Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French Page B

was dragging Nigeria ever further from the rule of law, fueling ethnic tensions, gutting the economy, and forcing more and more of the country’s talented educated class to choose a life of exile in order to survive.
    Mohammed came for me a little after 10 p.m. He has a dark complexion and the somewhat drawn and leathery skin of a heavy smoker. His dress, a simple white boubou, was surprisingly plain, and yet he was possessed of a certain elegance that radiated from a lively intelligence, and an ocean full of Nigerian self-confidence. Soon we were climbing into the black, chauffeured government Peugeot that was awaiting us and driving through the poorly lit streets of the big village that masqueraded as Nigeria’s new capital. Mohammed started working me over with sentences that began with phrases like “What you people fail to understand about Nigeria . . .” As I began playing devil’s advocate, he launched into an increasingly rabid attack on the southerners and the conversation grew more and more strained.
    “They are unruly people, those southerners,” he said. “They think that they can just take over the country by sowing disorder, but we will never allow it. Lagos should never be confused with Nigeria. Here we have traditions and order, and we respect authority. All those unruly people know is chaos.”
    Both Mohammed and I knew that the people he was referring to, who were still leading a boisterous protest movement against Abacha largely in the south, had the firm ground of principle to stand on. I was sympathetic to their cause, and the more hysterical he became, the less I was able to pretend otherwise.
    Ray Ekpu, the editor of
Newswatch,
one of Nigeria’s major weekly magazines, had confirmed to me just a day or two earlier in Lagos what I had already surmised about the crisis: “When you remove all of the excuses for canceling the elections, and the allegations against Abiola, you come down to one hard fact: The northerners do not want power to go to the south. If Abiola had been someone from a minority ethnic group, perhaps they would have accepted it. But in their minds, the Yoruba already control the civil service and the business of Lagos, and they feel that holding on to power is their only way to survive.”
    Nigeria had been created by the British as a colonial entity in 1914 and bequeathed to its people as an independent state in 1960. From the very beginning the prize of independence was a booby trap, an eagerly awaited gift that would explode just as it was being unwrapped. The colony’s masters in London had done little to prepare the population for the task of running a European-style nation-state. The truly explosive element, however, was the country’s very composition. Nigeria was a creation of European imperialists and mapmakers, and it pulled together an amalgam of diverse regions and peoples who spoke mutually unintelligible languages.
    The new Federal Republic of Nigeria’s three largest groups, the Muslim Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest and the Igbo in the southeast—the last two both predominantly Christian— had been lassoed into one state only by a huge accident of history. Each of these ethnic groups was larger than the population in many African countries. Each had stronger cultural and historic links with peoples in neighboring countries to the north, west and east, and each yearned for self-determination. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that differences in temperament, culture and even training received from the British— who concentrated their educational efforts in the south and encouraged poorer northerners to make careers in the military—quickly set Nigeria on a path toward disintegration.
    This ticking bomb exploded in 1967, with the Biafran War, a gruesome civil conflict that, like World War I, had begun in confusion, seemingly by spontaneous combustion, and was egged on by outsiders, most conspicuously by a France anxious to see West