British public opinion. His more open-minded attitude on lifting British control over Nigerians was unlike that of the previous governor, Sir Arthur Richards, whose heavy-handedness with radical elements had proven unsuccessful.40
Macpherson, though, was not totally infatuated with the nationalists; hard-core radicals and revolutionaries were effectively excluded from the program of devolution of powers. This attempt by the British to curtail growing radical nationalist sentiment among local Nigerians especially became the policy after 1945. A Zikist Movement (named for the influential activist leader Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe) along with labor and youth organizations were targeted for a form of containment that included imprisonment, and a propaganda campaign directed at youth to discredit incipient radicalism. It should be noted, too, that capitalism as an economic system was confronted with a more forceful challenge than previous decades. The Cold War had begun in earnest as the Soviet Union and Western nations reversed their wartime alliance. Now fears of a growing communist movement throughout British dominions created another reason to quickly neutralize militant thinking among Nigerians following the Second World War.41
A period of Nigerian constitution making arose from 1945 to 1950. Great Britain oversaw the organization of this process in cooperation with a select group of Nigerians deemed acceptable for an orderly transfer of power. Britain intended to retain significant economic and ideological controls, as needed, over the former colony with this arrangement. This would be achieved by inducing Nigeria to become a member of the British Commonwealth. At least five conferences were held during this time that produced several constitutions in an effort to dilute full nationalist aspirations for independence. These constitutions were in reality measures of checks and balances to (1) ensure “specific British interests on which our existence as a trading country depends;” (2) “forestall nationalist demands which may threaten our vital interests;” and (3) create “a class with a vested interest in cooperation.”42 Throughout the 1950s, Great Britain sought to insert binding language ←34 | 35→that would “not only consolidate the gains of the preceding decades of British rule, but also protect new ones and prevent an irrational government from getting the better of them.”43
British means to guarantee these objectives was to create a strong central government in Nigeria, a goal they felt would be most easily achieved by investing most federal power into a compliant northern region. The three largest and most contentious ethnic groups in the country—the Hausa-Fulani, the Igbo, and the Yoruba—were distributed geographically in the north, east, and west parts of the country. Since imposition of the colonial order British officials had obtained cooperation with their system of indirect rule through a willing Hausa-Fulani clientage based in the northern part of the country. British insistence that the arrangement was pro forma during the post-war constitution era, however, was not totally accurate. Northern leaders at first thought a strong central government was unnecessary (suggesting simply that any association with other regions in a government was undesirable). British colonial officials rejected the idea for political decentralization among the regions in hopes that a fully independent Nigeria was a united one, with a strong federal government to ensure that the ongoing need of the former metropole for access to the instruments of power would not be jeopardized. Yet Nigerian insistence on decentralization could not be completely discarded; greater autonomy for the regions would become part of a new constitution.
Other issues had already come to bear, and new ones soon would, on Nigeria’s march to independence. These would complicate African American understanding of the role Nigeria could play in the emergent pan-African sentiment of the next decade. In fact, the ANLCA would have to contend with them once they became exposed to the long-standing and complex aspects of Nigerian life. Included were ethnic minority concerns about adequate representation, and the tendency of the regions to assert their own identity parallel to a singular Nigerian nationality.44 These and other issues, along with the firm intent of the British to secure a legally based presence in the Nigerian political and economic landscape, enabled the British to exert its will on constitutional proceedings for the remainder of the 1950s.45 Perhaps the defining moment in this regard was the constitution brokered in 1954. On ←35 | 36→the one hand, it quelled a potentially violent confrontation between the northern, eastern and western regions, and yet it also laid the basis for a de facto division of the country when centralized powers of the Nigerian federation were partly redistributed to those regions. Thus, ethnic-regional power struggles were given constitutional sanction.46
Suspicions about self-determination continued to plague the process. One major denial by the British colonial office for Nigerian independence continued to be their observation that Nigerians remained unprepared to fully assume the reins of self-government. The aforementioned divisive factors among members of the indigenous population were given as reasons. Some officials believed the better reasoning was to delay sovereign statehood indefinitely. This was a hopeful defiance against mounting pressures from Azikiwe, the primary spokesperson for the eastern region; northern emir leader Alhaji Tafawa Balewa; and Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the western region-based Action Group to form a new state. Also noted among the delays to independence was the belief by some British leaders that Nigerian entrance into the commonwealth would lead to an Afro-Asian bloc within it, posing a threat they believed could dissolve the original purpose for the association.47
British vacillation over the mechanics of Nigeria’s future could not stave off the inevitable. October 1, 1960 emerged from this process as the date for an independent Nigeria and a transfer of power to its leaders. Thus, preparations to install a new administrative and institutional base began in the late 1950s. Nigerians selected by the British attended educational programs at missions and universities in Great Britain and schools in the United States. Personnel chosen to fill key positions within the government also attended training programs at the U.S. state department and spent time observing proceedings at the United Nations General Assembly.48 Nigeria and Great Britain both devoted attention to infrastructural development, including the formation of a Nigerian Economic Council that was chiefly the creation of Sir James Robertson. This important resource “provided the framework for broad economic policy” for the fledgling nation-to-be. Then a Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigerian Airways, and the Nigerian National Shipping Line, among other nation-building institutions, were founded.49 Of important note was the willingness of Balewa to ←36 | 37→accept a British study, which he commissioned, regarding implementation of a foreign policy that enabled Great Britain to “exert influence on the minds of Nigerian Ministers on foreign affairs on the eve of independence.” This included a defense agreement (later abrogated by Nigeria) that committed Nigeria to assisting Great Britain in future armed conflicts. All told, British leaders viewed the new Nigerian leadership by 1958 as “moderate” and generally receptive to inordinate British influence.50
Official U.S. interest in Nigeria had a dual character in the years immediately before and during the unraveling of European colonial empires. Trade between the two countries had slowly crept upward, demonstrating clear potential for increased economic activity under the right circumstances. The main products the United States received from Nigeria included cocoa, palm oil, and hides and skins. Nigerian crude oil in the immediate post-war years, available more in spurts than as a steady flow, was not the demand resource for the United States that it would become in later years. That would come only after the British discovery of substantial oil deposits in 1956. Oil in this region of the world easily fell within the sights of U.S. businessmen always looking for newer and inexpensive natural resources in third world nations. An example of the potential thirst for African oil by outsiders occurred when Great Britain blocked the U.S. oil firm Socony-Vacuum from access to oil deposits in Nigeria and Ghana in 1942.51
The other component of the United States’ economic affairs with Nigeria helped determine the direction of trade relations. As the changing colonial picture would have it, official U.S. policy—the combination of foreign affairs and business interests—was carefully positioned astride two contending forces: irreversible third world decolonization that included a leading role for Nigeria on its African end, and U.S. government advice to a reluctant Great Britain to disengage from its colonial possessions, even if only under favorable conditions. The task, again, was to restructure the colonial moorings in such a way that they would remain in place but would not visibly undermine the