Kada NGBALE

Urban/street photographers, show us your best city reflections today!

Urban/street photographers, show us your best city reflections today!

Today on African classics ✨

City keeps getting to our back 4. I'm sorry but Arteta is playing a dicey game, and not even maximally in front. We're playing well but it's gonna take a toll.

"Pressure is a privilege" Golden Globe winning actor Tom Hiddleston gives his thoughts on the huge clash between Manchester City and Arsenal 🎬

The Hausa-Fulani Debate This trending debate about the two ethnic groups dancing on the edge of an unmistakable rupture has, to me, always been a debate about political convenience disguised as ethnic certainty. They are two distinct groups, marked by different linguistic and cultural idiosyncrasies. Whatever the Fulani share with the Hausa, they also share, in one form or another, with other groups, just as the Hausa share traits with peoples beyond the Fulani. The difference is that these other groups rarely lose their consciousness of self. The traditional institutions across many northern communities are headed by monarchs of Fulani ancestry, and this is true even among the Nupe emirates in Nigeria. The Etsu Nupe in Bida and the Emir of Lapai, for instance, have distinctly Fulani ancestry, yet neither hyphenates his ethnic identity. They identify simply as Nupe, and that is the end of the matter. There is nothing in the cultural expression of a Hausa mixed with Fulani that is not, in similar ways, expressed among the Nupe mixed with Fulani. Culture is fluid. Identity is fluid too. We should be honest enough to admit this. Hausa is, of course, culturally magnetic, and that is why it has succeeded in becoming the Bermuda Triangle of many languages in northern Nigeria. Many of us grew up struggling to balance Hausa and our native language, trying not to lose one in the dominance of the other. But that cultural force is not enough reason to reduce Hausa to a mere language, as some tend to theorise, or to deny that it belongs to a distinct people. That would be like arguing that the universality of English means there are no distinct English people. A language can travel widely, absorb others, and still remain the language of a people whose distinct identity does not vanish with its spread. If these Nupe royal families, many of whom are patrilineally Fulani but maternally Nupe, could identify simply as Nupe and nothing more, then I believe every group can do the same—to choose a part that aligns with their reality. To me, that offers a practical template for integration among us. What it exposes, instead, is the poverty of a social arrangement in denial of lived identity, where accommodation rests solely on the father’s origin. That may satisfy the logic of patriarchy, but it does not satisfy the logic of justice, social reality, or national cohesion. We live, however, in a patrilineal society that compels the child to inherit the father’s identity, and this logic extends even into our notions of indigeneship and citizenship. Unless we are prepared to uphold that rigidity consistently, or else allow all of us to bear the identities of both parents, we are simply living a lie. My objection to the Hausa-Fulani categorisation is not that it is inherently flawed, for it reflects a social reality many of us already recognise. It is that the arrangement is self-serving, privileging one set of interethnic identities while denying the same legitimacy to others. Our society would be far more honest with itself if it embraced our maternal identities and values just as seriously as it does the paternal. That would not only weaken this patriarchal inheritance of identity, but also deepen integration. I made this argument years ago in a column where I advanced the case for bilateral descent. Every child is the product of two parents, two lineages, two inheritances. In many cases, indeed in most, the child is first shaped by the mother’s language, habits, and culture before any wider socialisation takes hold. It makes no sense, therefore, that a child of a Yoruba father and a Hausa mother, born and bred in Hausa society, formed by its language and customs, should be told to return to a father’s village he has never known whenever questions of belonging or political participation arise. That contradiction is one of the quiet engines of our national polarisation. 1/2