Anyway, I teased about comparing the Igbo to Calvinists, because they have a long tradition of being compared to another market dominant minority, the Jews — and of comparing themselves to the Jews. In fact, a small group of Igbo Jews was claiming to be a lost tribes of Israel for a while there.

The Big Necessity looks like solid bathroom reading. (Sorry.)

Trying to come up with a metaphor for the Igbo is a tough one. The Yoruba got ahead first from primary exposure to the outside world — the Igbo raised themselves up afterwards (1920s and 30s), acutely conscious of their backwardness, poverty, and isolation relative to the Yoruba.

I mention Calvinism as a half-assed metaphor simply because the Calvinists (in my dim understanding) thought that making money and bettering oneself was not simply a good thing but a sign of one’s moral rectitude and favor with God. I don’t know the Igbo well, but I think they might understand that idea, even if they put it in other terms.

Of course, some will be offended by what I say, and as an outsider I’m flailing around, largely clueless. The other thing noteworthy about the Igbo generally speaking is their open society in which each person must make his own way and there is little deference to inherited authority or status.

The other metaphor that comes to mind with Igboland is South China. Core Igboland is landlocked, crowded, life is hard, people became accustomed to living exceptionally close to the edge of starvation, no one has enough land, and neighboring areas see mercantile networks of Igbos, similarly to the South Chinese who are traders all over the regions adjacent to South China.

Rod Dreher at American Conservative has a rollicking discussion of the sh*thole issue on his blog. Doubtless it’s being discussed ad nauseum elsewhere as well.

It will be interesting to see Nigerians hold forth on the topic as they traditionally have a prickly sense of their own potential combined with a mania for self-criticism.

By the way, are all of Isegoria’s delightful readers familiar with the book The Big Necessity?

That article you cited is quite neo-reactionary, in its own way.

I lived in Southwest Nigeria for about a year in the 1990s, and my experience was not all that similar to the author’s — the economy was much more monetized and the extended family in some ways more attenuated. Nigeria was highly dysfunctional and still is.

The people I knew there would more likely be characterized as pushful and energetic rather than lazy (and I lived among the Yoruba, who are less pushful than the money hungry grasping pushful Igbo, who could be described as almost Calvinistic in their approach to money-making and trade).

If a reader did not know that Senegal is one of the more functional African states, he probably wouldn’t learn it from this essay.

Note: Mauritanians come from Mauritania, a big, low-income, arid country to the north of Senegal — they are discussed in the essay. Mauritians come from Mauritius, the small island in the Indian Ocean a few hundred miles out past Madagascar, on the opposite side of Africa.

I think there is some evidence that Africans are behaviorally different from Europeans (especially Northwest Europeans) on average. I don’t know why. Cochrane and Harpending say “Every society selects for something.” Village norms and the extended family play a big role. In many places there is a not a functioning commercial code. The Hajnal line has something to do with it, I suspect.

The role of Christianity is hard to pin down. I lived among the Yoruba, who are about half of them Christian and half of them Muslim. Both those religious are recent imports for the Yoruba — less than 200 years old for the most part.

This article below is paywalled, but provocative. Sometimes you can find excerpts outside the paywall. The author sensed that villages where Christian missions were active had a different ethos or vibe:

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.