There is nothing about the bloody legacies of Jos that would elevate the city in the foreseeable future to the legendary status of such global melting pots of culture as Lagos or London, New York or Rome. It was in Jos that Hausa-Fulani settlers inaugurated their now-infamous pastime of ethnic and religious cleansing with the coldblooded murders of hundreds of Igbo Christian settlers in 1945, following the successful Nnamdi Azikiwe-led anti-colonial, nationwide labour strike. It was at the Jos Railway Terminus that Jihadists chanting “Allahu Akbar” disemboweled pregnant Igbo women in 1966 and packaged one of the severed heads of the unborn babies for special delivery to the Biafran leader Odumegwu-Ojukwu. It was in Jos that Islamist mobs held down Igbo female students to be publicly raped by lepers. It was then Lt. Col. Jack Gowon (army chief of staff), Lt. William Walbe (commander of security escort), and Sgt. Jerry Useni (driver) – all from Jos – that connived to betray and kill their Igbo boss and personal benefactor, Maj. Gen. J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi (Nigeria’s first military president), in the Hausa-Fulani-led counter coup of July 29, 1966. It was on the hallowed grounds of the University of Jos on Bauchi Road that marauding Jihadists, with college students in their fold, unleashed ferocious horsewhips on Dr. Willy Umezinwa, a venerable Igbo professor of linguistics. 

In all these, Jos indigenes said nothing and did nothing, while their ancestral land was polluted and its authority taken over by dubious strangers who revel in the fetish of mind control and bestial power. Like sirens and leeches, these radical strangers continued to feed on the blood of the gullible and to thrive where they did not sow. The violence and killings continued unabated as seasonal orgies for seventy years till the present era of Al Qaeda-engineered, Boko Haram terrorism, which targets every Christian, every Northern minority, every southerner, and every moderate Muslim who dares to challenge the brutality. In these seven decades, not one Islamist arsonist or murderer has ever been brought to book. The culprits who were apprehended by the usual “joint task forces” of the police and the military have been allowed to evaporate with the morning dew of the very next sunrise, as if they never existed and their holocausts never happened. No semblance of an explanation has ever been proffered and no documentation of their incarceration has survived.  

My book, Igbos of Northern Nigeria (1996), which historicises the migration and persecution of the Igbo in the North, beginning in Jos, is a precursor to Oyegbile’s book. I was not born in Jos like Oyegbile. Like him, however, I am a proud alumnus of the University of Jos. I also lived in Jos for ten years and in the old Gongola for one year. The Igbo and Yoruba ethnic migrants settled in the modern Jos city at the same historical period, having been lured to the place both by the power of colonial developments and by fate. Until their very recent collective exposure to the borderless threats of the Boko Haram, Igbo and Yoruba experiences in Jos have been rather variegated. Yet, in spite of all odds, their love for the now faded glory of Jos had been steadfast.

In the ten years that I lived in Jos, there was no year that there was not an Islamic religious riot, leading to mass looting, arson, and killing. Every Friday afternoon, prayer time at the Jos Central Mosque and the surrounding mosques almost always harboured the potential for a bloody explosion. The broad streets of Bauchi Road and Masallacin Juma’a seemed tailor-made for the ‘protest’ marches of Islamic ‘almajiri’ urchins. Both roads ultimately lead to the Terminus Modern Market, with its hundreds of Igbo traders that were always already the targets of looting and the arsonist’s pyrotechnics. That contemporary American-type mall, the only one of its kind in Nigeria at the time, with its two floors and hanging loops, has been razed to the ground. 

At least, fifty percent of the Igbo businessmen and civil service professionals I used to know in Jos have escaped to Abuja, Lagos, southeast, and even beyond the shores of Nigeria since the last torching of the Terminus market. Many of those I knew in the city have lost lives and/or properties between 1997 and 2012. My own former lodging at Farin Gada, which was owned by a most genial Yoruba elder, was razed by an Islamist mob in January this year. Majority of the people I still know in the city now live in a state of perpetual fear, and many of them are looking for an opportunity to leave the city and the North. I have read several live, on-the-spot, action-time, texts and Facebook messages from people cowering in cellars or iron-barred rooms while prowling Jihadists burned and killed outside their doors.

The high potential for the demise of Jos is something that has never seemed probable to all those who had neither experienced nor considered themselves the targets of its constant bloodlust since 1945. First, other Nigerians had assumed that the Igbo victims brought death upon themselves with “their material greed.” Second, the northerners assumed that the southern victims brought death upon themselves with “their migrant adventurism.” Third, the Muslims assumed that Christian ‘infidels’ deserved their bloody “fate in the Jihad.” Now that those blood hounds, who apparently love their God more than they love human life, have gone after the heretofore complacent and acquiescent minorities, the traditional owners of the place who were their former allies, everyone assumes that a new “blood-dimmed tide is loosed” upon the Plateau. 

Senator Ndoma-Egba’s rhetorical dilemma is clearly located in the ‘miraginary’ delusion of ‘meconnaissance’ and willful denial. To those over whose bloodied heads the Islamists have rained their Friday doom-chants for seven decades, there was never such a place of glory as Ndoma-Egba would call the “Jos of old,” and the city had provided them neither handshake nor home nor laughter nor love nor peace, but always a perennial fear and blood and death and loss. In fact, Jos (especially since the name’s bastardisation from the native ‘Gwosh’ to the Hausa ‘Jos’) is a one-syllable word like ‘loss’ with which it shares similar letters and sound and brevity and, evidently, character. It didn’t have to take the blatant murders of Senator Gyang Dantong and Honourable Gyang Fulani, prominent sons-of-the-soil, to see that the beauty of Jos was the beauty of a painted tomb. Jos, like a house of ghosts, was a phantasm that the averted gaze mistakes for light.

Source: Daily Times Nigeria.