Coming from Nigeria, I have witnessed different reasoning in terms of our social relationships with others be it marriage, friendship at the workplace or school, business cooperation, and many more. It is usually a case of deductive reasoning where a certain group of people is judged by an attribute ascribed to their origin. For example, there are certain states where people would rather remain unmarried than marry from there, simply because of a deductive belief that people from the said state are not faithful in marriage, and has bad characters. There is even a statement on a particular Town that goes thus, " if you are presented in a situation where you have a snake and an unknown man in a room with you, and the man happens to come from a said Town ( I am withholding the name of the town for a reason), you should leave the snake and kill the man first". The saying was aimed at showing that people from the said town is evil but is that always the case?. For those who know the town, I speak of, haven't we met people from this state who are not just good people but admirable as well?
There is another state where the men there are ascribed with ritual money and fraudulent activities. Whenever a man from the said State wants to marry a lady from another state, the parents of the lady usually object to it. They fear that their child will be used for ritual as such stories used to be common in the state. Another tribe is attributed to dirtiness and Laziness. I can go on and on but the truth is that these are mere conclusions drawn from individual events, generalized over time and then from the generalized state, it is now individualized ( did that even make sense?, I hope it does ). What I mean however is that an individual incident(s) in the past is now being used to qualify a group of people ( inductive reasoning ), and still yet, the inductive reasoning is now being deducted to affect individuals ( I hope this makes sense now, lol). More like a continuous cycle of both inductive and deductive reasoning.
There have been people who married from States where the women are attributed with unfaithfulness but their marriage has never had cases of unfaithfulness.
There are men from states attributed with rituals who today have good legal businesses and are well recognized in society. The presidential candidate of the Labour Party, is from this state, is he a ritualist? He is loved by almost every Nigerian Youth.
The sad part of these things is the fact that people who subscribe to this deductive reasoning forget that we have different personalities. The Igbo people will say, "It is the same mother that gives birth but each is blessed differently by the same God". It is sad when Mothers hate their soon-to-be daughters-in-law even when they have not come in contact with the lady. Their hatred is mostly because she is from a *said" state or tribe. This happens even in this new age and even among people who claim they are literate.
In this period of let #speakpeace, let us try in any possible ways to sensitize people who subscribe to the deductive reasoning that coming from a particular tribe/state/environment, infers on one, the attributes of the tribe, especially the bad ones. None is born to be evil or with inclination toward evil. People choose their actions. One may come from a place known to be violent but choose not to be violent. The Islamic religion is rumored to be a violent one but haven't we met good Muslims? Aren't there some of them who speak up against those who use violence in their practice of Islamic religion??.
Let us #speakpeace to build peace and live peacefully, not just in Nigeria but the world at large.
