Every now and then, something jolts us out of our workaday parochialism. Last week, I was in Kano in northern Nigeria. I visited the Gide Mamakan, the museum just opposite the Emir’s palace.

And even though I’ve studied African history, I was struck by how much contemporary understanding of Nigeria’s dynamics and tensions had overtaken my own sense of history and its timelines.

It was in the 900s that the decentralised government of the people of Kano was replaced by the centralised feudal kingdom of Kano.

Kano lay on the old trade routes between West Africa and the rest of the world, so Islamisation took place through the next few centuries, in a fairly syncretic way. But it was only in the early 1800s that the Jihad established Kano as a Muslim kingdom.

Then came British conquest in the early 1900s. It was only in the early 2000s that Kano formally became one of Nigeria’s ‘Sharia’ states.

What struck me was the short period, in relative historical terms, of the Kano kingdom’s formally Muslim character – one century or so. And yet, when we think of Kano today, it is as though it has always been so.

I feel the same kind of historical jolt listening to the debates in the United States on so-called illegal immigration.

The US, of course, is founded on migration (forced migration in the case of Americans of African descent). Going back only a couple 100 years, most of the territories of the border states were part of the Spanish colonies. Going back a few hundred years more, all territories belonged to Native American communities.

With that in mind, the debate on ‘illegal immigration’ seems crazy to an outsider. Yet discussions on the control of migration go so far as discussions on building a wall to span the US-Mexico border.

I felt the same historical jolt with the attack by Israeli commandos on the Gaza aid flotilla – an attack that left nine dead.

We could get stuck at the level of discussing whether or not the group on board the flotilla had arms, or if they were supporters of fundamentalist anti-Israeli groups; or whether Israel is capable of independently investigating the attack; or why the Gaza aid flotilla came about in the first place – to respond to the Israeli blockade of Gaza since Palestinians elected Hamas to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority in 2006.

We could then get stuck on whether the Israelis are justified in doing so, and the impact of all of this on the latest round of ‘talks about talks’ – the so-called proximity. But again, stepping back and looking at this from the vantage point of history and being an outsider, the whole situation is crazy. People have moved all around the Mediterranean for 100,000s of years – from Spain to Lebanon and back again.

They have fought, they have mingled, they have lived alongside each other. They are fundamentally mixed, and they all have the right to be there.

But the mass migration of Jews to what is now Israel following the Holocaust displaced those living in Palestine at that point in time. They’ve built a state, but it is one that essentially functions as an apartheid state.

Discussions about a so-called two-state solution, accompanied by discussions about a dividing wall, prove the point. Especially as the viability of what might become the Palestinian state is continually being compromised by continued settlements. Meanwhile, the right of return for Palestinians displaced during the founding of Israel is off the table.

Like I said, it’s crazy.

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* This article first appeared in allAfica.com.
* L. Muthoni Wanyeki is executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.