Chinua Achebe on Biafra: An Elaborate Deconstruction

Abstract

A properly contextualized historiography in Chinua Achebe’s personal history of Biafra is necessary for shaping his discourse on Biafra clearly for a better understanding. British colonial intervention was a crass endeavor that repositioned clearly distinct peoples inhabiting the parts of the Niger basin that became Nigeria in an unhealthy social, economic and political arrangement that enabled the series of unfortunate events that included the pogroms of the Igbo and, of course, the genocidal Biafra war.

Keywords

British colonialism Igbo genocide Biafra war Chinua Achebe

Introduction

As much as it is Africa’s premier open sore, Biafra is also the albatross that dangles around the necks of the Nigeria project, its apologists, perpetuators, hangers-on and their likes. Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (TWAC henceforth) and its release in September 2012 underscore the never-ending reiteration of pieces of steadfast truth about Biafra and the events that canalized into its birth in May 1967. Those pieces of truth and associated events include the horrendous pogroms of the Igbo throughout Nigeria, the 30-month war that Nigeria levied and waged against the Igbo to crush Biafra, the death through deliberate starvation of the more than three million people, including women and children, that the war and its prosecution inflicted on Biafrans, and the lingering marginalization of the Igbo in Nigeria ever since Biafra’s defeat. Except for the revisionist hagiographers in our midst, the push factors that compelled the Igbo to embark on the journey that culminated in Biafra were long in the making.

In the beginning – where the rain began to beat

Chinua Achebe began his autobiography with a narrative about the ‘Berlin Conference of 1885’, which he used an Igbo proverb to equate to the ‘rain that beat Africa’ (Achebe, 2012: 1). As he articulates it in that narrative: the series of havocs that the ‘rain’ wreaked on the continent and its peoples, include the creation of ‘…new boundaries that did violence to Africa’s ancient societies and resulted in tension-prone modern states…’ (Achebe, 2012: 1). Achebe provides a quick reminder about how the Scramble for Africa that ensued amongst the participating European powers at that event ‘handed the area of West Africa that later became Nigeria, like a piece of chocolate cake at a birthday party’ (Achebe, 2012: 1) to Britain, which then proceeded to cobble together the several distinct nationalities that founded their respective naturally demarcated homeland in the sub region into the ill-fated Nigeria project.

The signature lyricism which is often associated with Achebe’s prose style is also evident here in the historical narrative that he weaved, especially in the introductory part of the book, which is devoid of the crucial details necessary for making it unequivocally clear that prior to Britain’s colonial intervention, there was hardly much in terms of serious political relationships between most of the distinct peoples that inhabit the areas that became Nigeria through Britain’s colonial fiat. Such other lyrical subtleties deployed by Achebe that could be misconstrued by mischievous readers and analysts of TWAC as indicators that the Nigeria project, and not the distinct peoples that were carved into it by the British, represents a given include his mention of ‘The northern part of the country…’ and of course the assertion that the ‘Berlin Conference sealed her [meaning Nigeria’s] fate’.

Geography and ecology also matter – the folly of British colonial fiat

Seriousness of purpose requires that one must make the conscious effort to deconstruct and clarify as many of those subtleties as possible and make it difficult for any such mischievous readers and analysts to have a field day in that regard. One must clarify that the parts of the Niger basin that the British carved into Nigeria and the distinct peoples that inhabit them exhibit some clear disparities that ‘can be traced directly to the differences in the geographical environment they inhabit in almost a neat non-co-terminus pattern’ (Ejiogu, 2011: 31). Sequel to the resolve by the British in the waning years of the 19th century to impose classical colonial rule on parts of the Niger basin and its inhabitants, the upper Niger basin, which encompasses the areas located north of the confluence of the River Niger and Benue river, was designated the Northern Protectorate, while the lower Niger basin, encompassing the parts that extend from the confluence southwards, became designated as the Southern Protectorate.

Ecology, peoples, their homelands and their cultures

Together, the lower and upper Niger basin encompass four distinct ecological zones, each of which, to a considerable degree, impacted the nature of the system of rule that each of the peoples that made their home there evolved through the course of time. In the lower Niger basin, there are the mangrove swamps that constitute a distinct ecological zone through which the River Niger drains into the Atlantic Ocean. The evergreen and thick rainforest ecological zone begins where the mangrove swamps terminate upland. This second ecological zone is followed by the third, which consists of thick deciduous rainforest vegetation, which thins down as it approaches the two-river confluence, from where the terrain becomes mostly grassland that joins up smoothly with the fourth and last ecological zone, which is mostly savanna forest vegetation.

The mangrove swamps ecological zone

The Ogoni, Ubani (Ibeno) Efik, Ijo (Ijaw), Kalabari and others who made their respective homeland in the mangrove ecological zone, are, thanks to the ecology of the environment that they inhabit, ‘great watermen, fishermen, and traders’ (Ejiogu, 2011: 34). Over the course of several centuries, and long before the first Europeans set foot in their environment to initiate centuries-long trade with them, these peoples were able to interact with both the mangrove ecology they inhabit and their neighbors who inhabit the dry land rainforest ecological zone to found trading city-states that served as crucibles in which they evolved the respective political and economic systems that served their social and political needs. For instance, in the typical case of the Efik, their city-states ‘functioned under the overall legislative, executive and judicial authority of their Ekpe (Egbo) secret society’ (Waddell, 1970 and Anene, 1966 in Ejiogu, 2011: 35). In contrast, their neighbors the Ibeno evolved and relied on a monarchical political system to run their own city-states. Each Ibeno city-state was structured according to a ‘House-system’, in which several Houses constituted the former, which comprised a loose hierarchy of freemen and their slaves who engaged in trade on behalf of their freeman principals. A House was governed by its head and chief alongside his subordinate chiefs. The hierarchy that prevailed in the Houses was fluid to the degree that even the slaves could ascend to head them. There was also an Advisory Council in each Ibeno city-state that was composed of all House heads and the priests (Anene, 1966).

The thick evergreen rainforest ecological zone

The inhabitants of the thick evergreen rainforest ecological zone included the Igbo, their neighbors the Ibibi (Ibibio), the Ogoja, Yakoro, Akwunakwuna and others, who are all less populous than the Igbo. They all exploited their ecology and made cultivation the mainstay of their respective economy. The Igbo particularly evolved and relied on a robust system of long distance trading with the other inhabitants of the lower southeast Niger basin stretching as far as the Cameroons to supplement whatever they needed but could not raise themselves. The success and ubiquity of that long distance trade was of legendary and epic proportions, especially because of how it linked the Igbo and their economy with those that they traded with throughout the lower southeast (Ottenberg, 1958; Ukwu, 1965, 1967).

Beyond the realm of the economy, the thick evergreen rainforest and its ecology played central roles in the evolution of the uniquely and seemingly intricate political economy in each of its distinct inhabitant groups. The thick evergreen rainforest ecology represented a formidable natural barrier that protected its inhabitants from large-scale invasion and as a result impacted the course and outcome of their political development. One instance is in the sense that none of its distinct inhabitants evolved or had need for either large political organization or the attendant centralized institutional structures and autocratic social authority patterns that obtain in the upper Niger (Anene, 1966).¹ Instead, they have been known to have evolved their respective political systems that are village-based and hinged securely in each case on a set of social authority patterns with highly democratic dimensions and influence relations (Anene, 1966; Isichei, 1973, 1983). It happened that for reasons deriving from colonialism’s inherent autocracy, its social authority patterns were naturally incongruent with the set of social authority patterns that each of those nationalities evolved and relied on to direct their affairs in their respective societies. Thus, from the outset, British intervention represented an unwelcome spoiler in the political development of those nationalities within the crucible of the Nigerian supra-national state.

The deciduous rainforest ecological zone

In a related vein, in the deciduous rainforest ecological zone where the Yoruba, the Bini, the Itsekiri-Urhobo peoples and others who constitute the Edo Commonwealth made their respective homeland, the trend was in the direction of the evolution monarchical political systems with apex institutional structures. Notable of all the inhabitants of the lower southwest’s deciduous rainforest ecological zone are the Yoruba. The Yoruba relied on the agency of warfare to build and transform monarchical states that they transformed into large political organizations without sacrificing the checks and balances deriving from the democratic dimensions of the set of social authority patterns that they evolved and relied on to practice authority in all realms of society in their respective town-based kingdoms (Atanda, 1973). For reasons that partly derived from the fact that the northern parts of Yorubaland are proximate to parts of the semi-arid savanna grassland and its ecology, the Yoruba were privy to and did borrow cultural traits that include the adoption, importation and deployment of war horses, and the use of eunuch and non-eunuch slaves in ‘the army and bureaucracy’ (Lovejoy, 1983: 17) from the Nupe and the Borgu peoples that inhabit those parts (Smith, 1965). These, they utilized to aid and abet their own state building and transformation activities in their own places of abode. These observations are especially true about the Oyo Yoruba who, as a result, were able to build and transform their Oyo kingdom into the most extensive political organization or empire that existed in that vicinity (Ejiogu, 2007).

The semi-arid savanna grassland

The semi-arid savanna grassland and its ecological zone, which covers most of the areas that constitute the upper Niger basin, is where the Hausa, the Nupe, Gwari and several other distinct peoples resided and made their respective homeland. Through conquest, inter-marriage and other cultural activities of intermingling that were facilitated by arid savanna’s natural barrier-free terrain, the Fulani for one, whose original home is in the Futa Jallon (Badru, 2011), and the Hausa fused into one socio-cultural group of people called the Hausa-Fulani whose presence is peculiar to that part of the greater upper Niger basin. The open savanna and its tsetse fly-free ecology exposed the upper Niger and groups that inhabit it to the unhindered movements of other groups and peoples from the vicinity and beyond, and of course also to the schisms, conflicts and warfare that characterized the sort of intermingling which is associated with that sort of environment.

Conquest and the control of people were prominent features of some the societies in the nationalities that inhabit the upper Niger. This was especially true of Hausaland, which became the scene of the type of political development that robbed the Hausa of their indigenous democratic political system that dated from some time in the 13th century, when some ambitious political actors in some Hausa groups began to coerce their people and founded leadership styles with despotic characteristics (Smith, 1964). With time those ambitious state building actors were able to found and transform seven city-states in Hausaland. They were able to morph into all-powerful despot-kings called the Sarkin who turned their own people into subjects whom they ruled as overlords. Under despotic Sarkin rule, Hausa society became highly stratified into rulers and their commoner-subjects or talakawa (Smith, 1971), from whom the former expropriated all sorts of surplus values with which they held extensive courts, and raised and maintained well-equipped standing armies that sustained their despotic rule.

Islam, which was introduced in Hausaland in the 14th century by Islamic scholars, provided some measure of ideological enabler for the Sarkin despots, mostly because of its external origin. This was in the sense that the control of the Islamic scholars who were based in the Sarkins’ courts translated logically to the latter’s control of what and how the former preached to the ignorant talakawa, who had, in addition to becoming rent-paying subjects of the Sarkins, become willfully subjected to kame or the appropriation of their property, labor, women and even ‘ceremonial self-abasement’ (Smith, 1964: 169) by their rulers.

Those Fulani Islamic clerics and scholars were part of some Fulani groups that arrived, settled, and co-existed peacefully in Hausaland at the said time. Although they were welcomed by the Sarkin despots, the latter remained nominal adherents of the faith at best. It was not long before the ensuing symbiotic arrangement between clerics and despots morphed into a tense power situation that came to a head in 1804, when it sparked off a jihad which Usman Dan Fodio, one of the Fulani clerics, declared against his benefactors (Paden, 1970) with the support of his ‘Town Fulani’ kinsmen and Hausa converts to their faith (Yeld, 1960).

That jihad, which led to the overthrow of Sarkin rule in Hausaland, enabled the founding of the Caliphate Empire by Dan Fodio and his kinsmen on the ruins of despotic Sarkin rule. With its capital in the city of Sokoto, the Caliphate Empire epitomized worse than the despotism that Sarkin rule stood for in Hausaland. Dan Fodio, who declared himself Sultan and spiritual head of the Empire, and his kinsmen wasted no time in co-opting the Sakins and all the trappings of their despotic rule and proceeded to use them as the foundation of the centralized, autocratic, feudalist system of rule that they presided over and relied on to administer their Empire. They ceaselessly extended the Empire through their jihad by conquering not only all of Hausaland, but also its adjoining areas to the north and far into the greater upper Niger basin, and even southwards to Ilorin in northern Yorubaland. Theirs was a system of rule that was based on a set of highly autocratic social authority patterns.

The Fulani jihad was still in full swing when British intervention to impose colonial rule in the upper and lower Niger basin kicked off in the waning decades of the 19th century. It was at the time that Frederick Lugard, who was Britain’s most ardent empire builder in sub-Saharan Africa, got his wish and led an expeditionary force in the upper Niger that defeated the last of the army of the ruling Sultan in 1803 and chased him down to the plains outside the city of Sokoto, where he killed him. Although successful, the Fulani jihad could not conquer and absorb all the peoples of the upper Niger into the Caliphate Empire before it was halted by Frederick Lugard. The above scenario represented the state of affairs in relevant parts of the upper and lower Niger basin at about the close of the 19th century, at the onset of British intervention.

A malignant social engineering and its persistent legacies

The mindless act of carving a polity out of distinct societies and their peoples, who from time immemorial had evolved and perfected their respective systems of rule, is at best driven by the most extreme form of selfish motives. In the main, that was the message that Achebe aimed to convey when he said:

If the Berlin Conference sealed her fate, then the amalgamation of the southern and northern protectorates inextricably complicated Nigeria’s destiny. Animists, Muslims, and Christians alike were held together by a delicate, some say artificial, lattice (Achebe, 2012: 2).

Some additional expatiation would help unpack the obscure strands of truth in Achebe’s immediate assertion above and imbue it with the necessary clarity that his reading audience requires to properly appreciate how Britain’s adventurers embarked on specific acts of social engineering that enabled colonial rule and ended up creating a dangerous legacy that would spawn political instability and related dysfunctional pathologies amongst the inhabitants of the parts of the Niger basin that Britain carved into the Nigeria project.

It is unavoidable that one must delve a little more deeply into the historiography of British intervention activities in the Niger basin, which perhaps economy of words and space deterred Achebe from doing in the book, in order to achieve that much-needed clarity for readers. That historiography is the story of how:

Steadily the men and machinery of colonial administration, whether in London or in Africa, developed a credo of political theory upon which the administration of Africans was based and strove dogmatically to maintain and extend its practices and principles over peoples and territories to which its application was often singularly inappropriate (Flint, 1978: 290).²

That ‘credo of political theory’ is no other than ‘native administration’ to which the British attached a doctrine that divested it of its everyday English language meaning of ‘all the ways in which locally born people might be governed’ (Flint, 1978: 290) and stood it up instead as a ‘British colonial jargon…[that] referred to a specific for integrating the traditional African rulers into the colonial administration, the system often more loosely termed “indirect rule”’ (Flint, 1978: 290). According to John E Flint:

In ‘discovering’ the system, the British imagined they had lighted upon the secret of successfully ruling ‘Africans’ and they made of native administration both a blueprint for action and a moral and theoretical philosophy with which to justify imperial rule in twentieth-century conditions. (Flint, 1978: 291)

Although its depth as a philosophy is quite extensive in ‘British imperial history’ (Flint, 1978), Frederick Lugard is one character ‘who exercised such profound influence over the development of native administration in British colonial Africa that it is justifiable to speak of “the Lugardian system” and to term its philosophy that of “Lugardian principles” (Flint, 1978: 291). Continuing, Flint puts it most aptly when he points out that:

It was Lugard who, after playing a significant role in the partition of Africa in the 1890s and in the transition of British public opinion to support imperial expansion in Africa, himself set up the classical system of indirect rule in Northern Nigeria from 1900-1906, extended its principles into Southern Nigeria, when the country was ‘unified’ by him after 1912, created the ‘blueprints’ of ‘native administration’ by the issuance of his ‘Political Memoranda’ for the instruction of administrators, and finally formed indirect rule into a justification and apologia for colonial rule The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. No other British colonial governor in Africa had a comparable impact on the shape and nature of colonial rule (Flint, 1978: 291)

Frederick Lugard wasted no time at all right after his formal appointment as High Commissioner of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria in recognizing that the set of social authority patterns upon which the Hausa-Fulani rulers based their centralized system of rule in their Caliphate Empire was highly autocratic. He was also quick to recognize that it would enhance his goal as de facto colonial ruler to co-opt them as clients/allies, and adopt those autocratic social authority patterns as integral components of the style of colonial system of rule that he instituted and then extended in a systematic manner, first to every part of the upper Niger, and subsequently to the lower Niger on the aegis of the amalgamated colonial state after he was appointed Governor-General, that is, sequel to his amalgamation of the two protectorates in 1914.

As Flint puts it further:

Lugard saw his position as governor almost exactly upon the analogy of a general commanding an army. He was the general; the British members of the administration were his officers to carry out his orders, whilst the colony itself was seen as a region undergoing a long-term and beneficent military occupation by English officers and gentlemen imbued with a code of military chivalry (Flint, 1978: 298)

From his military engagement against the Hausa-Fulani ruling autocrats, he quickly recognized that deep down, the Fulani is a war-making race which invokes, deploys and reaps the benefits of warfare in state building. In other words, he quickly understood that it was only through the projection of a bellicose posture in his engagement with the Hausa-Fulani rulers that he would achieve his imperial goals in the upper Niger. That was why he appropriated whatever advantages he could squeeze out of his designation and role as the legendary man on the spot to press and request then British Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain and his Colonial Office to give him the free rein to ‘unleash’ himself militarily in the upper Niger and coerce and subdue the local rulers into compliance. In his 1902 Annual Report to the Colonial Office, he ‘translated the need for military conquest into political-anthropological theory’ (Flint, 1978: 299) with the following announcement: ‘It is unfortunately true that the African savage in his primitive state can, as a rule, understand nothing but force, and regards arguments and verbal lessons as weapons of the weak, to be listened to for the moment and set aside when convenient’ (Flint, 1978: 299).

Yet, ‘at each conquered placed he busied himself with installing Fulani rulers, usually close relatives of the leaders he had deposed’ (Flint, 1978: 299). Even in Bornu, where the French were ahead of him and ‘deposed the sheik; the British invited him back, reinstated him, and secured his allegiance without bloodshed in the first major triumph of peaceful penetration of Lugard’s regime’ (Flint, 1978: 300). The guile and insincerity that underscored Frederick Lugard’s actions and utterances throughout the course of his state building endeavors in the upper Niger in those early days are revealed by the fact that, as he denounced the Fulani rulers and their regime as ‘an alien race’, ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’, he was also quick to proclaim his determination to ‘utilize, if possible, their wonderful intelligence, for they are born rulers and incomparably above the negroid tribes in ability’ (Flint, 1978: 299).

Frederick Lugard succeeded in bringing the Fulani rulers as his very strong personal allies–clients into the service of his colonial regime strictly on his own terms, and then proceeded to establish a common front against ‘those whom the Fulani had traditionally oppressed, like the pagans of the Benue valley or the peasant rebels of Satiru³, who resisted the British presence’ (Flint, 1978: 301).

After he vanquished them, Frederick Lugard’s successful co-option of the Hausa-Fulani rulers and their set of autocratic social authority patterns as part of his colonial project regime and system of arbitrary rule in the upper Niger became standing proof for him and his supporters ‘that he had brought genius to the realm of colonial administration in Africa…and had discovered mystical secrets of African administration’ (Flint, 1978: 302). As I have established elsewhere and earlier here, indirect rule is a value-loaded concept that affirmed an invader’s ‘claim to rule by right of conquest’ (Flint, 1978: 303). Since the indirect system of rule was applied and used to hoodwink especially people who were disposed to colonial domination by virtue of military conquest – in the case of the Caliphate society, even prior to colonial conquest; those colonized people were already being ruled as subjugated subjects of an autocratic ruling elite – in the overall case the fundamental essence was to use it to pull off and sustain ‘a confidence trick’ (Flint, 1978: 302) on those people, given that the retention of their existing autocratic rulers by the colonizer on the aegis of indirect rule amounts purely to enhanced subjugation. The fact that the alliance and clientage arrangement between Frederick Lugard and the Hausa-Fulani feudalist autocrats was such that the Caliphate and its rulers ‘retained and even developed its feudal character, with the British serving as suzerains in the feudal sense’ (Flint, 1978: 303) is fraught with noteworthy implications for us here on issues relevant to the subject matter of Achebe’s TWAC: through Frederick Lugard and his indirect rule, the enormous degree of subjugation of society and peoples that Caliphate rule achieved in the parts of the Niger basin that the jihad over-ran was enhanced by colonial rule. Moreover, Fulani autocracy rode on the back of colonial conquest into other parts of the upper Niger basin that successfully resisted Fulani jihadi conquest. The worrisome irony of it all is that Caliphate rule, which Frederick Lugard and his lieutenants found so attractive, epitomized backwardness in every sense of the word in every part of the Niger basin where it was imposed and sustained. Thus, in spite of ‘the myth of his own genius and the myth of Northern Nigeria as a model of administration’ (Flint, 1978: 303) that Frederick Lugard and his wife, Flora, spawned in British public opinion,

…when Lugard left Northern Nigeria in 1906, there was little to show. The protectorate was unable to live off its own revenues. It had little external trade; no roads or railways of significance; no proper secretariat or government departments; and no colonial education system or social services of any kind. Administration had consisted of military activities and mountains of paper issuing from Lugard’s own hand. (Flint, 1978: 303)

Indeed, even as an idea, the founding of the Nigeria project is the moral equivalent of mortal sin.

On the contrary, in the lower Niger basin where each and every one of the distinct peoples that inhabit parts of it evolved and directed their affairs and society on the basis of the democratic tenets that characterize every dimension of their age-old social authority patterns, notwithstanding the advent of colonialism’s stultifying style of the practice of arbitrary authority in society, everywhere, communities and individuals acted true to type and embraced new opportunities with enthusiasm, devoid of restraint of any type, wherever they found them in the unfolding colonial dispensation in practically every realm – the economy, colonial civil service, police, education, missionary activities, etc. The outcome in terms of contrast between the two protectorates was both phenomenal and dramatic. In 1905 alone, Frederick Lugard received financial handouts of as much as 405,500 pounds sterling and 75,000 pounds sterling respectively from the colonial office and the protectorate government of southern Nigeria (Lugard, 1905, 1906). Hear Flint again:

Southern Nigeria in those years saw the penetration of British and European capitalist activities and ideas and the spread of capitalist ethics through trade and missionary activities. Meanwhile, the contrasts became exceedingly awkward for the colonial office; while the revenues of the south grew and surplus could be invested in railway and harbor works, feeder roads, and other forms of economic development, the north remained poor, failing to balance its budget and in constant need of treasury grants-in-aid. Amalgamation, in which the south’s revenues could be used to create a balanced budget for a unified Nigeria was an obvious solution that could remove the awkward dependency on the treasury. (Flint, 1978: 304)

North and south – two natural contrasts dragged together

Left unexplained, the dramatic and spectacular contrast that became manifest right from the advent of colonial rule between the inhabitants of the areas that became the north and south protectorates of Nigeria might seem intuitive and procedural, as some might be tempted to misconstrue the said contrast in ways that would convey the notion that lower Niger groups prospered while their upper Niger counterparts failed to because the former were beneficiaries of British colonialism and its trappings. But when one recalls the range of social science research – Seymour Lipset (1959), Robert Putnam (1995a, 1995b), J Helliwell (1994), R Burkhart and MS Lewis-Beck (1994), David A Leblang (1997), Y Feng (1997), Dennis P Quinn and John T Woolley (2001) and Robert I Rotberg (2001) – that has established direct correlation between socio-political democracy and economic prosperity in society, then one would agree that any such notion as mentioned above is misplaced.

As I have delineated in greater detail elsewhere (Ejiogu, 2011), culture matters a great deal in how individuals and groups embrace or reject ideas and innovations in their pursuit of life’s endeavors in society. Max Weber’s well known articulation on the role of Calvinism in the rise of early capitalism in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Scribner, 1904-5/1930) is a pivotal case in point. In this regard one can draw a sort of related parallel about the Igbo, the Yoruba and the rest of the nationalities in the Niger basin who were disposed by the democratic tenets of their respective age-old social authority patterns to avail themselves of the opportunities in Western education and trade in cash crop agriculture, to mention but two that David Kimble (1963) and James S Coleman (1958) identified as principal agents of social, economic and political change in British West Africa during the early years of colonial rule. The underlying rationale for that is noteworthy: in those nationalities where land, the primary factor of economic production in society, was not under the tight control of an autocratic ruling elite, the incipient colonial milieu served as a social crucible in which everyone freely engaged in cash crop agriculture and reaped the benefits that accrued to them from the sale of their produce since they were not burdened by a predatory appropriation of their surplus production values, as was the case in Hausaland and the other areas in the upper Niger basin that came under the sway of Hausa-Fulani control through either the jihad or colonial conquest.

In Igboland, Yorubaland and elsewhere in the lower Niger, ‘money earned from trade or [cash crop] agriculture’ (Post, 1970: 36) was ploughed by individuals and communities into funding school tuition and scholarships awarded on merit for capable individuals regardless of their background, which enabled them to further their education at all levels in government-, missionary- and privately-run schools locally and abroad. The manifestation of the implied achievement motivation in these nationalities was not restricted to their members who chose their respective homeland or other locations in the lower Niger as their place of economic pursuit. If you take the Igbo, who are renowned for their legendary penchant for industry and inclination to readily embrace modernization-inducing change (LeVine, 1966) as a case in point, one would find that they were visibly present almost everywhere in Nigeria, where they constituted the significant majority in the professions, civil service, commerce and business. The village, town and clan unions that they founded and mobilized themselves into in their various abodes all over Nigeria, away from their respective villages in Igboland, in their economic pursuits became very strong factors that were reckoned with in the development of education and human capital, infrastructure, etc. in communities all over Igboland (Smock, 1971a, 1971b).

Nobody would say the same or anything similar about Hausaland and the rest of the upper Niger where Frederick Lugard insulated his Hausa-Fulani ruler–client–allies from ‘the agents of social and economic change – the Christian missionaries, the European traders, and the coastal traders’ (Nwabughogu, 1981: 77). In fact, Frederick Lugard often proclaimed that it would violate his promise to them if he exposed their Caliphate society to agents of change (Nwabughogu, 1981). He even cited the propensity of Western-educated Africans in Lagos to avail themselves of the courts and the rule of law to litigate against colonial authority as his reason for opposing their unfettered access to every part of the northern protectorate where he was in charge (Lugard, 1901). Margery Perham (1960), who was also one Frederick Lugard’s ardent admirers and biographer, revealed that he often derided the propensity of Western-educated Africans for trade and commerce as unsightly love for the dollar.⁴

The amalgamation as autocracy creep

Thus, it was not by happenstance that right after he believed that he had consolidated his establishment of the veritable project in the name of the protectorate of northern Nigeria – laced with his clientage–alliance pact with the Fulani rulers – Frederick Lugard, whose ambition to oversee the extension of the absolutism he consolidated up north in the projection of imperial authority to the lower Niger and its inhabitants remained boundless, began immediately in 1905 to persuade the Colonial Office to integrate the protectorate of southern Nigeria into the ‘magical’ administrative edifice that he believed he had erected in the upper Niger (Lugard, 1905). At first, his efforts failed to the degree that he was relocated by the Colonial Office the next year to Hong Kong as governor, where he remained until 1912. It was then that the unrelenting public relations campaign mounted on his behalf to hand-twist the Colonial Office into acceding to his demand to amalgamate the two British colonial projects in the Niger basin and put him in charge, to do it, by a second ad hoc lobby – see Flora Shaw (Lugard) (1903) and Edmund Morel (1911/1968a; 1902/1968b) – composed of himself, his then girlfriend, Flora Shaw, a Times of London reporter, Edmund D Morel and unnamed others, finally succeeded in swaying the Colonial Office on the need to extend the Lugardian methodology of projecting Britain’s version of imperial rule to the rest of the Niger basin under a single administrative umbrella (Nwabughogu, 1981). The lobby campaign was extensively initiated, fueled and stoked by Frederick Lugard himself, beginning in 1905 in various meticulously written colonial Annual Reports dispatches from his duty post locations, articles in prestige pro-imperial rule journals at the time, and of course through the revised edition of his Political Memoranda (Lugard, 1905; Nicolson, 1969; Nwabughogu, 1981).

Igboland is set up for perpetual violation

Proof that Frederick Lugard realized all that he asked for from the Colonial Office on the amalgamation can be found in the fact that the south was folded into the ‘Northern system’ that he had set up in the name of indirect rule. Communities everywhere in the lower Niger were subsequently carved up ‘into provinces like the north’, young British men were appointed district commissioners and ‘district officers and granted executive and judicial powers’ to straddle over them as autocrats in ways similar to the arrangements in the north (Afigbo, 1967, 1972). In Igboland and other lower southeast nationalities where authority was not normatively exercised through apex political structures, individuals were appointed in arbitrary fashion and given ‘warrants’ and imposed on communities as ‘Warrant Chiefs’ who operated as subordinates of the district commissioners. Frederick Lugard dismantled every semblance of any modicum that seemed proper in the system of colonial rule that his counterparts operating in the south had put in place, all in his zeal to subordinate the south and its peoples to Fulani feudalism.

Frederick Lugard’s perception of the challenges evident in the intricately complex Igbo political system and its supporting social authority patterns was purposefully simplistic. As a result, his ‘Warrant Chief system’ (Afigbo, 1966: 540) deliberately side-tracked their indigenous political ‘institutions and work[ed] at cross-purposes to them’ (Afigbo, 1971: 443). Part of the aberration which Lugardism encapsulated in Igboland was that while the ‘Warrant’ became the power and authority for everyone who received it in every Igbo community, the British regarded the warrant as a recognition of an authority which its holder was supposed to enjoy by traditional right…[But in popular usage] a warrant chief meant a chief whose only source of authority was the warrant’ (Afigbo, 1971: 443). In both conception and practice, the ‘Warrant Chief’ system and the Native Courts were both affronts to the Igbo and their social authority patterns. In further violation of tenets of their social authority patterns, some Warrant Chief appointees ‘were the traditional ritual heads of their villages’ (Afigbo, 1966: 541), and the rest were either social misfits who were otherwise unqualified to speak for their communities or they were ‘just ordinary young men of no special standing in indigenous society who had been pushed forward for the specific purpose of parleying with the white man’ (Afigbo, 1966: 541).

Figure 1.

Overlap of civilizations culminating in the worldview cultivated in the products of western education in Hausaland. Source: John Paden (1986: 7).

Figure 2.

Overlap of civilizations culminating in the worldview cultivated in products of western education in the lower Niger. Source: Ejiogu (2011: 158).

Compared with the Yoruba, and the Hausa-Fulani, it was not by happenstance that the Igbo presented a robust and sustained resistance to British intervention and rule – see Tables 1, 2, and 3. A careful assessment of Igbo cultural history is bound to reveal that their tradition of resistance derives from the democratic character of the dimensions of their social authority patterns. Biafra is partly symbolic of that tradition and culture of resistance.

Table 1.

Incidents that involved British-led forces in Igboland during pacification and colonial rule 1886–1957.

Year	Nationality involved	Targeted authority	Type and number of incidents
1886–1899	Several nationalities in the upper and lower Niger	Britain’s Royal Niger Company	Several acts of armed resistance numbering about 50
November 1901–March 1902	Aruchukwu and the Igbo heartland, lower Niger	British authority	Several acts of armed resistance numbering about 30
1902, 1903	Ogwashi Ukwu, Onisha, Ezi Asaba in western Igboland	British authority	Several acts of armed revolt numbering about three
June-August 1906	Owa and Agbo in western Igboland, lower Niger	British authority	Two armed revolts
November 1909–May 1910	Ogwashi Ukwu and other parts of western Igboland, lower Niger	British authority	Three guerrilla insurrections
November 1914	Warri, Kwale, Urhoboland and western Igboland, lower Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state and its authority	Five armed rebellions
November 1914–February 1915	Onitisha, Udi, Okigwi, Afikpo, Bende, Aba in the Igbo heartland in the lower Niger, and parts of the neighboring Igalaland in the upper Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state and its authority	Seven armed rebellions
1929	Igbo, and all the nationalities in the southeast, lower Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state and its authority	Extensive anti-taxation uprising
1949	Enugu and other townships in the lower Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state and its authority	^aStrikes (36) involving 47,000 workers
1950	Townships in the lower Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state and its authority	^aStrikes (26) involving 26,000 workers
1957	Townships in southeast lower Niger – Enugu, Onitsha, Port Harcourt	The British and the Nigerian supra-national state	Riots

Indicates strikes that simultaneously took place in all townships in Nigeria.

Adapted from items of information from Annual Colonial Reports 1916, 1950; Haywood and Clarke (1969).

Table 2.

Incidents that involved British-led armed forces in Yorubaland during pacification and colonial rule 1886–1957.

Incidents that involved British-led Forces in Yorubaland during pacification and colonial rule
Year	Nationality involved	Targeted authority	Type of incident
1892	The Ijebu Yoruba in the lower Niger	Lagos Colony Government	Armed resistance
January–February 1897	Ilorin (northern Yorubaland, lower Niger)	British authority	Armed resistance
August 1914	Egba Yoruba in the lower Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state and its authority	Extensive demonstrations and riots
October–November 1916	Oyo Yoruba in the lower Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state, its authority and the Aláàfin	Bloody, armed revolt
1918	Egba Yoruba in the lower Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state	Extensive armed revolt

Adapted from items of information from Annual Colonial Reports 1916, 1950; Haywood and Clarke (1969).

Table 3.

Incidents that involved British-led forces in the entire upper Niger during pacification and colonial rule 1886–1957.

Year	Nationality involved	Targeted authority	Type and number of incidents
1886–1899	Several nationalities in the upper and lower Niger	Britain’s Royal Niger Company	Several acts of armed resistance numbering about 50
January–February 1897	Bida (upper Niger), Ilorin (northern Yorubaland, lower Niger)	British authority	One armed resistance
August–September 1900	Yola in the upper Niger	British authority	One armed resistance
February–May 1900	Kaduna, Gurara and Okwa in the upper Niger	British authority	Three armed resistances
December 1900 and January–February 1901	Bida/Kontagora in the upper Niger	British authority	Two armed resistances
February–March 1906	Satiru, upper Niger	The British and their allies, the Fulani ruling classes	One armed revolt
April 1906	Hadeija in Hausaland, upper Niger	The British and their allies, the Fulani ruling classes	One armed revolt
February–March 1906	Tivland, upper Niger	The British and their allies, the Fulani ruling classes	One armed revolt
December 1908	Yonkwala and surround nationalities, upper Niger	The British	Three armed resistances
November 1914	Kabba, Ilorin, Mada, Nasarawa – the ‘semi-Islamized’ parts of the upper Niger that were forced into the new Caliphate areas	The British and their Fulani allies	Four armed rebellions
1915	Kontagora, upper Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state, its authority and the favored Fulani ruling classes	One armed revolt
1915	Kano, Bornu in Hausaland, upper Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state, its authority and the favored Fulani ruling classes	Two armed revolts
1915	Kano, Bauchi, Bornu	The Nigerian supra-national state, its authority and the favored Fulani ruling classes	Three armed revolts
May 1915–1916	Muri, upper Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state, its authority and the favored Fulani ruling classes	One armed revolt
1915	Montoil in the upper Niger	The Nigerian supra-national state, its authority and the favored Fulani ruling classes	One armed revolt
1915	Sokoto Emirate	The Nigerian supra-national state, its authority and the favored Fulani ruling classes	One armed revolt
1929	Tivland, upper Niger	The British and their Fulani allies	Armed revolt (extensive)
1948, 1960, 1963	Tivland, upper Niger	The British and their Fulani allies	Armed revolt (extensive)

Adapted from items of information from Annual Colonial Reports 1916, 1950; Haywood and Clarke (1969).

The Igbo in the Nigeria project—the clash of opposing worldviews

However, in spite of the arbitrariness and the obnoxious machinations that Frederick Lugard and others social-engineered into the founding of Nigeria to target and undermine in particular the Igbo and make it impossible for them to acquire the levers of state power in a post-British-ruled Nigeria, the Igbo embracement and adoption of the Nigeria project and the unlimited promise that they believed it held at the time were overwhelming and enthusiastic. For a people who were normatively attuned to unhindered participation in the direction of the affairs of their society and to holding their leaders to the highest standards of responsiveness, their quick embrace of the Nigeria project is understandable. At the same time, their unrelenting anti-colonial resistance and agitation for immediate termination of colonial rule constituted an unsettling aberration for the British, who quickly labeled, treated and engaged them as agitators who must be put and kept in their place for good. Thus, what ensued as a result was a bitter power situation in which the Igbo, the Yoruba and the other inhabitants of the lower Niger who wanted so badly to terminate colonial rule found themselves on one side, whence they sustained their anti-colonial resistance, while the Hausa-Fulani, who positioned themselves in the vanguard as the custodians of Caliphate rule and leaders of the north, lined themselves on the opposite side, where they reveled and basked as proud clients–allies of the British.

Conclusion

Almost all pioneer Igbo political actors who emerged as major anti-colonial activists were comfortably disposed to the conviction at the time that Nigeria, a mere contraption whose founding rested strongly on the colonizer’s anti-Igbo sentiments, acts and policies, was either sufficiently a country already, or at the least could be fashioned into one through the unhindered participation of every nationality involved. Hindsight has proven that such conviction was short sighted, to say the least. At a time when Obafemi Awolowo, the notable Yoruba anti-colonial activist, rightly described Nigeria as ‘ a geographical expression’ (Awolowo, 1947)⁵, Nnamdi Azikiwe, his Igbo counterpart, had become ‘Zik’ of Africa to his countless admirers from almost every nationality in Nigeria and even beyond, mostly because of the pan-Africanist political vision (Achebe, 2012: 41) he espoused.Azikiwe’s cosmopolitan pan-Africanist worldview is reflected in the fact that upon his return from ‘his university studies in the United States of America…he did not return to Onitsha, his hometown. He settled at first in Accra…’ (Achebe, 2012: 41) and then Lagos.

Unlike Awolowo, Azikiwe is known to have reached across nationality lines to build and nurture robust political coalitions throughout the course of his involvement in the anti-colonial campaign and thereafter. Azikiwe’s anti-colonial crusading career in journalism, which began in 1934 in Accra, the capital of then British Gold Coast, now Ghana, where he edited the African Morning Post, continued in Lagos, the colonial capital of Nigeria where he founded, published and edited the West African Pilot⁶ and a chain of other anti-colonial newspapers across Nigeria’s other colonial urban centers, epitomized the said inclusiveness as well. The same is true of Azikiwe’s involvement in party politics in Lagos during the era in which he started as a member of the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM), which he resigned from in 1941 over disagreements with the executive that vetoed his support for Samuel Akinsanya, an Ijebu Yoruba’s candidacy for a vacant seat in the Lagos Legislative Council. The remarkable pointer in that is that Azikiwe’s protest resignation was over ‘accusations of discrimination against Ijebu members’ of the NYM by its executive. With Herbert Macaulay, a descendant of returnee Yoruba slaves, Azikiwe then co-founded the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in 1946.

Unlike Azikiwe, Awolowo began and situated his political involvement unequivocally in the leadership of the Yoruba. As a mature student studying law in London, Awolowo founded a pan-Yoruba cultural group, the Egbe Omo Yoruba, held tightly to it and subsequently transformed it into a formidable Yoruba dominated political party, the Action Group.

The weight and seriousness with which Achebe holds Biafra is evident in the candid assertion he made towards the end of the introduction in TWAC: ‘But the Biafra war changed the course of Nigeria. In my view it was a cataclysmic experience that changed the history of Africa’ (Achebe, 2012: 2). Indeed, Biafra represents ‘a cataclysmic experience that changed the history of Africa’ on several levels: it was provoked by the resolve of a people who were targeted for annihilation to self-protect by invoking the powerful principle of self-determination as the rest of Africa and the world stood by and watched.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interest

None declared.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Professor EC Ejiogu is Senior Researcher in the Centre for Africa Studies (CAS), University of the Free State, South Africa. A contributor to the Encyclopedia of Nationalism (Academic Press, 2000), edited by Alexander Motyl, Ejiogu’s more recent works include The Roots of Political Instability in Nigeria: Political Evolution and Development in the Niger Basin (2011, Burlington, VT; Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing) and Africa Focus: Governance in the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Kwandiwe Kondlo (2011, Cape Town: HSRC Press). He has published in Political Power and Social Theory, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics and other peer-reviewed journals. Email: e.c.ejiogu@gmail.com and EjioguEC@UFS.ac.za

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