E Pluribus Nigeria

Beside the fairy-tale finery of distinguished delegates crowding into London's 132-year-old Lancaster House, the pale Colonial Office functionaries in their sack coats and striped trousers looked dignified but inconspicuous. Their appearance reflected their role. They were lost among the multihued robes, top-heavy turbans and richly feathered headgear of ebony-featured emissaries who had been summoned to London to speed the independence of some 33 million ill-assorted black British subjects in Nigeria. The result will be the creation of the largest independent state in Africa, the fourth most populous in the Commonwealth.

It was not Britain that was holding the day back. "Any suggestion which I may put forward," said Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd in a self-effacing welcome to the 70 delegates assembled around his oblong table, "will have but one object in view, the prosperity, good government and unity of Nigeria."

Bandwagons in Mayfair. Unity, if it comes at all, will have to be achieved by agreement among the colorful chief delegates: tall, aristocratic Alhaji Ahmadu, the Islamic and potent Sardauna of Sokoto, an Arabian Nights figure in a billowing green turban and red velvet robe, whose Moslem Hausas consider the pagans of the South no better than savages; boyish, chubby-faced Yoruba Chieftain Obafemi Awolowo, one of the shrewdest political minds in Africa and an ardent champion of regional self-government for his own people; scholarly and ambitious Dr. Nnamdi ("Zik") Azikiwe, the rich and demagogic U.S.-educated favorite of some 3,000,000 Ibo tribesmen in the East; and last but far from least, the Moslem commoner Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, an oracle of moderation in a sea of local extremism, who might well wind up as Nigeria's first Prime Minister.

Almost everyone agreed on independence soon--hopefully by 1959. All wanted immediate "Nigerianization" of the local government before independence. But as representatives of a loosely conjoined nation split in a hundred ways by personal, tribal, religious and economic rivalries and jealousies, no two of them went to the conference agreed on what independence should mean. Each anxious to be top dog in the government that emerges, Awolowo, Prime Minister of the Yoruba West, and Azikiwe, Prime Minister of the Ibo East moved into town with all the fanfare of hopeful candidates at a U.S. national convention. Each installed a huge staff in a top Mayfair hotel and hired a pressagent to get the bandwagons going. Meanwhile, as spokesman for the proud and feudal Moslem emirs of the North, who want independence with no democratic folderol to go with it, the Sardauna let it be known that only a Northerner would be acceptable as Premier to the 17 million people of his region, who outnumber both other regions combined by 4,000,000.

Gerrymanders in the Bush. To counter the Sardauna's majority, the leaders of the South hoped to gerrymander a "Middle Belt" out of the Moslem North, consisting of some 6,000,000 pagan tribesmen who since slave days have hated the Moslems. Zik himself nurtures a private plan to carve some non-Yoruba areas out of his chief rival's Western territories, while his opponents want to set up a new state among the non-Ibos in Zik's own Niger River delta.

Last March, when Nigeria's Federal House of Representatives voted to seek independence, Abubakar Balewa, the Northerner, warned his countrymen against the results of such feckless politicking. "We must do all in our power," he said, "to protect our country from the civil discord and strife into which some countries--and here I am thinking of Indonesia--have fallen after achieving independence." The Colonial Office, in its anxiety to see that the transfer of power is peaceful, has an even more unhappy comparison in mind: that of India and Pakistan, whose baptism of freedom took place in a bath of blood. By summoning the proud chieftains of Nigeria to neutral London, Britain hoped to help them find a peaceful path to independence.

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