Nigeria: A Country in Search of Nationhood

by Shebar Windstone

...it is time now to move from quiet diplomacy to variants of the same concerted action that brought to its knees one other nation, apartheid South Africa, that refused to accept the universal affirmation that makes the centrality of the human being, without exception of color, class, sex, race or religion, the means and the end, the agent through whom and for whom all development activities must be undertaken.

- Wole Soyinka, in The Open Sore of a Continent

The Colonial Legacy

Whether one considers Nigeria to be a nation-space, a nation still-born or a military camp, current conditions and events in that country may seem incomprehensible unless viewed in relation to Africa's colonial legacy. As early as the 1680s, African-European cultural and political relations, however beneficial to the citizens of both continents, could be labeled alliances between "kings, big men, and rich traders." By the 19th century, when slavery was replaced by wage-slavery and a new imperialism moved into the trade routes of the old overseas capitalism, Africa had developed well-organized community-based systems of production, trade and government evolved from lineage-based systems. One might venture to say that nations had evolved, albeit not nations on the European model. We can only speculate how African governments and economies might have realized their potentials had the colonialists not invaded.

Basil Davidson, in Let Freedom Come: Africa in Modern History (1978), provided a richly detailed overview of the process by which Europeans moved to impose their own monopolies upon those formed by Africans. In the name of "civilization," waving the banners of Christianity and Commerce closely followed by cannons and locally-conscripted soldiers, the Belgians, British, French, Germans, Italians, Portuguese and Spanish moved across Africa, willfully blind to the lands and peoples that they trampled. In 1884-5, representatives of the colonial powers sat down in Berlin to settle their rivalries by carving the African continent into mutually agreed-upon "spheres of influence" and occupation. In almost total ignorance of the geography and cultures in question, they drew lines as if with a ruler across the map, creating "national" borders that divided as many nations or ethnic groupings between countries as they did trap mutually exclusive nations within countries. Seventy years later, in Path to Nigerian Freedom, Yoruban Chief Obafemi Awolowo, would write:

Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no "Nigerians" in the same sense as there are "English," "Welsh," or "French." The word "Nigerian" is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria and those who do not.

However, this statement may have been in service of a larger political agenda on his part, not unlike that of the original colonists, since he was also to claim that "Only an insignificant minority have any political awareness... It must be realized now and for all time that this articulate minority are destined to rule the country."

By all accounts, the British occupation of what they called Nigeria was among the most benign, if only because the intent was to extract maximum resources at minimum expense. The British relied upon the system of "Indirect Rule" developed in India, using local kings and tribal chiefs as their henchmen, thereby minimizing resistance to white-imposed rule along with the human and financial costs that would have entailed. The costs of that rule had to be paid by the ruled, if not through forced labor then through customs dues or direct taxation. Agricultural production that had been sufficient for both local use and the export trade now had to be altered to meet the demands of a wage-based and export-weakened economy, and the cities became flooded with the exiles of the fields. By 1897, workers in Lagos were striking for a raise in their penurious wages - which they would not receive until forty years later.

That the British were too cheap to provide schools for their subjects was to prove a mixed blessing. Indigenous languages and cultures survived, but at the cost of the sense of national unity that might have been made possible by possession of a common language. Only a small minority of Nigerians, aided by missionaries or related to merchants or tribal heads, would receive a British education. The subjects of other colonial powers were similarly limited - perhaps deliberately, because, as a Belgian colonial minister noted in 1954: "We have seen that those Natives who have been shown Europe, and given a very advanced education, do not always return to their homelands in a spirit favourable to civilization and to the Mother Country in particular."

Not all those who profited from the British presence were bootlickers and sycophants. Long before the political horizons of large numbers of Nigerians (and other Africans) were widened by their participation in World War II, members of the educated élite were articulating cogent criticisms of colonialist practices and visions of a nascent nationalism or pan-African identity. In 1920, Thomas Horatio Jackson, a second-generation newspaper publisher, observed in his Lagos Weekly Record that

we have lived under the cramped condition of a military dictatorship when the law from being a means of protection had become an instrument of crime and oppression in the hands of unscrupulous officials... The last administration had made the very name of white man stink in the nostrils of the native.

By the early 1950s, according to Davidson, with a population of 40 million, Nigeria could boast only 150 lawyers, 160 doctors, and 786 clergymen. In all of northern Nigeria, there was not one doctor. The majority were not thoroughly at home in either European or African culture, but held the European nation-state as a model to be emulated. Not all of the educated élite were nationalists, nor were all of the nationalists educated. But those who were most adept at wielding the weapons of political power were as eager as their white-skinned predecessors to protect and enlarge their privileged status at the expense of the Nigerian peoples.

The achievement in 1960 of Nigerian independence from British rule would not have been possible without the support of broad masses of Nigerians. For them, this was not so much a political as a social struggle for improved living conditions, higher wages, more equitable laws and restoration of property taken by whites. Davidson notes:

When the nationalists came to the masses and said that all their woes were the result of colonial rule, and would disappear with the disappearance of colonial rule, multitudes of people were ready to listen to the good news and follow these leaders in the hope that something useful might ensue. They became nationalists, as it were, by association; but the association, more often than not, remained a fragile one.

Nigerians were united only in their opposition to the British. The contradictions inherent in the country's formation resurfaced after the initial euphoria of liberation wore off and, as Chinua Achebe would point out in The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), Nigerians found themselves stumbling over the "somnolent evangelical" lyrics of a national anthem composed by a British woman:

Though tribe and tongue may differ
In brotherhood we stand!

Martin Meredith, in The First Dance of Freedom: Black Africa in the Post-war Era (1984), suggests that unequal or indifferent British administration had at least maintained, if not exacerbated, the divisions and rivalries of the country's three geographical regions, three major groups (the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Ibo or Igbo), and "a host of 'minority' tribes, more than one hundred separate 'Native Administrations' and, in all, some 248 languages." (This tradition of dividing and conquering was honored in October 1996 when General Sani Abacha announced the creation of six more states, making a total of 36.) "By outward appearances," Meredith writes, "Nigeria provided a promising example of a carefully balanced and stable parliamentary democracy."

Behind this reassuring facade, however, politicians on all sides were engaged in a scramble for power and profit conducted with such reckless abandon that it led finally to the downfall of civilian rule within six years. The advantages of political office were used at every opportunity by Nigeria's leaders to accumulate empires of wealth and patronage with which to improve both their personal and their party's fortunes. In return for political support, party and government bosses were able to provide their followers and friends with jobs, contracts, loans, scholarships, public amenities; indeed with any favour that came within their purview. Public funds were regularly commandeered for political and sometimes personal gain. At every level, from the Federal government to Regional government down to local districts and towns, the system was worked by politicians in office to ensure that their own areas and members of their own tribe benefited, while opposition areas suffered from neglect. Politics thus degenerated into a corrupt and bitter struggle for the spoils of office. Each region was locked in competition, for a larger share of federal revenue, for the location of industries, for appointments to public office, for political advantage, often in an atmosphere of such cut-throat antagonism that tribal fears and mistrust became even more deeply rooted.

Subsequent power struggles brutally imitated the examples of previous powerholders' use of force and violence until even the pretense of democracy was abandoned. Conflicts escalated to genocidal proportions by 1967, when Lt.-Colonel Emeka Ojukwu, the son of a wealth Ibo businessman, who had received a degree from Oxford and trained in Britain as an army officer, attempted to lead the secession of the Eastern Region, which contained profitable seaports, rich oil fields, and half of Nigeria's land. Despite significant African, European and American support, the newly-declared state of Biafra couldn't stand up to the opposition of the Northern and Western Regions allied with minority groups within the Eastern Region. The great cost of human lives incurred in the two-year-long civil war was made greater by Ojukwu's putting relief funds into military efforts and his own pockets.

Western programs of aid for Africa, whether for emergency relief or to subsidize social and economic development, date back to the period immediately following World War II when, according to Davidson, it was believed that "African resources would restore a shattered Western Europe." Attempts to extract peanuts and poultry from colonies that couldn't feed themselves, like subsequent projects to develop infrastructural elements such as harbors, transportation and communications in order to more cheaply and efficiently extract goods, were rationalized as aiding Africans themselves by (as a British Labor Party program put it) going into partnership with them "to liquidate ignorance, poverty and disease." For the US, they became a cornerstone of Cold War strategy promoting capitalism and democracy to counter Soviet influence.

By this time, the old trade monopolies had been supplanted by transnational or multinational corporations, most often headquartered in the US while their tentacles rose up bearing different corporate names around the globe. Those who were in a position to sign contracts or to get a piece of the action were understandably eager to extract whatever they could from their would-be extractors, as long as they weren't signing over their own life-blood or homelands. In Nigeria as elsewhere, populations and exports grew while wages and the production of goods for local consumption fell. By 1970, an official commission would find that those at the bottom of the food-chain were experiencing "intolerable suffering" rendered "even more intolerable by manifestations of affluence and wasteful expenditure" by members of ruling groups who had no visible or legitimate means of support.