The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

It was impossible to know which transformations were permanent. Flora Lewis, whom the Times editor A. M. Rosenthal once called “the world’s greatest correspondent,” knew too much history to suspect that the rapid Israeli victory she saw, in the Six-Day War, in 1967, would bring permanent peace. When the shooting stopped, “the new ruins I saw there were almost indistinguishable from the ancient ones,” she wrote. And yet Lewis, one of the few mothers in her generation of war correspondents, never succumbed to the cynicism that might have relieved her of the urge to watch it all unfold. “When the bullets came over the King David Hotel,” a friend recalled, “she was the only one left in the lounge. Everyone else was in the basement.”

  At times, it was difficult to know which transformations were permanent. In the spring of 1968, Joseph Wechsberg returned to Czechoslovakia, the country of his birth, to witness the first flickers of political liberalization after a “quarter of a century of fear, police brutality, and enforced ignorance.” He described the head of Stalin’s statue “lifted from his shoulders in broad daylight, with nearly everybody in Prague watching.” Though he permitted himself to imagine that it might be “the beginning of a development that could shake the Communist world to its foundations,” by the end of the year a Soviet-led invasion had stamped out the awakening. And yet the embers smoldered for decades, and when, at last, the Communists receded, in 1989, it was the end of a process that had begun during that spring two decades earlier. Wechsberg could not know that timeline, but he sensed that the eclipse would be profound. He lingered on the image of the night sky emerging over the city, “high above the river, in liquid gold, and then, suddenly, the whole thing went deep blue.”

  Occasionally, the pivot points of history lay in plain sight, if a writer was well placed and wily enough to witness them. Writing under the pseudonym Xavier Rynne, Francis X. Murphy was a Redemptorist chaplain and theology professor who published wry, behind-the-scenes reports from the Second Vatican Council, the first time in nearly a century that thousands of Roman Catholic religious leaders and theologians met to settle doctrinal issues. In Rynne’s telling, they were negotiating nothing less than the Church’s encounter with the modern world. They condemned anti-Semitism, took steps to allow languages besides Latin to be used during Mass, and encouraged Catholics to foster relations with other faiths. He chronicled the tensions between reformers and conservatives, noting that “when Pope Paul invited the aged heads of Curial offices to resign last spring, several of them…replied that they were prepared to serve him unto death. That is why the Pope is now seriously considering making all top positions temporary.”

  But the epochal shifts of the sixties did not always announce themselves on paper; more often, the writers were left to weigh the signs of progress and retrenchment with nothing but their senses and their knowledge of the terrain. Mavis Gallant, the Canadian-born writer who published a hundred and sixteen stories in The New Yorker between 1951 and 1995, was in her Paris apartment in the summer of 1968, when students began to march on the Left Bank. They built barricades and tore up cobblestones, raging against a patriarchal state, still so conservative that homosexuality was outlawed and women were prohibited from wearing pants to work. In the course of the next four weeks, France lurched through a moral revolution, sweeping aside constraints on education, work, family, and love.

  In the clipped cadences of her diary, Gallant chronicled, with unsparing precision, those weeks and their players: the courageous, narcissistic students; the police who lobbed tear gas on to the balconies of troublesome neighbors; the intellectuals who preened on the barricades. Of one especially self-regarding professor, she wrote, “Wanted to say, ‘Come off it, vieux père.’ ” Gallant is best remembered for her fiction and the densely detailed universes that she conjured. But she was, first and forever, a reporter, who sought to absorb as much as she could about the lives of those she encountered—“what they ate, and what they wore, and how they spoke, and their vocabulary, and the way they treated their children,” she once told an interviewer. “I drew it all in like blotting paper.”

  Emily Hahn

  DECEMBER 10, 1960 (NIGERIAN INDEPENDENCE)

  THE SITE OF the Nigerian capital, which lies on the Atlantic coast just off the southwestern tip of the Nigerian mainland and is linked to it by a bridge and a ferryboat, is generally referred to as the island of Lagos, but it is really two islands, or even three, depending on how one counts. Lagos proper, also known as Eko, is separated only by a canal from a sister island called Iddo, and a bit apart from these twins is the island of Victoria, completing the Lagos group. The total area of the islands, together with a few small patches of the mainland in the immediate vicinity that are also part of the capital, is only twenty-seven square miles, and their total population is a teeming three hundred and fifty thousand….

  Public transport has always been one of the chief problems of existence in Lagos, and I had been given to understand that during the Independence, when the city would be seething with the excitement of entertaining special visitors, finding a taxicab might well prove impossible. It was my good fortune to be driven over this last lap by a friend, Jack, who lives near me in the English countryside and who visits Nigeria every year on business, attracted there, like the bulk of the foreigners in the nation today, by its substantial oil resources. Jack had prophesied that I would be glad of a lift into town, and he was waiting at the airport when I arrived.

  In the middle of the morning, which was bright but not oppressively hot, we drove off toward the city, with Jack pointing to decorated archways along the way and talking feelingly of the traffic difficulties and the general bedlam prevailing in Lagos during the Independence. I was not surprised, having been forewarned by a Nigerian official in London that many things besides traffic were far from normal in his country just then. “We don’t get any answer out of those people down there,” he had said, in a rare moment of desperation. “They are not attending to business. They are all jockeying for position in the new government.” Clearly obsessed with the fear of an accommodation shortage, he had added severely, “We expect many important people to attend the Independence. President Eisenhower has been invited, and no doubt he will bring a lot of people with him. The same applies to Mr. Khrushchev, not to mention other national leaders. This being so, I greatly fear there will be no room for you.”

  Fortunately for me, if not for President Eisenhower and Mr. Khrushchev, previous engagements with the United Nations prevented them from attending, though Governor Nelson Rockefeller did come, as head of the American delegation. I am not claiming that I got either Eisenhower’s or Khrushchev’s room—in fact, I’m sure I didn’t, since I shared a press billet with another woman—but their failure to turn up probably helped me just the same, by relieving the general pressure all over town….

  Just before I got into Jack’s car, a group of Nigerians—men and women—came slowly past the hotel, their bodies bent forward at a sharp angle as they strutted and danced strangely to the complicated beat of drummers in their midst; now and then one of the strutters would stop short, feet rooted to the ground, but would still keep the rhythm by jerking his or her torso this way and that. “It could be a wedding party or a funeral or anything at all,” Jack said. “Nigerians dance on practically every occasion. See the drum that fellow on the left has under his arm? That’s a talking drum. He can change the tone of its voice by squeezing or releasing it, and it actually does sound like talking.”

  A child walking by called to us “Hello! Freedom! Independa!” and the dancers, shouting and laughing, closed in until they surrounded us. One of the men half knelt in front of us, his head thrown back, and Jack balanced a coin on his forehead. Encouraged, another man advanced and threw his head back, but at this an ancient woman, who seemed to be in charge, scolded him sharply, and told the party to move on and stop begging. She shook hands with us both, and the others followed her example. Then they all danced away, twitching and jerking….

  The street
s of Lagos were almost choked with disorderly lines of traffic. Garlands had been strung between lampposts, and high hoardings had been raised and decorated with bunting shields, some of these in pure blocks of green or red, others bearing the national coat of arms. Along the waterfront, a marina unrolled its length between loops of color, interspersed with great bird cages holding likenesses of parrots whose feathers ruffled realistically in the wind. Office buildings were hung with brilliant strips of cloth. At a distance, the racecourse, which was the center of the Independence celebration, could have been a great oval of fully decorated Christmas trees….

  · · ·

  The next night, for once, all the pretty green vans seemed in order, equipped with drivers, and ready to accept passengers. Loaded, they rolled in cavalcade across the bridge, across the glittering town, to the glittering racecourse. We were on our way to see the Tattoo and the flag-changing ceremony. The ships in the harbor were dressed in their finest bunting, and one, bearing on its visible side a huge emblem of the crossed flags of Nigeria and Britain, was floodlighted. Everything in town was so gaily illuminated with red and blue and green and yellow electric lights that I could have read a newspaper in the van the whole way to the racecourse. I was riding with three representatives of the American Negro press, a Nigerian from the Ministry of Information, and a woman from somewhere in Central Europe who had made her home in Africa for several years. The Nigerian and the European woman were evidently acquainted, and they plunged almost immediately into an argument concerning religion. I listened with interest, for I knew little more about religion in Nigeria than what I had read in the guidebooks; namely, that the faithful are either Christians or Moslems or adherents of one or another of the medley of aboriginal beliefs held by the people before Europe and Asia moved in on them—a medley that is called, by Europeans and Asians, “paganism.” I now gathered from listening to the Nigerian that the term “paganism” is a grossly misleading simplification, a blanket term, embracing ancestor worship, pantheism, and a bewildering variety of forms of idolatry. The Nigerian scorned all the manifestations of paganism, speaking of them as if they should be eradicated as soon as possible—an attitude that enraged the European woman. “I wish you people wouldn’t be like that,” she burst out irritably. “I can’t understand people like you, who have been educated in the Western tradition. I don’t like calling these cults paganism any more than you do, because it seems to me there is something unpleasantly condescending in the term, but why must you try to destroy something so ancient, so valuable in your culture?”

  “Because most of it involves unpleasant practices,” the Nigerian said, speaking as if with an effort.

  “When it means so much to those poor people in the villages, too,” the woman hurried on. “Can’t you see what a pity it is to lose such a big part of your national heritage?”

  “I take it that you’d like to preserve the custom of human sacrifice?” said the Nigerian softly. “That you want our people to go on burying children alive in the mud to propitiate a god?”

  The woman muttered something about carrying things to extremes, and subsided into offended silence.

  We arrived at the racecourse, where solemn Girl Guides were again handing out programs and shepherding people to their seats. I reflected as I leafed through my program, elegant with shiny paper and photographs, that wherever the British have made and left their mark, tattoos are much the same, following a pattern laid down at Aldershot and exported to Africa, to India, to other parts of Asia, and, last spring, even to Madison Square Garden. Yet, unchanging though the pattern may be, I admitted to myself, a tattoo is a stirring thing.

  But not to everybody, I realized, recalling a Frenchwoman I had met at lunch that day. “All this Independence seems to me too English,” she said. “I saw the ceremonies in Ghana when they had theirs, and those seemed better—more African, with everyone doing just as he liked. Why, even the people directing things here are English.”

  “Don’t forget,” an Englishwoman at the table retorted, “until midnight we’re still in charge—at least nominally.”

  I looked around at the audience. It was huge. Every space was occupied, from the padded V.I.P. chairs in the grandstand—including the Princess’s—to my own hard bench. Of course, the crowd was predominantly African, but the British were out in force, the official contingent being headed by the retiring Governor-General, Sir James Wilson Robertson, G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O., K.B.E., and accompanied by a number of visitors from Britain who at one time or another had had a hand in managing Nigerian affairs. British teachers and missionaries had come to see the show, and so had British businessmen, with their wives. In fact—it dawned on me suddenly—the British were all there in perfectly ordinary, natural capacities; it was like the last day of school, or Parents’ Day.

  Turning back to the program, I read its outline of the midnight formalities that were to mark the mystic moment of changeover: “The Combined Guards of Honour…will salute in Farewell to the Union Jack of Great Britain and to honour the flag of the federation of Nigeria.” It would no doubt be an emotional moment, I thought; there would surely be tears in British eyes, and the Nigerians would probably whoop for joy as their banner began flapping at the top of the tall flagpole out there in the middle of the arena, where the Union Jack was now fluttering.

  The Tattoo drummed along without novelty. We had a massed-bands display (“the first time that a British Band has performed here…with Nigerian Bands”), and it elicited a nostalgic response from the British sitting near me, especially when the players broke into a tune that is undoubtedly regimental, although I know it as “Early One Morning.” The people around me hummed the melody in such numbers and with such happy fervency that the sound dissipated the noise from the brasses and hovered over us in the still night air. I recalled the words:

  Early one morning, just as the sun was rising,

  I heard a maid sing in the valley below;

  “Oh, don’t deceive me! Oh, never leave me!

  How could you treat a poor maiden so?”

  Next, or soon, came a motorcycle display, a physical-training display, and so on and on—all staged in the familiar half gloom provided by the inadequate searchlights. More to my liking was the musical ride, performed by mounted police from the north—the Arab-haunted north, where emirs in white headdresses keep their wives hidden away and are born to the saddle. The riders came from Kano and Katsina and Sokoto, and they looked the part, wearing brilliant uniforms, carrying lances, and riding caparisoned steeds. As the climax of their display of skill, they thundered straight at us in a row, lifting their lances and screaming war cries. At that moment—light or no light—they really came alive.

  The seamanship display, the modern battle, and at last, as smartly on the dot as any Englishman could desire, we reached the assembly and that page of history on which, with the changing of the flags, the rule of the Federation of Nigeria would begin. The massed bands marched on again, the guards of honor took their places. Two church dignitaries—one Anglican, the other Roman Catholic—walked out on the field shoulder to shoulder and mounted a rostrum that had been placed ready, and each in turn said a prayer. They were supplanted by the chief Imam of Lagos, a swathed figure who started out by praying in traditional Arabic; his syllables brought from many Nigerians in the audience an involuntary grunt of approval that seemed to roll all the way around the tiers of seats. The Imam then switched to Hausa, and again there was a rumble of response. He stopped praying. It was exactly midnight.

  The bands began to play. “God Save the Queen,” they played, and we all rose to our feet with an enormous rustle and looked up at the Union Jack, picked out of the darkness by one of the searchlights. But those who had tears in their eyes blinked them back instead of shedding them when, just as everybody’s gaze focussed on the flag, rockets started shooting up into the air from the right of the racecourse and bursting overhead in phosphorescent green showers. At the same instant, the light trained on t
he flagstaff began to flutter off and on. Some people declared later that it went out entirely, but this is not true; it was snapped off and on, over and over again, so rapidly that one couldn’t see a thing that was happening. Suddenly, as the last of the rockets died out, the light went on again clear and strong. The change had been made. Invisibly, the Union Jack had disappeared, and the flag of Nigeria now hung in its place. It did not actually flap in the breeze, because one end of it had been caught up in the rope in the hasty scramble to hoist it in the dark—a circumstance that worried some Nigerians a bit, I heard later, since they naturally thought of it as an omen. Still, there was the green-and-white flag, and I listened expectantly for the whoops of joy. There were none.

  Oh, there was applause, all right, but only clapping of a polite sort—about as much as had been accorded the physical-training display. Then, with a bit of preliminary drumming, the bands started up again, and everyone remained standing to sing, in English, the Nigerian national anthem:

  Nigeria, we hail thee,

  Our own dear native land,

  Though tribe and tongue may differ,

  In brotherhood we stand,

  Nigerians all, and proud to serve

  Our sovereign Motherland.

  All the Nigerians there—Hausa, Ibo, Nupe, Yoruba, and the rest, whether they came from the north, the east, or the west—sang these words, and perhaps they all meant them; it would be idle to speculate on that. Again I looked around for some sign that this was a deeply significant occasion. There was no such sign in the Nigerian faces nearest me, and the British faces all wore an expression of smiling rigidity. And then I saw one—just one. We were still standing and the last chord of the Nigerian anthem was slowly dying away when from a tier behind me came a single glad cry and a man’s voice said loudly, “So we are free now! So we are free!” I stared in the direction of the voice and saw the man laugh in joy and raise clenched hands. The heavy white cloth of his sleeves slipped back and hung down from his thin black arms. That was all, but to me it was a spark that vied with the star-spreading rockets in the sky.