Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Igbo may have many different subgroups but they’re conscious of their own existence and other groups are conscious they exist. I’m sure there are liminal groups who are Igbo enough to be discriminated against in Hausa or Fulani areas but different enough that in majority Igbo areas they wouldn’t be considered “real” Igbo. Having fuzzy boundaries doesn’t disqualify an ethnic group from existence or we wouldn’t hav…
Have you considered that looking up things on the Internet is not exactly a suitable proxy for actually having experience with a situation? When I mentioned Western arrogance, I wasn't anticipating that I was going to run full-tilt into it immediately. > The Igbo may have many different subgroups but they’re conscious of their own existence and other groups are conscious they exist. I don't quite see how that has any…
You spoke of Nigeria’s 400 ethnic groups as if this was dispositive of the Igbo existing. Having subgroups does not mean the Igbo do not exist. Being in what is now Nigeria for less than a hundred years is equally irrelevant.
> As you said >> there's an ethnic group in my country - the Igbo - that are so pervasively, aggressively[0] entrepreneurial that it's become a meme. If you did not understand what I said, you might as well have said so rather than go on a Wikipedia binge to seem knowledgeable. That statement was referring to the society-wide master-apprentice system that the Igbo have, undeniably capitalist but inherently prioritizing the success of the collective over the success of the individual.
If you meant to write something different that’s fine but what you wrote is obviously true. Without regard to master apprentice models the Igbo do more buying and selling as middlemen, whether in wholesale or retail trade than other Nigerian ethnic groups. They are more educated and set up more businesses.
>> If they’re a minority that’s disproportionately involved in trade that makes them a merchant minority.
>They are not a minority, but I am rather tired of trying to explain that to somebody who apparently thinks US/European-type demographics are the only kind that exists. How, exactly, do you call one of three major groups that each make up twenty-something percent of a population a minority without falling over the cognitive dissonance?
It’s entirely possible for a state not to have a majority ethnic group. That means all ethnic groups are minorities. If one of those groups is disproportionately mercantile they’re a merchant minority. If they’re disproportionately likely to enlist in the military that makes them a military minority. The Hausa are way over represented in the Nigerian military compared to their share of the population, like Southerners in the US. They’d be a military minority.
>> They also have non-central features of being a merchant minority, like being subject to pogroms
>> They were not subject to pogroms because they were a "minority", jesus christ. The '66 pogroms in Northern Nigeria were part of a countercoup in disproportionate response to a coup d'etat earlier the same year which had ended the lives of (amongst others) two especially beloved Northern political leaders
>> Oh actually never mind me, it was just "'minorities' bad" and not a complex political situation in a newly independent country.
A complex political situation in a newly independent country is entirely compatible with pogroms. People were killed for being Igbo in large numbers, by civilians and the state. This happened in part because of the assumed political loyalties of Igbo people. I imagine we can both agree on that.
> But that didn’t happen and the Igbo are Nigeria’s merchant minority.
> Or consider that of the Igbo are not among the ethnic groups in Nigeria that could possibly be called merchant minorities
Then which ethnic groups are better candidates? Is there a group that is almost entirely engaged in trade with minimal involvement in primary production, and that does so for the market when it does?
> For example, it's rather clear that you're unaware of the history between the Yoruba and the Hausa both prior to and during the colonial era, or that the Fulani are an actual minority ethnic group both in Northern Nigeria and in the country as a whole and would actually be fairly classifiable as a "merchant minority" if we cared to apply political labels made for populations in diaspora to people living in their own country - the Fulɓe are semi-sedentary, widely dispersed, tend to live in ethnic enclaves, and have formed several ethnic subgroups throughout West Africa due to integration with clear majority populations.
The Fulani are a terrible candidate for a merchant minority. They’re pastoralists who are widely dispersed across West Africa because they kept on conquering other people as nomads who can move their wealth and people large distances in short amounts of time are wont to do. Semi-sedentary herders of cattle, some of whom have settled permanently in towns, with insignificant numbers of settled farmers of crops are not merchant minorities under any understanding of the term. Even less so when they were the pre-colonial ruling class in the areas of Nigeria where they’re a minority. And being in one’s own country is hardly dispositive of being a merchant minority. The Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Jews in inter-war Poland were merchant minorities in their own countries. If the Igbo were predominantly concentrated in their own country they’d be a merchant majority there, like Jews in Israel.