Africa's Gulliver:

...When Nigeria is free, the problems of Africa will be half solved," a top party official said to me...

...Though not yet independent, Nigeria had hoped to participate in the recent meeting of the Prime Ministers of the British Commonwealth, but Nkrumah, the first Negro African member of that expanding club, voiced his objection in no uncertain terms...

...And so it goes...

...It is big and relatively rich...

...The North is predominantly Hausa in population but is ruled by Fulani Emirs who, about the time Napoleon was conquering Europe, subdued the area in a holy war and established there an "empire" with its capital at Sokoto...

...The British, a short half century ago, put these dissimilar pieces into a single package and coined for it the name "Nigeria...

...Nigeria, a Gulliver among her Lilliputian neighbors, will ultimately achieve a commanding position, assuming always that the federation holds together...

...Moreover, it is able to speak with one voice and to project itself on the pan-African stage through one personality...

...We will not stand aloof from the tribunals discussing African problems...

...Neighboring Ghana, though facing serious internal problems, is compact and tidy in comparison...

...It will be at once the "mother country," the "older brother" and the "senior sister" to the rest of the continent...

...Within its borders it can provide a market large enough to attract foreign investment capital...

...In fact, Azikiwe, head of the NCNC, was one of the original proponents of West African unity and his newspaper is still published under the title The West African Pilot...

...Nigeria, then, is emerging as a major force favoring the status quo...

...Two related questions must be asked: Is Nigeria's confidence well– founded...

...These factors must not be underestimated...

...This is partly a reaction to Nkrumah's aggressive pan-Africanism, but it is deeper than that...

...On that date, the British leave their largest remaining colony...

...These views are typical of the Action Group and the NPC...

...There is the Eastern region where the industrious and ambitious Ibo live...

...How much energy there will be left over for Nigeria's ambitions as an African leader must remain a moot point...

...The Ghana leader achieved independence three years ago and ever since has been exploiting his lead to advance his own concept of African unity and his own ambitions as an African leader...

...A federal minister, charged with important responsibilities for planning Nigeria's foreign policy, promised: "There will be an African Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs...

...Ghana has only one-sixth the population of Nigeria and only one-fourth the land area...

...Nkrumah is frequently scored as "brutally ambitions," behaving "like Hitler" and seeking "the encirclement of Nigeria...

...The federal Prime Minister has told Ghana "freely and frankly" that Nigeria wants no part of any movement that interferes in the political affairs of other countries...

...Many Nigerians are convinced that after independence day, competition will cease because "everything is in our favor...

...The Nigerian reaction is a mixture of amusement ("We tend to laugh at the emotionalism of Ghana...

...rubber, tea and coffee in addition to its traditional staples: cocoa, cotton, peanuts and palm products...

...The fiery, Dublin–trained lawyer (he has made himself something of an expert on the Irish Rebellion) said at his inaugural, "From the first of October, whether she likes it or not, Nigeria will be compelled to play a major role in world affairs...

...For the opening years of Africa's post–colonial era, Nigeria's optimism is likely to be disappointed...

...The Government is controlled by a coalition between the Eastern NCNC (the most radical of the three parties) and the Northern NPC (the most conservative of the three parties...

...An equally eminent politician in an opposing party was sure that "Africa is looking up to us for leadership...

...But the competition will be real...

...It forces the conclusion that Nigeria will concern itself for a long time to come, not so much with the problems of pan-Africanism, but the dilemmas of pan-Nigerianism...

...However, its very size and diversity, which one day will add to its strength, may for the present be a liability...

...Nigeria will be a massive conservative influence in pan-African affairs, the heavy lump which Nkru-mah's yeast must make rise if present political relationships in West Africa are to be fundamentally altered...

...They leave behind a vast territory only recently nationally conscious and only now beginning to ponder its role in Africa...

...it is so unnecessary...

...Nigeria is a "have" power...

...And what kind of role in African affairs is it likely to play...

...There is finally the Northern region, larger in population and area than the other two combined...

...In general, the Nigerian capital exudes extraordinary confidence...

...In the African family of nations, Nigeria will gain without effort familiar respect and loyalty...

...Wachuku himself reviewed for me Nigeria's position in some detail, arriving again at the inevitable conclusion—the ascendancy of this land was predestined, written somehow into its soil, its people, its geographic location...

...It is situated strategically, a keystone fitted into the coast of Africa holding together the western and central reaches of the continent and extending north into the desert, where the ancient overland routes which once linked this area to the coast of North Africa and the Upper Nile Valley originated...

...AFRICA'S GULLIVER Nigerian Federation has potential for emerging as continent's 'power' By Robert C. Good I WAS IN the visitors' gallery when Jaja Wachuku was installed as the first African Speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives...

...Nigerians, on the other hand, talk about the importance of maintaining, and indeed developing, their own political personality, and insist upon respect for frontiers as presently defined...

...Talking with Nigerian leaders, however, one quickly forms the impression that Speaker Wachuku's warning was unnecessary...

...ROBERT C. GOOD, a research associate of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research, has just returned from an extensive tour of West Africa...

...A predominantly non–Moslem, comparatively progressive South (East and West) stands against a Moslem, conservative and isolated North...

...The Sharpeville riot in South Africa and the A-bomb tests in the Sahara have profoundly moved even the isolated and inward-looking Northern region...

...There is considerable suspicion of Ghana among Nigerians...

...But even the most ardent Nkrumah admirer in the NCNC becomes a conservative when you press him as to his own prescription for Africa's future...

...It is Moslem, feudal and reactionary...

...This is partly because Nigeria's own complexities as a nation will oblige it to look inward rather than outward to the rest of Africa and partly because it will be unable to relate itself to Africa through the voice and commanding presence of a single national hero...

...Ghana has its Kwame Nkrumah, Togo its Silvano Olympio, Guinea its Sekou Toure...

...If we embarked on an active pan-African program," a thoughtful minister in the federal Government said to me, "we would neglect our own responsibilities at home...

...Ghana really doesn't matter...

...Northerner Abubakr Tafawa Balewa serves as federal Prime Minister...

...Its population is pushing toward 40 million, far and away the most populous nation on the continent...

...Already it is exporting small amounts of oil, tin...

...Nigeria's conservatism is partly a bitter response to Nkrumah's initiative...

...Eastern leader Azikiwe is President of the federal Senate...

...At Nkrumah's recent All-African Conference in Accra, the Nigerian delegation stressed the importance of guaranteeing existing frontiers and made special reference to the boundaries of Togo and the Ivory Coast—the states on either side of Ghana...

...here Nnamdi Azikiwe's National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) predominates...

...superiority ("Compared with Nigeria, Nkrumah is the leader of a small African tribe...

...Nigeria may correctly anticipate its great power status, but it suffers from a great-power complex in advance of the facts...

...Though much has been done in recent years to knit the country together, Nigeria is still in danger of being fractured several ways...

...If Nigeria does not effortlessly inherit African leadership, its weight will nonetheless be felt and felt profoundly...

...Ghana wants to undo present political relations...

...Ghana does not have a winning hand, but it holds one or two strong cards and it will continue to maneuver its pieces, however clumsily, on the chessboard of African diplomacy...

...Nigeria is a federation of three disparate areas, created not by God, but by the British, as an eminent Nigerian once observed...

...I heard repeated reports of Ghana's financial support of those elements in the British Southern Cameroons who oppose unification with Nigeria, of the Ghana Trade Union Congress causing a split in the Nigerian organization of the same name and of other, often undefined, "underground" activities sponsored by Accra...

...Nkrumah, on the one hand, wants a political union among African states as an antidote to the present "Balkanization" of the continent and to provide an adequate political base for the development of what he calls an "African personality...

...Prime Minister Nkrumah stood on the world stage as early as 1955, when he represented emergent Ghana at the Bandung Conference...

...Among NCNC partisans, there are often favorable references to Nkrumah's dynamic leadership for African independence and unity...

...It has a single, relatively disciplined party infused with missionary zeal for its pan-African foreign policy and possesses an impressive (though not always sophisticated) machinery to implement that policy...

...In the North, the major party is the Northern Peoples' Congress (NPC) headed by Sir Ahmadu Bello, religious and temporal leader of Sokoto, and Sir Abubakr Tafawa Balewa, former school teacher and self–made political figure of the first magnitude...

...Lacking fixed institutions, historical roots and developed ideologies, African politics tend to be the politics of personality and personal loyalties...

...These phrases are used repeatedly...

...The pan-Africa Nigeria envisages is the voluntary cooperation of fully independent states...

...it can hope for some measure of economic self-sufficiency...

...The normal calculations of power and influence—those based on population statistics, natural wealth, skills, geographic expanse and location—are not yet particularly relevant...

...In the South, the Yoruba and Ibo are antagonists...

...This will probably change quickly...

...This complex bit of political reporting is relevant here for only one reason...

...according to its own estimate, it will be the pivot around which all of Africa will shortly turn...

...Nigeria wants to stabilize them...

...This is, of course, an extremely relative judgment, but potentially Nigeria is so by its own estimates...

...There are finally the tensions within each region—Fulani versus Hausa in the North and the dominant tribal group versus minority groups in both East and West...

...and Western Chief Awolowo is head of the Opposition...

...All the indications, then, point to a period of competition for leadership between Ghana and Nigeria— the one revisionist and aggressive, the other seeking to legitimize the political status quo...

...At the federal level, the several parts are held in delicate balance...

...Nigeria is blest with at least four eminent men and cursed because none is preeminent, nor in the nature of things is likely to become so...

...The ability to maneuver, to propagandize, to appeal— these are what count in the period of fluidity, testing and probing now beginning in West Africa...

...and determination ("If Ghana threatens some small country, like Togo, we'd send in troops...

...There is the Western region, home of the commercially vigorous Yoruba peoples and seat of the Action Group headed by Chief Obafemi Awolowo...

...Nigeria's conservatism is finally a reflection of its newness on the African scene...

...Nigeria, then still without a federal Prime Minister, was not represented, much to the disappointment of its nationalist leaders...

...It has only begun to participate in the periodic all-Africa conferences and has only started to inform itself of the great issues that agitate the continent...

...With that magninimity which only those can display who are convinced of their great power (and in one of the most eloquently mixed-metaphors in political literature), a major Nigerian party has said that there is no reason for apprehension of the "Nigerian Colossus": "We shall always deal with other African States in an honest and statesmanlike manner by laying all our cards face up on the chessboard of diplomacy...

...it can diversify its economy so as to free itself from dependence upon world prices for one or two commodities...