Empire in toto was possible. Great Britain at first thought ←32 | 33→otherwise and instituted a mix of labor concessions and repression against unions and select individuals. Popular labor leader Michael Imoudo was detained. These measures and the general colonial policies of ongoing subservience had minimal results and ultimately produced a rising rebelliousness among Nigerians. Though somewhat temporary, these actions by the British “influenced the course of African nationalism, however indirectly.” Such empire-driven policies meant the war had taken a toll on Great Britain, a circumstance not helped by similar rebelliousness in other parts of what would become known as the third world. Containing the activisms and fighting a war was the cost of empire. The talk of the day increasingly was of a transfer of power. African American activists took a noticeable interest in this new development.37
The reforms that would lead to self-government and eventually independence began to take shape due to several factors that accelerated the process. One study about the concessionary attitude of the British to end their colonial arrangement noted rather critically that the British had always intended to prepare its subject peoples for self-rule “after a period of tutelage since colonial rule itself was a burdensome duty undertaken by the imperial powers.”38 The tone of this benevolent reasoning by Great Britain implied that the colonial enterprise was inherently collapsible, but obtaining the most from it was preferred in the meantime. A second causation was the fact that the United States applied pressure on colonial powers to relinquish their territories or at least embark upon significant reforms. In addition, a liberal attitude toward colonial subjects by British citizens encouraged a lessening of rigid controls. Lastly, mounting opposition by colonial subjects would help force an end to empire.39
Whether separate or in combination, all of these pressures prevented the British government from avoiding the inevitable. It took the Local Government Dispatch of February 1947, however, to formally launch reforms. In this measure Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones suggested Great Britain prepares an educated African elite to assume the reigns of government rather than traditional leaders at the local level. Rebellions in Accra, Ghana, a year later forced implementation of the act. Sir John Macpherson was installed as governor of Nigeria, and ←33 | 34→his liberal inclinations enabled him to advance the move to self-government. Macpherson was able to win some measure of trust from Nigerian nationalists, an achievement in tandem with British public opinion. His more open-minded attitude on lifting British control over Nigerians was unlike that of the previous governor, Sir Arthur Richards, whose heavy-handedness with radical elements had proven unsuccessful.40
Macpherson, though, was not totally infatuated with the nationalists; hard-core radicals and revolutionaries were effectively excluded from the program of devolution of powers. This attempt by the British to curtail growing radical nationalist sentiment among local Nigerians especially became the policy after 1945. A Zikist Movement (named for the influential activist leader Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe) along with labor and youth organizations were targeted for a form of containment that included imprisonment, and a propaganda campaign directed at youth to discredit incipient radicalism. It should be noted, too, that capitalism as an economic system was confronted with a more forceful challenge than previous decades. The Cold War had begun in earnest as the Soviet Union and Western nations reversed their wartime alliance. Now fears of a growing communist movement throughout British dominions created another reason to quickly neutralize militant thinking among Nigerians following the Second World War.41
A period of Nigerian constitution making arose from 1945 to 1950. Great Britain oversaw the organization of this process in cooperation with a select group of Nigerians deemed acceptable for an orderly transfer of power. Britain intended to retain significant economic and ideological controls, as needed, over the former colony with this arrangement. This would be achieved by inducing Nigeria to become a member of the British Commonwealth. At least five conferences were held during this time that produced several constitutions in an effort to dilute full nationalist aspirations for independence. These constitutions were in reality measures of checks and balances to (1) ensure “specific British interests on which our existence as a trading country depends;” (2) “forestall nationalist demands which may threaten our vital interests;” and (3) create “a class with a vested interest in cooperation.”42 Throughout the 1950s, Great Britain sought to insert binding language ←34 | 35→that would “not only consolidate the gains of the preceding decades of British rule, but also protect new ones and prevent an irrational government from getting the better of them.”43
British means to guarantee these objectives was to create a strong central government in Nigeria, a goal they felt would be most easily achieved by investing most federal power into a compliant northern region. The three largest and most contentious ethnic groups in the country—the Hausa-Fulani, the Igbo, and the Yoruba—were distributed geographically in the north, east, and west parts of the country. Since imposition of the colonial order British officials had obtained cooperation with their system of indirect rule through a willing Hausa-Fulani clientage based in the northern part of the country. British insistence that the arrangement was pro forma during the post-war constitution era, however, was not totally accurate. Northern leaders at first thought a strong central government was unnecessary (suggesting simply that any association with other regions in a government was undesirable). British colonial officials rejected the idea for political decentralization among the regions in hopes that a fully independent Nigeria was a united one, with a strong federal government to ensure that the ongoing need of the former metropole for access to the instruments of power would not be jeopardized. Yet Nigerian insistence on decentralization could not be completely discarded; greater autonomy for the regions would become part of a new constitution.
Other issues had already come to bear, and new ones soon would, on Nigeria’s march to independence. These would complicate African American understanding of the role Nigeria could play in the emergent pan-African sentiment of the next decade. In fact, the ANLCA would have to contend with them once they became exposed to the long-standing and complex aspects of Nigerian life. Included were ethnic minority concerns about adequate representation, and the tendency of the regions to assert their own identity parallel to a singular Nigerian nationality.44 These and other issues, along with the firm intent of the British to secure a legally based presence in the Nigerian political and economic landscape, enabled the British to exert its will on constitutional proceedings for the remainder of the 1950s.45 Perhaps the defining moment in this regard was the constitution brokered in 1954. On ←35 | 36→the one hand, it quelled a potentially violent confrontation between the northern, eastern and western regions, and yet it also laid the basis for a de facto division of the country when centralized powers of the Nigerian federation were partly redistributed to those regions. Thus, ethnic-regional power struggles were given constitutional sanction.46
Suspicions about self-determination continued to plague the process. One major denial by the British colonial office for Nigerian independence continued to be their observation that Nigerians remained unprepared to fully assume the reins of self-government. The aforementioned divisive factors among members of the indigenous population were given as reasons. Some officials believed the better reasoning was to delay sovereign statehood indefinitely. This was a hopeful defiance against mounting pressures from Azikiwe, the primary spokesperson for the eastern region; northern emir leader Alhaji Tafawa Balewa; and Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the western region-based Action Group to form a new state. Also noted among the delays to independence was the belief by some British leaders that Nigerian entrance into the commonwealth would lead to an Afro-Asian bloc within it, posing a threat they believed could dissolve the original purpose for the association.47
British vacillation over the mechanics of Nigeria’s future could not stave off the inevitable. October 1, 1960 emerged from this process as the date for an independent Nigeria and a transfer of power to its leaders. Thus, preparations to install a new administrative and institutional base began in the late 1950s. Nigerians selected by the British attended educational programs at missions and universities in Great Britain and schools in the United States. Personnel chosen to fill key positions within the government also attended training programs
