For Africans, nationalism has its limits.

last updated 8 January 2015

Nigeria

Tajudeen Abdulraheem

Patriotism is tricky for Africans, said Tajudeen Abdulraheem in the Kaduna Weekly Trust. We may call ourselves Nigerians or Ugandans or whatever, but are we really? “Do we really enjoy the full rights and freedoms and feel the complementary obligation to be loyal and voluntarily discharge our duties toward these states?” Most people feel a primary loyalty to their village, clan, or tribe, not to their country. And for most African countries, the disdain goes both ways. How many times have we seen our governments dispatch helicopters and troops to find a Westerner “lost in some impenetrable forest?” Yet if one of its own citizens is similarly lost, the government just shrugs. Non-Africans are actually “free to move around the continent” while natives who try to cross African borders are “routinely humiliated.” I propose a new concept of citizenship: Confer “African citizenship” on all residents of the continent. “We may never quite be Nigerians, South Africans, Kenyans, Chadians, or any of the other possible colonially induced artificial creations, but at least we can be who we are: Africans.”