The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
Cont'd
Just as Roberson had predicted, no one in the British media would touch the story. Smith lost everything in the decades he spent trying to get a "liberal" journal like the Guardian or Independent to pick up the story. He published the responses he got over the years, showing how the Omerta code continues to work even when the Empire is gone. Here is what the Guardian's Hugo Young wrote to Smith in a letter dated June 2, 1993:
“Perhaps there is a simpler explanation of why your story has not been published. Maybe in an earlier period, pre-1990 when the 30-year rule would have bitten, you had some cause to feel that the authorities were trying to suppress something and the newspapers were their allies – but I stress I have absolutely no knowledge of any involvement on the Guardian’s part.
“Now however, it is at least possible that the problem is journalistic. Is the Nigerian election of 1960, however corrupt, a story our readers would be interested in?"
Predictably, when Smith persisted in trying to interest the Guardian, Mr. Young resorted to smearing him with the following dismissive note:
“Dear Mr Smith (1) I have not the least idea what the Guardian did or did not do about Nigeria long before I joined it. (2) You seem to be in a state of demented obsession, which causes you to defame me (and others) to all and sundry. Please desist. (3) This will be last communication. Do not trouble our fax machine or our secretaries.” – Hugo Young, The Guardian, 13 May, 1994 to Harold Smith [my emph. WB]
Thus we read why the one of the alleged ‘experts’ on Africa, Alastair Hetherington, could not find space in his book The Guardian Years on the first and at the time most devastating calamities to befall Africa — the Biafran War, a war that came about as a direct result of the rigged elections of 1959-60:
“Dear Mr Smith … I am sorry that you did not find any reference to Nigeria and the Biafran situation in my book The Guardian Years. The omission may well be because the book was originally 120,000 words long, and had to be cut down to 80,000. … I am afraid that I cannot become involved in correspondence on the subject now.” – Alastair Hetherington, former editor of the Guardian, 10 June 1994.”
Some of Smith’s letters to the powerful areheartbreaking:
Open Letter from Harold Smith to the distinguished statesman and former Prime Minister, Lord James Callaghan.
29 December 1997
Dear James Callaghan,
I am reading Ken Morgan’s fine biography of your extraordinary life of public service with great interest. I am coming to the conclusion that, as British foreign policy was based on ‘bipartisan consensus’, all major politicians were knowledgeable regarding the decision to intervene in Nigeria’s democratic process, which led to its total destruction.
Politicians at that time were, of course as now, men of honour. Whatever hard decisions were made, they must have entailed considerable deliberation by people and experts with enormous experience and knowledge of Nigeria, such as yourself and your mentor Margery Perham. I am not about getting judgmental or displaying indignation. At the time my career was extinguished (and almost my life) in 1960, my politics, beliefs and background were indistinguishable from your own.
...I enclose a printout of my Internet Home Page, which gives its location. Everything I write has been supplied freely to Government and the Secret Services. They have only to ask to be given any information they seek.
Yes, I do think that those who carry out ‘necessary’ treason to our laws and constitution and democracy should in due course justify such conduct. The delay should not be nearly forty years. Neither should Mr Blair in 1997 feel compelled to operate a ‘cover-up’.
As my health is a struggle and precarious at seventy (as it has been since 1960), I am very conscious of the need not to bother you unduly in your incredibly active retirement. However, for the sake of the vitally important historical record and ‘truth’, I would appreciate your contribution to the resolution of what exactly happened in connection with British interference with the Independence Elections in Nigeria. If Western type parliamentary democracy was perceived to be a non-starter in Nigeria, why did we proceed with the Westminster model? What was the ‘necessity’ quoted to me by the Governor General? The Cold War? Communism? Vital oil fields? A pre-emptive attempt to protect the unity of Nigeria? To protect the North? Was it the belief that democracy was untenable and a benign dictatorship would best serve British interests?
The Smiths send their very best seasonal greetings to Lady Callaghan and yourself.
* * *
Smith finally got a bit of recognition, in 2007 — a mere half-century after he started trying to tell Progressive journalists his story. His "recognition" was granted in a corner of the BBC radio empire, an infrequently-run BBC4 radio show called Document. The episode is called "The Gift of Democracy?" though when it first ran in 2007 it was titled “Rigging Nigeria.”
Now there’s no need to get paranoid, but it’s still odd that such a big story seems to have vanished from all but the fringes of the web. And TBH, you do get a little paranoid after years of trying to research the crimes of the Empire. Too many of these stories just vanish, too quickly.
It’s odd how that keeps happening. Google “Harold Smith” and the first link you get is an attempt to debunk him (on population figures from the pre-election census, not the election-rigging itself).
His boss Robertson’s Wiki entry has nothing at all about election-rigging.
The Wiki page on Nigeria’s 1959 elections also fails to mention it.
Even Chinua Achebe, world-famous Nigerian novelist (Things Fall Apart), was ignored when he tried to tell the world what happened in 1959. His memoir of Biafra, the doomed Igbo state of the 1960s and the rigged elections that started the civil war, is his least-known.
In fact, you have to pull hard against the current of the internet to find anything at all about that disastrous first Nigerian election.
It’s not that Smith’s claim of rigging by the departing colonial administration is far-fetched. When the BBC asked David Anderson, who runs the African Studies Centre at Oxford, if Smith’s claims made sense, he answered:
“In almost every single colony the British attempted to manipulate the [election] result to their advantage.... I would be surprised if they had not done so [in Nigeria].”
This is how the doomed, artificial state we call Nigeria lurched into existence. The Hausa, despite low literacy and a tradition of intolerance toward Southerners, ran the armed forces, thanks to decades of British preferential promotion. And thanks to the rigged elections and census, they ran national politics too.
Almost instantly, huge and bloody pogroms against Yoruba and Igbo living in the Northern cities began, watched indifferently by soldiers and police.
Here again, it’s very difficult to find anything online about these pogroms — I mean “even more difficult than it is to find anything on African casualties in general.” Only the Igbo remember, and very few listen to them.
Still, the pattern is clear: Igbo were dynamic, entrepreneurial people, who were disproportionately strong in small businesses in the Hausa cities of the north. And like other such minorities (Chinese in SE Asia, Jews in Eastern Europe), they were hated for being of alien faith, alien language, and above all for their prosperity. It’s very easy for the local elite to steer street rage toward these small, easy targets, and the Hausa elite has been doing so for generations.
So you can’t fix a date when organized violence against Southerners in general, and Igbo in particular, began in the North. It was a constant, even before independence — and often aimed at Igbo and Yoruba because they were the driving force behind the push for independence, which the well-bribed Northern elite resented.
After independence, with the Hausa in control, the pogroms grew bigger and bloodier, with the active help of Hausa soldiers and police.
In 1966, pogroms against Igbo became the norm, a daily event, in the north — with no attempt to crack down on the mobs by Northern elites:
“The massacres were widely spread in the north and peaked on the 29 May, 29 July and 29 September 1966. By the time the pogrom ended, virtually all Igbos of the North were dead, hiding among sympathetic Northerners or on their way to the Eastern region. The massacres were led by the Nigerian Army and replicated in various Northern Nigerian cities."
No one knows exactly how many Igbo died, beaten, hacked, or burned to death in the North in 1966, but the British press of the time estimated 30,000 dead, with hundreds of thousands more raped, beaten, and burnt out.
A million Igbo started streaming back to the southeast after losing everything they had. Rage among the Igbo led to their doomed attempt to secede and form their own state, Biafra, in 1967.
That’s a terrible story, too big to tell here. What matters is that after the fall of Biafra in 1970, Hausa domination of Nigeria was set in place permanently. It helped that at least a million Igbo were dead (estimates go as high as six million), and a whole generation of their children stunted by artificial famine. You never fully recover from prolonged starvation in childhood. It’s a terrible way to make war, but a very efficient way of crippling an enemy ethnic group with a history of surpassing yours intellectually and economically.
With the Igbo kneecapped, the smaller peoples of the Middle Belt have no potential allies. Nigeria belongs to the North — and the Northern elite has been taught to regard these small, alien peoples of the Middle Belt as fair game.
And that’s how a place gets to be “one of those hopeless Hell-holes.” It doesn’t happen naturally. “Nigeria” is not a natural creation. It’s a British Empire chimera, engineered to keep power in the hands of reliable Imperial clients who are also (not coincidentally) the most intolerant, reactionary element in the whole society.
at britain
