Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
Igbophobia is a gangrenous affliction within Nigeria’s influential leadership, including among ethnic Igbos themselves. Some wear their disdain openly, their fear of Igbo resilience barely concealed beneath rhetoric. Their paranoia is simple: an irrational dread that the rise of a particular people spells the collapse of their own dominion.
Worse still are those who, though undeniably Igbo by ancestry, disown their identity out of selfish ambition or personal vendettas. They eagerly erase their heritage, rewriting themselves into whatever mold profits them most. Their betrayal is not ideological but transactional – an opportunistic trade-off where they barter cultural loyalty for a fleeting seat at the oppressor’s table.
But the most treacherous of all are the insiders – the ones within Igbo heartland who actively facilitate the deprivation, marginalization, and subjugation of their own people. They are the modern-day “House Slaves,” content with their janitorial privileges while their brothers toil under the sun, breaking their backs on plantations of injustice. They parrot the master’s disdain for rebellion, branding every struggle for liberation as a misguided insurgency. Their loyalty is not to their blood but to their comfort, trading the collective good for personal crumbs, happy to enforce the chains that bind their kin so long as they remain slightly looser around their own wrists.
Yet history is rarely kind to oppressors, and even less so to their enablers. The passage of time has an unforgiving way of unmasking those who broker injustice against an entire race. Empires fall, regimes crumble, and the echoes of betrayal linger far longer than the fleeting rewards of servitude. Those who mortgage their people’s future for temporary power soon find themselves discarded, abandoned by the very system they helped uphold.
In the grand scheme, the loudest enemies are not the most dangerous. The most insidious threats come from within – wrapped in familiar tongues and familiar faces. These are the ones who, when the tide finally turns, will be remembered not as victims of oppression, but as willing accomplices to their own people’s subjugation.
Except by God’s will, what mortal – be they oppressor, traitor, collaborator, pretender, opportunist, or hater – can halt the ascent of the Rising Sun?*
