Nigeria: As in the rest of Africa, things might not be quite as they seem

In January this year hundreds of Muslims were massacred near Jos, in north-central Nigeria. In what appears to be direct retaliation, on March 7, three largely Christian villages were attacked and several hundred Christians killed. The governor of Plateau state, Jonah Jang, had warned the national army about reports of suspicious people with weapons in the area hours before the attack, but the military failed to take action. When he tried to locate the commanders by telephone he couldn’t get any of them. Connivance or incompetence on their part, or a bit of both?

The head of the northern area of Nigeria’s Christian Association told the BBC he believed mercenaries from neighboring Chad and Niger were involved. He said they had alerted the central government about training grounds in the northern state, but nothing had been done about it. Many people cross into Nigeria under the pretext of being pastoralists, but are in fact mercenaries. They enter along pastoralist routes, which are not monitored at all in this half-empty, extensive part of Africa, and leave unnoticed after carrying out their activities.

So just another bloody conflict in a remote corner of Africa, awful and incomprehensible? Which also happens to be a religious war? A kind of Crusade shifted to another time, another place. Not quite so neat and simple to package for worldwide media consumption.

Something of the origin of the conflict can be found in an interview the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, the administrative capital, John Onaiyekan, gave to Vatican Radio. He explained that the violence “is a classic conflict between herdsmen and farmers, only that the Fulani pastoralists are Moslem while the villages where the farmers have settled are Christian Berom.” He further noted that the international media is quick to “report that it is Christians and Moslems who are killing one another, but this is not true, because the killings are not caused by religion, but by social, economic, tribal and cultural issues.”

The Archbishop of Jos, Ignatius Ayan Kaigama, voiced similar sentiments in a peace committee meeting on Monday 8th. This committee was established by government and includes elders of the various tribes, as well as religious leaders and former civil and military directors. He told Aid to the Church in Need that it’s too simplistic to say it’s just a religious war. It was necessary to look beyond and work out a political and social solution. Besides, the violence is favored by the wide circulation of weapons in the area; and it’s very easy to find persons who will come to fight only for a handful of dollars.

It’s not all about religion. The edge of the Sahel does happen to coincide pretty much with the Christian-Moslem fault line, but it is also a place where rainfall is unpredictable, irregular and scanty, yet where there’s enough water for subsistence farming. Just like so many other parts of Africa, but here the Fulani, who have been Muslims for centuries, have lived and moved across, whereas the Christians are considered comparative newcomers. Ancestral land, the importance of cattle (for wealth, prestige and “bride-price”) the search for grazing land and access to water are factors always to be taken into account in this part of Africa, as in much of the continent.

Sorry to say, but the method of destruction is effective. Mud and straw huts are easy to burn, and no-one can hide in a fire. Machetes are horrific and savage, but from Rwanda through post-election Kenya, they are considered the weapon of choice. They are cheap, imported from East Asia, easy to transport (taking into account the easily-corruptible low-paid employees at border posts); and don’t need reloading, just sharpening on any of the huge rocks found all over Africa.

Isn’t this region of Nigeria another Sudan, ethnically and religiously divided? The Arab North and the Christian/animist South. Again, not quite so simple. It is true that Sudanese Christians have heretofore been generally treated as second-class citizens, when not persecuted. But it is also a lesser-known fact that the South is home to African Muslims, admittedly some, not all, forcibly converted. Darfur, about which little is heard now though still not at peace, was an ethnic issue, not a religious one. The ones being killed and driven out by the Arab soldiers, on account of the expanding population and the need for grazing land and water, were Africans, but Muslims, not Christians.

Tanzania, Uganda and parts of the Kenyan interior offer not only a quite different picture, but a sign of hope. In all these places, owing to their history of the past more than one hundred years, it’s not uncommon for Christians and Moslems to exist, peacefully, within the same family. In traditional Africa, which is most of Africa, ties of blood are stronger than any other, and respect for the beliefs of others is generally taken for granted. In addition, inter-faith peace initiatives are set up to deal with local conflicts, and Christians and Moslems work together to provide humanitarian aid in times of famine and natural disasters.

And if these countries became predominantly Muslim? Wouldn’t they impose “sharia” law on everyone, including Christians? Recent history shows that this depends on the political leadership and the presumed reaction of Christians and other non-Muslims.

As Archbishop Kaigama says: “we have to look beyond.” Africa is never quite what is seems to be.

Martyn Drakard is the Spero correspondent in Africa.