By Azu Ishiekwene
There Was a Country, lamented Chinua Achebe, Nigeria’s literary icon and one of the world’s greatest storytellers. Achebe’s title evokes many things in the mind beyond its primary thematic concern – a journal of the author’s experiences of the Biafran War, which raged between 1967 and 1970. Among other things, it raises the question: What happened to the country?
Biafra was stillborn. But what happened to Nigeria? If the groundnut pyramids were evacuated and the cotton ginneries, leather tanneries, textile factories, car assembly plants, electricity projects, steel complexes, petroleum refineries, and every state project that would have made the country were sabotaged, what happened to the people and their humanity?
A doctor and a man
Whereas Achebe’s memoir was published in October 2012, less than five months before his death 13 years ago, another book, A Doctor’s Nigeria, by Robert Collis, published by the Camelot Press Ltd in 1960, portrays a rustic Nigeria of 1960 following the road tour and adventure by the author, a British colonial medical officer and storyteller of Irish origin, who came to Nigeria in the late 1950s.
I’ve been reading his book slowly for the pleasure of being lost in it. Collis tells the story of Nigeria when it was a paradise unspoilt by greed, religion, ethnicity, and the mortal fear of insecurity and its various franchises.
Not that Nigeria was perfect, but chaos, rage, insanity and violence were abnormal. Collis’s book is, in a manner of speaking, an earlier version of Achebe’s There Was a Country.
That was what I thought in recent days following reports of yet another wave of bandit attacks that killed scores of people in Kwara and Niger states and left scores more injured or uprooted for life. It’s difficult to imagine that the road from Jebba to Bida in Nupeland, the scene of some of the most recent horrendous bandit attacks, is the same vicinity that Collis traversed 60-something years ago on a trip upcountry from the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, where he worked.
A road tour of Nigeria
Collis’s book is a personal encounter. It is part social observation, part memoir, and part travelogue – a journey through the heart of a country, where once upon a time, the lamb and the lion lay side by side, and people were kind to each other as if their lives depended entirely on charity. And they travelled with nothing to fear.
Many Nigerians in their late 20s or early 30s might find it hard to believe there was indeed such a country where you were not afraid to travel alone at any time and didn’t need to share your live location or use a Google Map to get there safely. Safety feels like a very distant memory, a nightmare. On my two recent road trips to Zamfara and Benue States, my wife kept a vigil and sneaked anointing oil and a rosary into my luggage, despite a military escort.
Collis would be turning in his grave. From the UCH, Ibadan, where he set out on the first leg of his boomerang-like tour of a nearly 1,500-kilometre road trip in his Morris car – the whole trip was over 4,800 kilometres – he had only his paper map and barely enough petrol in his car. Still, he enjoyed his journey and even lifted strangers without a care.
Unusual encounter
He drove through Ogbomosho, Ilorin, Mokwa, Bida, Minna, Kaduna, and Gboko in Benue State, and through Cross River State to the Cameroon border, getting as close to the border as possible. Today, these places are near replicas of the UNITA minefields in Angola of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, ruined by banditry, kidnapping, and neglect.
The difference is that, unlike the mines which blew out the life or impertinent foot of a trespasser, bandits in search of human booty now control much of the territory through which this doctor travelled, for whom a white man would have been more than a cache of gold.
Collis may not have lived, or been too traumatised to tell of his adventures: of sleeping in his car and waking up somewhere in Bida to find a young boy on a donkey peering at him with genuine human concern. Today, it might have cost a stone on King Charles’ crown to pay the doctor’s ransom.
Yet, Collis travelled carefree, and a lorry-load of passengers even stopped to bail out this stranded traveller who had run out of petrol and made frantic efforts to siphon fuel from their own vehicle to his own so he could continue to the next town.
Meeting Balewa at home
Considering what we see on social media and TV these days, the thought that Collis lived to tell his story evokes nostalgia for lost innocence and a beautiful past. By his own account, even if only mildly alluded to, Collis, and many of the people he encountered on his journey, had the shared pleasure of a simple life.
His walk-in encounter with Nigeria’s first and only Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who lived in his mother’s house in Bauchi, is the stuff of folktales. He wouldn’t meet a governor today without having booked an appointment days, if not weeks, in advance, and not before going through a labyrinth of security and protocol checks to reach the castle of His Excellency!
It is not Collis’ adventure as such that is at issue, but the fact that once upon a time, 65 years ago, if we start counting from independence, people slept with open doors or left their houses open and free as they attended to their daily obligations without a bother.
In the countryside, folks who had commodities to sell left them by the wayside or in spaces that served for such exchanges, indicating the price by the number of twigs left there. It was the same at the newspaper vendor’s stand, too. Buyers paid and left without any personal contact whatsoever with the sellers.
More religion, less kindness
In today’s civilised world, despite the very domineering presence of organised religion and the presence of electric fences, CCTV cameras, and reinforced doors and windows, neither city nor village folks are as safe as they were in the uncivilised past.
Hostage taking, banditry, cattle rustling, and a callous disregard for the sanctity of human or animal life have turned contemporary Nigeria into a perpetual crime scene.
Six and a half decades after independence, and with the full complement of police divisions in every local government headquarters, Nigerians are not safe in their hamlets and communes. They can only travel along certain highways at significant personal risk.
Between Achebe and Collis
Achebe’s account bemoans poor leadership from pre-war failures into the post-Biafran War era as a continuation of corruption, tribalism, and moral bankruptcy that stifled national healing and progress.
He condemns the post-war entrenchment of ethnic favouritism through appointments and resource allocation, undermining true unity. He sees this as a betrayal of ideals, where “unity” became a hollow slogan masking elite self-interest. He likens them to “blind rulers” leading Nigeria into deeper “iron years” of decay.
Achebe’s generalised narrative doesn’t quite fit the profile Collis gives of Prime Minister Balewa. In his legendary meekness, Balewa told Collis, “I don’t really know why I gave up my pleasant schoolmaster job here for that place (Lagos) with its cocktail parties, its political intrigues and all the rest.”
Of the pending Nigerian independence, Balewa had said: “Whoever will take over and hold the country united when the British go, has a work of the most awful complexity. He will need eyes in the back of his head, and on both sides, if he is to steer the ship into port and avoid the currents running over the rocks.”
Balewa was right. But in hindsight, did Achebe’s lamentation suggest that the prime minister was also naïve? And could Collis’s portrayal of Nigeria’s innocence have been a bit too optimistic?
Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book, Writing for Media and Monetising It.
