethnicities who had united under one king to raid Igbo villages.
It is what it is.
The walls of Benin were the largest Earth structure on Earth. Please Google it. Research it. They were larger than anything man had previously built without bricks, bar none. The Benin moat was one of the longest on Earth EVER. Who do you think built it? You think the Binis did that brutally hard work themselves?
It is this same emotional response to issues that made it possible for smaller ethnicities to take advantage of disunity in the past. In 2021, what has changed?
On July 5, 2021, Southern Governors held a meeting in Lagos to press for a Southern Presidency in 2023. All the Southwestern Governors attended. Three Governors of the South-south attended. Only one Governor from the Southeast attended (Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu state).
The very next day, Ohana’eze Ndi’Igbo released a statement saying that if the Presidency must return to the South, it must go to the Southeast.
I happen to agree with them. However, how can you get to lead when you do not yet understand the power of unity? As it stands now, if power returns to the South, it is going to the Southwest, not because they deserve it, but because they are united.
Precisely what has changed between 400 hundred years ago and today? And then when someone unearths that history, so lessons can be learned going forward, you gather to heap insults. At the end of the day, the same mistakes of the past are made in the present.
Anybody that tells you what you do not like is your enemy. He has been recruited by Hausa and Fulani.
You want to hear sweet lies about the past. Is that not what the All Progressives Congress did to us? And how far has it taken us?
Again, as I said before, history is not always pleasant. But if you do not learn from it, then your future will also not be pleasant.
As Christ said “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Free from marginalisation, fractionalisation, and alienation.
Thank you all, and may God bless you.
Reno Omokri is a former presidential aide