Opinion

Farooq Kperogi : The new Pope is “black,” now what?

Published

6 months ago

May 10, 2025

Farooq Kperogi : The new Pope is “black,” now what?

In the aftermath of Pope Francis’ death, many Africans on the continent and in the diaspora wondered if the Catholic Church would, for a change, elect a Black Pope. Well, they got one in Pope Leo XIV even if this isn’t apparent on the surface.

Although the Pope doesn’t identify as Black, he has Black African bloodline flowing in his veins through his mother.

Robert Francis Prevost, who changed his name to Leo XIV upon becoming the pope, traces maternal ancestral roots to grandparents in the state of Louisiana whose ancestry is part Black African.

According to the New York Times, “The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records,” lived in a part of New Orleans, Louisiana’s biggest city, “that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.”

Records from the 1900 census, the New York Times reports, show that the man who gave birth to the pope’s mother, identified as Joseph Martinez, described his race as “Black” and his birthplace as “Hayti,” the older English spelling for Haiti.

Haitians trace ancestral descent from six major West African ethnic groups: Fon and Ewe from what is now Benin Republic and Togo; Yoruba from what is now Nigeria and Benin Republic; Igbo and Kongo from what is now Nigeria and Central Africa respectively; and Akan from present-day Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

That means there is a high likelihood that the pope has distant cousins from Nigeria. That won’t be surprising because, as I pointed out in my February 13, 2021, column titled “Surprising American Cousins Through My Mother’s Ancestry,” my own AncestryDNA record, which I initiated with my mother when she visited me from Nigeria between 2017 and 2018, matched us with several phenotypically white distant American cousins.

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“As we went through the photos of hundreds of distant cousins that AncestryDNA’s matches showed, [my mother] was struck with astonishment to find lily white people as her eight cousins,” I wrote. “She asked how that was possible. I explained to her that in the American South, where most Black people were enslaved, many slavers sexually exploited the enslaved, the consequence of which DNA results are now revealing.”

The new pope’s story is another possible explanation.

It should be noted that the pope’s maternal grandfather obviously also had European, possibly French and Spanish, ancestry in addition to his African ancestry. He was probably so light-skinned that he could pass for a white man outside the United States.

He probably chose to identify as Black only because of America’s strange “one-drop rule,” which held that a person with even the faintest scintilla of Black African blood in his/her pedigree is Black.

As Madison Grant wrote in his unbearably racist book titled The Passing of the Great Race, “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”

In other words, whiteness symbolizes purity, and any other color line that touches it inevitably soils it. So, the American notion of Blackness conceives of it as an inerasable genetic stain on whiteness, so that the remotest ancestral connection with Black Africa defines one as Black.

That is why the legendary three-time heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali whose great-grandfather was an Irishman is celebrated as a Black American. That’s why former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is probably just about 15 percent Black in his gene pool, is celebrated as a Black American success story.

It is why Mariah Carey, who would be called “bature” or “oyinbo” in Nigeria, or “muzungu” in eastern Africa, is accepted by Black America as a Black woman. And that is why it is only in America that a white woman can have Black children, but a Black woman cannot have white children.

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This preposterous logic, this scandalously hidebound, hopelessly essentialist notion of Blackness would make most Europeans “Black” since recent DNA evidence suggests that about 75 percent of Western and Southern Europeans have vestiges of African blood in them.

In the eighteenth century, a German physician and anthropologist by the name of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, on the basis of his flawed analysis of human skulls, taxonomized the human family into five races: Caucasian or white race, Mongolian or yellow race, Malayan or brown race, Negroid or black race, and American or red race.

This arbitrary division of the human family is often fingered as the foundation for scientific racism. It was used by eighteenth-century American judges as the intellectual and moral basis for the promulgation of so-called anti-miscegenation laws (laws that forbade interracial marriage or interracial sex) in a misguided bid to police racial boundaries.

One of the reasons interracial marriages were frowned upon by advocates of racial purism was that mixed-raced children disrupted the easy certainties of Blumenbach’s simplistic racial taxonomy.

As Yale University professor of history Glenda Gilmore once noted, interracial liaisons “resulted in mixed race progeny who slipped back and forth across the color line and defied social control.”

The pope’s maternal grandmother was Creole, who are descendants of the racial alchemy between French, Spanish, and African ancestors but who are nonetheless categorized as “Black” in the United State because of the (il)logic of the one-drop rule. Famous American musicians with Louisiana Creole heritage are Beyonce (through her mother) and Prince.

Creoles can be so light-skinned that they can pass for white. Throughout the nearly two years I lived in Louisiana, I often had difficulty telling a white person from a Black person. People I considered unambiguously white took offense when I identified them as such; they would tell me they were “Black.”

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On other occasions, however, people I thought would self-identify as “Black” based on my previous encounters with seemingly white “Creoles” would take offense when I called them Black. Before I left Louisiana, I stopped guessing or discussing people’s racial identity. Yes, racial identification is that tenuous, that fluid, and that notoriously unstable in southwest Louisiana!

It was unsurprising that the pope’s mother, Mildred Martinez, identified as white. With a light-skinned Black Haitian father and a probably even more light-skinned Creole mother from New Orleans, she most certainly would look phenotypically white.

She chose to escape the chains that Blackness imposed on her and embraced whiteness. In America’s racial terminology, she would be described as having performed “passing.”

Passing is defined as a phenomenon when a phenotypically white but legally Black person (because of traces of African ancestry in them) intentionally present themselves as white to evade racial discrimination and gain access to social, economic, or legal advantages in a racially stratified society where white people occupy the upper end of the totem pole.

During the Jim Crow era in southern United States, when segregation and anti-Black laws were codified in the law books, “passing” was often a survival strategy for light-skinned Black people who could physically blend into white society. I have no doubt that that was what happened with the pope’s mother.

John Joseph Prevost, the pope’s brother, told the New York Times that they don’t discuss their mother’s Black heritage. “It was never an issue,” he said. In fact, USA Today and many American newspapers describe the pope’s mother’s heritage as “Spanish.” The African part of her rich racial tapestry is elided.

The New York Times reported on the pope’s maternal African heritage only because a Black New Orleans genealogist by the name of Jari C. Honora unearthed it with powerfully compelling documentary evidence and shared it with the paper.

Well, going by America’s peculiar logic of racial classification, the pope is “Black” because his whiteness is mediated by the invisible, imperceptible, maybe even genetically negligible, but nonetheless undeniable Black African blood coursing through his papal veins.

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.

Farooq Kperogi : The new Pope is “black,” now what?

Opinion

Why a Customer-Centric After-Sales Offer Matters More Than Ever

Published

2 days ago

November 12, 2025

Trends Admin

Why a Customer-Centric After-Sales Offer Matters More Than Ever

The recently concluded VerveLife 8.0 Grand Finale at the Eko Convention Centre, Victoria Island, Lagos, was a vibrant celebration of fitness, lifestyle, and entertainment.
The two-part event drew over 10,000 participants for an unforgettable day of workouts, masterclasses, and experiences that reflected Nigeria’s growing wellness culture.
However, one of the evening’s most memorable moments came when Chidera Nkem was announced as the winner of the grand prize—a brand-new Chery Tiggo 2, courtesy of Verve and Carloha-Chery.
The cheers that followed were quickly met with a practical question whispered among the crowd: “How will she maintain the car?” It was an insightful question—one that echoes the frustrations of many Nigerian vehicle owners.
High maintenance costs, a scarcity of trained technicians, and the proliferation of counterfeit spare parts have made car ownership an expensive and sometimes exasperating experience.
Another, perhaps unspoken, reason for the question was social perception. In many quarters, young people—especially young women—are often presumed incapable of maintaining modern, tech-driven vehicles without significant financial or professional standing.But this perception, and indeed the broader experience of vehicle ownership, is beginning to change. Forward-thinking automobile brands are reimagining what it means to own and maintain a vehicle, moving from a transactional relationship to a customer-centric, service-driven partnership.
In Chidera’s case, Carloha has ensured that she can drive her new Chery Tiggo 2 Pro with complete peace of mind. Thanks to Carloha Care 6-6-7, the company’s comprehensive after-sales package, her car is covered for six years—at no extra cost.
Here’s what that means: 6-Year Warranty: Every new Chery SUV or sedan purchased from Carloha comes with a six-year or 200,000km warranty, ensuring that any manufacturer-related defect is fixed at no cost to the owner.
Six-Year Free Service: Carloha also covers both parts and labour for routine servicing over the same six-year period, removing one of the biggest pain points in car ownership.
Seven-Day Repair Guarantee: If a repair takes longer than seven days, Carloha provides a courtesy car for the customer to use until the work is completed. This structured, customer-first approach goes beyond marketing—it represents a shift in how value is delivered.
Carloha’s after-sales model transforms car ownership from a burden into a long-term relationship built on trust and reliability.Imagine if every automobile brand in Nigeria embraced a similar philosophy.
The market would not only see more satisfied customers but also deeper brand loyalty and stronger consumer confidence. In today’s competitive environment, after-sales service is no longer an optional extra—it’s a strategic imperative.
As consumers become more discerning and value-driven, brands that place the customer experience at the heart of their operations will lead the way. Customer-centric after-sales care isn’t just good business—it’s the future of mobility.

Felix Mahan
General Manager Marketing
Carloha Nigeria

Opinion

What President Bola Tinubu must urgently do to avoid American trouble – Prophet Genesis

Published

4 days ago

November 10, 2025

Trends Admin

Prophet Israel Oladele Ogundipe

What President Bola Tinubu must urgently do to avoid American trouble – Prophet Genesis

A popular religious leader, Prophet Genesis, most commonly known as Prophet Israel Oladele Ogundipe, the founder of the Genesis Global Church, recently addressed the concerns of the Nigerian public regarding the escalating tensions between the United States and Nigeria.

These tensions arose from claims made by the US government that Nigeria was not doing enough to combat the killings of Christians within its borders. Consequently, the Trump administration designated Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) due to severe violations of religious freedom.

President Donald Trump, along with several American lawmakers, including Senator Ted Cruz, has argued that Nigeria is facing an “existential threat” or “Christian genocide,” alleging that the Nigerian government is “allowing” these atrocities to occur. In response, the man of God has urged the Nigerian government to act quickly and decisively.

In his second message, he warned the Nigerian government about the actions it must take and pleaded with all Nigerians to behave as responsible citizens.

He stated, “We all want Nigeria to succeed. We are all patriotic to this call. Some of us may not believe in the narrative presented by the U.S., China, and others. Nigeria is a leader in Africa. We have a strong military capable of defeating any insurgents. We have assisted other countries in their fights and achieved results. So, the question remains: why can’t we combat this insurgency?”

Recently, a group of bandits invaded the Nissi community in the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State, kidnapping an Anglican priest and his wife. According to sources, the bandits abducted the priest, Edwin Achi, and his wife, Sarah Achi, from their residence in Nissi village.

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He further noted that the government must put an end to the killings, as he receives messages almost every day about people being kidnapped and murdered. He urged the government to demonstrate that it can stop these killings quickly, as this would prevent any potential intervention from the U.S. and Donald Trump. He emphasised that Trump means what he says, and he does not want the government to take it lightly.

In recent days, the government has shown that some hostages are being released and some bandits are being captured. However, we must consider how many people have lost their lives due to this insurgency. It seems that the government is not ready to confront this harsh reality.

To those who are exploiting sympathy and using religious divides to further their agenda, I urge you to understand that this is not a conflict between Muslims and Christians. We must unite against the insurgents and bandits who threaten our unity. We must not allow them to distract us again.

This conflict is not one between the South and the North or the West. Currently, many Igbo people want Donald Trump to invade Nigeria, while a significant number in the North oppose American intervention. This division is concerning. We need to recognise the implications of a U.S. invasion; it would be akin to returning to another era of slavery. Nigeria has much at stake, including its resources that could be exploited, a decrease in foreign investment, and the diversion of its oil.

I urge the government to end the killings once and for all. Let us stop pointing fingers and cease pitting Christians against Muslims. The reality is that Nigerians are being killed. We must awaken and take the necessary actions,” he concluded.

Prophet Israel Oladele Ogundipe is the founder and spiritual leader of Genesis Global Ministry, headquartered in Lagos with branches in several countries. After a challenging childhood marked by poverty, Prophet Ogundipe found refuge and support in the Celestial Church of Christ, where he became a member, instrumentalist, and minister. He eventually left to establish his own ministry, Genesis Global Outreach.

What President Bola Tinubu must urgently do to avoid American trouble

Opinion

Trump, Christian genocide, and terrorism in Nigeria, By Farooq Kperogi

Published

6 days ago

November 8, 2025

Trends Admin

Farooq Kperogi

Trump, Christian genocide, and terrorism in Nigeria, By Farooq Kperogi

Nigeria’s online and offline discursive arenas have been suffused with frenetic, impassioned, and intensely heightened dialogic exchanges in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s designation of Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” and this threat to militarily invade the country to stop what he called a “Christian genocide.”

Nigerians are predictably divided largely along the country’s familiar primordial fissures. But beyond the surface disagreements, there’s actually a deeper congruence of opinions we miss in moments of hyper-aroused emotions. And this revolves around the recognition that Nigeria faces an inexcusable existential threat from the intractable murderous fury of terrorists and that the earlier it is contained by any means necessary, the better Nigeria’s chances of survival.

The major areas of disagreement among conversational sparring partners (i.e., whether, in fact, there’s a Christian genocide; what really actuates Trump’s intervention; the question of what foreign intervention means for Nigeria’s sovereignty) actually have a convergence point.

For example, Muslims who question the factual accuracy of the existence of a Christian genocide in the central states point to the continuing mass slaughters of Muslims (both at home and in mosques) in the far north. But they don’t deny that the nihilistic, blood-thirsty thugs who murder both Christians and Muslims in their homes and places of worship identify as Muslims, even if they are a poor representation of the religion they identify with.

I honestly struggle to fault Christians who perceive the episodic mass murders in their communities by people who profess a different faith from them as deliberate, systematic, premeditated acts designed to exterminate them because of their faith.

If the situation were reversed, it would be perceived the same way. If murderous outlaws who profess the Christian faith (even if they don’t live by the precepts of the religion) continually commit mass slaughters of both Christians and Muslims, Muslim victims of these slaughters would instinctively read religious meanings to the murders.

As I noted in my April 12, 2025, column titled “Selective Outrage Over Mass Murders in Nigeria,” human beings derive their sense of self from belonging to collective identities, so when members of an out-group attack that collective, it provokes a powerful emotional reaction.

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Even in such states as Zamfara, Sokoto, and Katsina, where more than 90 percent of the population is Muslim and where clashes between sedentary farmers and itinerant herders are age-old, the persistence of mass slaughters has ruptured the centuries-old ethnic harmony between the Hausa and the Fulani that Nigerians had taken for granted. BBC’s July 24, 2022, documentary titled “The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara” captures this dynamic powerfully.

It doesn’t matter if people in the Middle Belt perceive the homicidal ferocity of the terrorists as “Christian genocide” or people in the Northwest see it as “ethnic cleansing.” What matters is that they shouldn’t be allowed to kill anyone.

I understand Muslim anxieties behind the “Christian genocide” narrative. It unwittingly exteriorizes the crimes of a few outlaws to the many who are also victims of the outlaws’ crimes. But if it takes calling these blood-stained bastards “Christian genocidaires” to eliminate them, the accuracy of the description is immaterial. If an equal-opportunity murderer of Christians and Muslims is killed only because he kills Christians, it still benefits Muslims because the murderer won’t be alive to kill Muslims.

Of course, people who question Trump’s motive are justified. In 2016, Trump enthusiastically endorsed Ann Coulter’s book Adios America, which claimed that the growth of Nigerians in the United States from virtually zero to 380,000 was problematic because, in her words, “every level of society [in Nigeria] is criminal.” Most Nigerians in the United States are Christians.

By December 2017, in his first term, Trump was reported to have said that people from Haiti and Nigeria should be denied visas because “15,000 Haitians who received U.S. visas all have AIDS,” and that 40,000 Nigerians who visited the U.S. that year would never “go back to their huts” after seeing America.

In January 2018, he was widely quoted as saying he didn’t want immigrants from “shithole countries” like Nigeria and Haiti but preferred “more people coming in from places like Norway,” a statement that made clear his racial preference for white immigrants.

That same racial logic was evident when he described white South Africans as victims of “white genocide” and offered them asylum but has not extended the same offer to Nigerians he claims are facing “Christian genocide.”

Unsurprisingly, by 2019, toward the close of his first term, Nigeria experienced the steepest decline in visitors to the United States of any country, according to data from the National Travel & Tourism Office.

Given this record, skepticism about Trump’s sudden concern for Nigeria is entirely warranted. Anyone familiar with his long-documented hostility toward Black people would reasonably question why he now professes to care enough about them to “intervene” on their behalf.

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His intervention is probably the product of three forces: powerful lobbying from Nigerian Christian groups who got through to the right people, a way to get Nigeria to scale down its embrace of China in the service of rare earth mineral exploration in the country, and an appeal to his evangelical Christian base even if he himself isn’t a believing, churchgoing Christian.

But given the direness of the depth and breadth of bloodletting in the country, who cares what his motivations are? If Trump’s intervention causes the Nigerian government to more seriously take its responsibility to protect all Nigerians, I would salute him. In fact, if direct, targeted hits at terrorist enclaves become inevitable because the government is either unwilling or unable to act, most people (Muslims, Christians, southerners, northerners, supporters or critics of the government, etc.) who are genuinely worried about the unchecked expansion of the theaters of insecurity in the country would be happy.

When it comes to questions of life and death, we can’t afford the luxury of pointless partisanship and primordial allegiances. Most Nigerians I know would accept help from Satan if that were what it would take to stop the unending blood-stain communal upheavals in the country.

What is the point of our sovereignty if we can’t stop perpetual fratricidal bloodletting? In any case, most Nigerian governments and opposition politicians in my lifetime have not only routinely sought America’s intervention in Nigeria’s internal affairs when it suits them, they serve as willing informants to America, leading me to once posit that the CIA doesn’t need secret agents.

In a May 20, 2017, column titled, “Xenophilia, Fake Sovereignty and Nigeria’s Slavish Politicians,” I said the following:

“Many Nigerian leaders seem to have an infantile thirst for a paternal dictatorship. The United States is that all-knowing, all-sufficient father-figure to whom they run when they have troubles. We learned from the US embassy cables that our Supreme Court judges, Central Bank governors … and governors routinely ran to the American embassy like terrified little kids when they had quarrels with each other.”

If the undermining of our sovereignty is what it would take to provide peace to everyday Nigerians, most people won’t miss it.

The urgent task, therefore, is not to litigate the purity of motives abroad or to indulge in perfunctory moralizing at home, but to force Nigerian institutions to perform. Whether pressure comes from international actors, diasporic lobbying, or domestic outrage, it must translate into concrete reforms: a security strategy that protects civilians, accountable and professional security forces, transparent investigations of atrocities, and long-term efforts to address the economic, political, and environmental drivers of violence.

Nigerians must insist that any external attention be channeled into strengthening the state’s capacity to protect all citizens and into justice for victims, not into new forms of dependency or political theatre. Only by combining unity of purpose with institutional competence can Nigeria begin to end the killing and reclaim the dignity of its sovereignty.