How a spilled basket of tomatoes paralysed Nigeria

IT STARTED WITH a squashed tomato that led to a killing. It has since escalated into clashes that have taken at least 20 lives and a standoff between northerners and southerners that has paralysed Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.

Last month a porter carrying a basket of tomatoes in the crowded Shasha market in Ibadan, a city in south-western Nigeria, accidentally spilled his cargo, leaving a pulpy mess. An argument with a nearby shopkeeper over the clean-up soon took an ethnic turn. The porter, who spoke Hausa (a language that identifies him as coming from Nigeria’s north), took a blow from a Yoruba man. As the porter fought back, his assailant slumped, mortally stricken.

Word soon spread on social media that a Yoruba man had been killed in the heart of Yoruba land, inflaming long-smouldering tensions in a country divided between its mostly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. For hours afterwards Hausa and Yoruba traders hacked at one another or burned down market stalls. At least 20 people are thought to have been killed. Thousands, most of them northerners, were forced to flee.