By Uduma Kalu
Well, Obi, I am not trying to win an argument. But to help find a way, like you, out of our conundrum as a nation framed together from outside. I will like to hear your own solution.
You said I misread Bhabha. So I was forced to go online to look up what he said about fragments and nations. And what others said too in that direction.
Below has my finding.
But first. We have been making the Nigerian and other colonial African built nations possible for over a hundred years like Nigeria, for instance. Wars, election cancellation, power concentration, all manner of marginalization still prevail. The nation is hijacked and serves only outsider forces led by those you said were selected to serve other interests.
Achebe told me in South Africa that since we have been trying to make Nigeria work and it hasn't, let's try the Swiss presidential formula where power rotates among the regions.
Alex Ekwueme formulated the six political regions we have today in Nigeria. Achebe's idea was to use the Swiss model for power to rotate among the six regions. It hasn't worked. Rather, power rotates between North West and South West.
I'm not saying nothing is impossible. But for how long will we keep searching? The problem with us, I think, has been our mis understanding or misreading of the Zik idea of African super power. Zik actually caused that confusion. But taking his 1949 speech where he said fragments are nations, we build an African super power from that... a commonwealth of nations forming the super power. Of course, there will be strong nations that will steer the super power without being the behemoth.
Now, let me respond to you on Bhabha.
You are right that Bhabha describes the modern nation as an ambivalent site that links together diverse acts and actors. I never disputed that. Where I think you misread me is in assuming I said this makes nation impossible. I did not. I said Nigeria, as currently built, checks all the spots of that ambivalence — hybrid, unstable, and perpetually unfinished — and that we have paid the cost for over a hundred years trying to force it.
Let me quote Bhabha directly from the net, not my summary of him:
*1. Bhabha on the split nation:*
> "The problem is not simply the 'selfhood' of the nation as opposed to the 'otherness' of other nations. We are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population."
> "Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye." — Preface to _Nation and Narration_
That is the ambivalence you cited. The nation is split within itself. It is heterogeneous. It is not one organic essence.
*2. Bhabha on fragments as nations — his exact words:*
At the end of _The Location of Culture_, he deliberately closes his argument on the nation with this, which he says should be read "from the nation's edge, through the sense of the city, from the periphery of the people":
> "Fragments of a vessel in order to be articulated together must follow one another in the smallest details although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of making itself similar to the meaning of the original, it must lovingly and in detail form itself according to the manner of meaning, of the original, to make them both recognizable as the broken fragments of the greater language, just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel."
Fragments need not be like one another. Fragments _are_ the broken parts of the vessel. The nation is that vessel — a translation of fragments. In Bhabha's logic, fragments are nations because each carries the burden of meaning of the whole.
He makes this clearer:
> "It is the in-between space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture, and by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves."
The nation lives in that Third Space.
*3. Other sources who say fragments are nations:*
This is not Bhabha alone.
*Benedict Anderson, _Imagined Communities_:* "The nation is imagined as limited and sovereign... it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship." — Fragments imagining themselves as one.
*Partha Chatterjee, responding to Anderson and Bhabha:* "The most powerful as well as the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the modular forms of the national society propagated by the modern West." The fragment is where the creative nation lives.
*Prasenjit Duara:* "The nation is not an either/or category; fragments, local communities, diasporas are themselves nationed spaces that contest and constitute the nation-state."
So Obi, when you say "Nigeria checks in all the spots" of Bhabha's ambivalent, hybrid nation, you are confirming my point. Yes, it does. And that is why after over hundred years of wars, cancelled elections, looting, power concentration, it remains unfinished and hijacked — because we have tried to build a behemoth by suppressing fragments, rather than building a commonwealth FROM fragments. Building an empire called nation instead of allowing the fragments to decide
My reading of Zik's 1949 speech — fragments are nations — is that we should build the African superpower not as one behemoth state like China, but as a commonwealth of nations, where strong nations steer without swallowing the others. That was also Blyden's and the 19th century West African intellectuals' quest for a West African republic.
Zik's 8 regions in his _Political Blueprint_, which influenced Kalu Ezera's _Constitutional Developments in Nigeria_, was a productive guide, not an absolute one, as you said. Nations evolve dialectically. But the starting point is to admit fragments are nations.
That is all I have been saying.
Ndewo.
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