LAST Saturday, January 27, 2024, Nigeria joined the rest of the world to mark the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. The event called our attention to the fact that Holocaust memorial goes beyond the remembrance of the unfortunate incidents that occurred during the Second World War.
It was an opportunity to acknowledge the evil of hate speeches and racial segregation which Adolf Hitler effectively exploited to plunge the world into a catastrophe.
One important lesson to be learnt from that tragic event is that Hitler’s genocide succeeded mainly because it was a state-sanctioned ideology of hate. The Holocaust didn’t begin in the gas chamber, it began with the demonising of a particular race, similar to the way some of our politicians, religious and ethnic leaders are making inciting statements today and getting away with it.
Another reason Hitler’s annihilation exercise succeeded was due to the elite conspiracy of silence, which is also presently afflicting Nigeria. It is dangerous that today, our elites have chosen silence in the face of mass killings and ethnic cleansing ravaging some parts of the country.
Impunity was also a contributing factor to the systematic extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Western Europe. It is important to understand that to combat fiendishness, impunity has to be tackled head long, because it is the symbol of lawlessness. Nigeria is presently in an era of gross impunity, where perpetrators of atrocious acts are left unpunished.
One of the reasons the United Nations General Assembly instituted the international day for the remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust is to keep the history of that tragedy within the focus of the younger generations, so that they can learn from it. Sadly, here in Nigeria, the true history of our own civil war is officially suppressed. Perhaps to properly conceal the truth, history as a subject was mischievously removed from our basic education curriculum by the government.
The truth is that Nigeria has a diverse and complicated history. We must not be ashamed to teach our children the history of our country. Just as the history of the Holocaust is passed from generation to generation, we must incorporate the history of our past into our educational curricular.
This will help the younger generation to have a better understanding of the drivers, processes and consequences of genocide, the danger of prejudice and hate speech, and the human dimensions of historical events.
In other nations like Nigeria with a troubled past, this has proven to be both a helpful closure and an entry point for engaging in difficult conversations about unaddressed national trauma.
So, let us teach ourselves and our younger ones all the truth about the Nigerian Civil War which has been described as Africa’s bloodiest civil war, just as the United Nations has continued to teach us about the Holocaus.
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