For one month, delighted Londoners watched
the 80 ceremonially dressed Nigerians—some with necklaces of animal
teeth, others with feathered straw hats, at least one with a jeweled
crown—parade into Lancaster House for their historic conference.
Everything possible had been done to make them feel at home. For the
Colonial Office's big reception at the Tate Gallery, all nude statues
were carefully screened so as not to offend Moslems. The Lord Mayor
served up a banquet of stewed peanuts, and one paramount chief—His
Highness James Okosi II of the Onitsha—fulfilled a lifelong ambition:
to ride the escalator at the Charing Cross underground station. In the
end, the Nigerians got what they had come for: on Oct. 1, 1960, the
largest of Britain's remaining colonial territories
would get its independence . But behind the scenes the
conference had revealed ominous signs of trouble to come. From the start there was a clash between the personalities of the
Premiers of the three regions—each obviously more important than the
scholarly Federal Prime Minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. In
Western eyes, Obafemi Awolowo of the Western Region seemed the most
statesmanlike: as the conference began, the London Times carried a
full-page ad proclaiming his declaration for freedom under the title
“This I Believe,” prepared with the help of an American public
relations man. In contrast, U.S.-educated Premier Nnamdi
Azikiwe of the Eastern Region seemed to have learned more in the U.S.
about Tammany tactics than Thomas Jefferson, and was somewhat under a
cloud as a result of a British tribunal's 1956 investigation into
corruption in his administration. The North's Premier, the Sardauna of
Sokoto, a haughty Moslem of noble birth, could barely conceal his
contempt for his less aristocratic colleagues. Insults & Accusations. Under the great chandeliers of the Lancaster
House music room, where Chopin once played for Queen Victoria, the
Premiers bickered, shot insults back and forth like poisoned darts.
When the conference took up the ticklish problem of how to protect the
rights of minorities among Nigeria's 250 tribes, Awolowo suggested
creating three new states. The North's Sardauna, not wishing to
relinquish any of his own territory, vetoed the idea. Nor did he like
the plan for a centralized police force under the federal government:
he much preferred to use his own force, which, answerable only to him,
can pop a man in jail with no questions asked. At one point, the Sardauna accused Awolowo of sending his supporters to
Israel to be trained as saboteurs in the North —a charge fabricated
out of the fact that Western Nigeria has imported agricultural experts
from Israel to advise its farmers. Awolowo countercharged that the
Sardauna flogs his prisoners. At receptions the delegates sipped their
orange juice, icily aloof from one another. In elevators conversation
would suddenly stop if a delegate from another region got on.
