A bit of India in Nigeria: a signed portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru in Nnamdi Azikiwe's library.
Plus my reflection because I'm not a great photographer.
Turns out Krishna Menon is at the end of this street.
On May 31, I left Nigeria, and through the magic of time zones, I landed in Delhi on June 1. Leaving behind Nigeria, I came to India to continue my quest for knowledge and/or a dissertation topic. In this third country of my odyssey, I came seeking V.K. Krishna Menon. Krishna Menon was the irascible, cranky, and very leftist advocate for Indian independence in London during the 1930s and 1940s, thorn in the side of the United States at the United Nations throughout the 1950s, and India's Minister of Defence from 1957 to 1962. Despite a nearly thirty year long tenure as Jawaharlal Nehru's confidant, Nehru had to remove Krishna Menon as Defence Minister during the Indian Army's disastrous performance against the Chinese invasion in the fall of 1962 (which by complete coincidence occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis).
I did some light sightseeing, including at the Rajpath, in the very new part of New Delhi (built by the British in the 1910s to house their governmental offices, relocated from Calcutta in 1912). The building photographed here now houses India's Ministry of Defence, and thus served as Krishna Menon's offices in the late 1950s.
Much of my time in Delhi has been spent either at the National Archives of India, or at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, a truly world-class institution housing Jawaharlal Nehru's papers, as well as the papers of many of his colleagues and collaborators, including Krishna Menon.
Teen Murti
"The Nehru" is located at Teen Murti, on the grounds of Nehru's old home, where he stayed from 1947 to 1964 as India's first prime minister. Next to the old house is the Library building, which is where I spend my time.
The Library
Krishna Menon lived just around the corner from Nehru, and even after his sacking in 1962, used to go over to Nehru's house in the evenings to talk about the politics of the day. Krishna Menon never married or had children, and so his house was not kept as a museum, but a statue stands to him on his namesake street, not far from Teen Murti.
In future posts I will offer more about my life in Delhi, but I wanted to finally get the blog up to the current country, at least before I leave India in about two weeks. A blog's work is never finished.
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The video for today is an interview (I believe from 1954) with Krishna Menon. You can marvel at the former substance of television news:
*Brief programming note: this will be the last post for Nigeria (at least exclusively; I will probably have some posts late in the year comparing the different places I've been this year).
While staying in Enugu, in May, I made a couple of trips to the nearby town of Nsukka. Nsukka is the home of the University of Nigeria, which Nnamdi Azikiwe worked for nearly twenty years to establish. A bit like Thomas Jefferson, who insisted that founding the University of Virginia was his greatest accomplishment, Azikiwe felt that the University of Nigeria was his most important contribution to Nigeria. Azikiwe, unusually for his generation, had studied in the United States rather than in Great Britain, and always wanted to bring an American-style university to Nigeria, in contrast to the British-based universities established during the colonial era (such as the University of Ibadan and the University of Lagos, which began as branches of University College London and King's College London, respectively).
Nnamdi Azikiwe Library at UNN
Before Nigeria became independent, Azikiwe served as the Premier (prime minister) of Eastern Nigeria, and he spearheaded the creation of the University, purchasing land in the small town of Nsukka, a place near and dear to his heart. (Azikiwe had received an alleged* assassination threat while backing an anti-British strike in Lagos in 1945, and had fled to eastern Nigeria, sheltering in the small village of Nsukka. The town held a place in his heart ever since.) [*"Alleged" because his political opponents claim he created this threat out of whole cloth.] With the help of the Ford Foundation and Michigan State University, Azikiwe and the newly independent Nigerian government opened the University of Nigeria for the 1964 academic year.
Mr. Ekwelem
I wanted to see UNN (for "University of Nigeria, Nsukka") in part because of Azikiwe's long association with it, but also because I guessed the university would have materials related to his career. I connected with a librarian at UNN's Nnamdi Azikiwe Library over the internet, and Mr. Vincent Ekwelem served as an incredibly gracious host. (Mr. Ekwelem even took me to the campus health clinic when I got a case of food poisoning--an experience I'd rather not repeat, but which was a truly wonderful case study of generosity: it reminded me of the Good Samaritan.)
Onuiyi Haven
Mr. Ekwelem also provided a crucial connection, to Azikiwe's widow, Professor Uche Azikiwe, who has just retired as a professor of education from UNN. Azikiwe had built his home in Nsukka (called "Onuiyi Haven") and lived there from the 1960s until his death in 1996. Professor Azikiwe graciously allowed me to use Azikiwe's papers, which sadly only cover from around the 1970s. Azikiwe had assiduously kept all of his papers, and even built a library on his estate to house them all, but during the Biafra War, Nigerian Federal forces burned the entire library. Thankfully, some of Azikiwe's papers remain, but I can only imagine the incredible wealth of African and Nigerian history which was lost in 1967 with the burning of that library. This serves as yet another reminder that the academic study of history is not divorced from the unfolding of history itself: after all, historians can only reconstruct what we can access in the physical documents which survive, or in the minds of people who survive to tell their tales.
Mr. Ekwelem also graciously welcomed me into a very interesting space: the UNN Senior Staff Club. Although meant for, well, senior staff, I was welcomed at the club nearly every night of my visit to Nsukka. The club had lots of couches around TVs, usually showing the Champions League finals (in which I cheered for Mr. Ekwelem's beloved Real Madrid), as well as a set of couches circled around a small podium with a wooden throne. There, the president of the club sat each night, and would shout out the "business" of the club, which usually consisted of the mobilization of "soldiers" (bottles of beer) for the members. Members who addressed the club would stand and recite a formula, "Honored president of the club; Life members of the club; Esteemed members of the club; I present these [x] soldiers for..." whatever purpose they had. Since it was election time for the campus' staff and student councils, many people came to the club to offer "soldiers" in pursuit of votes! It was a truly unique experience, and I look forward to returning to the club--not for its soldiers, but for the wonderful barbecued kebabs they served there, in the Hausa style. (I always chuckled to myself too, because the couches at the club looked a lot like the seats in the SPECTRE meeting in Thunderball. Somehow I managed to forget to photograph the club, so you'll have to take my word for it.)
I could not have been more warmly welcomed in Nsukka, either by the University, and especially Mr. Ekwelem, or by Professor Azikiwe at Onuiyi Haven. Nsukka holds a very special place in my heart, and I look forward to returning! I felt my idea of hospitality evolve just by being in Nsukka (and really, in all of Nigeria), and I hope to bring that level of hospitality back with me when I return to the USA next year.
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For my video today, I thought I would offer what amused me so at the UNN Staff Club--its similarity to a set-up in the James Bond film Thunderball (1965), and the room in which the evil organization SPECTRE meets.
And in case you ever wondered how such rooms actually get built:
My apologies for dereliction of duty in getting these blog posts up. Since the year is running out, I realize that I should get these posts up before I come back to the USA...
After two months in Ibadan, in early May I flew to Nigeria's eastern region, where I primarily worked in the city of Enugu. Enugu used to be a coal mining town, but since the discovery of vast oil reserves a bit further south on Nigeria's southeast coast, the coal business has dried up in favor of oil. When British forces fired on a miners' strike in Enugu in 1949, it nearly prompted an anticolonial insurgency in the country. The intervention of Nnamdi Azikiwe helped prevent further violence, to some activists' chagrin at the time. When Cyprian Ekwensi described the incident in his 1954 novel, People of the City, he referred to a thinly veiled Enugu as the "Eastern Greens," which sticks with me, thanks to images like these taken near my hotel.
The city's other claim to fame is as the former capital of Nigeria's Eastern Region, which in 1967 seceded as the Republic of Biafra. The ensuing war, alternately called the Biafra War or the Nigerian Civil War, raged until 1970 and resulted in millions of casualties and a humanitarian crisis. (More on this below.)
For my immediate purposes, Enugu was the site of an important period in Nnamdi Azikiwe's political career. So, since I'm studying Azikiwe, I figured I had better go to his old stomping grounds. Much of my time in the city was spent at the branch of Nigeria's National Archives in Enugu--which, perhaps in a spirit of federal unity, looks exactly the same as the branch in Ibadan.
I also spent a good bit of time at the Polo Fields Mall (built, unsurprisingly, on an old polo field), which provides a useful landmark in Enugu: just go towards the big Ferris wheel.
Bust of Azikiwe at the stadium.
Azikiwe was a sportsman throughout his life, and so it seems fitting that the major stadium in Enugu is named after him. Nnamdi Azikiwe Memorial Stadium serves as the home for the Enugu Rangers, who compete in the NPFL, the Nigerian Professional Football League.
It was tough to get a good shot of the stadium.
I now return to Biafra, because eastern Nigeria has experienced a resurgence of Biafran nationalism in the past several years, partly due to the advocacy of a British-born and -based activist. However, the dissatisfaction with Eastern Nigeria's piece of the pie since 1970 has been simmering for a long time. (For a brief overview, see this and other articles from the excellent site Africa is a Country: http://africasacountry.com/2017/07/nationhood-and-the-struggle-for-biafra/). On my final day in the East (and second to last day in Nigeria), on May 30, there was a 'stay at home' protest where many people across southeast Nigeria stayed at home as a way of indicating the levels of support for Biafran independence, or at least dissatisfaction with the status quo. Other signs of this were apparent even to a clueless white guy like me: at the post office a woman told me she believed Biafra would come some day, though she hoped it would be without violence; and in possibly half the taxi drivers' windows, I would see a sticker like this one:
I apologize for the poor picture quality, but in my defense, the taxi was moving. The sticker shows an imagined nationalist international, with the current leader of Biafran nationalism alongside Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump, under a banner of fighting terrorism. I believe this is a thinly veiled critique of Nigeria's current government, and especially its president, Buhari, for failing to eradicate the Boko Haram extremist forces in the country's north. But I think that by grouping Nigerian local politics with Israeli, Russian, and now U.S. hardline politics, a sort of anti-Islamist message is implied. I found these stickers fascinating, but sadly my lack of Igbo language skills prevented me from asking about how the taxi drivers interpreted this really interesting read on world politics. I'm afraid the international alliance portrayed will remain quite imaginary: I would be rather surprised if President Trump knows what, or where, Biafra is.
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For my random video, I offer a slightly less random video, since the music video for Dire Straits' 1980 song "Skateaway" featured none other than Nnamdi Azikiwe's daughter as the "roller girl." Sadly, Jayzik Azikiwe passed away in 2008.
