News arrives from Lagos that the Nigerian police have issued a stern warning against reprisal attacks on South Africans, while a British envoy urges calm. One must ask: is this a sensible plea for peace, or a desperate attempt to paper over the cracks in a post-colonial project that is rapidly dissolving into farce? The answer, as always, is both.
We live in an age of performative outrage and collective amnesia. The latest flare-up, triggered by attacks on Nigerian businesses and citizens in South Africa, has seen the predictable cycle of vengeance and counter-vengeance. Nigerian youths, inflamed by social media footage of burned shops and looted goods, demand retaliation. The police, ever the voice of fragile order, warn that such reprisals will be met with the full force of the law. Meanwhile, a British envoy, presumably reclining in an air-conditioned office in Abuja, delivers the boilerplate message: “Let us not descend into chaos.”
One cannot help but think of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, where he observed that the Roman Empire’s provinces, once bound by law and loyalty, degenerated into fractious rivalries as central authority waned. The British Commonwealth, that peculiar hangover of empire, is suffering a similar fate. Here we have two nations, Nigeria and South Africa, both heirs to the British imperial legacy, both grappling with the absurdities of borders drawn in London, and both locked in a cycle of mutual contempt that would be farcical if it were not so tragic.
The Nigerian response to South African xenophobia is understandable, even if misguided. When a neighbour kicks your dog, you do not burn down your own house. Yet the logic of reprisal is older than civilisation; it is the bedrock of the blood feud, the tribal vendetta that modern statehood was supposed to supplant. And here we see the failure of the nation-state concept in Africa: the state claims a monopoly on violence, but the people, feeling abandoned, take justice into their own hands.
What of the British envoy? His plea for calm is the empty rhetoric of a man whose empire no longer exists. The United Kingdom, itself riven by Brexit and Scottish separatism, has no moral authority to lecture anyone on unity. The envoy’s words are a ghost, a spectre of a time when a telegram from Whitehall could stop a war. Now, they are merely noise.
Let us not forget the economic dimension. Nigeria and South Africa are economic rivals, vying for dominance in a continent that is perpetually sold as the “next big thing” but remains mired in corruption, inequality, and resource curses. The attacks on Nigerian businesses in South Africa are not random; they are the resentful spasms of a struggling economy where locals see foreigners as stealing jobs and opportunities. It is the same ugly populism that fuels anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and America.
The deeper problem is intellectual decadence. We have abandoned the idea of civic nationalism for a primordial tribalism dressed in modern clothes. The educated elites in both countries—the ones who send their children to British schools and buy London property—speak of pan-Africanism while their compatriots burn each other’s shops. They tweet platitudes about “ubuntu” and “brotherhood” while the police prepare for the inevitable violence.
What is to be done? First, we must admit that the Commonwealth is a sham. It provides no real mechanism for dispute resolution, no binding arbitration, no collective security. It is a club for former colonies to reminisce about cricket and tea. Second, we need a new kind of politics, one that transcends the borders drawn by dead Europeans. But that would require a revolution in thinking, and revolutions are messy things.
In the meantime, the Nigerian police will warn, the British envoy will urge calm, and the cycle will continue. The only certainty is that the fires of reprisal will burn again, and we will all pretend to be surprised. As Gibbon wrote, “History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Today’s news is merely another entry in that endless ledger.
