Читать книгу The Diplomacy of Theodore Brown and the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War - Keith A. Dye - Страница 12

Chapter One

Sourcing the Prelude to 1960: Great Britain, Nigeria, African Americans, and the United States

Historiographical currents that led African Americans to engage the Nigerian civil war in 1967 had been well underway before colonialism, anti-colonialism and post-colonialism were terms to describe the years of African independence. These currents, to be discussed shortly, of not only previous decades but arguably previous centuries throughout the Atlantic World were background to the above-mentioned terminologies that fomented a relationship between Africa and African Americans. Rather than present an assemblage of facts to showcase the big picture, this chapter seeks to point to a few important links on a chain of events that helped place the later activities of the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa in a chronological framework to better consider why the group pursued its negotiations course. Beginning this first chapter with the encounter between the ANLCA and Nigeria in 1967, therefore, would evade the necessary transition of eras that helped establish the climate for a contested post-colonial war, and an invitation to the ANLCA to participate in conflict resolution discussions. By reviewing select secondary sources, this prelude more than anything else attempts to tie what may appear to be unrelated ←21 | 22→occurrences together onto a larger portrait of empire, peoples and its aftermath in a contracting Atlantic World.

Movement within an Atlantic Empire

It might be asked how African Americans as distant relatives to the victims of European colonialism were impacted by the breakup of western empires following World War II. Nigeria prior to independence in 1960 would provide an answer to this question of empire.¹ That large West African territory had been a location where a significant percentage of African American ancestors originated during the trans-Atlantic slave trade that began in the fifteenth century. Nigeria came into existence as a sizeable territory when Great Britain imposed its colonial order onto a region that in its broadest configuration became West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Equally important to an understanding of the role Nigeria would have in anti-colonial activism was its prominence as a pro-independence leader. These aspects of Nigeria nurtured the idealization African Americans had for a trans-Atlantic union with the land and its people, a sentiment that later resulted in the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa. Post-war disintegration of the colonial order, it was thought, could lead to a reunification that might restore to African Americans and Africans a self-determination severed generations previously by European interstate battles for power and security.

Other assets seemed to enhance this hopeful enterprise of African Americans as the years advanced. Nigeria by the mid-twentieth century had a large population, was reasonably productive, and had a thriving economy compared to its neighbors. The territory also had enough suspected oil reserves to lure any wildcatter. With the country commanding respect both regionally and from its international supporters, it seemed only a matter of time before the transitioning of Nigeria to indigenous statehood would help accelerate the pace of the African American freedom movement. There were challenges, but none preventing a first-time opportunity for African Americans to engage Nigeria as a leader among an emerging region of nations. This improvement to the African ←22 | 23→American capability for power was a departure from the pattern of previous African American relations with African organizations, these having lacked the advantage of sovereign authority. Liberia, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone were nominally free and inconsequential states within the colonial universe, barely capable of exercising the last word in their foreign affairs, though adamant about correcting this deficiency.²

Adjustments in World War II-era relations between African Americans and Africa were born of earlier African American opposition to the European empire system. One benefit was a more visible international profile. African American attacks on oppression in the broader arena became bolder as the decades advanced. Such endeavors often emphasized institutional development alongside written and verbal expressions of protest. All would combine as political investment with Africans when a post-colonial world was in sight. It might be fair to consider, then, that African American assistance to Africa had by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed the profile of special interest foreign affairs.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, these internationalist endeavors of African Americans included emigration societies headed by Martin R. Delany, Alexander Crummell, Edward Blyden, and Henry M. Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and others who hoped to provide an African nationality for African Americans. This growing movement included the “civilizing” missionary projects of Althea Maria Brown; the industrial educational programs offered by the Tuskegee Institute and led by Booker T. Washington; and the first pan-African conference (congress) organized by Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams in 1900.³ Essayists and poets moved in and out of their genre by producing reams of turn-of-the century anti-imperialist literature. Small-scale business collaborations between African Americans and Africa were founded or advertised as having great potential, with indigenous Nigeria among the traversed areas. The record of these activities indicated they were not aimless thrashings about for immediate political favors, obvious since dates for independence were indeterminate. Perhaps a better understanding would have it that these undertakings were crusades that would accrue later as ←23 | 24→credentials for more substantive interactions with Africa charting its own course in world affairs.⁴

African American and African cooperation expanded after the turn of the twentieth century. Their joint intentions defied imperial conquest, upheaval in Europe, and prosperity turned into Depression. These destabilizing occurrences slightly loosened the controls stronger nations had on colonized peoples, drawing the similarly afflicted African American population closer to the oppressed. The cross-Atlantic operations against colonialism of the generation before would now be accompanied by more strident attacks, with West Africa a major beneficiary. Campaigns demanding release of captive peoples were noticeably more aggressive for the next contingent of liberationists. These included the agitations of the Marcus Garvey African redemption movement through his Universal Negro Improvement Association that, according to one author, was “strongest in West Africa,” as compared to other regions of the continent.⁵ Added to this were the W.E.B. DuBois-led pan-African congresses of 1919, 1923, and 1927. The decades-long cultural exposition famously known as the Harlem Renaissance ushered in a torrent of creativity in music, dance, theater, literature, painting, and film that linked African Americans with Africa. In some instances these protest, too, were against colonial constrictions. More voices raged against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, inspiring a contingent of African Americans to fight alongside Ethiopian forces. Collaborations by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Council on African Affairs, and Nigerian and other African activists in Africa and the Americas increased during the interwar and war years.⁶

All of this started without the cooperation of Great Britain, of course, the dominant colonizing nation engaged in the Atlantic slave trade and who stood to lose more than her imperial neighbors. For it was the objective of the British to retain their colonial possessions as proof of their continued sway over world affairs and resources.⁷ Maintaining this control was not easy for the British, as witnessed by the onslaught of the Axis powers that made “the good war.”⁸ Immediately following this military conflict was an equally volatile Cold War political contest primarily between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist ←24 | 25→Republics (USSR). Both were eager to become reigning superpowers years beyond what historian Eric Hobsbawn labeled the “Age of Empire,” 1875 to 1914.⁹ Hobsbawn’s declaration, therefore, was not the final word to such pursuits. The United States climbed further up the ladder of world power as an exhausted Great Britain sought recovery from the war.¹⁰ As if that wasn’t enough distress for the British, agitation for independence by India, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and other parts of Africa would top off the Empire’s troubles. African American activists assisted these colonized peoples whose plight they believed resembled their own, a view generally shared by leaders of colonial movements. African Americans and other peoples under the weight of the colonial system stood to benefit from its collapse. All of this meant that the British Empire, originally conceived of as a global construct, could no longer outpace the enlarging shadows of a setting sun.

Predecessors to the ANLCA realized, and later the group itself, that World War Two-era pronouncements about an insecure Atlantic World were a reminder of that region’s antecedents that helped produce West Africa, and what the upheaval meant for the old and new worlds.¹¹ Both colonizer and colonized, as well as their supporters and detractors were confronting the war-era crisis of surging upheaval. Much as it had been in the past as for the wartime present, the depth of this combat would make later generations of activists, particularly those of the 1960s, aware of its well-known significance in Atlantic World history. African Americans were more than observers to the process, as would be indicated by the growing sophistication of their organizations.¹²

ANLCA executive director Theodore Brown later would become very familiar with the symbolic importance of the ocean, as evidenced by his many flights from the United States to Africa. Lagos, the political capital of Nigeria and an Atlantic construction would be his operating base upon entry to mediations between disputants to the Nigerian conflict. This experience would be one of several that helped make Atlantic World history relevant to the ANLCA. What mattered was the history of how these distant shores were connected, an inescapable and profound series of occurrences that produced African Americans and their many liberation organizations.

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Well before Nigeria-Biafra, therefore, the Atlantic served as a conduit for the nefarious slave trade. A series of Papal Bulls beginning in 1442 seemed to give ecclesiastical (legal) sanction to slaving, but especially so with Romanus Pontifex in 1455, and certainly as issued by Alexander VI in 1493 (Inter caetera), a document that divided the world between Spain and Portugal and thereby can be interpreted as a formal beginning of Atlantic slavery as an organized event. To smooth out further arguments between Portugal and Spain, it was recast as a political compact in 1494 as the Treaty of Tordesillas. Both were charters of the Atlantic that destroyed the freedoms of Africans.¹³ Expectedly unacceptable to nations excluded from the arrangement, it nonetheless withstood an attempt at modification by Pope Paul III’s executive decree that enshrined the right of native peoples (American Indians) to freedom while excluding such extension to Africans. England, among dissenting parties, had heard enough. They, too, claimed a right to the Atlantic and its unfolding events, and would not accede to anything resembling a trans-national edict that locked them out of the anticipated riches of an enlarging oceanic world. They instead took matters into their own hands. According to one author, “the English … lacked any initial founding charter issued by an international authority. Henry VII’s letters patent to John Cabot of 1496 were to some degree an attempt to replicate the language of Papal legislation ….”¹⁴

The Atlantic Ocean would grow in its reputation for torrid affairs. It became a tricontinental theater involving Africa, Europe, and the New World that seemed to foment more disputes on the timeline to twentieth-century empire troubles. These would include the controversial charge by American patriot Thomas Jefferson in 1776 that Great Britain forced the slave trade onto his fellow colonists, then headed for independence. Or when that same British Empire and the United States declared an end to slave importations by 1808, with the British seeking its enforcement by patrolling the Atlantic Ocean, the waters of the Caribbean islands, and the West African coast. The British Empire was intent on maintaining their expansionist proclivities over the Atlantic World. They sought further control of the water highway when they sanctioned an end to slavery in their colonies with implementation of the Emancipation Act in 1833 (questionable, as it allowed for gradual ←26 | 27→freedom, contentious as disavowed by the U.S. government, but an inspiration that led to the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia). This Act would pose challenges to slave plantation owners in the Americas whose livelihood was derived from transporting goods produced by slave labor over the ocean. An innocence of the Atlantic Ocean was no longer sustainable. It soon would resume its role as a passageway for the European colonization of Africa with the U.S. government a quiet witness to the process.¹⁵

Traversing the ocean, finally, meant continuing its association with controversy when colonized peoples were dragged into two of the most devastating wars of the twentieth century. The second of these—World War II—was the culmination of five centuries of remarkable yet rancorous civilization for Atlantic World inhabitants. It metaphorically forced a reversal of the ocean’s flow to become a conduit for reinstituting previously discarded human rights. This new worldly conflict became “a war of competing empires and contradictory visions for transforming the global order.”¹⁶ As an example, representatives from America and Great Britain met on the HMS Prince of Wales, an Atlantic Ocean vessel, in September 1941 to produce the Atlantic Charter. This was an arbitrary but hopeful bilateral guarantor of freedoms from fear and want and the rights of free worship and speech for the world’s peoples.

That charter as the modern incarnation of what the ocean had come to mean for empires did not, however, completely settle the waters. Its third clause was of special regard for the African. “[T];he right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live; and … to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them” was interpreted differently by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his colonial secretary Oliver Stanley. They insisted the phrase did not apply to subject peoples of that empire. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt disagreed but eventually decided not to reject their views.¹⁷ Deputy British prime minister Clement Attlee, however, said the charter applied to Africans, somewhat rescuing any remaining chance to make good of an Atlantic metaphor. West Africans immediately denounced the Churchillian perspective through editorials, articles, and delegations to England demanding representative government.¹⁸

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There had been and would be other conferences by the same nations and their allies that issued statements interpreted by Africans as potentially capable of alleviating their oppression.¹⁹ These gatherings were launched by nations that had helped to define its symbolic meaning, and of course the British were ever present. Such were Bretton Woods in 1944 and Yalta and Potsdam in February and July1945, respectively. Decisions were made at these confabs by Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and the United States to maintain a united front. They hoped to put the finishing touches on the Axis powers, to disassemble the overlordship imposed on less powerful European nations by their expansionist neighbors, and to work out post-war European reconstruction. Emboldened by the attention to what was seen as a new post-colonial world, Anglophone Africans sent memoranda and other requests to the resident British colonial office seeking to present their case for an end to empire rule. This protest was organized by Nigerian nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe, owner of the widely read West African Pilot and later first president of an independent Nigeria. He, along with a delegation of other West African newspaper owners, submitted a request titled “The Atlantic Charter and British West Africa” to the secretary of state of colonies. It called for major reforms as a prelude to full independence. The petitioners received no consideration.²⁰

Not giving up, Africans sought attendance to a conference announced in March 1945 and to be held in San Francisco for the establishment of a supra-national organization. The United Nations (UN) project was a highly ambitious gambit to foster permanent peace and cooperation among countries of the world.²¹ This seemed to answer African calls for international attention to their plight. They hoped—again—to denounce the colonial arrangement governing their lives if given an opportunity to appear at the affair.²²

The odds that Africa could expect substantive assistance from the United Nations were unfavorable. For one, the proposed UN was not the first time in that century that a gathering of nations presented themselves as a forum for restitution of crimes suffered by colonized peoples. The League of Nations called into existence following World War 1 had disappointed Africans on the colonial question. The League refused to enjoin European colonialists to U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s ←28 | 29→principle of self-determination for subject peoples in Africa, an idea among his war-weary Fourteen Points. The world’s expectations for the success of this UN predecessor were small; even the United States withheld its membership. International relations during the inter-war years apparently never departed from Hobsbawn’s Age, remaining just as enticing but deceptive and volatile. Africans knew it from first-hand experience.

Rebuffs aside, other groups and individuals read potential into the new international formation of April 1945. These broad-thinking activists helped Africans remain vigilant about utilizing the sentiment of freedoms espoused in the Atlantic Charter and at Yalta.²³ This, too, seemed baseless in retrospect. African Americans such as NAACP leader W.E.B. DuBois and UNIA founder Marcus Garvey, among a small coterie of activists, had also approached the League of Nations about ending colonial domination of Africans. Though admirable to both their supporters and Africans in need of an advocate, the spokespersons did not have the resource of a U.S. delegation to wrangle any concessions out of the European empire system. Would the UN be any different?

African hopes, therefore, for a complete reversal of their colonized status by the United Nations were premature, if the indifference of the League was any precedent. Indeed, Africans under British domination tried to gain admission to the UN founding conference several times but were blocked by the British colonial office. In that month African members of the Nigerian legislative council resolved that the British government should “approve the appointment of a delegation of two unofficial members to attend as observers at the … conference.” The British response was simply “no such observers were to be allowed.”²⁴

What appeared to make a United Nations approach sensible was the granting of observer status to several African Americans attending the conference in San Francisco. This enabled them to lobby UN members about issues pertinent to subjugated peoples. After struggling with U.S. officials over African American representation in the delegate selection process, NAACP officials W.E.B. DuBois, Mary McCloud Bethune, and Walter White were retained as consultants to the American delegation.²⁵ This advantage enabled them to present demands that called for ←29 | 30→an end to colonialism.²⁶ The NAACP, founded as a U.S. progressive era organization, had expanded to include a geographical scope that promoted anti-colonial activity. Southern Africans, as much colonized as other regions, had a strong voice for freedom provided by the NAACP and the Reverend G. Michael Scott, a white ally from that area.²⁷ Other formations, such as the National Negro Organizations of America for World Security and Equality, its spinoff Federated Organization of Colored People of the World, and the Council on African Affairs, among others, also tried to confront colonialism at the United Nations. Although the results of the efforts of these groups were meager at best, the broader picture would have it that the pace of colonial change had quickened in an era of empire decline.²⁸

The command of the Allied powers to orchestrate final surrender of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and the Japanese empire, and in restructuring the international order, perhaps impressed Africans in their drive toward liberation. It seems more than coincidence that in October 1945 Africans and African descendants convened the Fifth Pan African Congress in Manchester, England, following major summits of the Western powers.²⁹ Continent-born Africans at this fifth PAC then declared—reminiscent of the display of power by the allied nations—that they and not African descendants would lead the proceedings and subsequent pan-African affairs while continuing to recognize the necessary roles and participation of African Americans and other peoples of the centuries-old African dispersal. Kwame Nkrumah, a decade or so away from becoming the first president of a soon-to-be independent Ghana, was the chief proponent of this idea and supported by other Africans. Coincidently, scholar and activist Dubois was one of only two African Americans in attendance at that fifth congress out of two hundred attendees, unlike the previous gatherings. Africans from Nigeria and Ghana (then the Gold Coast), along with Ethiopia, Egypt, and Liberia, subsequently would assume leadership positions in campaigns with other Africans for self-rule or outright independence.³⁰

This entry of African nationalism into a new post-war phase was significant. African-born spokespersons—and Nigeria and Ghana were uppermost—now ascended onto the larger stage to advocate the pan-African cause from the stronger position of anticipated sovereign ←30 | 31→states, as opposed to persons (racial minorities) originating from a Western country leading the way.³¹ The roles assumed by African Americans and Africans in previous pan-African affairs had now rotated, settling upon a new leadership more fitted for an era represented by the 1945 congress. African nationalism rose in tandem with pan-Africanism. The conference ended with a sense of fulfillment, with the potential for success just on the horizon. No longer reformist or predominantly so, the thinking of Africans in attendance reflected a mood of upheaval characteristic of the time, “on a note of insurgency,” as one author stated. Delegates endorsed reciprocal tactics to achieve freedom if “the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force.”³²

The case of Nigeria had become troublesome for the British during the war. Lacking rhyme or reason, colonial Nigeria’s always inchoate political union was an indirect rule, leaving open the unintended opportunity for African resistance to oppression. Circumstances were quite manageable up through the 1930s, but war and anti-colonial agitation in other parts of the world particularly India had begun to shake British power. The British would not voluntarily withdraw from the territory they named “Nigeria” for the river coursing through its lands; that was neither the nature of empire nor what they considered their manifest destiny. After all, British ways would civilize the world if only subject peoples would demonstrate their appreciation. This same imperial attitude, moreover, had been directed against the German state during World War II in an attempt to force capitulation to war-ending demands by the British. Nigerians had to contend with double humiliation in a struggle with metropole requirements and local British administration demands for cooperation to make the colonial system work, and to combat the German menace. This was an economic battle as much as political, with London marshalling its domestic and colonial resources, including key Nigeria, to “strangle German trade as a war measure.”³³ Exports of cocoa, rice, palm kernels, and other crops to Germany were halted and redirected to British markets and troops. This was a move reminiscent of the British navigation acts of the eighteenth century, an economic control measure against American colonists in the expanding wars for empire among Europeans. Nigerians had no clout to change ←31 | 32→the British policy, and thus it seems difficult to characterize them as having willingly contributed to the war effort.³⁴

Indigenous Nigeria’s inability to determine their role in the war was one indignity, and wartime inflation in 1941 would compound this problem. The result was a means of resistance familiar to both metropole and Brits in Nigeria. Now Nigerians both moderate and radical resorted to vigorous activism to assert their cause. These measures were similar to, but uncoordinated with, African American protests during the same year for entry into the American armed forces free of racially discriminatory practices. Labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who would later co-found the ANLCA, led this effort. Though the objective of the Nigerian protests was different (though perhaps only by a matter of degree) than that of the African American protests, the tactics were the same. Nigerians resorted to strikes, walk-outs, sit-downs, marches, and other means of protest in an attempt to slacken hardships inflicted upon them in their own land, including being forced to limit their food consumption while producing more for British troops, and to increase production of raw materials. Nigerian railway and dock workers would join those means of protest especially when precipitated by strains on the transportation system, an interior-to-coast distribution network. Those workers had been forced to work overtime to extract minerals from the soil for the war effort that were then transported on cargo rail cars to the coast. Native African protests against tightening controls and meager compensation continued up to and after the war, differing in intensity but indicating a clear pattern of opposition.³⁵

Wartime relations between the United States and colonial administrators in Nigeria offered little respite for Great Britain. This, too, weakened British power in Nigeria, inadvertently giving rise to aggressive Nigerian campaigns for relief from oppression. Nigerians and British business persons resident in Nigeria increasingly demanded more trade relations with the United States. Great Britain, however, was careful not to allow a trade deficit with its overseas ally to occur. The mother country resisted demands to relax stringent import/export trade policies, thereby helping to further spur African resistance.³⁶

Yet a devastated, war-torn Europe eroded the sense that continuing the British Empire in toto was possible. Great Britain at first thought ←32 | 33→otherwise and instituted a mix of labor concessions and repression against unions and select individuals. Popular labor leader Michael Imoudo was detained. These measures and the general colonial policies of ongoing subservience had minimal results and ultimately produced a rising rebelliousness among Nigerians. Though somewhat temporary, these actions by the British “influenced the course of African nationalism, however indirectly.” Such empire-driven policies meant the war had taken a toll on Great Britain, a circumstance not helped by similar rebelliousness in other parts of what would become known as the third world. Containing the activisms and fighting a war was the cost of empire. The talk of the day increasingly was of a transfer of power. African American activists took a noticeable interest in this new development.³⁷

The reforms that would lead to self-government and eventually independence began to take shape due to several factors that accelerated the process. One study about the concessionary attitude of the British to end their colonial arrangement noted rather critically that the British had always intended to prepare its subject peoples for self-rule “after a period of tutelage since colonial rule itself was a burdensome duty undertaken by the imperial powers.”³⁸ The tone of this benevolent reasoning by Great Britain implied that the colonial enterprise was inherently collapsible, but obtaining the most from it was preferred in the meantime. A second causation was the fact that the United States applied pressure on colonial powers to relinquish their territories or at least embark upon significant reforms. In addition, a liberal attitude toward colonial subjects by British citizens encouraged a lessening of rigid controls. Lastly, mounting opposition by colonial subjects would help force an end to empire.³⁹

Whether separate or in combination, all of these pressures prevented the British government from avoiding the inevitable. It took the Local Government Dispatch of February 1947, however, to formally launch reforms. In this measure Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones suggested Great Britain prepares an educated African elite to assume the reigns of government rather than traditional leaders at the local level. Rebellions in Accra, Ghana, a year later forced implementation of the act. Sir John Macpherson was installed as governor of Nigeria, and ←33 | 34→his liberal inclinations enabled him to advance the move to self-government. Macpherson was able to win some measure of trust from Nigerian nationalists, an achievement in tandem with British public opinion. His more open-minded attitude on lifting British control over Nigerians was unlike that of the previous governor, Sir Arthur Richards, whose heavy-handedness with radical elements had proven unsuccessful.⁴⁰

Macpherson, though, was not totally infatuated with the nationalists; hard-core radicals and revolutionaries were effectively excluded from the program of devolution of powers. This attempt by the British to curtail growing radical nationalist sentiment among local Nigerians especially became the policy after 1945. A Zikist Movement (named for the influential activist leader Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe) along with labor and youth organizations were targeted for a form of containment that included imprisonment, and a propaganda campaign directed at youth to discredit incipient radicalism. It should be noted, too, that capitalism as an economic system was confronted with a more forceful challenge than previous decades. The Cold War had begun in earnest as the Soviet Union and Western nations reversed their wartime alliance. Now fears of a growing communist movement throughout British dominions created another reason to quickly neutralize militant thinking among Nigerians following the Second World War.⁴¹

A period of Nigerian constitution making arose from 1945 to 1950. Great Britain oversaw the organization of this process in cooperation with a select group of Nigerians deemed acceptable for an orderly transfer of power. Britain intended to retain significant economic and ideological controls, as needed, over the former colony with this arrangement. This would be achieved by inducing Nigeria to become a member of the British Commonwealth. At least five conferences were held during this time that produced several constitutions in an effort to dilute full nationalist aspirations for independence. These constitutions were in reality measures of checks and balances to (1) ensure “specific British interests on which our existence as a trading country depends;” (2) “forestall nationalist demands which may threaten our vital interests;” and (3) create “a class with a vested interest in cooperation.”⁴² Throughout the 1950s, Great Britain sought to insert binding language ←34 | 35→that would “not only consolidate the gains of the preceding decades of British rule, but also protect new ones and prevent an irrational government from getting the better of them.”⁴³

British means to guarantee these objectives was to create a strong central government in Nigeria, a goal they felt would be most easily achieved by investing most federal power into a compliant northern region. The three largest and most contentious ethnic groups in the country—the Hausa-Fulani, the Igbo, and the Yoruba—were distributed geographically in the north, east, and west parts of the country. Since imposition of the colonial order British officials had obtained cooperation with their system of indirect rule through a willing Hausa-Fulani clientage based in the northern part of the country. British insistence that the arrangement was pro forma during the post-war constitution era, however, was not totally accurate. Northern leaders at first thought a strong central government was unnecessary (suggesting simply that any association with other regions in a government was undesirable). British colonial officials rejected the idea for political decentralization among the regions in hopes that a fully independent Nigeria was a united one, with a strong federal government to ensure that the ongoing need of the former metropole for access to the instruments of power would not be jeopardized. Yet Nigerian insistence on decentralization could not be completely discarded; greater autonomy for the regions would become part of a new constitution.

Other issues had already come to bear, and new ones soon would, on Nigeria’s march to independence. These would complicate African American understanding of the role Nigeria could play in the emergent pan-African sentiment of the next decade. In fact, the ANLCA would have to contend with them once they became exposed to the long-standing and complex aspects of Nigerian life. Included were ethnic minority concerns about adequate representation, and the tendency of the regions to assert their own identity parallel to a singular Nigerian nationality.⁴⁴ These and other issues, along with the firm intent of the British to secure a legally based presence in the Nigerian political and economic landscape, enabled the British to exert its will on constitutional proceedings for the remainder of the 1950s.⁴⁵ Perhaps the defining moment in this regard was the constitution brokered in 1954. On ←35 | 36→the one hand, it quelled a potentially violent confrontation between the northern, eastern and western regions, and yet it also laid the basis for a de facto division of the country when centralized powers of the Nigerian federation were partly redistributed to those regions. Thus, ethnic-regional power struggles were given constitutional sanction.⁴⁶

Suspicions about self-determination continued to plague the process. One major denial by the British colonial office for Nigerian independence continued to be their observation that Nigerians remained unprepared to fully assume the reins of self-government. The aforementioned divisive factors among members of the indigenous population were given as reasons. Some officials believed the better reasoning was to delay sovereign statehood indefinitely. This was a hopeful defiance against mounting pressures from Azikiwe, the primary spokesperson for the eastern region; northern emir leader Alhaji Tafawa Balewa; and Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the western region-based Action Group to form a new state. Also noted among the delays to independence was the belief by some British leaders that Nigerian entrance into the commonwealth would lead to an Afro-Asian bloc within it, posing a threat they believed could dissolve the original purpose for the association.⁴⁷

British vacillation over the mechanics of Nigeria’s future could not stave off the inevitable. October 1, 1960 emerged from this process as the date for an independent Nigeria and a transfer of power to its leaders. Thus, preparations to install a new administrative and institutional base began in the late 1950s. Nigerians selected by the British attended educational programs at missions and universities in Great Britain and schools in the United States. Personnel chosen to fill key positions within the government also attended training programs at the U.S. state department and spent time observing proceedings at the United Nations General Assembly.⁴⁸ Nigeria and Great Britain both devoted attention to infrastructural development, including the formation of a Nigerian Economic Council that was chiefly the creation of Sir James Robertson. This important resource “provided the framework for broad economic policy” for the fledgling nation-to-be. Then a Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigerian Airways, and the Nigerian National Shipping Line, among other nation-building institutions, were founded.⁴⁹ Of important note was the willingness of Balewa to ←36 | 37→accept a British study, which he commissioned, regarding implementation of a foreign policy that enabled Great Britain to “exert influence on the minds of Nigerian Ministers on foreign affairs on the eve of independence.” This included a defense agreement (later abrogated by Nigeria) that committed Nigeria to assisting Great Britain in future armed conflicts. All told, British leaders viewed the new Nigerian leadership by 1958 as “moderate” and generally receptive to inordinate British influence.⁵⁰

Official U.S. interest in Nigeria had a dual character in the years immediately before and during the unraveling of European colonial empires. Trade between the two countries had slowly crept upward, demonstrating clear potential for increased economic activity under the right circumstances. The main products the United States received from Nigeria included cocoa, palm oil, and hides and skins. Nigerian crude oil in the immediate post-war years, available more in spurts than as a steady flow, was not the demand resource for the United States that it would become in later years. That would come only after the British discovery of substantial oil deposits in 1956. Oil in this region of the world easily fell within the sights of U.S. businessmen always looking for newer and inexpensive natural resources in third world nations. An example of the potential thirst for African oil by outsiders occurred when Great Britain blocked the U.S. oil firm Socony-Vacuum from access to oil deposits in Nigeria and Ghana in 1942.⁵¹

The other component of the United States’ economic affairs with Nigeria helped determine the direction of trade relations. As the changing colonial picture would have it, official U.S. policy—the combination of foreign affairs and business interests—was carefully positioned astride two contending forces: irreversible third world decolonization that included a leading role for Nigeria on its African end, and U.S. government advice to a reluctant Great Britain to disengage from its colonial possessions, even if only under favorable conditions. The task, again, was to restructure the colonial moorings in such a way that they would remain in place but would not visibly undermine the drive for Nigerian independence, particularly during the constitutional period.

The depth of this dilemma cannot be overlooked since the United States had a growing economic presence in Nigeria. Meager though ←37 | 38→it was, especially between 1890 and 1918, there had been economic exchange between the United States and colonial Nigeria that indicated some interest in tropical products. Following Germany’s defeat in World War 1, the U.S. profile grew as Britain and its colonial office in Nigeria gave the United States a first-in-line trading partner status, albeit with the understanding that British firms would receive preferential treatment.⁵² Cotton became an important textile imported from the United States, although demand for it was largely determined by a receptive British government. U.S. automobiles were also highly desired. One Nigerian, W. Akinola Dawodu, became wealthy providing transport services and auto parts to the Lagos market.⁵³ It should be noted, however, that U.S. import-export figures for the 1920s remained modest, never rising above 14 percent between 1915 and 1926.⁵⁴