The greatest surprise about Nigeria at 100
A GIANT was born in 1914, an African giant.
The same year European powers set about
each other in the trenches a framework was
laid out for a nation that over the next
century would grow into Africa’s mightiest
economy, one with a population so prodigious
it will soon overtake every other barring
China and India.
The founding on January 1, that year of
the colony of Nigeria was an act of
extreme imperial chutzpah. Desert
emirates in the north and coastal
kingdoms in the south had for years
been under nominal control as British
protectorates, but for London to unite
such diversity was to believe a mosaic
has no cracks. The story of Nigeria, first
under Britain, later as an African nation
independent since 1960, has largely been
the story of those cracks.
Any attempt at a history risks being
grimly repetitive. The Nigerian cycle of
political crisis, economic
mismanagement and civil strife might
appear relentless. To the outsider, Biafra
and Boko Haram, Abacha and Abiola,
coup and corruption can merge into one.
So Richard Bourne is to be congratulated
for avoiding such sameness in his ‘new
history.’ By focusing on the streams that
have shaped the nation, he captures one
that is multi-dimensional in its fault
lines, tantalising in its possibilities yet
exasperating in its performance.
He lays out how traders drove Britain’s
interest in Nigeria, one begun by the
Scottish explorer Mungo Park’s 18th-
century charting of the Niger river. It
did not end well for Park, who would
drown in the river — an omen perhaps
for Britain’s relationship with the delta
and its vast hinterland.
Just as in India, Bourne shows how in
West Africa it was commerce that came
first, with colonialism only being retro-
fitted. Instead of Robert Clive’s
profiteering East India Company, we
have palm-oil monopolists fixing prices,
the Royal Niger Company and colonial
officers gerry-mandering elections. So
diverse were local chieftaincies, fiefdoms
and monarchies that it took the wife of a
British governor-general to name the
ensemble. In an 1897 letter Flora Shaw
suggested one drawn from the mighty
river — Nigeria.
The colonial period 1914–1960 is not
given soft treatment. While Nigerian
businessmen prospered more than
Africans in most racially charged parts
of the continent, Bourne argues that a
significant failure of British
administration created in part the
conditions for Nigeria’s modern malaise.
Having set up such a massive country,
the colonialists were at fault for not
dealing with the north-south divide, one
separating a relatively wealthy,
nominally Christian south, from a
poorer, more conservative, Muslim
north. Bourne describes colonialism’s
expedient acceptance of the north’s less
attractive features – de facto slavery – in
exchange for local emirs willing to bend
to British control. All over Africa the
same mistake would be made by
outsiders: instability bad, stability good,
even if takes a ghastly local dictator to
provide it. So when independence came,
there were no meaningful national
political parties and, tragically, no
national leaders, no Gandhi nor
Mandela.
It is a trope among critics of modern
Africa that colonialism left no graduates,
no ‘educated’ locals capable of taking
over at independence. Nigeria undoes
this solecism. Bourne cites tens of
thousands of pre-1960 Nigerians with
tertiary education, a sizeable cadre that
would yet prove incapable of developing
their country.
Those talented local leaders dwelt on
their own fiefdoms. Civilian rule was
tried in the 1960s only for the army to
step in brutally when regional horse-
trading led to gridlock. Bourne tells how
the school-age son of a murdered
Nigerian prime minister was given
sanctuary by a kindly prep-school
headmaster in England.
If chutzpah was shown by colonialists,
the failing Nigerian leadership would
show it in spades when it came to
corruption. Not for them the occasional
porn video or moat-cleaning claimed on
expenses. Bourne takes us through the
monumental skulduggery that filched
much of the trillion US dollars the
country has received in oil income since
1960. He writes of ‘Mr Ten Per Cent’, a
politician who decimated tenders; the
widow of a dictator caught fleeing with
38 suitcases stuffed mostly with cash;
and a recent report that in a country
with 36 states, 23 governors face
accusations of graft. Yet with an MP
earning a million pounds a year, the
venality of local politicking is hardly
surprising.
If anything Bourne is guilty of
understatement when he calls Nigeria’s
first hundred years ‘turbulent.’ But to
focus on the corruption and political
crises is perhaps to miss the point. For a
country so vast and diverse, Nigeria’s
greatest achievement is its continued
existence as a single nation. If that
diversity can be harnessed, then the next
hundred years promise a spectacular
new history for Africa’s giant.
•The book A New History of a Turbulent
Century, was written by Richard Bourne.
This review by Tim Butcher was
published in The Spectator.
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