Applications for identity in the IBB autobiography, Farood Kperogi

The autobiography of the former “president” Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida has already been analyzed for his selfish mendacia, moral spinness, exasperating insensitivity, self-cornering and posthumous posthumous stripes of tail of dead colleagues.

I will not revisit these points here. As someone who has an academic interest for which he is working on a rhetorical book of the construction of collective identity in Nigeria, I was attracted by the ibb self-defines of his identity in his autobiography.

It was Gimba Kakanda, Sa, to the vice -president and former newspaper editorialist, who first accelerated my appetite in this regard in his Facebook update on February 19th.

Kakanda had read an early copy of the IBB autobiography and had written this intriguing sum of it: “It is a journey that begins with her origins, as the son of a Gbagyi woman, and leads to the questions of June 12: the answers you will have to read to find out on its own”.

In a column of February 15, 2020 entitled “true ethnic origins of the previous presidents and heads of state of Nigeria”, I had observed that “the ethnic identity of IBB is surprisingly a magnet for controversy and speculation. It was called Gbagyi (which people of Hausa calls Gwari), cloud and even Yoruba of Ogbomoso or Osogbo. Biographers at different times that his immediate ancestors were Hausas da Kano who emigrated to what is now the state of the Niger.

I was curious to know if Ibb admitted that his maternal filiation was Gbagyi (or Gwari). In reality he did it. But while he is very specific on his maternal descent line, he was vague for the ethnic identity of his paternal ancestors.

This is how he describes his paternal ancestors, starting with his grandfather: “Snipts of details that I heard suggested that before it was a little a vagabond, migrating from Sokoto to Kano and Kontagora and settled in Wushishi”.

Contrast it with the specificity with which it describes its maternal inheritance: “Apparently, [my grandfather] I met his future wife, a young Gwari girl named Halima, in Wushishi, and since his future mother -in -laws would have allowed him to marry his daughter only if he had agreed to do his home in Wushishi, he promptly obeyed their conditions before settling in Wushishi and marrying his beautiful wife, Halima. “

In another description of his maternal descent by Gwari, he is informative and specific: “But before leaving, my father met and married a beautiful Gwari girl with a clear skin, Inna Aishatu, who would become my mother”.

Her paternal grandmother was a beautiful Gwari woman and her mother was a “beautiful Gwari girl with light skin”. Why did he need to attract attention to their lust and complexion?

Why did he retain these details about his grandfather and father? Sokoto, which according to him is the apparent root of his paternal origin, was populated both by the Fulani and by Hausa in the “subsequent part of the 19th century” when his grandfather left her for Kano and subsequently Wushishi.

Although the whole marriage between Hausa and Fulani has started to intensify at this moment, people have still identified their legacy through their fathers. Ethnic identities or labels were not ighenate. His father Hausa or Fulani?

Perhaps, perhaps, he replied obliquely to this question by recalling the attention on the clear skin of his mother of Gwari for free to let it know that his light complexion is inherited from his mother since the Fulani are stereotypically with clear skin?

Well, Ibb told a biographer that his great -grandfather came from the village of Kumuria [Kumurya?] In the state of Kano, from where he went to Sokoto. But in his autobiography, he mentions only his grandfather who migrates from Sokoto to Kano and subsequently to Wushishi. Is this intentional and strategic paternal ancestral ambiguity?

Let’s see tests of identity anxieties in the life of Ibb after leaving his cultural cocoon of Niger. Until 23 years when he returned from India as second lieutenant, his name was Ibrahim Badamasi, Badamasi was the name of his father.

“However,” he writes, “before setting myself hard at the first brigade, a particular accident led me to add” Babangida “to my name. During the official commitments that led to my deployment to Kaduna, agents who confused the name Yoruba, Gbadamosi, with my surname,” Badamasi “, they repeated me if I was Yoruba. The military. since that question persisted (and since I knew I wasn’t Yoruba!), I decided to face the other name of my father as my surname.

Three things came out after reading this part of the book. First of all, I find it intriguing that he did not hesitate to tell us about the ethnic identity of his mother and paternal grandmother and even deciding for a Yoruba identity that he knew he would bind him, but chose to hide his paternal ethnic identity.

Secondly, Ibb does not mention Babangida as the other name of his father when the reader meets him for the first time in the book. Identifies his father like Muhammad Badamasi, not Babangida Badamasi. Perhaps this oversight is attributable to sloppy writing (ghost).

Third, Gbadamosis is not, rigorously, a name Yoruba. It is the Yoruba abometitation of Badamasi, which is intended as a Muslim name in Nigeria. Many people in the north -ovest of Nigeria, from where he says that his paternal roots have sprung up, bear the name.

When I wrote of unusual Muslim names in Nigeria who do not seem to have any link with the rest of the Muslim world, including “Badamase”, readers who are familiar with Badamase’s etymology told me that the name (which was probably a variant of Badmasi) belongs to Badmasi, belonging to Badmasi, belonging to Badmasi, belonging to Badmasi, belonging to Badmasi, Badmasi, belonging to Badmasi, belonging to Badmasi, belonging to Badmasi, belonging to Badmasi, belonging to Badmasi, belonging to Badmasi.

The book, a sufi poem, is used as a resource for Arab Vocabulary lessons. Over time, it became popularly known as Badamase, from the name of its author.

I found no academic corroboration for the statement according to which Badamasi is the name of an Arab poet, but there is a Muslim scholar and Ilorin poet of the late nineteenth century with the name of Badamase whose poems are often used to improve the Arab vocabulary and are a firm point in the curriculum of traditional Islamic schools. But it is not clear if he is the original bearer of the name.

Badamasi was Yorubized in Gbadamosi and subsequently anglicalized in Badmus in the land of Yoruba.

. Currently, Muslim names, which should transcend, even neutralize, ethnicity, at least on the surface, can become the bearers of the weight of ethnicity in Nigeria. There are notions of “Muslim names of Yoruba” not only for their peculiar housing Yoruba, but because of their higher frequency of the usual one among the Yoruba Muslims.

For example, many Muslims in the North and Muslims Yoruba have concluded, without a grove of evidence, that the speaker of the Chamber of Representatives Tajudeen Abbas is a man from Zaria di Yoruba because “Tajudeen” occurs more frequently among the Muslims of Yoruba than among the Muslims who make Hausa.

But Tajudeen Abbas is a prince Zaria. A friend of mine publisher from Yoruba rejected when I said that the speaker was at least paternally Fulani asking which man Fulani or Hausa I knew who he brought the name Tajudeen.

I mentioned Tajudaen Dantata. I therefore asked if he thought the dangled family was Yoruba because they called one of their Tajudeen offspring. This concluded the conversation.

Dr. Raji Bello, a man from Fulani from Yola, also speaks of how he is often mistaken for a Yoruba man because people assume that Raji is a Muslim name exclusively Yoruba even if it is a Muslim name commonly born from the Muslims of South Africa and West Africa.

Dr. Bello resisted the type of impulse to which Ibb sold. Once he said he was recommended by an elderly man in Zaria to change his name in Rabiu. But he took his name from one of his ancestors, an important Muslim scholar of the nineteenth century in what is now Adamawa named Modibbo Raji.

In the end, Ibb described his father as a “messenger/interpreter” in the office of the colonial district but did not say what he interpreted. Since he had no western education and did not speak English, he translated Gbagyi, the language of his mother, in Hausa or vice versa?

Well, I’m not finished reading the book.

■ Kperogi is a complete professor of journalism and media emerging at the Kennesaw State University in Georgia, in the United States.

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