The first time I saw someone use the phrase in my title was in a 1999 poetry anthology by Ibiwari Ikiriko. The next time I would read that phrase is when I use it to write, in this article.
I have told a lot of people that the British only did a portion of colonizing, it is THEM who have done the rest of the colonization to US. Nigeria’s problem began when we decided that there were minorities and majorities. It went on when oil wells began to be privately owned instead of government owned or even more humane, owned by the communities they were discovered.
I am an indigene of a minority, the Ijoid group. It's funny that we don't just bare the name, but we live minority lives as well. I became concerned with crude oil exploration and exploitation in 2012 when I was part of an opposing debate team with the topic the discovery of crude oil, a blessing or a curse? When I went on my research for the argument and found out the many damages done to the South, due to the discovery of the nation’s economy in it, I was enraged! It took me back to a place in Okrika, they call “dirty gutter”. I had seen children bathing around this gutter that looked absolutely clean but for the pungent smell that came from the effluent that ran through from the refinery. I wrote a story in 2016 about Alali, a young Ijaw girl who lived around the time crude oil was discovered in Bayelsa state. I have never felt the pain of my protagonists until she came. You see, ever since we decided that there were majorities and minorities, we created a them and us syndrome – where I feel subjected to another person because they are from a major group, where the people from major groups feel they have rights to own everything and even me, whether I like it or not, because I'm a minority.
I have always known ethnicity created a divide – the major and minor divide, but I had not understood the extent to which the gulf was until I taught a group of 9 year olds the issue of ethnicity. Two of the points given for the causes were uneven distribution of resources and weakness of some ethnic groups due to population size. I was injured when I realized that I was supposed to inform my pupils (of which some are minorities) that because they were minorities, the political and social decisions people make that include them was to be decided by the majorities.
When I wrote the story of Alali and shared it on my blog, a young man advised me to be careful about it. He perceived I had written too boldly about things that I should be scared to write about. I thanked him for his advice, after having a good laugh of course! It is like telling someone with a terminal disease not to search for hope that there could be something, anything that could remedy their case.
I'm a minority not just because of my geopolitical region, even the majorities are confined to a particular geographical region. I'm a minority because they decided that there can only be three majorities. Today, I realize that I am as much Nigerian as every other person, and it's no one’s place to call my language, my tribe, my way of life, my person – minority.
