Ghosts of Empire (48 page)

The Alake of Abeokuta postponed his planned visit to the summer of 1936; the Silver Jubilee celebrations of 1935 were used as an excuse for him not to be granted an audience with King George V. As one Colonial Office official wrote, the ‘King has in the past . . . received Emirs and Sultans from the North, but the special fatigues of the Silver Jubilee make these precedents of no great importance'. He added the rider that the ‘Alake of Abeokuta is, I believe, generally admitted to be a very important person in the Yoruba States'.
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The visit of 1936 failed to take place too; the King died in January that year and the Alake decided not to visit at that time. The civil servant acidly remarked, ‘I expect the Alake will want to come next year–unless the coronation is made an excuse for putting him off–though more probably
he
[emphasis in original] will regard it as the chief motive for his visiting this country.'
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This brief story shows how much the chiefs in the Yoruba west bought into the notion of empire. They were ‘very important' people who enjoyed a power and authority directly granted to them by the British Empire. In the Igbo-dominated east of Nigeria, however, the system of indirect rule was less successful, since the Igbo, as Chinua Achebe has related, did not have chiefs, and the attempt to foist such leaders on them failed. The problem was that the system of Muslim emirates, which was adopted for
the north of the country, became the ‘model for the whole of united Nigeria'.
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In 1937, Margery Perham, the Oxford academic and Nigeria expert who had befriended Lord Lugard in his old age, could speak of the ‘democracy' of Igbo culture. She observed that the ‘headship of any group' in the Igbo villages was ‘never autocratic'. It was ‘representative to an exceptionally full sense'. There was in the east of Nigeria a ‘distribution of authority'. She was aware of reports which stated that ‘younger men who have acquired high titles . . . or simply by virtue of their abilities, [were] able to raise their voice in council'. Perham could see in 1937 that ‘the artificial system of the last thirty years or so'–the system of indirect rule and the promotion of the local chiefs and petty princes–had, in the south-east of Nigeria, ‘been revealed as defective'.
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It was this deficiency which would set Nigeria up for the crisis of civil war and which, in the form of tribalism and corruption, continues to exercise a malign influence on modern Nigeria.

The Second World War was a period of great upheaval for the British Empire. British officials could see that, by fighting Nazi Germany, they were actually undermining their own position among the colonial peoples they governed. Lord Moyne, the Colonial Secretary, warned the Governor of Nigeria about the high expectations raised by one of Clement Attlee's speeches: ‘There is no doubt that in the minds of many coloured people we are fighting this war primarily to vindicate the doctrine of the equality of all races in contrast to the Nazi idea of the Herrenvolk.' He added, ‘I feel that we must be very careful to live up to what is expected of us.'
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Nigeria itself was a backwater in the worldwide conflict, and the British officials there grew increasingly frustrated and found themselves sidelined. The Governor, Sir Bernard Bourdillon, was hankering after Khartoum and ‘a closer contact with war'.
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A career Colonial Office man who had spent time in Iraq in the 1920s, Bourdillon was now approaching sixty and was keen to get out of Nigeria. ‘I am very fit, but there is no doubt that, after 34 years in the tropics, I am not as energetic, physically or mentally, as I was when I first came here.' It would be better, even if the end of the war is ‘not clearly in sight', for there to be a change of governor. In June 1943, Sir Arthur Richards was appointed in his place. Richards was now fifty-eight. He had a mischievous sense of humour and a dry, cynical wit. A product of Clifton College and Christ Church, Oxford, he was just the kind of liberal administrator who so often presided over the last days of empire.

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.'
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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'.
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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'.
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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'.
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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.'
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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'.
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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'.
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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'.
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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'.
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