In the year 1990 or thereabout, at the University of Lagos – trust students and their creative inclinations – we named some folks Umqombothi. They were students on exchange programme from Apartheid South Africa. The name sounded pejorative but that was all we could dream up to capture those young ladies who wagged their big mid-body members in very provocative swings down the sidewalks of the university. They usually got drunk, especially in the evenings. This, they visibly demonstrated through the way they tottered, their eyes bloodshot and their liquor-jerked-high accents calling attention to them. Some mischievous student colleagues attributed…

The mindless xenophobic violence against Nigerians and other African immigrants in South Africa is igniting social media conversation about what one might call global Naijaphobia, that is, the mass resentment of Nigerians in many parts of the world. We are now increasingly stereotyped worldwide as rude, boisterous, tastelessly showy, domineering, and criminally inclined. From Euro-America to Asia, from Southern Africa to East Africa, and even in other West African countries, many people judge Nigerians by the attitudinal excesses and moral indiscretions of a minority of us. Nevertheless, amid the righteous indignation that this admittedly unfair reality provokes in us, we…