Documentation, development, and ideology in the ... - Roger Blench

Documentation, development, and ideology in the northwestern Kainji languages 107
The tendency to privilege religion as the source of this violence is found in
both international and local media. Concerning Nigeria as a whole, Blench
writes:
Although in principle, individuals are free to adopt what religion
they like, in reality, particular ethnic groups tend to either adopt
Islam or one species of Christianity. As a consequence, ethnic
conflicts often become rewritten as religious conflicts, because this
suits the agenda of urban elites [author’s italics] (Blench 2003a: 9).
The danger of such a re-interpretation is that conflicts then become more
likely to spread beyond the boundaries of the ethnic groups, potentially to any
part of the Nigeria. Blench (2003a) gives the following example involving the
Tyap people of the Middle Belt:
...the conflicts in Zangon Kataf in 1992, were essentially between
the indigenous people, the Tyap, and the Hausa traders who had
been resident in the town since the nineteenth century. Old
resentments about unequal access to resources and the relative
wealth of the migrants came to a head in violent riots with loss of
lives and property. However, this was soon interpreted as a
religious conflict and in Kaduna there were further riots which had
a Christian/Muslim character (Blench 2003a: 9).
Similarly, violence involving Christian farmers and Fulani pastoralists (almost
all of whom are Muslims) often has as its root cause conflict over natural
resources (Blench 2003b, 2004). Certainly conflict also occurs between
different ethnic groups who share a single religion – see Blench (2004) for the
fraught relations between the Hausa farmers and Fulani herders in northern
Kebbi State (i.e. north of the Kainji-speaking area), virtually all of whom are
Muslims.
It would not be true to say that religion is irrelevant to such disputes.
Differences in culture arising from the religious divide may make it harder to
resolve the initial competition for resources, and increase the likelihood that it
will result in violence (Blench 2004: 28) – and rewriting such conflicts as
religious quarrels can serve to transform them into just that. Since 2005,
emissaries from other regions of Africa and the Middle East have ensured the
financing of radical urban groups whose agenda is far from the ethnic issues
more characteristic of the zone. The terrorist activities of militant Islamist
groups such as Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (better known as
Boko Haram ‘Western education is forbidden’) have little to do with the
ethnolinguistic makeup of Nigeria. The cumulative effect of decades of