The Convoy We Export

What defines a people? And what decides the respect they receive, both within their own sphere of influence and beyond it?

Every nation carries two reputations. The first lives inside its borders: how its citizens, its institutions and its own bodies regard it. The second lives outside them: how other nations, and the ordinary people of other nations, regard it. My argument is that both are decided by the same thing. Not a nation’s economic value. Not its military power. Its cultural value.

By cultural value I mean the ideas a people hold, and the way they live those ideas out where others can see. Culture is how a group of people is perceived. It is the set of beliefs and assumptions they carry, made visible in what they make, sing, preach and celebrate. Others watch it, and they judge us by it.

Economic value does real work for every nation. It provides trading power: the ability to take part in global trade, to exchange resources and finance with other nations, to sit at the tables where deals are struck. Military power does real work too. It secures borders and deters threats.

Both contribute to what makes a nation. Neither, on its own, commands respect. A wealthy nation can be courted and still not admired. A powerful one can be feared and still not esteemed. Access and fear are not respect. At the core of a nation’s identity, and of its standing in the world, sits something else.

Take Nigeria as a case study. Nigeria is a great nation: great in population, great in what it has achieved in its history, great in what its citizens accomplish across the world. Nigerians lead hospitals, lecture halls, boardrooms and stages on every continent.

It is also rich. Nigeria has crude oil and natural gas. It has solid minerals scattered across the country, from tin on the Jos Plateau to gold in the northwest, coal in Enugu and iron ore in Kogi. It has one of the youngest and largest populations on earth, a vast store of human capital. On paper, we hold every economic lever a nation could need to command respect.

Yet Nigeria is not accorded the respect that inventory would predict. Why? Because of the cultural identity it presents in the international space.

Nigeria exports culture. We export music. We export art and film. We export religion and religious conviction. These exports are popular across the globe, and part of the reason is that Nigerians, and Africans in general, are spread across the globe. Much of the warm reception our culture receives abroad happens within migrant African communities.

That distinction matters. How far a culture travels tells you about its audience. What it carries tells you about its people. To know what our culture is saying to the world, we have to look past the reach and listen to the message. Two scenes make this plain.

A Nigerian musician flies into the United Kingdom and sells out one of its largest venues, the O2 in London or an arena in Manchester. The place is filled to the brim. The production is spectacular. By every commercial measure, it is a triumph.

Now listen to what is being sung. The message, stripped to its bones, is this: I have a convoy. Policemen in my convoy, soldiers in my convoy. Do not cross my line, or the men around me will show you something. Fear me. Not for the value I offer, not for anything I give you or show you, but because of how many men travel with me.

That is what thousands of people are chanting, word for word. The lyrics a crowd knows by heart tell you the true cultural value of the people in that room.

Now take religion. A Christian minister arrives in the UK, and the same kind of arena fills again, this time with people who have come to pray and to hear a message.

Listen to the prayers. They are almost entirely about personal gain: personal finances, personal resources, victory over personal enemies. Listen to the sermon. It is about how each person can break through in their own life. There is nothing about the wider world. Nothing about the society they live in, or the land around them. The mindset returns, again and again, to enriching and empowering oneself, until one becomes the man with many men in his convoy.

Here is the telling part. Put these two events side by side and you often find the same faces. In my observation, as many as half of the people at the Christian conference will also be found at the secular concert.

How do they reconcile the two? Easily, because there is nothing to reconcile. What joins them is ideas, ideology. The vehicles differ, one secular music and the other a Christian conference, but the idea travelling inside both is the same. Both carry the true cultural value of the people.

This explains how someone can attend a Christian conference and still keep their ticket to the concert. It also explains why the same people can be drawn to do whatever it takes to become financially buoyant: so that they too can have many men in their convoy, and lord it over others.

Power over other people, put on display. Look at it in any form, the song, the sermon or the ambition, and you find the same idea underneath. It is the thread that runs through what we export most loudly.

When I see that as our cultural identity, I have to ask: is that what I want to celebrate in my own country? Is that what I want to honour in my own space? And if it is not what I would celebrate, why would anyone else respect it?

An argument like this invites pushback. Here are the strongest objections I hear, and how I answer them.

So, to return to the question. What commands respect for a nation, at home and abroad? Its cultural value. Not its economic value. Not its military value. And that value is always seen, and seen through, in its elements of culture: the songs a crowd knows by heart, the sermons a congregation says amen to, the ambitions a generation is taught to admire.

Cultural value is not dug out of the ground like crude oil. It is made, one song and one sermon at a time. That means it can be remade.