A few days ago, a suicide bomber got on a luxury commuter bus in Northern Nigeria and blew himself up, along with 60 people who were heading home from work.
It didn’t get much publicity. African casualties rarely do, especially when there’s a depressing religious angle. The suicide bomber came from the Northern Nigerian Islamist group “Boko Haram.” The name is interesting: “Boko” comes from the English word “book,” as pronounced by the Hausa, the biggest northern ethnic group. “Haram” (“forbidden”) is an Arabic word, the Wahhabis’ favorite word of all. When people talk about “Northern Nigeria” they mean “Muslim Nigeria.” There are three big divisions in the country: The Muslim/Hausa North, the Christian/Igbo South, and the Yoruba West. (The Yoruba are the only big group that’s mixed, with Christians and Muslims). Boko Haram blew up those buses because the people on them were going to an Igbo/Christian neighborhood of Kano, a Muslim/Northern city.
That’s already more than most squeamish Westerners want to know. “Ah, it’s religious…” is about all they need to hear before settling back into their comfy stances. Conservatives figure it’s just one more proof that all Muslims are crazy. The left mumbles “Islamophobia” and tries to change the subject to Palestine. So from left to right on your radio dial, there’s not a lot of what my social-studies teacher called “hunger for knowledge.”
I loved NSFWcorps, didn't make the crossover to pando. But the war nerd was consistently on point. I felt like he argued convincingly in a narrative fashion from facts, and it seemed natural to appreciate his stance on things (American drones, there were a bunch of [48 hour] links I enjoyed). The thing about Wikipedia is that it's nearly indespensible for getting a snapshot of things, it's so handy for looking up references that someone drops in an essay, but it's dry. I could try and look up Nigeria to try and understand it's place in the world and how it's doing internally, but I would never take the Demographics and History and Government components and be able to picture it as the war nerd paints it here. I sometimes have no idea where to start when I try to understand something. Case in point: Hinduism. The Wikipedia article on it couldn't possibly do it justice, and I've been looking all my life to understand Hinduism the way I "understand" Nigeria currently by way of the war nerd while only having Wikipedia as a starting point. Sorry, tangent. It's a bit heartbreaking, to put it mildly, but I can think of no evidence to believe otherwise.The US was neutral, too busy with the idiotic distraction in Vietnam to pay any attention…or maybe the US was also in favor of keeping Africa a continent full of coups and poverty. All I know is that the more I look at the recent history of Africa, the more I see unanimous opposition to the strong peoples like the Igbo and the Tutsi. Seems like we like our Africans hungry and corrupt.
Funny that he says that, since I had just recently read an article talking about how that was misinformation. It seems like he's usually on top of little bits like that.“Boko” comes from the English word “book,” as pronounced by the Hausa, the biggest northern ethnic group.
Often said? A dangerous phrase. This is how we end up with lazy reporters who parrot what they read on Wikipedia or what they read in other news stories (who were often, in turn, parroting from Wikipedia or other reporters.) Amen. Christ.Starting in 2009, Wikipedia's article on the Hausa "Boko alphabet" incorrectly asserted that the word derived from "book." It was corrected two days ago, when someone noticed Newman's article. Wikipedia's entry on Boko Haram likewise carried the falsehood for at least a year and a half until it was partially corrected at the end of last month, though allowing a falsehood to persist on equal footing with the truth: "The term "Boko Haram" comes from the Hausa word boko figuratively meaning "western education" (often said to be literally "alphabet", from English "book", but the Hausa expert Paul Newman says it derives from a Hausa word with meanings such as "fraud" as "inauthenticity".)"