Sunday, February 06, 2000

GUARDIAN


 Forward To A Millennium Past

By

G.G  Darah

SUDDENLY, everyone of the six billion inhabitants of our marvellous  planet
Earth has grown younger by 30 days, yet we all feel as if it was only
yesterday. But in the cyber chambers of our imagination, we still see and
hear these resplendent lights of laughter and atomic bangs of explosives
with which we awakened ourselves to the paradise of the millennium to be
regained. As the late Nigerian poet, Christopher Okigbo rendered it in
verse, that is what life is: a coming and going  that goes on  forever.

  Nevertheless, things have changed and the world with them. Midstream into
the first 30 days, more wonders in electronic transformation occurred. Bill
Gates, the iconic idol of this wired civilisation stepped aside as the
chairman of Microsoft, the  most stupendous success story of this ceaseless
striving to play the divine. Time Warner and AOL, two other dinosaurs of the
industry agreed to be transfigured into siamese twins of the economy of
scale.

  Vlademir Putin, the political enfant terrible of year 2000 lost  his
smiles to the smokes of Chechnya. The Germans who once tempted God with
pogrom to obliterate humanity are mired in treacherous terraces of their own
success in nationhood. Helmut Khol, their Goliath for 16 years, got seduced
by the Liliputian David of untransparent husbandry of party funds. This is
the disease of affluent societies: when they have no Mobutus or Abachas to
persecute, they go for saints stained  with the ink of their selfless
service to country. The Americans who, for lucre, seduced all of us to
accept 2000 as millennium birthday are no longer at ease. A few days ago,
they started the electoral trials of aspirants to their presidential throne.
That is after they, like the Germany, had scapegoated William Jefferson
Clinton, the only American President in 50 years who presided over a booming
economy.

  What of Africans, the first inhabitants to tread on our vast earth? We are
still not far from the picture of us presented by the Nigerian ex-slave
pioneer novelist, Oludah Equiano when he said: ours is a nation of singers
and dancers. We are the first of the five continents on earth to stage a
football fiesta in Year 2000. In the three weeks of the tournament, Africans
will abandon the killing fields for the fields of play and ecstasy. Even if
Bola Ige, Nigeria's Power and Steel minister swallows all the electricity
like Sango, the Yoruba god of fire and iron, we will light our stadia with
laughter. Let the intractable militias of our restless cities besiege our
bedrooms,  we will play soccer. Should President Olusegun Obasanjo now
visiting India decides to bring gurus from Hindu temples in Bombay and
Calcutta, we will dance reggae with football. In the beginning was the world
peopled by black Africans and, in spite of everything, we are still the
world.

  Therefore let the truth be told: the splendid achievements of the past 500
years belong essentially to Europe, east and west. The embers of that era
smouldered for ages in the hearths of medieval and feudal Europe before they
sparked in inventions and machines at about the close of the 15th century.
The trees of the spectacular transition were watered by the blood of
martyred visionaries and heretics who challenged the fatalistic orthodoxies
of the early Church. Millions of peasants and gentry were slaughtered  to
appease the gods of the Crusades waged by the Church. Then  came the
intellectual ferment of the  Renaissance at about 1490. With the likes of
Galileo, the halo of superstition and ignorance were torn asunder. As the
fruits of science and relentless inquiry matured, Western European scholars,
merchants, adventurers and seekers of fortune ventured abroad to explore the
world and its infinite plenitude. One epochal event was the "discovery" of
the Americas by the Spaniard, Christopher Columbus in 1492. After this, the
world never remained the same again.

  The consequent expansion of learning, inventions, manufacture and
political power turned the western hemisphere to nursery of a new global
economy. There had been other globalism in human history, some of them
centred around Africa's achievements. The triumphs of the European
civilization are the theme song of the current epic of the second
millennium, Anno Domini.

  But like all epic narratives, the fragments and rhetorical formulae came
from different climes and endeavours. However, Europe 500 years ago had the
auspicious environment to harvest the strands and weave them into an
enthralling and grouping story.

  Where was Africa in 1500 A.D? Probably in decline and distress. The black
Egyptian civilization which inaugurated the current track of scientific and
technological breakthroughs was already 6,500 years old. Through African
Queen of Sheba, Ethiopia had  been connected to the Jews several thousand
years before Jesus. That pioneering Egyptian civilization invented
mathematics, astronomy (now in its spacecraft, interplanetary phase), all
varieties of engineering medicine and democratic systems of government. Our
black ancestors of Egypt invented the modern calendar 2,600 years before
Jesus Christ was born. (In fact, the young Jesus had his learning in mystics
in Egypt for some years! Black Egyptian civil engineers built the first
skyscrapers (pyramids which are still in solid state). The Egyptians
invented the science of writing (hieroglylics) later improved upon by
others. These same Africans established the first universities where the
likes of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Pythagoras obtained their degrees.
They took this knowledge to  Persia, Babylonia, China, India, Greece, Rome
and Western Europe. The British who drank of the knowledge after Julius
Caesar's conquest of the British Isles in 55 BC later recycled it to U.S. At
its peak, Egypt had 101 colonies, and was more formidable than current
United States of America.

  By 1500, the civilization in Zimbabwe had attained its height and
declined. Carthage in North Africa had had its day, having nurtured Generals
Like Hannibal who overran most parts of Southern Europe in 15 years with
military tanks in the form of elephants. Other African generals like Othello
had awed Europe with conquests and military rule, leaving behind most  of
the folk festivals and belief systems that are dominant in the traditions of
southern Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Italy. By 1500, too, three
blacks had been Popes of the Roman Catholic Church. St. Augustine, one of
the leading theology scholars was black. Archbishop Francis Arinze now in
the race to succeed Pope John Paul II is following in their footsteps.

  When the European Renaissance was opening in the early 15th century, West
Africa had had universities for many years, including those of Timbuctu and
Sankore to the north of Kano. In fact, Kano itself had already enjoyed 500
years of global limelight as a flourishing cosmopolitan centre with
industry, commerce and learning that took its fame across the Sahara Desert
to Libya and the Mediterranean sea board. Step back another 700 years and
you will encounter the NOK culture of how Middle Belt states of Nigeria
which started 200 years ago before Jesus. At the time Kano was in boom, the
Kanuri of Borno had assimilated Islamic religion and made some advance in
literacy and scholarship.

  In what is now Nigeria, Benin, Ife, Igbo-Ukwu, Oyo and Idah had had
sprawling empires by 1500. When the first Portuguese explorers reached Benin
City in the 1470s, they were awestruck by the exquisite art and advanced
town planning in the place. They committed their fundings to writing and so
more  Europeans came in search of  Great Benin. In 1500, the Benin Empire
had spread its intimidating wings to Lagos and Port Novo and Whydah in what
is now Benin Republic (Mark the name). At the time Benin attained its
summit, nationalities like Ijaw and Urhobo of the lower Niger had had a
history spaning several centuries.

  The closing decades of the 16th century were a turning point in Africa's
destiny. In 1492, Columbus had discovered the Americas, opening up a phase
of exponential expansion for Europe but provoking a tragedy in Africa. The
birth of the New World necessitated the trans-Atlantic slave trade which, in
300 years cost Africa nearly 250 million people. The same 16th century saw
wars of Islamic expansion in West Africa which captured kingdoms and
kinships and export of millions of slaves from Africa. The new centuries of
political power did more. With the instruments of theocracy and warfare, the
newcomers, also known as Almoravids, conquered the tropical kingdoms of the
Western Sudan - Mali, Songhai and Ghana. As a result of military conquest
from the north (Sahara) and the slave trade from the South (Atlantic), West
Africa declined precipitously until the later 19th century when European
colonizers took over. Professor Peter Ekeh has attempted an original
theoretical exegesis  of this perpetual tussle between the Sahara Desert and
the Atlantic Ocean in the making and domination of tropical rainforest
nations.

  All through West Africa, this North-South divide still drives the struggle
for power.

  What was happening elsewhere in the world during the 30 years of Africa's
despoliation and stagnation? Perhaps, we should retreat further to the  dawn
of  the 600 years after the Christian era. Whilst most of Europe was in a
barbarian state, the Chinese were already advanced in the manufacture of
porcelain and silk. For the first 300 years, Chinese maritime power was
unrivalled like that of the Phoenicians on the Mediterranean centuries
earlier. During the Ming dynasty, the  Chinese Admiral Zheng undertook a
naval expedition to  East Africa in the 1410s which mobilised 62 ships, 225
support vessels and 28,000 men. The Chinese also invented gun powder in that
century and, by it, revolutionised the technology of warfare forever. But
the Chinese emperors, like their Egyptian counterparts 400 years earlier,
failed to popularise the knowledge as the Greek pedagogists (Plato,
Aristotle, Socrates) did and thus fertilised chains of civilisations across
Europe and the rest of the world.

  In the rest of Asia, the Indians, Mongols, Japanese and Koreans made great
strides in science and manufacture. The millennium special edition of THE
ECONOMIST that reviewed world history from 1000 to 1999 reports on page 82
that by 1625, Francis Xavier, a Portuguese Jesuit missionary, had coverted
500,000 Japanese to Christianity. It was their revolt against the Tohugawa
military dictatorship in 1637 and its ruthless suppression that first
brought Western Europe into hostility with Japan. The feud lasted  till the
Second War when the United States of America exploded the atomic bomb in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Before Marco Polo and Vasco Da Gama visited  between
the 14th and 16th centuries, India had  had a flourishing textile industry.
In the 1450s, the Koreans invented their own writing and  began a properly
documented march into modernity.

  To recap, the events that changed and /or chained Africa came from the
Middle East via Islamic religion in the 7th century. The religion created
new state systems, redrew the maps of power and made Arabic language the
chosen tongue of politics and power. The strongest influence come from the
Horn of Africa and the Nile Valley. As Professor Ali Mazrui observes in
chapter 4 of the The Africans: A Tripple Heritage (1986), the Islamic
"religion captured Saharan Africa and parts of the Nile Valley before  it
captured West Africa. It penetrated parts of eastern Africa and trickled
further inland and further south." (P.95). After nearly 800 years of Islam
in Africa, Christianity arrived. Thus began the crosscurrent of the Crescent
and the Cross, between sharia and secularism. The resurgence of that
conflict in post-military Nigeria reflects this increasing tension. Caught
in this vortex, African indigenous religions and thoughts have been fighting
for survival for half a millennium.

  As the armies of the Islamised conquerors of Africa were tearing down
indigenous state and value systems, Western Europe discovered the Americas.
>From 1519, the Spaniards begun the massacre of the Indian population with
guns and smallpox biological warfare. Other European migrants into North
America did the same. The need to replace the labour wasted in these
genocides led to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of three centuries. These
were the 300 years of Africa's stagnation and regression. In 1632, the
Dutch, following Vasco Da Gama's ocean track, set foot in South Africa's
Cape of Good Hope and inaugurated a racial enclave that took 300 years to
dismantle.

  During this period, science and inventions made strides in Western
Europe. This was the age of Galileo's telescope, Isaac Newton's physics,
Hooke's air pump, Huygen's  pendulum clock, Michael Faraday's electricity,
James Watt's steam engine, Nicolas Appert's food preservation machines. At
the beginning of this half a millennium, the German Johannes Gutenberg's
cast-metal printing machine had improved what the Chinese invented and used
700 years earlier. As the edition of THE ECONOMIST already referred to put
it, the era (1500-1900) was one in which technology was driven by scientific
knowledge, adding that "knowledge is cumulative: once it exists, it does not
cease to exist. So this process of accumulation, with discovery building on
discovery, is strongly self-reinforcing with a built-in tendency to
accelerate. When a certain critical mass of knowledge exists, the pace of
future accumulation can increase very sharply, as previously unsuspected
connections between different branches of knowledge are exploited, each
breakthrough creating new opportunities." (P.10).

  By the late 19th century when Africa re-encountered Western Europe, a new
imperialism and colonialism had started. In 1884/85, the Berlin Conference
of European imperial powers took place. Thenceforth, all Africa was to be
chopped up into colonial territories like an elephant killed in a hunt. Even
the Nile Valley and East Africa already vanquished  by the Arabs fell under
Western European colonial yoke. Some of the knowledge processes described in
the paragraph above re-entered Africa via formal education and the school
system. After 100 years, the process has not been internalised enough to
trigger a truly African version of the civilisation of technology. In the
concluding part next Sunday, I will examine this past 100 years from the
prism of the Nigerian enigma.

Forward To A Millennium Past (2)

In the second part of his millennial essay, G.G. Darah examines Nigeria in
the first half of the 20th century and welcomes the reader to Enigma Land.

THOSE who seek to understand the Nigerian enigma in the past 100 years
should first attempt to answer this quiz: Why is petrol cheaper in Maiduguri
on the fringes of the luminous Sahara than in Forcados and Bonny on the
breast of the Atlantic Ocean? Forcados and Bonny are the only two terminals
from which Nigeria's crude oil is channelled to the voracious world market.
If you do not find a clue in this, try to detonate the paradox in the fact
that Sokoto where English-style education started in 1914 still harbours one
of the lowest literacy rates in the country. Those who seek to know the
anatomy of the secrets in the intestines of the elephant called "North"
should inquire into why the Tiv who joined the Nigerian Army since 1898 have
just had their first General in the person of Maj.-Gen. Victor Malu. If
these things are stranger than fiction, ask yourself why Delta State which
accounts for about 25 per cent of Nigeria's crude oil production has neither
a federal polytechnic nor university. The simplest formula for unravelling
these puzzles is to recognise that whatever has happened or is happening in
Nigeria is, in the immortal words of the late South African novelist, Ms.
Bessie Head, a question of power. Having power in Nigeria is neither the
outcome of endowment in mineral wealth nor in mountains of money or academic
degrees. Power here issues from either the advantage of affinity with the
old feudal North or from the barrel of the gun or both. Nationalities and
groups which are excluded from these assets may howler from now till
doomsday, they will remain perpetual serfs of the sections that are "born to
rule." This is the story of Nigeria: as it was in the beginning.... But why
am I jumping the queue of the suspended narrative of last week?

The 19th century background

  Let's retrace the fragments of the 900 years of world history before
Nigeria was born. At about 1804 when the Black Jacobins were unfurling the
banner of a French-type revolution in Haiti, the Fulani Islamic Army in
Northern Nigeria was accomplishing a similar mission over their Hausa (Habe)
hosts. Having subdued the area in blood the way the Spanish conquistadors
did the Aztecs and Incas of South America, the Fulani flagbearers settled
down to rule the North in their own theocratic image. That Jihadist surge,
lest we forget, was destined for the Atlantic coast but for the valiance of
the likes of General Ogedengbe of Ijeshaland whose tropicalised military
manoeuvre outwitted the equestrian army and halted its advance along the
Ilorin-Offa-Ekiti corridors. Offa, for example, lost 200 chiefs the day the
Jihadists attempted a crossing of this cultural frontier. The Oyo empire was
smouldering in internal feuds of decay as Afonja, its commander-in-chief,
failed to do what Ogedengbe did and compromised his Ilorin sentry vigilance
like the ill-destined King Mutesa of Buganda (Uganda), offered refuge for
the beleaguered Fulani and they had respite enough to settle there till
today. Ibadan, the rendezvous of rebel generals and freedom-seeking peasants
was rising into fame from the ruins of war-wearied Yoruba country. The Egba
to the south-western stretch were garnering returnee Yoruba diaspora and
Christianised elite to reconstruct their autonomous, independent nation
state which had by 1859 fosted a newspaper industry. Igbo-peopled Eastern
Nigeria was yet to emerge from its village enclave culture to found a common
administrative territory. Note that the 1884/85 Berlin Conference had
instigated a scramble for Africa's colonisation. In 15 years, all the
territories, except Liberia and Ethiopia, were gobbled up like caskets of
wine.

  In the Niger Delta, city states sustained by profits from the traffic in
slaves and (vegetable) oils were heading for exhaustion induced by overdose
of imported hot drinks and the excesses of affluent aristocracies. Jaja of
Opobo had been ensnared by the British and deported to Jamaica by the 1870s.
>From 1861, Lagos had been seized and indomitables like Madam Tinubu had been
forced to retreat to Egba hinterland. Nana Olomu's Ebrohimi which was like
Panama City to the interior trade in palm produce was sacked in 1894, the
way the America-led allied forces devastated Saddam Hussein's Baghdad in
1991. Ijaw's Am(B)ekederemo of Kiagbodo, pioneer ship owner like Bishop
Ajayi Crowther, was apparently too contented in his well-earned riches and
splendour to think of political power. After Nana, only Oba Ovonramwen
Nogbaisi of Benin remained to insist on fairer deal in Nigeria-Britain
relations. With the mandate of Berlin, Ovonramwem had to go and he did in
1897 with the February invasion and massacre which witnessed the largest
looting of art treasures in the millennium under review. 1897 was the year
that Lugard's concubine, Ms Flora Shaw, published an article in The Times of
London where she christened the land watered by the Niger and its
tributaries: Nigeria. Her spouse was to adopt this love-cloned nomeclature
later.

Incubation of Nigeria

  With all resistance drowned in blood, the British were now emboldened to
establish the biggest colony of theirs besides India (which included
Pakistan and Bangladesh). The Oil Rivers Protectorate of the Niger Delta
formed the initial experiment with Calabar as first administrative capital
of the nascent country. The disinvestment of the ominibus Royal Niger
Company assets had begun and it soon spread to the North which the company
controlled, too, under royal charter. This was truly robbing the British to
empower the British. Thus, at Lokoja on January 1, 1900, the British Union
Jack fluttered menacingly to proclaim the nucleus of historic yoking
together of the Northern and Southern provinces.

  But resistance cannons boomed still in pockets of unsubdued territory. The
babel-tongued, "stateless" peoples of Adamawa Province on the Camerounean
border (now Adamawa and Taraba states) fought gallantly into the twilight
years of the 19th century. The Ijebu had been overrun in 1894, the year Nana
fell. Egbaland and the heartland of the Oyo empire were to follow in tow. By
1903, Col. Bowe's troops cajoled war-famished Yoruba armies of the Ekiti
Parapo and Ibadan legionaries to accept an armistice. In 1898, the Ijesha
wing of the nascent Yoruba proto-bourgeoisie made the first move in private
sector intervention in economic development. Rallied by Brazil-nurtured
Dacosta, the Ijesha in Lagos planned to construct a railway from Lagos to
Ilesha. The British colonialists, dreading competition, killed the project
in infancy.

  Several years earlier, the British were rampaging in the Sudan under Gen.
Gordon's command. An Islamic Mahdi (messiah) Rabeh still tormented them and
his guerrilla militias had to be pushed westwards to the region of Lake
Chad. The French who were outmanoeuvred by the British in East and Central
Africa plotted a revenge in West Africa. From their Dahomey foothold, they
surged eastwards to appropriate the border regions of Borgu in the
Kwara-Niger shoulder. Both imperial land grabbers set out on a race to the
village of Nikki to plant their flags. The British arrived first and won the
diadem for their Nigeria. in 1902, the British who had triumphed over Chaka
and his Zulu impi commandos had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands
of the Boers (Dutch latifundists) in South Africa. The British were,
therefore, not in the mood for further military reverses in Africa. So, when
the Sokoto Satiru revolt against them burst in 1904, they spared neither men
nor beast in squelching the uprising. The previous year, Lugard had moved
against an Emir in Zaria who deployed armoury and poetry to oppose the
British conquest of the region. They treated him the way President Reagan
did Panama's Noriega a decade ago. The emir was captured and deported to
Lokoja. He lost his poetic gifts there. Let deposed Sultan Dasuki remember
that he had comrades-in-travail a century ago!

  By 1906, the "pacification" of the land of the Niger (Nigeria) had been
completed. Mission accomplished, Lugard was posted to Uganda to carry out a
similar imperial assignment for Queen Victoria. In the intervening years
before the 1914 amalgamation decree, the British sought to consolidate
effective occupation a la Berlin Conference mandate. Churches and schools
spread to areas hitherto shut to them. The Urhobo-Edo country, south-eastern
Nigeria and large sections of the Middle Belt came under the influence of
church, trade and state during these years.

Second coming of Lugard

  But "Nigeria: to be or not to be one unitary state" still remained the
question to be answered by the British. The Southern Provinces with their
long encounter with European mercantilism, abundant forest resources and
rising indigenous elite earned enough revenue to pay the bills of colonial
administration and leave substantial surplus for expropriation by
metropolitan Britain. But the Northern half was insolvent and money had to
be diverted from treasuries in the South to fund their survival. This
awkward situation could not be sustained for long and soon the colonial
office in London would insist on self-reliance because it did not want the
British tax payer to bear the burden of administration. The British faced a
horned dilemma.

  In 1898, a Niger Committee headed by Lord Selbourne recommended
amalgamation in phases, hence that of 1906 which fused the Colony and
Protectorate of Lagos with the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. The
Protectorate of Northern Nigeria was constituted in 1900. The two halves
were governed until 1914. A colonial office report had supported this policy
beyond 1914, the argument being that the North was too different from the
South in history, culture and economic viability to warrant their being
yoked together. From his Uganda base, Lugard submitted a contrary memorandum
favouring a unification. His argument won and he had to be recalled to
Nigeria in 1913 to execute his pet plan. The amalgamation of January 1914
was the ultimate triumph of the Lugardian thesis. That is the year,
therefore, that Nigeria was born as a unified country.

>From amalgamation to 1939

  Nigeria's nativity coincided with the outbreak of the First World War
(1914-1919). In 1917, three years of Nigeria's existence, the Boshevik
socialist revolution occurred in Russia, an event that altered the
international system for 70 years thereafter. Under Vladimir Lenin, the new
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) proclaimed the legitimacy of the
right of nations to self-determination. It became a cardinal theme of
anti-imperalist mobilisation as the League of Nations (precursor of the UN)
was in its formative stage. These global transmutations engendered
anti-colonial agitation and the 1919 Treaty of Versailes endorsed by America
's Woodrow Wilson and colleagues affirmed the primacy of struggle for
freedom by colonised peoples.

  The first phase of Nigeria's pro-independence nationalism was fired by
these changes. In 1918, our Herbert Macaulay and Ghana's Casely Hayford
founded a party for the British West African colonies of Nigeria, Ghana, The
Gambia and Sierra Leone. The Pan-Africanist Movement was waxing stronger
with intellectual giants like Marcus Garvey, George Padmore and C.L.R.
James, especially after a congress in 1919. The generation of Macaulay was
to be swelled by scholar-ideologues such as Professor Eyo Ita who founded
the first pan-Nigeria youth movement to promote revolutionary disengagement
from colonial bondage.

  From about 1921, the British began to concoct some constitutional
arrangement for Nigeria. A legislative council with Nigerian elected and
nominated members was set up about 1922. Constitutional debates about fair
representation raged on intermittently for years as political consciousness
grew in the capital, Lagos, and other burgeoning urban centres. The hardest
hit against British colonialism was in 1927, following the introduction of
poll tax in some provinces. The anti-tax revolt that ensued was spearheaded
in the Niger Delta region by two Urhobo militants - Oshue and Eyube. The
movement they headed met at Agbarha in Warri in April 1927 and declared
unilateral independence of the Niger Delta from British rule. Oshue himself
was addressed as head of state and "excellency" before his arrest and
detention. From the Niger Delta, the revolts spread to Iseyin in Oyo and
other districts, culminating in the famous Aba (Owerri Province) Women
uprising of 1929 in which hundreds perished.

  The indignation over these brutal killings also watered more political
agitation. By the early 1930s, more groups asserted political presence. One
such iroko seedling planted by these changes was the coming to Lagos of the
29-year-old Michael Athokamien Ominus Imoudu who, like a colossus, was to
bestride the labour movement for fifty fighting years. The Nigerian Youth
Movement of Eyo Ita took off in 1934, spreading the theatre for
revolutionary youths like the late Odemo of Ishara and Funmilayo
Ransome-Kuti to test their skills in grassroots work. As if Macaulay, the
storming petrel of Kirsten Hall, was not tall enough to give the British
sleepless nights, another intellectual gladiator of anti-colonial struggle
landed in Nigeria in 1937. He was Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe. He arrived
clutching two degrees, a journalism career in Ghana and determination to awe
the British. His West African Pilot started in Yaba in 1938 joined his
magnus opus (RENASCENT AFRICA) book to sting the national middle class to
step forward to reclaim the historical role of enlightenment and
emancipation from colonialism and racism. Also, 1938 was the year Imoudu
filled the 8-kilometre route from Ebute Metta to Lagos Island with 3,000
demonstrators over economic hardship and racism in the Nigerian Railways.

  Those events moved Nigeria tumultously through the Great Capitalist
Depression of 1929-1939. At the end of the decade, the Second World War
broke out in June 1939 and consumed over 40 million people before ending in
August 1945. That was the year the Nigerian proletariat fired the guns of
relentless struggle that brought independence to Nigeria 15 years after in
1960.

  As novelist Chinua Achebe said of a story, its narrator is often a captive
of the gregarious motion of the telling. I have found myself snared by the
velocity of the story of Nigeria in the millennium. But I will extricate
myself with a safe-landing conclusion next week. It is a promise.

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