Nobody Asked Me, But…
“Ah, that man is very detribalised.”
In Nigeria, this is almost always a compliment.
It is what we say about the politician who has friends from every part of the country, the businessman whose boardroom is a miniature Nigeria, the public servant who does not appoint only people from her village, or the man who married a woman from another ethnic group. He eats everybody’s food, speaks a few Nigerian languages and feels at home anywhere in the country.
He is, we say approvingly, so detribalised.
Except that detribalised does not mean any of those things.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines detribalise as “to make members of a tribe stop following their traditional customs or social structure.” (I checked. No dictionary records the meaning Nigerians give it.)
In other words, it describes a process by which a person or community becomes detached from the customs, social structures, and institutions associated with the group to which they belong. In colonial Africa, European officials and scholars used “detribalisation” particularly in discussions of Western education and Africans who no longer fitted neatly into the social structures through which colonial authorities sought to govern them.
In Nigeria, the British described educated Nigerians, including descendants of Africans who had been enslaved and later liberated, and people who emerged from early Christian missionary activity, as “detribalised natives.” Even when a Nigerian had become sufficiently educated and Westernised to escape the category of “tribal”, he was still, apparently, a native!
At some point in Nigeria, we turned the word into a compliment. Recently, Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, mourning the late Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, reached for it. In a statement, he described Tukur as “a detribalised Nigerian, great patriot and towering national figure whose contributions to the country transcended ethnic and political boundaries.” It was meant as praise.
Another thing we ought to be careful with is the word tribe itself. We use it constantly in Nigeria to describe Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Tiv, Ijaw, Efik, Kanuri and hundreds of other peoples. But tribe is a very imprecise word for what we are trying to describe. These are peoples and ethnic communities, with their own languages, histories, political traditions, religions, social institutions and internal differences. Many also contain numerous subgroups with identities of their own. “Ethnicity” is the more useful term, in my opinion.
And there is also the incongruity of singing “Though tribe and tongue may differ, / In brotherhood, we stand” as part of our national anthem. I know the colonial anthem is making a point about national unity despite differences of language and ethnic identity. The incongruity is that we are using “tribe” as a shorthand for ethnicity in 2026.
A closer examination of the word makes our Nigerian usage of detribalised rather peculiar. British indirect rule relied heavily on chiefs, customary authorities and institutions that colonial officials classified as “traditional”. At the same time, urbanisation and Western education were producing Africans who did not fit neatly into those structures. Detribalised belonged to a world in which Europeans were deciding what counted as “tribal”, what counted as “modern”, and how Africans who moved between those worlds should be understood.
We have carried the word on our heads long after the colonisers left.
To most of us, even the very educated, a Nigerian is “detribalised” because he has demonstrated that he can relate to those beyond his ethnic group. But notice what the word actually means: The admirable Nigerian is one who is detached from his particular identity!
The underlying assumption is stranger still. Knowing less about your own history does not make you more enlightened. Familiarity with another culture does not require estrangement from your own. Nor should our former colonisers remain the final arbiters of sophistication or morality. The last bit is a Nobody Asked Me, But…for another day. For now, let’s talk about detribalisation.
We have taken tolerance and called it detribalisation. We have taken broadmindedness and called it detribalisation. We have taken the simple ability to see another Nigerian as an equal and given it a word that suggests the shedding of one’s own identity.
And because we have never examined the word closely, almost no one notices the contradiction, and the word has been carrying a meaning completely alien to it.
So, I have a small linguistic suggestion: Can we say what we actually mean?
If a person does not discriminate against Nigerians from other ethnic groups, say so. If he has friends from everywhere, say so. If he believes Nigeria belongs to all of us, by all means, say so. If he can be proudly Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ijaw, Tiv or whatever else he is, without believing that his identity makes him superior to anyone else, say that too.
Maybe the ideal is not the “detribalised” Nigerian, but the Nigerian who is confident in who he is and has no problem making room for those who come from elsewhere.
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Image: Emmanuel Ikwuegbu on Unsplash
