A United States-based Professor of journalism and emerging media, Farooq Kperogi, has described the reintroduced Nigeria’s national anthem as self humiliating, saying he will never sing or stand up for it…..READ FULL ARTICLE HERE
It was reported that the President Bola Tinubu-led Nigerian government had a few days brought back the 1960 independence national anthem following the passage of its bill by the National Assembly.
But reacting to the development in his Saturday Nigerian Tribune’s column, Kperogi, who is a Professor at Keenesaw State University, said the national anthem has brought him shame.
“My column on the back page of Saturday Tribune about the new regressive, self-humiliating Nigerian national anthem, which I will never sing or stand up for whenever I am in Nigeria,” he said.
According to the Kwara-born scholar, “Nothing in my adult life has made me more ashamed to be a Nigerian and more inclined to completely divest my emotions from Nigeria than the readoption of “Nigeria, We Hail Thee,” a colonially created national anthem whose first stanza drips wet with the spit of racist condescension, gender exclusion, and stodgy, ungainly archaisms.
“First, it’s inexcusable national self-humiliation to discard a home-made national anthem, irrespective of its defects, for one that was made by an imperialist whose influence we’re supposed to be independent of. That instantiates a phenomenon that social anthropologists call cultural cringe,” he said.
Kperogi said the new national anthem brought back the memories of brazen dominance of Nigeria by western powers.
“I am mortified that the very first stanza of our national anthem derogates our humanity. I have written multiple articles on what I have called the vocabularies of racial differentiation and exclusion in which I have repeatedly pointed out that “tribe” and “native” are racist words that white people reserve only for people they consider inferior, and that their appearance in Nigeria’s first national anthem was one of the reasons for the anthem’s rejection in 1978.
“I’ll repeat some of the things I’ve written over the last few years on this issue and hope that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu sees reason to rescind the readoption of this denigrating British anthem written for Nigeria.
” Shorn of all pretenses, “tribe” basically means backward, primitive nonwhite people. Let no one deceive you that the word means anything other than that in the English language,” he said…..READ FULL ARTICLE HERE
Leave a Reply