The Role of Ethnicity in Nigerian Education

Ethnicity and tribalism have frequently been used interchangeably, although the former has tended to acquire a neutral connotation with a scholarly flavor and the latter a pejorative meaning as a populist designation, especially when exploited by African politicians in political campaigns. All African nations are artificial polities fashioned by the colonial powers for their own administrative conveniences; and they are all marked by a high degree of ethnic divergence. Each country has a multiplicity of ethnic groups with different cultural histories, languages, religions, and value systems. There are no distinct class demarcations in the Western sense such as the upper, middle, and lower. The emergence of the middle class is only a very recent phenomenon. As pointed out by Smythe,1 in Nigeria class leveling is not the traditional form of social stratification. Rather, age, title, and lineage are the historical determinants of stratification; and individual achievement-especially in the Eastern Sector-is more relevant to a man's social and political status in the South than it is in the North. Wallerstein2 contends that ethnicity is both functional and dysfunctional. In a traditional rural setting, an individual is first a member of his or her family, then of a tribe; tribal and family loyalties are supportive of each other to some extent. Detribalization, or shifts in these loyalties, resulted from the colonial rule and the consequent process of urbanization. The factors responsible for urban migration include the desire to find better and more rewarding jobs; to obtain better education, since educational institutions tend to concentrate in cities; to escape from the tyranny of excessive family responsibilities; and to seek political power. Wallerstein further maintains that ethnic groups can be defined

Colonialism · Distrust · Ethnic group · Middle class · Nationalism · Pejorative · Political science · Politics · Social science · Social stratification · Sociology · Solidarity · Tribalism · African Education and Politics · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law

• The good, the bad, and the ugly in the melting pot

  Open Access•Olusoji George, Olusoji James George et al.•Equal Opportunities International•2017

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