Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  The native chiefs themselves continued to feel affection for the idea of empire. They were still trying to make money out of the British and, at home, they strutted with all their former confidence. At the height of the war, one Yoruba chief, who gloried in the title of the Akarigbo of Ijebu-Remo, was busy petitioning the Colonial Office for money which he claimed had been promised his father in the original treaty of 1894. The Chief believed that a subsidy of £100 a year had been stopped in 1914 and, consequently, he claimed accumulated arrears of £2,900 for the years 1914–42. The Colonial Office declined his request; the government argued that it had subsidized him and his lifestyle to a far greater extent than just £100 a year. Oliver Stanley, the aristrocratic Colonial Secretary, firmly put the upstart Chief in his place. ‘Since 1916 the Akarigbo has been paid a salary from Native Authority funds, rising from £100 in 1916 to £600 at present,’ Stanley wrote to his parliamentary under-secretary. This payment, as far as Stanley was concerned, fulfilled ‘the obligation in the Treaty of 1894’. Another official laughingly believed that the Akarigbo was ‘trying it on’, a thing which the ‘Ijebus are very prone to do’. While Britain faced the ultimate challenge to its survival from Nazi Germany, it seemed that everyone was ‘trying it on’, attempting to get money from the Treasury in Whitehall. The official remembered that ‘shortly before the outbreak of war the City of Genoa raised a similar question on account of a debt incurred at compound interest by Edward III’: ‘I feel that the Ijebus have something in common with our Genoese creditors.’3

  The Yoruba chiefs were not the only Nigerians who had something to lose from the demise of the empire. While the Nigerian independence movement was being led by southerners, such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, in the 1940s, the northern emirs were slow to recognize the new forces working on the Nigerian political scene. They had benefited significantly from British rule; their power and prestige had been buttressed by the policy of indirect rule, and, while they were suspicious of educating the mass of their people, they enjoyed the finer things which British rule had to offer. Some northern politicians had become ardent Anglophiles, one of whom was Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, an illegitimate son of the Sultan of Sokoto, the most revered of the Islamic chiefs who dominated the north of Nigeria.

  Born in 1910, he had been educated at Katsina College, a teacher training academy, which was exactly the kind of boarding school that Lugard had fondly imagined would educate the elite of Northern Nigeria. The college had been founded in 1922, with four British and two African masters. Its function was the ‘teacher training of Muslims’, and its emphasis was on the training of character. It became a leading educator of the northern elite, so much so that one British writer observed that ‘one seldom makes a mistake when you comment, “You must have been to Katsina College,” on hearing a now middle-aged Northern Nigerian speaking beautiful English’.4 The Sardauna himself remembered his days at Katsina fondly; he looked back on a world of houses and all the paraphernalia of the British public school in its Edwardian heyday. He loved cricket, but his favourite game was fives, particularly ‘the Eton variety of the game’, which he noted had ‘a little spur wall on one side which adds a great deal to the complexities of playing’. The Sardauna recommended Eton fives as a ‘first-class game’, which was the ‘quickest way of getting exercise if you haven’t much time’. Writing in the early 1960s, he observed that he and some of his colleagues ‘still put in half an hour or so of an evening, whenever we get the chance’. He and his friends were also ‘teaching young people to play it’. He was particularly honoured, on one of his visits to Great Britain, to be ‘invited to play the game at Eton’.5

  Katsina College was particularly effective in inculcating British values. Sir Hugh Clifford, the Governor of Nigeria, in the 1920s had envisaged special colleges for princes ‘which they had in India’. This fitted the Muslim elite in Northern Nigeria very well. It also meant that many of the leading men in the north had started their ‘working lives as teachers’, because Katsina was nominally a teacher training college. The Sardauna felt he had more in common with the English than with his fellow Nigerians from the south of the country. He recalled his pleasure at staying with a family in Richmond, Yorkshire in 1948, where he had travelled to improve his English under the sponsorship of the British Council. In Yorkshire, he studied local government and also British methods of farming, and he stayed for a whole month. The Sardauna was ‘delighted to live with an English family as part of their life’. He learned a ‘great deal about the English and the way they lived and thought’. The whole experience ‘had been of the greatest service to me ever since’.6

  Men like Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, were Anglophile conservatives. The Sardauna saw the emirs as being natural rulers and not merely ‘effete, conservative and die-hard obstructionists’. As far as votes for women in Northern Nigeria were concerned, he was ambivalent. In his vivid autobiography, written in quaintly old-fashioned English, he noted, ‘I daresay that we shall introduce it in the end here, but . . . it is so contrary to the customs and feelings of the greater part of the men of this Region that I would be very loath to introduce it myself.’7 By 1948, however, while the Sardauna was staying with friends in Yorkshire, the tide had moved quickly in the direction of some kind of independence. Arthur Richards had already proposed the first post-war constitution of Nigeria; wary of the tribalism in the country, he had proposed a unitary (as opposed to federal) constitution to counter this feature of Nigerian politics.

  After the war, there was a growing feeling that independence was just a matter of time. A hundred thousand Nigerians had served in the armed forces, and two divisions consisting of over 30,000 men had fought against the Axis powers in the Middle East, East Africa, Burma and India. The example of Indian independence in 1947 had ‘a considerable impact in Africa’. By the early 1950s, the attainment of independence had become a ‘foregone conclusion’.8 Nigerian politics had, consequently, developed rapidly in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, when three powerful political parties, each linked with the largest tribal group in the area, were formed in the three regions of Nigeria. In the east, the Igbo had their party, the NCNC; in the west, the Yoruba had the Action Group, while in the north the NPC represented the Hausa-Fulani Muslims. The northern leaders, conservative as they were in outlook, continued to be sceptical about independence. Northern nationalism differed from that of the south, since it was opposed not so much ‘to British colonial rule as to the withdrawal of that rule making possible some form of southern domination’.9

  The social differences between the three regions had actually become wider during the period of British rule, in the two or three decades before the independence of Nigeria in 1960. The roots of tribal nationalism lay to ‘a great extent in the uneven educational development of the country’. The western Yorubas had enjoyed earlier contact with European missionaries. They were literate and had converted to Christianity, and now they had acquired a large degree of control over the businesses, the professions and the civil service. The eastern Igbos had started their own process of development in the 1930s and 1940s to eliminate what they perceived to be the economic and social gap between themselves and the Yorubas. In the north the emirs, the feudal lords and their retainers still maintained an iron grip on power and restricted Western educational opportunities, which they believed were corrupting influences, for their people.

  The prevalence of Islam in the north was one of the reasons it had proved so attractive to Lugard and the early district commissioners. Islam was something they felt they understood, as many of the district commissioners had experience in the Sudan or had served in Asia. British officials appreciated the hierarchy and framework of Islamic society. The ‘savages’ of the south were, as we have seen, less well understood. There were, naturally enough, accusations that bias was shown by the British to the north. Frederick Forsyth, the novelist, would later write that ‘the English loved the North; the climate is hot and
dry as opposed to the steamy and malarial South; life is slow and graceful, if you happen to be an Englishman or an Emir’. The snobbery and class-consciousness that underpinned so much of British life in the early twentieth century found the idea of feudal rulers familiar and charming. The bias towards the north was a trait that the Foreign Office itself acknowledged in 1970: ‘it was an article of faith in Eastern Nigeria, and had been for decades, that the British were hopelessly biased in favour of the feudal Emirs of the North; there was some basis for this, since the North retained the highest proportion of British officials, many of them coming from the Sudan with a romantic passion for Islam and for polo-playing aristocrats’.10

  In the polo-playing north of the country, pageantry, royalty and invented traditions were combined in the institution of the durbars, imported from India. In 1959, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester came to Nigeria, representing their niece Queen Elizabeth II. A durbar was held at Kaduna, the northern capital, during which 3,000 turbaned horsemen and 7,000 warriors dressed in medieval chain-mail, along with archers, lancers, musketeers, musicians, dancers, tumblers and snake-charmers, all presented themselves in a procession lasting three hours. The Duke and Duchess had come to celebrate the granting of self-government to Northern Nigeria, the last region to be given this degree of autonomy. This granting of self-government was regarded as the last step on the road to independence for the whole of Nigeria. ‘The future may not be easy for you,’ warned the Duke of Gloucester. ‘You have a heavy task before you.’ Each of the three regions now had its own prime minister. As Prime Minister of the Northern Region, the Sardauna of Sokoto took centre stage and played the perfect host to the royal couple. He was the dominant political player in the north, ‘a land of ancient walled cities and feudal emirs’, which was ‘three times the size of the two other regions put together’.11

  The 1950s had witnessed an intensification of the mutual suspicions and jealousies which characterized the relations between Nigeria’s three regions. The original Richards constitution had given way to three more constitutions which all tried to address the same problem. Would Nigeria be a federation of independent regions, or would it be centrally administered under a strong unitary government?

  Independence finally came on 1 October 1960. The new federal Prime Minister, responsible for the central government, was another northerner called Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, but everyone believed him to be a creature of the Sardauna, who had earlier told an American journalist that he would leave the job of being Nigeria’s prime minister to ‘one of my lieutenants’.12 There had been elections in 1959 in which none of the three tribally based parties had secured an overall majority, but in which each had won handsome majorities in its home region. The Northern Region was the most populous of the three regions, with about 50 per cent of the country’s population, so it was not surprising when the Northern People’s Congress captured 134 out of 312 seats in the 1959 pre-independence parliament, all of which were in the north. In the east, the Igbos had won eighty-nine seats, while the Yoruba Action Group in the west won seventy-three.13 The next five years were ‘characterized by political crises’ as each of the three main parties fought for ‘supremacy over the federal government’. That there were three regions, each with its own ethnically based party, was wildly destabilizing and the perfect recipe for ‘ethnic combat’.14 The independence constitution had left the north strong. In this region, the Sardauna of Sokoto remained regional prime minister, and, so people said, the most powerful man in the country.

  In the immediate period after independence, the Northern Party formed an alliance with the Igbos and allowed the Yorubas in effect to be an official opposition party. All parties were ‘locked in a ferocious competition for a larger share from the national treasury’: ‘Tribalism became the ideology of politics.’15 As population would influence the allocation of seats, censuses became keenly contested, the figures were disputed and sometimes the actual findings were repressed. The 1962 census took place in a climate of political tension and mounting confusion. In 1952, before the final constitution had been settled on, people had been under-counted in the census taken that year, because it was believed that the census was an instrument by which the colonial government would collect more taxes. In 1962, after independence, the census was now believed to affect political representation and so figures increased dramatically in many regions. The 1962 census was said to have cost £1.5 million, but the figures were never published. The Sardauna of Sokoto was reputedly upset by the findings when he saw that the unofficial figures showed that, while the north’s population had gone up 30 per cent from 16.8 million in 1952 to 22.5 million, some of the eastern areas claimed increases of 200 per cent. The western returns also gave an increase of 70 per cent.16 The implications of all this were clear: it was rumoured that the north no longer contained half the population and so could easily be dominated by a combination of the other two regions. When shown the results of the 1962 census, the Sardauna was said to have ‘torn up the figures in disgust’ and to have ordered Tafawa Balewa, the federal Prime Minister, ‘to try again’. 17 Balewa did try again. Another census was conducted in November 1963, in which the Northern Region managed to ‘find’ another 7 million people more than the previous year and now, with a population of 29.8 million, there was no question of the north not having more than half of Nigeria’s population of 55 million. Needless to say Dr Michael Okpara, Prime Minister of the Eastern Region, the Igbo-dominated area, rejected the census on the grounds that the ‘Northern figures were fraudulent’.18 Satisfied with the new figures, the Sardauna allowed the federal Prime Minister to publish them, which he did without consulting the other regional premiers. Elections took place at the end of 1964 in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and disillusionment. It was clear that the only issue at stake was whether the north would dominate Nigeria, or whether the two regions in the south could muster enough seats to counterbalance the northern bloc.

  Outside purely electoral politics, there were other ethnic tensions. There was the problem of immigrants in the north, people who had come in search of work from the west and, in particular, from the east. The northern elites clearly resented these newcomers and managed to keep the immigrants in so-called strangers’ communities, where, because of the difference of religion, schooling was segregated and two different societies existed side by side. As early as 1912, the British socialist E. D. Morel had observed that the ‘Southern Nigerian system is turning out every year hundreds of Europeanized Africans’, but the ‘Northern Nigerian system aims at the establishment of an educational system based upon a totally different ideal’.19 Fifty years of colonial rule had failed to bridge this gap. As ethnic tensions flared, the position of southerners in the north became more precarious. It was not possible to become a northerner by simply settling in the north, since an individual had to be born into a northern tribe to be considered a true northerner. Southerners were being systematically eliminated from the regional civil service in the north, ‘and even Englishmen and other foreigners were preferred to them’.20

  After the elections at the end of 1964, the easterners openly threatened secession and there was anarchy in the Western Region, while in the north the Sardauna was still trying to keep out southern influences in order to consolidate his power. It was obvious by 1964 that the Federation of Nigeria was falling apart. The mood of chaos deepened during 1965, as southerners became increasingly frustrated at being passed over in the civil service by northerners who, they believed, were less qualified than themselves. There were rumours of insurrection, even of a coup by disgruntled eastern officers in the army.

  At the very beginning of 1966, the Sardauna of Sokoto planned to visit Saudi Arabia, where he hoped to spend a little more than a week, between 3 and 11 January, to pay his respects to the leaders of the Islamic faith. He had gone to Sokoto at the end of 1965 to say goodbye. Like a scene from a tragic play, there had been some grim forebodings and death threats, but the Sardauna’s mood was compos
ed and contemplative. He was in a fatalistic mood as he and his entourage of about twenty returned to Kano on the 11th after the successful visit to Mecca. The Sardauna went straight to Kaduna, the northern capital, where he was visited by Samuel Akintola, a distinguished Yoruba chief, who now served as the premier of the Western Region. Akintola had heard rumours of a coup, and was visiting his friend the Sardauna to discuss possible reactions to this new and alarming threat. On Friday 14 January the two regional premiers met at the Sardauna’s house. Between 2.30 and 5.30 p.m., the two men discussed the plots and rumours they had heard. Akintola pointed out that he knew people in the army and that there were plans, now well advanced, to overthrow the federal government. Akintola, according to one source, argued with the Sardauna, saying, ‘If the Prime Minister does not intervene with troops, we are all going to die.’

  Chief Akintola left Kaduna to return to Ibadan, the capital of the Western Region, at 6 p.m. on the Friday evening. ‘I will go back to Ibadan and face my death,’ he declared. Once Akintola had gone, the Sardauna held a security meeting, then went out to play fives with some friends. Meanwhile the usual crowd of people came to the Sardauna’s house between 8 and 10 p.m.–hangers-on, clients of the great feudal lord, who would petition for favours and money almost on a daily basis. Between 1.30 and 2 a.m. on the morning of Saturday the 15 th, shots were heard outside the Sardauna’s palace.21 A twenty-nine-year-old Sandhurst-trained major, Patrick Nzeogwu, led his body of troops to the door of the palace and threw a hand grenade through the front gate as his men shot the gate itself from its hinges. The Sardauna was counting his prayer beads with his three wives. The Major, an Igbo by ethnic origin, educated in the north, had been holding night manoeuvres with his troops for six successive weeks. The city had become so used to the sound of gunfire during these manoeuvres that the police did not bother to investigate on the actual night of the rebellion. The men marched into the palace and dragged the Sardauna outside, propped him against a wall and shot him.