Another Man's War Page 2
It was in faraway London that Churchill’s government fretted over the bigger picture. The African colonies were a vital source of raw materials – food and rubber and gold. The Royal Navy relied on the ports along the African coast – Freetown, Lagos, Cape Town and Mombasa – as refuelling stations and bases so that Britain could keep control of the Cape and Suez shipping routes. Britain needed an African army, a large one, to protect these colonies. These were matters of global strategy that a crowd in a country town like Owo could not be expected to understand. The recruiting officer himself probably struggled with some of it.
Hitler didn’t really feature at all, at least not directly in sub-Saharan Africa. The threat in East Africa had originally come from the Italians, whose African territories bordered the British colony of Kenya; in West Africa, it came from the Vichy French, whose territories sat between and above the four British colonies spaced along the coast. To complicate things further, the recent news from the Far East, of a Japanese attack on Malaya, suggested an ominous new danger to British interests in the Indian Ocean. However, it was Hitler who everyone had heard of, and for that reason British officers in Nigeria felt it was best to keep the focus on him. And so the message that Isaac got that day was maybe somewhat simplified, yet it contained one fundamental truth: in the dark days of December 1941, Britain needed Isaac Fadoyebo, and thousands of other Africans like him, to defend its Empire.
Not so long ago, the land around Owo had been covered in forests of towering trunks and buttressed roots, thick with tangled creepers and vines. There were elephants, buffalos, leopards and chimpanzees. The first road-builders, in the early years of the twentieth century, had to put up red signs that read ‘Elephant Pass. Beware’. When Isaac Folayan Fadoyebo was born, in December 1925, those forests were still largely intact, although the loggers and their teams were methodically selecting and cutting down the greatest trees, shooting out the game as they went. There were many who said the old way of life was disappearing.
Isaac’s birthday, to be precise, was 5 December 1925. Not many families recorded dates then in the small village of Emure-Ile, but Isaac’s father Alago was an unusual man. Some twenty years earlier, Alago had been a small boy in the village, when the first schools opened in Owo, which was the nearest town, a few miles away. Most parents were suspicious of these schools. Send children away when they need to be taught how to plant yams and look after goats? What if, at the end of it all, they don’t want to come back and farm? In the end, Alago’s mother and father only let him go because they feared he was too lazy for the farm. When they took him to the fields, he sat crying while his brothers did all the work. He was ‘a good for nothing boy’, so what was there to lose, they thought.
So off Alago went, to Owo, to try to enrol at the new government school. He didn’t have a birth certificate – nobody did – but the teachers had their own crude method of assessing whether a little boy or girl was old enough to start lessons. All the children were asked to stretch their left arm over the top of their head, and see if they could reach as far as their right ear. Then, they had to repeat the exercise with their right arm and left ear. On this basis, Alago was enrolled. He was the first child from the village of Emure-Ile to get a modern education, a distinction he carried proudly for the rest of his life.
The British had established control over Lagos, on the coast some two hundred miles away, in the 1850s and ’60s. The British professed noble ideals, but they were prepared to use ruthless methods. Royal Navy ships had shelled Lagos in 1851, after the Oba refused to stop trading in slaves. A sailor on board one of the British ships said, ‘the town burnt famously all night’.* A colonial official would write many years later that the burning of the Portuguese barracoons was ‘the final act in the long struggle to suppress an infamous traffic that had brought profit to many and credit to none’.* However, the Victorians’ anti-slavery fervour did nothing to stifle the British appetite for imperial expansion, nor their growing conviction of racial superiority. If anything, quite the opposite. Slavery, they had decided, was sinful, but it was also an impediment to progress: the British Empire had a duty to promote free labour and commerce instead. Thus, it pursued enrichment and took over new territories, confident in the morality of such actions. In 1894, the Liberal MP Wilfred Lawson said in the House of Commons that ‘formerly we stole Africans from Africa, and now we stole Africa from Africans’.*
By the closing years of the nineteenth century, the British were remorselessly extending their influence into the hilly and forested interior, into the heartland of the Yoruba people. In 1897, they sent a punitive expedition to the neighbouring kingdom of Benin, some seventy-five miles to the south of Owo, to seek revenge for the killing of several British soldiers. The Oba tried to ward off the invasion with many human sacrifices, but this seemed to have little effect on the advancing enemy, nor his maxim guns and seven pounders. The British were horrified by what they found in Benin – pits filled with bodies, piles of human heads – and they burnt the city to the ground. But first they helped themselves to its treasures: the executioner’s swords with silver handles, the ivory leopard carved from the tusks of five elephants, and the thousands of bronze sculptures. All these were carted back to London, while the Oba was sent into exile in distant Calabar. With the fall of Benin, the British were now masters of a vast area that they would soon declare was Southern Nigeria. Not long afterwards, missionaries and civil servants, exuding an air of brusque confidence, began arriving in towns and villages the length of Yorubaland and beyond. To say the British brought change to these unsuspecting communities scarcely does justice to the jarring rupture their arrival announced.
The British had also crushed the last resistance in the very different territory to the north. In 1903, British soldiers captured the ancient cities of Kano and Sokoto, the capital of what had once been a great Fulani empire. Despite these violent beginnings, British officials quickly came to feel very much at home in what they called Northern Nigeria. They loved the open, dry landscape, the small isolated rises of kopjes on the plains, which stretched all the way to the edge of the great Sahara. It was perfect horse-country, good for hunting, and reminded some imperial old hands of northern India. The British found the North’s lingua franca, Hausa, both pleasing and relatively easy to learn, whereas in Southern Nigeria they complained that the ‘pidgin’ was a demeaning and debased version of English. And in the autocratic emirs of the North, the British saw noble and courteous aristocrats – kindred spirits, they liked to think, with their own ruling class. A cosy and mutually advantageous relationship developed between the emirs and colonial officials, sealed on the polo field. The emirs were allowed to stay in their palaces and enjoy their revenues, provided they heeded the discreet advice proffered by the British. In time, British officials came to speak of the ‘Holy North’, a place where empire building was a romantic pursuit.
In 1914, the British amalgamated the territories of Northern and Southern Nigeria, their very different peoples brought together in a single protectorate. It was a fateful decision. The North already lagged far behind the South in education and economic development, and in the subsequent decades that gap would only grow. But for all ‘Nigerians’, as they were now called, the world was being turned upside down by the power of new imported beliefs and technologies.
In 1897, the same year that Benin was sacked, the first British person was seen in Owo.* The local king there, the Olowo, had a more acute sense of which way the wind was blowing and understood the need to come to some sort of accommodation with the newcomers. The British governor in Lagos had recently described the practice of human sacrifice as ‘detestable, abhorrent, disgraceful, cruel and revolting’.* The Olowo freed his slaves and declared an end to human sacrifice, and the British allowed him to stay in his sprawling palace, with its many shrines, and to keep all his wives.
However, Owo would be transformed by the arrival of the British. First, the missionaries gave out bibles, and built a chu
rch. Next came the administrators. The district officer – As∙oju O∙ba Ilu Oyinbo, or ‘Agent of the King of the Land of the White People’ to give the literal translation of the Yoruba version of his title – positioned his house on a hill just to the north-west of the town. This, the people were told, was the ‘Reservation’, where neither loitering nor noise was allowed after 6pm. Next to the Reservation was the barracks, the Bareke, soon crowded with clerks, soldiers, prison warders and interpreters as the new government took root.
By 1903, Owo had two schools, a courtroom and a post office, and, by 1906, an upwardly mobile trader or clerk could go to the post office and make a phone call to Benin, or even Lagos. In the market, the traders now preferred the silver shilling coin bearing the bearded king’s head to the old cowrie shells. Some of the more prosperous families had a sewing machine, perhaps a bicycle, and had replaced their palm-thatched roofs with the corrugated iron, or ‘pan’, that was already fashionable on the coast and in the bigger towns.
People in Owo thought the district officer had some very odd habits – he was said to dine alone in a special white coat, served by his steward, who also wore white but with a red sash – but they grudgingly admitted that he also made himself useful. He had ordered that a clean stream be dammed, so that piped water flowed into two large concrete tanks. The women and children queued up by these every morning and evening, waiting to fill the empty kerosene tins that they carried on their heads.
This was the Owo that Alago arrived in when he started at the government primary school. He was taught English, and how to read and write. He also learnt about Christianity, and converted to this new religion. He changed his name to Joshua, which was how he would be known for the rest of his life. However, school was not always a happy experience. When Joshua failed to learn the difference between ‘steal’ and ‘steel’, a master beat him severely with a cane. Covered in blisters, he refused to return the following day. His school days were over. He took a job as a clerk in a timber company, but his parents urged him to return to Emure-Ile, so that he could get married. He agreed, and, to his delight, discovered that his few years of education and formal employment commanded some respect in the village.
In his absence, Christianity had arrived in Emure-Ile, brought by the traders who moved from town to town. A group of converts met each Sunday in the house of a village elder. In 1913, with the encouragement of a British priest in Owo, they built a small Anglican church, with mud walls and a thatched roof. They called it ‘Our Saviours’. Joshua was appointed ‘scribe’, a position that brought modest remuneration but some prestige, and one that he would hold until his death. His young bride, Isaac’s mother, had been christened Lydia, but she always preferred to be called by the Yoruba name her parents had first given her, Ogunmuyonwa. She had received no education, and she would never learn to read or write.
Emure-Ile in the 1920s was a place of red-dust streets and a few rows of rectangular mud houses, with modest courtyards, shaded by mango trees. The people grew yams and maize in the surrounding fields, hacked and burnt out of the great forest. In more recent years, many had started to plant cocoa trees, as traders returning from further west brought stories that this new crop could bring wealth. The nights in the village were dark and quiet, illuminated by a handful of paraffin lamps and countless stars. But, when the moon was full, the villagers gathered in front of their houses to hear women sing and perform plays, sometimes accompanied by the metallic rhythms of the oteye, a simple instrument comprised of a metal rod, which makes a rasping sound when scraped by a smaller stick.
People in Emure-Ile had adapted to the arrival of Christianity in their pragmatic way. Adopting new beliefs did not mean discarding old ones, and the pantheon of Yoruba gods retained a powerful hold over the villagers. Joshua’s modest position in the Anglican Church did not stop him from acquiring six more wives. He was good-looking, tall and slim, and his womanising ways sometimes got him into trouble. There were brawls in the village, and a court case. On one occasion, a local chief, the El-Emure, was so upset with Joshua that he put a curse on him, saying he ‘would not reap what he sowed’. Ogunmuyonwa gave birth to five boys, but they all died in infancy. So, when she became pregnant again, she decided to travel to a neighbouring village to have the delivery there, beyond the reach of any curse. In later years, she would always say she’d made a wise choice, because this time the precious boy, Isaac, survived.
On the day of Isaac’s birth, Ogunmuyonwa’s mother, Aleke, went to see a fortune-teller, to see what portended for him. ‘This boy will be a soldier, and will raise his family up and shine a light on them,’ the fortune-teller said, and advised that Isaac’s arrival be celebrated with the slaughtering of a goat, shared among everyone in Emure-Ile. Joshua would eventually have ten children, but Isaac, as the eldest surviving son, was always a favourite.
Isaac’s first lessons took place besides the Anglican church in Emure-Ile, where the pastor gathered the younger children together and taught them basic literacy. Soon, Joshua and Ogunmuyonwa were in bitter disagreement over whether Isaac should go on to primary school. Joshua had seen enough to know that a new society was taking shape, and that to ‘go school’ was the key to economic and social success. Ogunmuyonwa thought in the old way and struggled to see beyond the confines of the village. A boy, she said, was a useful pair of extra hands on the farm. It took the special pleading of an uncle for her to give way. Sometime in the early 1930s, after Joshua had saved up enough money, Isaac went to stay with relatives in Owo, and enrolled at St George’s Anglican School. He was not yet ten years old.
Discipline was harsh at St George’s. The children were caned and flogged. Their teachers were African, but British inspectors would pass by on regular visits. Each time this happened, the headmaster would produce the brown leather book he kept in his desk, and the inspector wrote down his observations in a beautiful flowing hand. This was always done with great solemnity. Sometimes, to the dismay of the teachers, the British officials could be terse in their comments. On 13 September 1936, the Acting Chief Inspector of Education for the Southern Provinces, L.W. Wakeman wrote, ‘it is to be hoped that a little pressure will be brought to bear upon parents to leave the children in school for the full infant course’. The education officer for the province, G. Waterfield, regretted that the school had ‘a good African band, but the Yoruba school boy does not seem to judge the music so much by the sounds produced as by the rich glitter of the brass on the more expensive powerful instruments imported from abroad’.*
Anthony Enahoro was growing up in Owo at the same time as Isaac. He was the son of the headmaster at the government school, just up the road from St George’s, and he remembered that the school inspectors were treated like demi-gods, their visits awaited with great anticipation; ‘flowers were trimmed, paths cleaned, sanitary blocks washed out, the garden was weeded, rotten fruit picked off the trees in the orchard, uniforms…washed and ironed afresh and the school band played God Save the King and Rule, Britannia to near perfection’.* But not, apparently, near enough to the satisfaction of G. Waterfield.
Isaac and his classmates didn’t have exercise books, instead writing their lessons on small wooden slates with pieces of chalk. The teachers taught in English, and imposed fines of half a penny on any child caught speaking Yoruba. Isaac, who had already picked up some English by reading his father’s collection of books at home, was never fined, and was always near the top of the class. He learnt not only the Englishman’s language, but also his history and geography. Likewise, Enahoro wrote of his Owo schooldays that he became ‘as familiar with the famous sites of London as with the streets of Owo. The measure of one’s education…was one’s degree of familiarity with the English language, English culture and English life, of which I came to know far more in my boyhood than I knew of parts of Nigeria outside my own.’* The children in Owo sang English songs, and learnt about heroic white explorers who discovered lands inhabited by barbarous and black natives.
On Empire Day, at the end of May each year, Isaac competed in the high jump and pole vault. He had inherited his father’s strong, athletic body. The celebrations were especially elaborate in 1937, to mark the coronation of George VI, the colonial masters’ new king.
At least once a week, Isaac’s favourite younger sister Adedeji would meet him at the school gate after classes ended in the early afternoon. She often went to the forest to pick leaves for wrapping pounded yam, which she had discovered could be sold in Owo market for a few pennies. She shared her small earnings with her brother. Isaac would show his gratitude by accompanying her halfway home to Emure-Ile. The two children walked barefoot through the forest groves, and then the open patches of yam and cassava lined with banana trees and palms. Flocks of hornbills and plantain-eaters glided overhead. Then, every Friday afternoon, Isaac would walk the entire journey to Emure-Ile, to spend the weekend in the village with his mother and father, and young brother and sisters, before returning to Owo on Sunday. They were happy days.
School opened Isaac’s eyes. He started to imagine a wider world, one that stretched far beyond the fields on the edges of Emure-Ile and Owo. The first motorcar had arrived in Owo in 1927, and, when Isaac started at St George’s, there were still only four in the entire town. They were owned by the town’s elite: a rich businessman, an agent of the John Holt trading company, the district officer (of course) and the Olowo, who insisted that a bugler march in front of his Model T Ford whenever he was taken for a drive. But by the mid-1930s vehicles passed through Owo on a regular basis. Travelling salesmen arrived, hawking little packages of quinine and castor oil, which, they said, could cure every ailment known to man.
The more entrepreneurial people in Owo were also beginning to take advantage of new opportunities, some even going as far as Lagos. The distant city had a romantic allure. Trams ran through the streets, it was said, and two- and three-storey buildings were powered by electricity. There were any number of Oyinbos, or white people, in Lagos, and great ships docked at Apapa wharf. ‘The Liverpool of West Africa’, some of the Oyinbos had been heard to call it. A 1924 guidebook for British businessmen described it as ‘the most modern and civilised town amongst the English possessions on the West African Coast…where one can indulge in almost every kind of sport, including horse-racing and polo’.* But, for the humble trader from the interior, the attraction of Lagos was not polo, but the opportunity to make a few pennies, selling traditional cloth and bush-meat.