The nationality question

By Obi Nwakanma

What does it mean to be a Nigerian? This question may seem clearly resolved in the Nigerian constitution: anyone born, whose forebears as at October 1 1960, had roots in any portion of the land which as at January 1914 became amalgamated as the Union of the old protectorates of Southern and Northern Nigeria. Such a person is a Nigerian by birth and has every right pertaining thereto that affiliation guaranteed under the bill of rights. But there are cleavages in the national imagination that make this question increasingly unresolved and academic.

It also leads to that question “what is a nation?”; in fact, “when is a nation” to quote Soyinka in his book, The Open Sore of a Continent which in critical ways further problematizes that question. Classical theorists of nation have described the “nation” as a system of affiliations, whose soul is at its most pristine, the kin, but at its most complex a broader network of principles beyond the primordial boundaries. “Nationalism” Gellner writers, “is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.”

Benedict Anderson offers the description of nation as an “imagined community.” There is in the echoes of these definitions a striking truth that nations are artifices of history. Their artificiality draws from the fact of their hybrid condition; their “amalgamation” of very multiple affiliations into a coherent order or force of union.

The modern nation, a 19th century invention is thus a means by which order was often imposed on the chaotic and unsustainable prenational dynastic states for greater security and higher productive capacity. Nationalism thus, again as Anderson puts it, is the “expression of a radically changed form of consciousness.” Many disenchanted Nigerians today romanticize the idea of a halcyon ethnic past, especially retailed by right-wing and conservative groups who view Nigeria as the “artificial creation of Great Britain for its own interest.”

But the creation of modern Nigeria by the amalgamation in 1914 followed a series of historical situations, particularly history that made some aspects of the African past unsavory. The Lagos we talk about today was a brutal slave port, and if we must tell ourselves a bit of truth, British colonialism and the amalgamation of Nigeria was possible only because we Africans by the 19th century had made a formidable mess of our society.

The Yoruba groups had been fighting their own “world wars” (“Ogun-Ijaiye”) for a hundred years; From the 17th century, the Aro-Abam confederacy made Igbo land and much of the Niger delta ungovernable through slave raids and engineered civil wars; the Caliph in Sokoto and the Shehu in Borno who had himself displaced the dynastic sovereigns of Bornu were at war, and the jihad, an offshoot of developments in Sudan and the Ottoman dynasty of the Khelides in Egypt and Turkey was spreading war and violence; pushing boundaries to the point that either the Sokoto Caliphate or the Aro Confederacy would eventually have established a dynastic rule in West Africa in the long run.

The amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914 was basically a forceful closure of an inevitable history following a destruction of the prenational dynastic states. This background is crucial because those who wish to “renegotiate” Nigeria around these protonational hegemonies we now call the Igbo, the Hausa-Fulani, the Yoruba, the Ijo, the Idoma, the Efik, the Edo, and so on and so forth, must realize that the amalgamation of Nigeria did some profound good which we, from the distance of time, now fail to acknowledge.

While we must acknowledge that the African past was not “one long night of savagery” we must at the same time accept that the past was no el-dorado. We must return to the past only to salvage the best things we left behind, and try to leave the weightier baggage behind. Did Britain colonize and amalgamate Nigeria for exploitation and for its own benefits?

Yes, no doubt. But a struggle commenced from then to free the lands that had become Nigeria from the clutches of exploitation and political oppression under colonialism: basically to free Nigeria from the stranglehold of British exploitation and control. That struggle was called the anti-colonial nationalist or independence movement.

It was won for Nigerians by a generation of anti-colonial fighters led by Nnamdi Azikiwe, so that by 1953, we had limited home rule; by 1960 we had political independence, and in 1963, to establish full sovereignty outside the British commonwealth, the Nigerian Federal Parliament declared Nigeria a Republic, no longer a subject nation to England, but its own sovereignty under the constitutional presidency of Nnamdi Azikiwe, premiership of Tafawa Balewa and the parliament of the Federal Republic. The implication is quite simple: Nigeria was no longer established to serve Great Britain. In declaring itself a sovereign republic, it claimed its own sovereign mandate to exploit itself for itself and by itself.

All the former profits once accruing to Great Britain reverted inexorably to those who inherited Nigeria, presumably, the citizens of Nigeria as defined by its constitution and national charter. Now, the question, did Britain stand by while its interests were at stake? Hardly. No capable nation, seeing a profitable intervention in another nation, stands aside.

From 1945, when it began to plot its strategic withdrawal following a review of the Atlantic charter, colonial Great Britain began to formulate its post-imperial policy towards soon to be free “possessions” as they referred to their colonies. They made strategic recruitments in the national political, intellectual, and bureaucratic leadership. It is called “partnership building.”

In 1947 for instance, the colonial office helped to organize and fund the Northern Peoples Congress and the Action Group as countermands to the anti-colonial party, the NCNC. The poisoning of the national well began from some of these subterranean moves aimed at securing the “crown’s long held and long term interests” to quote a particular archival source.

Between 1947 and 1957, the foundational discourse on Nigeria, or what we now call the “national question” was raised and settled. Among the central questions was whether Nigeria could remain one nation, or whether as Britain withdrew, the nations and peoples with whom they had entered into old treaties of protection, and who came to be amalgamated into the Union of Nigeria might seek independence on their own. Nigeria in other words has long had its National conference to determine the “nationality” question.

The Nigerian national Conferences were held in Ibadan in 1950 and ’51, and in London, in what we call the Constitutional Conferences in 1957 and 1958. The national question was settled in those meetings, in other words, even if some charlatans  remain ignorant of the minutes of our last meetings. It is melancholy consolation to observe that the history of Nigeria continues to reproduce certain foundational anxieties and questions already settled, by the pre-independence discussions that took place among the leaders of the new nation leading towards independence and freedom from Great Britain. (To be contd.)