Nigeria was a unique concept in the formation of modern Africa. It began
life as a highly lucrative if climatically challenging holding of the
Royal Niger Company, a British Chartered Company under the control of
Victorian capitalist Sir George Taubman Goldie. It was handed over to
indigenous rule in 1960 with the best of intentions and a profound hope
on the part of the British Crown that it would become the poster child
of successful political transition in Africa.
It did not. One of the signature failures of imperial strategists at the
turn of the 19th century was to take little if any account of the
traditional demographics of the territories and societies that were
subdivided, and often joined together, into spheres of foreign
influence, later evolving into colonies, and finally into nation states.
Many of the signature crises in postcolonial Africa have owed their
origins to this very phenomenon: incompatible and mutually antagonistic
tribal and ethnic groupings forced to cohabit within the indivisible
precincts of political geography. Congo, Rwanda/Burundi, Sudan and many
others have suffered ongoing attrition within their borders as historic
enmities surge and boil in restless and ongoing violence.
Such was the case with Nigeria in the post-independence period. The
traditions and practices of the Islamic north and the Christian/Animist
south, and even within the multiplicity of ethnic division in the south
itself, proved to be impossible to reconcile. The result was an
immediate centrifuge away from the center, complicated by the vast
infusion of oil revenues and the inevitable explosion of corruption that
followed. All of this created the alchemy of civil war and genocide,
which erupted into violence in 1967 as the eastern region of Nigeria
attempted to secede. The war that followed shocked the conscience of the
world, and revealed for the first time the true depth of incompatibility
of the four partners in the Nigerian federation.
This book traces the early history of Nigeria from inception to civil
war, and the complex events that defined the conflict in Biafra,
revealing how and why this awful event played out, and the scars that it
has since left on the psyche of the disunited federation that has
continued to exist in the aftermath.
