Sorry tale
C. C. WRIGLEY
But Always as Friends Sir Bryan Sharwood Smith (Allen and Unwin 100s) The Administration of Nigeria, 1900-1960 I. F. Nicolson (out. 45s) To search in the colonial period for the ex- planation of the Nigerian tragedy would be a partial error; for wars are 'caused' by those who wage them, whether directly or by proxy. At the same time, the earlier British dispositions certainly set the stage for conflict, and these two retrospects by former colonial officials are valuable contributions to the understanding of its antecedents. The first part of Sir Bryan Sharwood Smith's memoir is much like that of any other district officer, but in his later years he was a mover of events, and his account of them has great historical interest. He was a 'Northerner', who saw the rest of Nigeria as a necessary but not very congenial extension of 'the North', which he governed from 1952 to 1957. In Mr Nicolson's more academic study the author does not appear in person, but it can be inferred that his vantage-point was Lagos. They thus represent the two poles of colonial politics—for though there were 'Eastern' British too, they were, then as later, much less influential.
Sir Bryan suggests in his foreword that he and other Englishmen were engaged in con- structing a 'great experiment in parliamen- tary democracy', which was ended by the coup of January 1966. This is doubly wrong. The experiment had collapsed long before the majors opened fire, and few of the British rulers of Nigeria were greatly concerned with parliamentary democracy. (Nor were they, as some academics would have it, engaged in building a nation.-) What they were interested in was administration, and that was their real achievement. Whatever else went wrong in Nigeria after in- dependence, administration did not wholly fail. Through putsch and massacre, even in the desperate conditions of beleaguered Biafra, the wheels of government continued to turn, and if the post-war death toll re- mains below half a million it will be because they are, however slowly, turning now. A study of Nigeria's administrative history is thus opportune, and indeed overdue. If Mr Nicolson's wise, sad and scholarly book could have been read earlier in the right quarters it is conceivable (though admittedly improbable, seeing what the right quarters are like) that much misjudgment might have been avoided.
A civil servant to the core, he knows that administration is not enough : there must be some sort of political consensus in order that the administrators may get on with the real task, 'the relief of man's estate'. Writing in 1968, he was reluctantly and unsentimentally inclined to go along with Biafra, acknowledging that 'the men in power in the East could hardly have done anything else' but secede, and recognising in Ojukwu a 'focus of authority' which he found hard to discern elsewhere.
That deficiency he traces to the early years of British rule, and much of his book is devoted to a denunciation of Lord Lugard. So far from garlanding the great proconsul, Mr Nicolson would have had him im- peached, charging him with instituting a military tyranny under the guise of indirect rule, and with dividing Nigeria under the pretence of unifying it. The indictment is devastating, but pressed with such relentless zeal that it partly defeats its purpose, pro- voking a certain sympathy for, his victim — though not, it is true, for that really dreadful woman, Lady Lugard. The implica- tion is, moreover, that but for the Ogre of Kaduna the imperial enterprise would have been an unqualified success; in the darkness which surrounds the figure of Lugard the other rulers of Nigeria shine with an almost saintly glow. As he really knows, things were not as simple as that.
He acutely remarks that, while the North was created by a soldier as a command struc- ture, his milder successors were schoolmasters at heart and 'saw it as the School; and it is arguable that their sen- timental allegiance did more harm than any of Lugard's errors. Certainly Sir Bryan's book might well have been entitled, like the one his father wrote, The Faith of a Schoolmaster. It is full of sports days, or durbars, graced on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion by Her Majesty in person. There was anxious discussion of the House, or Emirate, system: was it better to let bullying go on, or to intervene and so undermine the authority of prefects? And his reaction to the prospect of a unified and self-governing Nigeria was like that of a headmaster threatened with absorption into the com- prehensive in the town. Among Northern officials, however, he was a progressive, a colonial Dancy, who rejected outright resistance, or secession, and sought instead to reverse the terms of the merger.
His book shows, more clearly than he pro- bably intended, how he encouraged the young educated Moslem leaders to share his own commitment, and taught them to see how they could control the Federation. He reproduces a touching letter from his friend Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (speaker of the words that provide his title) who had been sent to represent the North in Lagos. Hating his sojourn in Babylon, knowing by 1957 that the British had shosen him as their suc- cessor, and believing that the Federation would not survive them, Abubakar asked with apparent sincerity that this cup might pass from him. Sir Bryan's reply was kind but firm, as to a reluctant head boy: he must continue in his allotted role, 'furthering the interests of the North and of Nigeria'—in that order.
Sir Bryan's attitude was understandable. There was in the Moslem north a way of life, a society, which no one with any sensibility could have wished to see subjected to :.Southern demagogues and lawyers. In many ways, it was preferable to the belief, always too common in Lagos, that there was a 'right' structure for Nigeria, which must be imposed at all costs. And in the end Mr Nicolson acknowledges that the blame for Nigeria rests neither with Lugard nor with the able and honourable men who laboured after him in this unconsidered corner of the world.
It rests with the imperial power, which first took upon itself to rule some 30 million people in this part of Africa, then forgot about the place for fifty years, and finally. when colonial possessions had become an embarrassment, disengaged itself with singularly little sustained forethought. Sir Andrew Cohen, after a few hours in Sokoto in Sir Bryan's company in 1948, went into 'one of those periods of deep, impenetrable silence for which he was well known', and emerged with the scheme of three self- governing regions. Lord Chandos later surveyed the scheme with his businessman's eye for the advantages of size, and insisted on a strong centre. Between them they created a 'federation of nationalities' in a form which, as Nicolson points out, satisfied none of the conditions which the com- monsense of John Stuart Mill had laid down for such a polity a century before.
Yet the experts on government were silent or approving. There is much justice in Mr Nicolson's charge, that the failure of the academics in the 1950s (and, it might be ad- ded, later) to supply 'hard facts and harder thought' about the problems of government in this part of Africa was a `trahison des clercs'.
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