The only person for whom Isaac’s return seemed to be bittersweet was Joshua. He was overwhelmed to have his son back, but could not hide his dismay when he learnt that Isaac would be disabled for life. ‘Nineteen years old, this is not the start in life you need,’ he said. He wished he could have handed over one of his good legs in exchange for Isaac’s damaged one. Isaac remonstrated, ‘Baba, what can we do? Let us just thank God that I’m alive.’*
Early the following day, the two men walked to the Anglican church and prayed. Afterwards, Joshua said it was only on this second day that he really believed Isaac had returned; the previous evening had been too much like a dream. Still, he worried about Isaac’s leg, and pleaded with him to visit a village healer. Isaac refused, saying, ‘I was not prepared to have my leg further mutilated by traditional healers.’* He tried to reassure Joshua. The Yorubas believe in destiny, Isaac said, whatever God has decided is going to happen to you will so happen. He had put himself in trouble, joining the Army of his own volition. Now, Isaac vowed, he would give life a good fight. ‘Even if I fail,’ he said to his father, ‘people will see my efforts and will say, “This guy has tried.”’
Joshua smiled but remained unconvinced. He found it hard to believe that a young man with a limp could ever do well in life.
Within a year, Joshua started to fall ill with what his daughter Adedeji would call ‘severe arthritis’. Isaac scraped together what money he could find to pay for medicine. Then, on 20 May 1947, there was a total eclipse of the sun over Emure-Ile. Many people were convinced that the world was coming to an end. Shortly afterwards, Joshua died. It was, wrote Isaac, an ‘unexpected and premature departure from the world…it was sad that he did not live long enough to enable me to reciprocate his kindness and affection.’*
Isaac was true to the promise he’d made to his father in the village church. He did not dwell on the past, but got on with trying to build a new life for himself. In February 1946, he paid a courtesy call to the district officer at Owo, who told him that he was entitled to a gratuity of eighteen pounds for his war service (about six hundred pounds in today’s money). More importantly, he was also eligible for a disability pension, backdated to the day he had been discharged from the British Army. The Army did not pay pensions for war service (in Africa, other colonies or Britain itself), but it did recognise its obligation to those who had come home wounded. Isaac was judged to have a ‘60 per cent disability’, and, as the pension for a ‘100 per cent disability’ had been fixed at thirty shillings a month, he would receive eighteen shillings a month for as long as he lived. Returning to Lagos, he took advantage of the quota system for ex-servicemen to secure a position as a temporary clerical assistant at the Department of Labour. He was, technically, the very lowest grade of civil servant. Isaac was a boy of, as he put it, ‘obscure origins’, but he now had a much-prized civil service job, with security and prospects.
The Department of Labour was on Catholic Mission Street, almost next door to the handsome Edwardian buildings of King’s College. The famous school had experienced its own upheavals during the war. In 1944, the authorities had moved the boys out of their boarding houses and into lodgings on a nearby street, so as to provide temporary accommodation for soldiers. The boys protested. Dozens were arrested, and, to the enduring bitterness of many associated with the school, eight were forcibly conscripted into the Army. Two years had passed since those events, and things seemed to be getting back to normal. Isaac would see ‘KC’ boys every day, in their smart blue blazers and cricket caps, strolling along the colonnaded verandas that overlooked the racecourse, with an air of confidence in their future that he could only envy. He knew that his chance to enjoy the kind of education they were receiving was long gone. But Lagos offered many opportunities to distract Isaac from such emotions, and he grabbed them. He was a young man in the big city with a regular wage in his pocket. In his own quaint words, he was ‘careless and fond of going out in company of friends to make merry’.*
His colleagues at the Department of Labour warned him that, if he ever wanted to be more than a temporary clerk, he would need better academic qualifications. In other words, he needed to pursue more work, and less merrymaking. Isaac heeded their advice, and so, after he left the Department of Labour at the end of each day, he hurried to a backstreet night school, which arranged correspondence courses through Wolsey Hall, a college in Oxford. He took O Levels, and then A Levels,* the night school sending the papers off to England for marking. He did well in English, Yoruba and economics, even history of economics, and battled manfully with the British Constitution. But he struggled with mathematics, especially algebra. Simple equations and simultaneous equations he could master, but, when the teacher got to quadratic equations, Isaac was flummoxed. He persevered, though, and, each time he passed an exam, his seniors at the Department of Labour encouraged him to take another. They admired this young clerk with the stiff leg and the remarkable war story.
In the middle of Lagos Island is an area that is sometimes called Oke Popo, but is better known as the Brazilian Quarter. It got its name from the thousands of slaves who settled there in the nineteenth century after they were freed from sugar plantations in north-east Brazil. Some had been born in Africa, often in the Yoruba interior, but had been sold off as children to Portuguese slavers; others had been born in the Americas, but never forgot their African origins. In Lagos, they and their descendants were known as ‘Agudas’, a relaxed mix of Roman Catholics and Muslims with names like da Silva, Dos Reis and da Costa. Many were fine stonemasons, bricklayers and carpenters, and in their work they developed a unique and cheerful style of architecture, the ‘Brazilian Style’, characterised by colourful, stucco-plaster facades, decorated doorways, sash windows and fine wrought-iron balconies. Isaac lived in the middle of the Brazilian Quarter, on Tokunboh Street, for some fifteen years, renting two rooms in a blue, single-storey house typical of the neighbourhood. Tokunboh Street was already paved, but in those days only the occasional car passed by. The noisy but much-loved steam-tram that had trundled down the middle of the street had stopped working back in the 1930s, leaving an empty median where children played table tennis on planks of wood.
Lagos had charm in the late 1940s and ’50s, in a way that those who only know it from more recent years would find hard to imagine. It was greener and quieter, a more gentle place. The shops closed at noon to allow for a siesta and reopened in the late afternoon. In the evening, Lagosians liked to promenade along the Marina, for a mile or more, watching the boats come into the harbour. They’d stop to pay a few pennies to a photographer with an old wooden camera to capture a romantic pose under the palms. At the southeast end of the Marina was Lovers’ Garden. ‘The town was very quiet,’ remembered Esther Salawu, ‘the Marina was peaceful, you could stroll there in the evenings, sit on the benches, nobody would harass you. I would sit there with my husband and take the fresh air.’*
Perhaps it’s too easy to romanticise the city of that time. Lagos was built on a swampy island, with a humid, sticky climate, and space was always at a premium. There were slums, certainly, and pot-holed back streets, crammed with what one 1950s visitor called ‘the tumble of houses of all shapes and sizes set at all angles, the stained steps, the rickety balconies and shuttered windows, the milling, variegated, talkative crowds’.* There were pickpockets, small-time gangsters known as jagudas and teenage prostitutes in knee-length bonfo frocks, looking for business day and night.* Many parts of the city did not have running water, and the open drains stank of offal and sewage. Indeed, ‘night-soil men’ walked down Tokunboh Street each night after dark, collecting pails of human waste, which they dropped in the lagoon. But Lagos was safe, the kind of town where women walked home alone at night at any hour, and families often left their doors unlocked.
On warm nights during the dry season, Isaac would pull a mat out onto the veranda at Tokunboh Street, and sleep outside. When he was much older, he would look back on those early years in Lagos
with incredulity, comparing what the city was with what it had become. ‘Crime then was much, much less. But nobody can sleep outside in Lagos now,’ he would say, laughing at the very notion. ‘They can come and kill you.’ Nor did people have to worry about mosquitoes then, because the city authorities ensured that the gutters were swept clean and sprayed with insecticide. In those days, people in Lagos took electricity, or ‘light’, for granted. ‘If they wanted to take out light, they’d warn you, but it soon came back,’ remembered Isaac. ‘It was reliable, very reliable. But now…light may go for weeks!’ Like many older Lagosians, he would shake his head at the absurdity of it all, then let it go with a wave of the hand. The alternative, he said, was to get upset and angry, and what good would that do?
The fact was that Lagos had given Isaac a better life than he would have had if he’d stayed on the farm in Emure-Ile. Immediately after the war, the worst racial prejudices of British rule were finally breaking down. Today, Aduke Alakija is a vivacious nonagenarian, fond of sparkling conversation and an after-lunch brandy.* Born in Lagos in 1921, she was the daughter of a prominent lawyer and publisher, Sir Adeyemo Alakija, who sent her as a young girl to Britain to receive a ‘proper’ education. She went to a boarding school in north Wales, and from there to the London School of Economics. In March 1945, she returned to Nigeria, a self-assured young lady. A few weeks later, Aduke was taken by Sir Adeyemo to see the arrival of Isaac’s hospital ship. ‘My father was showing me off at the time,’ she said. The event left little impression on her; maybe she found it hard to relate to the experiences of the soldiers, mainly illiterate men from Northern Nigeria. In the circles she moved in, people were more interested in politics, education and getting a job in the government. But what she did recall, very clearly, was an occasion, a few weeks later, when a shop attendant ignored her in order to serve a white lady. Under Aduke’s interrogation, the unfortunate boy confessed that it was the manager, Mr Jones, who had instructed him that white customers be given preference. ‘What, in Nigeria?!’ exclaimed Aduke. ‘Never!’ Mr Jones was called down to the shop floor where he stammered a denial that such an instruction had ever been given. On future visits to the shop, Aduke had to insist on not being given preferential treatment herself.
It was what became known as the ‘Bristol Hotel Incident’ of 1947 that signalled the true turning point in race relations in Lagos. The white manager of the famous hotel refused to admit a man of mixed Anglo-Sierra Leonean descent, not knowing that he was in fact leading a commission sent by the Colonial Office in London. The news spread across the city. Demonstrators stormed their way into the Bristol, smashing windows and furniture, and furious articles appeared in the West African Pilot and other newspapers. The governor quickly moved to outlaw racial segregation in all Lagos establishments, including at the best hospital and the most prestigious private club, the Ikoyi Club. A few years later, Aduke was admitted as the Ikoyi Club’s first Nigerian woman member. ‘By then they were begging us to join,’ she said, ‘so a group of us would go and drink there on Sundays.’ Initially, some of the white members, ‘most of them second rate’ in her withering assessment, resisted the new state of affairs, but they soon moved on.
By the early 1950s, the social scene included Nigerians of different ethnic backgrounds mixing freely with Europeans, Aduke recalled. Now, divisions owed more to class and education than to colour. ‘There were certain classes that you could never tolerate, the people who worked for railways and so on,’ she said, ‘but if you had the same type of education, and so on, you all got on.’
At Christmas and New Year, Europeans and Africans put on their finery and gathered together to watch the horses at the racecourse. Black and white jockeys raced side by side. In 1956, a young Queen Elizabeth came to visit. Aduke, who was presented to the Queen as one of Nigeria’s first female lawyers, remembered that the monarch seemed rather nervous as she was introduced to Lagos society. Evidently, when it came to self-confidence, Nigeria’s elite had nothing to learn from their British counterparts. It may have been this quality that helped ensure the ‘colour bar’ was never set so high, nor enforced so rigidly, as it had been in Southern or Eastern Africa.
Nigeria, just like the other West Coast colonies, had been saved partly by its climate. The ‘White Man’s Grave’ deserved its malign reputation for disease. It had never been an attractive proposition for settlers, and this meant there was no significant European society to jealously guard its privileges, no white farmers prepared to shed blood to keep land they had taken. Elspeth Huxley, who had lived much of her life in colonial Kenya, visited Lagos in 1953 and perceived the ‘inter-racial bonhomie’* while having a wonderful time during a dance at the Island Club. The academic Margery Perham found the atmosphere in colonial Lagos in the 1930s to be ‘utterly different’ from what she had known in other African colonies. Here ‘a proud assertive people…walked the streets in their bright flowing robes as if Lagos and its suburbs, its markets and its official buildings was entirely their city and subject to no suzerain power’.*
It was as if the Nigerians knew what belonged to them, and the British were tolerated on sufferance. And by the 1950s the British were not only climbing down from their privileged social position, but they were also relinquishing political power. They had decided to go.
British officials worried in private that there were not enough trained Nigerian civil servants to run the country. But they also admitted that they were starting to feel out of place, that Nigeria was like a bored hostess, waiting for her self-invited guests to leave.* Independence was coming.
There was no great struggle for freedom in Nigeria, no popular uprising that forced Britain to fight or leave. If there had been, the withdrawal would have happened even quicker. Instead, a group of able Nigerian politicians, with wildly competing agendas and different regional powerbases, found themselves pushing against an open door. The disagreements between these politicians and the British hinged on the exact timing of the departure and, crucially, over how power would be distributed between the regions. The champions of Southern Nigeria, Obafemi Awolowo of the Yorubas and Nnamdi Azikiwe of the Igbos, wanted the British out as soon as possible, while the leaders of the less developed North asked them to stay longer. These differences came to a head in the Nigerian parliament in 1953, after which Northern leaders were booed and heckled on the streets of Lagos, and there were anti-Southern riots in the North. It was a fevered atmosphere and there was much apprehension about the future. Many Nigerians, especially in the South, accused the British of ‘divide and rule’, of favouring the North. British officials maintained that the differences between the regions were real enough and insisted they were now doing their best to build bridges between them.
The original sin was Britain’s. There was no unity in Nigeria because Nigeria was not, at least at that time and before, a country in any meaningful sense. Its borders had been shaped purely by imperial ambition, some two hundred different ethnic groups lumped together. Even Nigeria’s name was a British invention, thought up by Flora Shaw, the wife of Lord Frederick Lugard, the colony’s first governor-general. Awolowo put it with cruel succinctness in 1947: ‘Nigeria’, he said, ‘is a mere geographical expression.’ It’s a moot point, though, whether any politicians did enough in those pre-independence years to reach beyond their own ethnic constituencies. A few months before the British left, Nelson Ottah penned a damning, but ultimately prescient analysis for Drum magazine. Nigeria, he said, was in grave danger of falling apart because of tribalism, ‘created and fostered by our own politicians. In their desperate quest for power the first word in their mind was never Nigeria. It was Ibo, Yoruba or Hausa. And they only began to pay lip-service to Nigeria after they had made sure that their greatest weapon, tribalism, was well set up behind them.’*
The preparations in Lagos were frantic. Workmen tore down old buildings, put up new ones, widened roads and rushed to finish an expensive new hotel and stadium, all to make sure the city would celeb
rate Independence Day in a state of suitable grandeur. ‘Never has there been such a delirium of activity,’ wrote Drum magazine, which, with exuberant optimism, predicted the event would be attended by some 250,000 visitors from ninety countries.* After all, as people in Lagos said, this was not just any old colonial territory about to step onto the world stage. Nigeria was by far the most populous colony in the British Empire; with a population of more than forty-five million, one-third of all imperial subjects were Nigerian.
Queen Elizabeth sent her cousin, Princess Alexandra, to the ceremony on her behalf, and thousands of Nigerians braved heavy rain to cheer her along the fourteen-mile route from the airport at Ikeja. The next day, 30 September 1960, the skies cleared. The excitement, observed the reporter for Drum, ‘was almost unbearable’. At dusk, the crowds walked along the Marina, now decorated with festive lights depicting camels, parrots and other animals, towards the racecourse. The churches rang their bells, the ships in the lagoon joyously sounded their sirens and the Navy, stationed across the water in Apapa, fired a twenty-one-gun salute. The Princess drove round the thrilled crowds in an open-top car, waving her white-gloved hand. ‘Abeke!’ shouted the Lagosians – ‘We beg to cherish her!’ – in appreciation of her beauty.
At precisely midnight, the Union Jack was lowered and, in a sudden flash of floodlights, the new green and white flag of an independent Nigeria was hoisted high above the capital. Nigerians sang their national anthem for the first time, their many voices straining with emotion: ‘Nigeria, we hail thee, our dear native land; though tribe and tongue may differ; in brotherhood we stand’.* The first prime minister, Tafawa Balewa, could not have been more gracious about the soon-to-be-departed British, of whom, he said, ‘we have known, first as masters, and then as leaders, and finally as partners, but always as friends’.
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