By Farooq A. Kperogi
When vigilantes incinerated traveling Hausa hunters in Uromi, Edo State, on the mistaken assumption that they were “Fulani herdsmen,” countless Hausaphone Muslim northerners sent the videos to me with commentaries that reeked of unappeasable wrath.
Because there is a 6- to 5-hour time difference between Atlanta and Nigeria, some of the people who shared the videos with me became noticeably impatient with the perceived delay in my response.
Frustrated by the lag in my intervention, they sent messages reminding me of my swift and impassioned condemnation of the May 2022 murder of Deborah Yakubu in Sokoto. They wondered aloud why, unlike my immediate reaction to that previous incident, I had not yet commented on these recent videos.
A few even recalled my January 1, 2011, column titled “Jos bombings: Can we for once be truthful?” where I denounced, in the strongest terms possible, the mass massacre of Jos Christians by a group that called itself Jama’atu Ahlus Sunnah Lid Da’awati Wal Jihad. (I’ve just been made aware of a similar mass murder in Plateau recently. I could republish my 2011 column, and most people won’t notice that it’s a 14-year-old piece except for some names).
Of course, they never reminded me of my swift, full-throated denunciation of the February 1, 2018, murder and burning of 7 innocent Fulani cattle herders in Benue “by people who have been programmed to associate criminality with all Fulani cattle herders,” as I pointed out in my February 10, 2018, column titled “News Media’s Cultivation of ‘Fulani Herdsmen’ Hysteria.”
The people who were impatient with me implied that I was deliberately courting the approval of Christians. In their view, this meant I was seeking validation or favor from the Christian community, possibly at the expense of my own religious identity. Essentially, they accused me of prioritizing external validation over internal solidarity, implying a certainnegligence or disregard for the sentiments and expectations of my own religious community.
Nonetheless, since the publication of my March 29 column, titled “Barbaric Mass Burning of Innocents in Edo,” scores of Christians routinely tag me to mass murders committed by Muslims against Christians and challenge me to objurgate them with the same passion as I did the Edo mass incineration.
It seems to me that public commentators unfairly shoulder a burden of intervention that should properly belong to people in positions of authority. Too often, it falls upon commentators to address and amplify crises, even though their roles are fundamentally different from those who wield executive power and influence.
Writing about the horrendous human tragedies that have increasingly become the signature of our national life in Nigeria imposes tremendous mental strain on me. It is emotionally draining and psychologically taxing to continually engage with, dissect, and articulate these disturbing events.
Nonetheless, I deeply understand the reasons behind distraught citizens’ desire to have their anguish acknowledged and amplified by individuals they perceive as having sizable platforms. They turn to public commentators because of their frustration with those in authority, who are perceived as detached, indifferent, or ineffective in responding adequately to their suffering.
Most importantly, though, our outrage toward mass murders often seems conditioned by whether the perpetrators differ from us in identity or affiliation. During Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency, for instance, I faced vicious personal attacks from northern Muslims for drawing attention to Boko Haram’s relentless massacres of Muslims in the North, massacres that many preferred to overlook.
Similarly, bandits in the North have consistently burned, slaughtered, and dismembered their victims, yet these atrocities rarely provoke widespread indignation or inspire righteous anger. Because the victims do not fit the narrative of northern Muslims being victimized by (southern) Christian aggressors, their suffering is met with muted concern at best and outright indifference at worst rather than outrage or vigorous outcry for intervention.
This dynamic is not unique to the Muslim North. In the Christian North, numerous lives are frequently lost in inter-ethnic communal violence. In these cases, however, both the victims and perpetrators typically share a common Christian identity.
As a result, the collective sense of hurt and urgency felt by communities within these areas is markedly diminished. The outrage and intensity of grief that would typically accompany violence perpetrated by Muslims against Christian communities is notably absent, which reflects how religious identities powerfully shape public empathy and indignation.
In the southeast, so-called unknown gunmen perpetrate shocking acts of brutality, including gruesome murders, against fellow Igbo people. But there is rarely any pressure or expectation placed upon commentators like me to amplify these events publicly or to demand action from authorities.
This selective silence, this inconsistency in how acts of violence are perceived and responded to, this tendency for our outrage to be contingent upon the identity dynamics between victims and perpetrators, is an instinctive, age-old, even evolutionary human trait about which psychologists and philosophers have written.
For example, in their Social Identity Theory formulation, Henri Tajfel and John Turner assert that we derive our sense of self from our membership of collective identities, and that attack on the collective triggers an intense emotional response but that intra-group violence, though troubling, is psychologically processed as an internal issue and thus evokes less public rage.
From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, we are hardwired to depend on group cohesion and cooperation and to be suspicious of outsiders. Thus, violence perpetrated by out-groups is perceived as a threat to group resources or status, which invokes defensive anger and intolerance.
Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Rorty have also written about the moral burden of “othering,” which refers to the process through which out-group members are mentally constructed as fundamentally incompatible or as morally deficient, thus deserving harsher judgment or reduced moral consideration.
The moral distance created by “othering” leads people to interpret out-group violence as evidence of moral depravity or inherent hostility. The result is that out-group violence elicits intense moral condemnation. Conversely, violence within the in-group, involving individuals perceived as morally closer, is more readily explained away, forgiven, or rationalized.
In communication scholarship, we also talk of selective perception. It is an instinctive cognitive bias that predisposes us to perceive reality in ways that reinforce and soothe our predetermined prejudices.
Related concepts are selective exposure (the tendency to see only those things that affirm our pre-set biases and to block out those that cause us cognitive dissonance) and selective retention (the tendency to remember only those things that confer psychic comfort to our sentiments and to forget those that don’t fit that frame).
We are more tolerant of and readier to justify hurtful words that come from our “friends” than we are of even less hurtful words that come from our “enemies.”
Psychologists who study cognitive biases point out that our default positions as humans is to support our kind, to selectively expose ourselves to and perceive, even retain, only those points of views and perspectives that reinforce our prejudices.
It’s often an unconscious process. And so, it takes nothing to be prejudiced. It’s effortless. What isn’t effortless is the capacity for conscious distancing, for dispassionate reflection, and for self-criticism.
It takes self-reflexivity and self-awareness to rise superior to the default impulses that so readily and so easily crowd and becloud our minds in moments of emotional tension. Very few are capable of this, and that’s why some people question the practical utility of the idea of deliberative democracy—the idea of government by rational conversation.
Because this is not unique to Nigeria, I hope humans can evolve to the point where we transcend these troubling predispositions.
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