World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [59]
18 In any event, there is no denying the bottom line. The Ibo are a disproportionately dynamic, urban, and prosperous minority—not just in Nigeria, but everywhere they go. In West Africa it is often said that the banks in countries like Benin or Côte d’Ivoire would collapse if the Ibo withdrew their deposits. In the United States there are strikingly successful Ibo communities in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, and other major cities.
Indeed, not only the Ibo but other Nigerian ethnic groups like the Hausa and the Yoruba have become the preeminent petty traders of West Africa. While the far more lucrative import-export business is dominated by Lebanese with ties to the global marketplace (to be discussed below), a stroll through the alleyways of any West African market makes clear that most goods bought and sold by the “mama benzes” and “marché mamas” aren’t exactly part of the technologized global marketplace. Rather they’re the products of West African, and particularly Nigerian, industry.
Nigeria is the economic powerhouse among the West African states, with a towering industrial leg up on the other countries in the region. In part because of this industrial head start, Nigerians dominate petty trading throughout the cities and villages of West Africa. It’s not unusual to find Ibo selling auto parts in the most remote village markets of Benin, Togo, or Burkina Faso. Ibo merchants travel with their goods, ferrying the products of the Nigerian auto parts industry across the West African bush because they have the contacts, know the terrain, and can do it most cheaply.
In the stalls of Marché Dantokpa in Cotonou, Benin, one is more likely to hear the merchants speaking Pidgin English, Ibo, or Yoruba (another Nigerian language) than French, the national language of Benin, or Fon, the language of the ethnic majority. The spillover from Nigerian industry ultimately ends up in markets like Dantokpa, not quite global but regional in reach, where the local equivalent of the Western-educated MBA is the Nigerian with family contacts on both sides of the border who uses her familiarity with the corrupt and often dangerous Nigerian highway to her advantage. At Dantokpa’s taxi station, cars leave regularly for Nigerian border towns, Lagos, and beyond. The Nigerians return burdened with cheap goods that eventually make their way, usually through Nigerian hands, to the smallest market towns in West Africa. Indeed, while West Africa has not yet undergone the homogenization (with an American face) caused elsewhere by global markets, it has seen a regional homogenization (with a Nigerian face): There may not be a McDonald’s on every corner, but in every West African market Nigerians sell the same goods from the same factories at the same prices. Hence, the ubiquitous plastic African sandals and housewares decorated with the faces of former Nigerian strongmen.
The global marketplace has so far had minimal effects in West Africa, benefiting principally European and Lebanese expatriates and local political elites. But indigenous West Africans are connected in a vibrant regional marketplace, dominated by the Ibo and other ethnic groups from Nigeria. These groups have created ethnic enclaves in the region’s major cities that tend to be more ostentatious than the other neighborhoods, earning Nigerians a reputation as fierce hagglers and crafty traders. While wealth inequality is already stark in many cases, as globalization finally reaches African shores the disparities are likely to grow, enriching these groups that already know how to manipulate the markets.
The “Ibo of Cameroon” and
Other Successful Indigenous African Minorities
In the same half-admiring, half-insulting way that the Ibo are called the “Jews of Nigeria,” the “aggressive and commercially vigorous” Bamiléké are known as the “Ibo of Cameroon.” Even before independence in 1960 the Bamiléké had come to dominate petty