A short while back, the Zimbabwean-South African writer Panashe Chigumadzi wrote on this site that she was no longer talking to Nigerians about race, because while she believed “that my Nigerian sisters have the ability to engage racial politics meaningfully, … a significant number choose not to. And when they choose not to engage meaningfully they usually choose to do it loudly.” She ended with the challenge: “Since you will not be quiet my Nigerian brothers and sisters, Giants of Africa, bolekaja! Come down from your glass house and let’s fight! Come down and let’s fight about this thing we call race.”

It just so happened that in mid-March 2019, right after Nigeria’s presidential elections, Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate, was asked by American literary theorist Henry Louis Gates to compare Nigeria to South Africa, where there was a clear “class divide” between rich and poor blacks. Soyinka responded: “They are probably on the same level. The difference in Nigeria, of course, is that it’s not marked by race, so it’s not really as apparently agonizing as in the case of South Africa. We created—as in South Africa—a new class of millionaires from the military ranks and their collaborators in civil society.”

Nigeria’s recent presidential elections confirmed Soyinka’s observation. Muhammadu Buhari who retained the presidency on the All Progressives Congress (APC) ticket is a former military general. His main opponent, Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), is a rich businessman who served as the country’s first vice president after the return of democracy in 1999. Buhari, on one side, claims that most of his wealth is in cattle; this is highly disputed. On the other side, Atiku’s wealth is rumored to surpass that of Aliko Dangote, the supposed richest black African man if you count what is on the books. (It was also rumored that Atiku was barred from entering the US over his business dealings.) When elephant’s battled, what became of the grass? Nigeria also now has more poor people in it than does any other country in the world.

I realize that these facts, on their own, explain nothing. This is because when we think of Nigerian politics, we tend to do so bearing an exoticist “Heart of Darkness” lens; in a way, Nigeria has long shared only a slightly lessened level of scorn than did Joseph Conrad’s version of the Congo.

When you read that Nigeria’s election is about class, did you not ask yourself what about rigging? What about tribalism? What about violence? Drawing liberally from Achille Mbembe, I think one could define the exoticization of Africa as a process by which Europe came to associate the continent with everything that Europe, through the eyes of Hegel, imagined to be bad. It is this Hegelian alchemy, let’s call it, that has shaped the West’s poisoned encounter with Africa since scientific racism was born amidst the enlightenment. But as the saying goes, the real alchemy consists in being able to turn the supposed gold you’ve created back again into what it was initially.

We could keep fighting about this thing we call race—but isn’t it time we also started fighting about this thing we call class? This is, firstly, an essay about what Nigerians are thinking about. Secondly, it is an essay about what the world is thinking about when it thinks about Nigeria. Thirdly, it is an essay about why both Nigerians and other Africans should be thinking about race and class more often. It is also, fourthly, an essay about rigging, about tribalism, and about violence. And, finally, it is an essay that offers an ideological explanation for Nigeria’s 2019 election.