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According
to Richard Cust, Professor of Early Modern History early modern England
was a “solidly hierarchical society”, defined by acts of landowning,
hunting and hospitality (i.e. the hosting of receptions and dinner
parties).

Mr. Cust said this in a May 2009 University of Birmingham inaugural lecture, titled “The Invention of Snobbery in Early Modern England”.

The English have long
been masters of what Cust described as a “culture of distancing and
distinction; elitism; social condescension.” According to him, in a bid
to set themselves apart from the ranks of the undistinguished many
Englishmen resorted to tracing their ancestries as far back as they
could. Some went as far as the Norman Conquest. In at least one case a
gentleman traced his genealogy to Noah’s Ark.

Cust’s
lecture touched on a number of interesting issues, such as the
obsession of many English families in early modern England with
possessing “Coats of Arms”, as markers of “collective honour”, or for
the purposes of “mask[ing] ancestral and social origins.” All of these
were of course the beginnings of the (still-baffling and cruel) British
class system.

Fortunately
for us in Nigeria, however, the ‘Snob’ industry is nowhere near as
complicated as the English version. Trust Nigerians to simplify their
imports, even whilst managing to maintain their size and importance.
Where you stand in the Nigerian society is determined primarily by how
much money you have today, not by how much you had last year, or how
much your father had forty years ago. It really doesn’t matter where
you are coming from, as long as you have done well for yourself. It
also doesn’t matter by what route you arrived at your current financial
success – politics, business, the civil service, Internet fraud,
religion – everyone is welcome at the table of abundance.

As
the Yoruba saying goes, money made from carrying shit will not smell of
shit. Unlike the English system, designed to run on a certain, ruthless
form of exclusivity, the sky seems big enough for all birds to fly in
Nigeria. We are pragmatic people, the edges of our practicality having
been honed by years of wildly volatile economic conditions.

I
once watched a documentary, about an Englishwoman whose family owned
thousands of acres of land, upon which sat a mansion in which
generations of the family had lived. The woman, finding it difficult to
maintain the property, then decided to give guided tours to visitors,
as a means of raising money. In line with traditional British obsession
with the past, she was sure that people would visit, awed by the mix of
grandeur and ancient history that she had inherited. England is laden
with the ghosts and shadows of aristocratic backgrounds like these,
sustained on the leftovers of proud pasts.

If
that woman lived in Nigeria, a sad fate would await her. Lacking money
today, her noble past would be unable to deliver her. Nigerians do not
reckon much with the past. Which is what I think explains the gross
disrespect we extend to our museums. No one is permitted to live on
past wealth, or forgiven for attempting to do so. On the other hand
forgiveness for past poverty is readily dispensed. The man who today
struggles to pay his children’s school fees, will have the chance to
start afresh when tomorrow he becomes a local government chairman rich
enough to export all his children to private school in England. By the
time the children return speaking like native English people, the man’s
place in the Nigerian social pecking order is all but assured.

I
doubt that money would buy “class” in England. In Nigeria, the case is
different. Even though there are occasional hints of a ‘taxonomy’ –
“Old Money” and “New Money” and “Money-Miss-Road” -in the final
analysis, all monies are one and the same thing. Chieftaincy titles,
honorary doctorates and praise singers do not discriminate between one
form of money and another. Money indeed matters, and God help you if
you think that a mouth fluent in English will make up for a pocket that
is not fluent in money. You will be told point-blank that you are only
“blowing grammar!” Polite conversation was also something that the
English paid attention to. The higher your class the more adept you
were in the ‘Art of Polite Conversation’. Coarse and rough and vulgar
talk was for the bottom of the social heap. In contrast, rich Nigerians
have no qualms about overlooking all laws of conversational decency.
They are allowed to be shamelessly coarse, to throw, “Bullshit! Do you
know who I am?” at everyone who seems to be getting in their way.

Nigeria
certainly has its laws, which anyone aspiring to ‘stand-out’ would do
well to learn. One example: The First Law of “shining”, as follows:
“The more the darkness you surround yourself with, the brighter you
will shine”. It is this law that explains why there are streets that
have only one house with its lights on, while the rest remain at the
mercy of PHCN, mournful in the glow of the powerful lamps from the Big
Man’s house. Welcome, all ye intending snobs, to Nigeria.