Past masters
Sir: I cannot persuade myself to believe that C. C. Wrigley was objective when he reviewed Renascent Africa in your issue of 17 January. This was a book I wrote over thirty years ago and it has just been reprinted.
For reasons outlined below, I am bound to criticise hi'm for lacking objectivity because he failed to make a fair analysis of its con- tents, although his paraphrase of its theme was impartial. He merely treated superficially the background of colonialism which had in- spired the writing of the book, and then made fun of three issues: 'a gifted and ambitious young African clerk,' American Negro colleges and the nationalist movement in West Africa.
Mr Wrigley's assumption that 'the mixture of magpie encyclopaedism and moral rhetoric . . . seems to have passed for higher education in American Negro colleges forty years ago' is questionable, if not truculent, in the absence of specific evidence of an academic or pro- fessional nature. I do not know his claims to authority for assessing the relative importance of institutions of higher learning, but I cannot allow him to make such remarks with impunity.
Renascent Africa is a collection of selected articles published in my columns, from 1934 to 1937, in the African Morning Post, when I was editor-in-chief of that daily newspaper in Accra, Gold Coast (now Ghana). I maintain that the publication of any encyclopaedic piece of literature is not frowned upon by pub- lishers, critics or readers in this country. It is, therefore, unfair for MI- Wrigley to conclude that the publication of such a book is a re- flection on the American Negro colleges. After all, I am also a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (1933), an fvy League institution.
Whether my political role was a failure or a disaster is a matter of opinion, and I will not quarrel with Mr Wrigley for his diatribe in this respect. But I should remind him, in all modesty, that when I arrived on the African political scene, in 1934, only Ethiopia, Liberia, South Africa and Egypt were the independent African states. Today there are forty-two. A, for my role in Nigerian politics, I can only say that with the support of an overwhelming majority of its people, I rose from humble be- ginnings to become, respectively, legislator minister of state, premier, president of the senate, governor-general, and president of th,. Federal Republic.
It is possible that my political activities were disastrous to people like Mr Wrigley; in which case, he can hardly avoid regarding me as a failure. But for him to generalise, without sub- stantial evidence, that 'the weaknesses of the nationalist movement in West Africa' were caused by 'intellectual poverty, the lack of a sense of proportion, and the simple faith in the power of the word' is absurd. If he in- tended these labels for me and for West Afri- cans, then my retort is that his criticism depicts one who lacks an intelligent grasp of the social forces in West Africa when my book was written.
Nnamdi Azikiwe C/o 122 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1
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