BIG-CITY JOURNALISM:
PART VI
I suppose the most exciting event I ever had to cover
was something that happened while I was asleep, that is, the overnight murder
in 1966 of the Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Nigeria, and the recently
elected Premiers of two regional governments. For a week or so I had been
covering a Commonwealth conference, and had decided to stay on in Lagos for a
few days to write some stuff about Nigerian politics.
On a Saturday morning I had arranged that a
government information officer would pick me up and take me out to the
University for an interview with Wole Soyinka, the well-known (later Nobel
Prize winning) playwright. The man did
not arrive when he was expected at 9 a.m, so I settled down to wait. The lights in the hotel appeared not to be
working, but I just said to myself, “Ho hum, so things don’t work so well here.
What else is new?” I was getting restive by 10 o’clock, and at 11 o’clock I
decided to grab a taxi and go out there myself. As he pulled away, the taxi
driver said, “We just killed our Prime Minister last night, did you know that?”
“Ho hum,” I told myself again, “very
fanciful these Africans.”
“You don’t believe me?” asked the driver.
“Well-l-l….
“Were the lights working in your hotel this
morning?”
“No, they weren’t.”
“You begin to believe me little-little?”
Little-little is right. When I reached
Soyinka I found him in a state of great anxiety. He knew something drastic had
happened, but he had no idea whether his side or some other was now in power.
And it was important for him to find out. He had become a man of political
substance when, during the recent election of the government of the Yoruba
region, he had seized the microphone at a radio station and broadcast what he
said were the real, as distinct from the invented, results, which showed that
the incumbent, Samuel Akintola, had been
defeated, although claiming victory.
I returned to the city, and decided to go
look for another man I had on my list to interview, Hubert Ogunde, a man who ran
a theatre group that was famous throughout West Africa, and whom I was assured
knew everything that was going on.
To find him, I simply had to give his name
to the taxi-driver, who took me to him without further ado. He greeted me with
great fanfare, and immediately began to tell me the details of what had
happened overnight. He said a group of young Army majors in the Northern part
of the state had murdered the Prime Minister, Abubaker Tafawa Balewa, but also
the most powerful man in the Northern region, Ahmedu Bello, the Sardauna of
Sokoto, as well as the federal Finance Minister Chief Festus, who was famous
for his corruption, and the recently re-elected premier of the Western Region, the
afore-mentioned Samuel Akintola, along with 18 other functionaries. Ogunde was
able to describe to me how the majors had broken into the houses of these
political leaders and shot them dead as the preliminary act in a plot designed
to take over the government and clean out the corruption, looting of public
funds and flamboyant living that had taken root in their country.
A mistake was made by the plotters in that
they did not ensure takeover of the army in Lagos, the capital, and by the
afternoon it was reported by the wife of one resident British correspondent,
who went horseback riding every day, and had been told something about what was
happening, that the chief of the Army, General Ironsi, had taken command of the
situation and established a military government. The chief plotter was a major
called Patrick Chukwunma Nzeogwu, a 30-year-old who had often irritated his
superiors. He was arrested within three days, and later joined the Biafra side
in the civil war, and within 18 months was killed by federal troops in an
ambush.
Although there was no verification of
Ogunde’s tale, I decided to file a story outlining the story he told me (which
later proved to be true in every detail).
The next day, Patrick Keatley, a Canadian who worked for The Guardian and I decided to take
everyone’s copy to Ghana, since in Nigeria all communication with the outside
world was suspended. We were detained at the airport in Accra and told to wait
in a room, but outside we could see taxis pulling up, and since we were not
locked up, we decided to sneak out and take one of them to the cable office.
There a friendly operator told us all the copy we had handed in would have to
be cleared by Mr. Newman, the censor, before it could be dispatched. Where was Mr.
Newman? “He is at the beach.”
We urged they bring him back post-haste, and
after an hour or so, this very pleasant young man turned up and began to read
through the copy and send it off. We had strategically placed our own copy on
the top of the pile, to ensure it beat everyone else’s. Then we flew back to Lagos
on the next plane.
A few days later I met Wole Soyinka over
dinner. Afterwards we made a tour of the remarkable ju-ju clubs of Lagos ---
arched, low-lying vaults unlike anything I had ever seen, with frenetic,
intoxicating drumming and chanting, and sensuous dancing by the “mammies” of
Lagos, fat old women with huge bottoms who shook their booties to extraordinary
effect. Wole was greeted as a hero in every club we entered, and we had no
sooner sat down than the table in front of us was filled with bottles of beer
that had been sent over by his admirers.
I had plenty to write about in addition to
the tale of the failed coup. Hubert Ogunde turned out to be one-of-a-kind, the
type you meet only once in a lifetime, an old-time theatre manager,
entrepreneur, actor, playwright with a following that it would be hard to
imagine being duplicated in any Western country. He had ten wives, and all of them worked in
his theatre company, most of them as actresses, as did many of his veritable
army of children.
Ogunde had written, at the time I met him,
33 plays that he had performed up and down the West coast of Africa, a number that
rose to 50 before he was finished. Later in life he became a star of the first
Nigerian films. Ogunde’s father was a Baptist preacher, and his maternal grandfather,
in whose house he was raised, was a priest of African traditional religions, so
he was well placed to give expression to the ethos of his society. He was a policeman at first, got his start in
the theatre under the sponsorship of the Christian church, but after writing
some plays with religious themes, he resigned from the police and set up the
first professional theatre in the country. He changed his subject matter to
themes of national or contemporary political interest, incorporating realism,
dancing and singing --- his works were a sort of folk opera.
My research into what might have caused
this failed coup revealed the extremely sloppy way in which British politicians
decided to hand power to the inhabitants whose fortunes they had controlled for
so many decades, as if they were almost hysterical in their urgent desire to
get rid of their fabled Empire. I remember the Colonial Secretary in 1960, Iain
Macleod, telling us that independence was given to Tanganyika “entirely because
of Julius Nyerere.” He had been educated at Edinburgh University, and was
essentially regarded as a “sound chap”. He may have been his country’s only
university graduate, but to him was granted the impossible task of running a
new nation totally unequipped to run itself.
Similarly in Nigeria: I had always thought
the British gave most power to the northern region because the Sardauna of
Sokoto had gone to Eton, and played fives there whenever he returned to
Britain. But I had the story slightly wrong. Apparently, he was educated not at
Eton, but at Katsina College in Nigeria, established by Lord Lugard to have all
the attributes of a British public (i.e. private) school, and he emerged from
that education as a convinced anglophile. He loved cricket, but his favorite
game was fives, which he recommended as an excellent source of exercise for any
adult. “The Sardauna was particularly honoured,” wrote Kwasi Kwateng in a book
on The Ghosts of Empire, “when he was
invited to play fives at Eton during one of his visits to Britain.”
Thus, I think it could be said that the
British decided to give major power in Nigeria to the Northern Region under an
impossible constitution, that inevitably could not last, because the Sardauna
of Sokoto, the north’s top personality, was a sound chap who played fives at
Eton. Incredible, but true.
Perhaps not quite so incredible was that all
this haste to quit troublesome Africa was part of Britain’s overall scheme to
abandon the Commonwealth and join the EEC. That they bequeathed to African
nations borders that were drawn up by colonial civil servants without reference
to any local reality --- a decision with tragic consequences reverberating in
Africa and the Middle East until this very day --- was apparently of little
concern to the British leaders.
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