Bloodshed in Nigeria

Long-legged, black Haussa farmers in white robes and turbans loped into mud-walled Kano (pop. 120,000), the largest city in Northern Nigeria. Near the green-domed mosque, the Haussa mingled with their Moslem coreligionists, the fierce Fulani, and waited in the midday sun for the decision that would come from the palace. Abdullah Bayero, the fat and scented Emir of Kano, was wrestling with a problem. Both the royal flatterer and the court jester cowered in the background as he pounded across the Oriental rugs in the baked mud stronghold. At last the emir spoke: "Tell the Southerner my answer is no."

State of Emergency. The Southerner was Samuel Ladoke Akintola (B.A., Oxon), slick-talking Yoruba lawyer who had just resigned as Minister of Labor in Nigeria's central Council of Ministers. A nationalist who wants home rule (within the British Commonwealth) by 1956, Akintola had journeyed to Kano hoping to arrange a meeting which would whip up Northern enthusiasm for his independence movement. Apparently he had forgotten, or did not care, that the proud Moslem emirs of the Northern region have no taste for independence if it means exchanging their British masters--who in the main are just, if aloof--for a group of African Oxonians recruited in the coastal cities.

Kano is a city that flourished in the days of Scheherazade; its sturdy peasantry, like 11 million other Northern Moslems, loftily disdain the nimbler-witted Ibos and Yorubas who dominate Southern Nigeria. When Emir Abdullah's decision was announced, Haussa and Fulani alike broke away from their mosque and poured into the Saba N'Gari (Stranger's Quarter), where 60,000 Ibos and Yorubas conduct Kano's retail business. Rioting went on for three days; when it was all over last week, 45 were dead, 200 injured. Speechmaker Akintola was bundled into a government plane and shipped back South, where he promptly indicted his attackers as "victims of imperialism, who have lived so long in bondage as to lose every taste for liberty."

Constitutional Flop. In far-off London, the House of Commons showed its alarm. Nigeria, more than twice the size of California and rich in palm oil, tin and perhaps uranium, is Britain's most populous (30 million) colony. Under a federal constitution promulgated in 1951, it seemed to be driving hard towards self-government, along the same boisterous lines as its rival-neighbor, Prime Minister Nkrumah's Gold Coast (TIME, Feb. 9). Yet last week the Colonial Office admitted that the constitution was a flop, and Nigeria in a jam.

The roots of the trouble are not in colonial oppression (in modern Nigeria, there is none) but in the casual lumping together of conservative Northern Moslems with precocious Southern Ibos and Yorubas, most of whom are religiously poised between paganism and Christianity. The Ibos, about 3,000,000 strong, live east of the steamy valley of the Niger, Africa's third-largest river. Their leader, Dr. Nnamdi ("Zik") Azikiwe, 48, is a U.S.-educated tub-thumper whose chain of bush newspapers helped him launch Nigeria's most powerful political party. In the Southwest, an equal number of Yorubas make their headquarters in Ibadan (pop. 400,000), Africa's largest native city, and support Zik's chief rival, 43-year-old Barrister Obafemi Awolowo. Usually Zik and Awolowo fight each other, but when they got together in support of independence by 1956, the two-sided South was united for race against the Moslem North. Result: bloodshed in the streets of Kano.

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