Nigeria Was Well Prepared For Independence

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30941, 23 December 1965, Page 2

Nigeria Was Well Prepared For Independence

Because outsiders have never been allowed to own land in Nigeria, there are no tense rivalries between Africans and Europeans living there. Nor is there any competition for jobs. Europeans go to Nigeria on short-term assignments, said Mrs Helen Callaway in Christchurch yesterday.

Britain prepared Nigerians well for independence, she said. When it came, in 1960, there was no problem about pushing Europeans aside, as there has been in other African countries where European settlers were reluctant to give up the estates they had established. “The Europeans in Nigeria know they will not be there indefinitely. They go to teach in university or to help construct a dam, for instance. They are not building a future for their children and making a permanent home in the country, as the European settlers in Rhodesia are,” she said.

Nigerians were most appreciative of what the British had done for them. Mrs Callaway went to Nigeria in December, 1959, with her husband, Dr. A C. Callaway, an economic adviser to the Government. They lived in the university city of Ibadan, with an almost entirely African population.

In this situation, with Europeans in a small minority, both races mixed socially and enjoyed each others’ company in the big university centre.

“Most functions are multiracial. We hardly ever held a dinner party without including Nigerians, who are bright, witty people,” she said. “Some of the Africans gave more lavish parties than we could ever afford.” Dr. and Mrs Callaway often visited villages and found the people there friendly, usually inviting them in for a meal. Their food was highly spiced, rather like Mexican dishes, not altogether to the taste of American-born Helen Callaway. Mixed Marriages “We met quite a number of well-educated Africans married to European women,” she said. “The successful ones were largely between intellectuals with a great deal of flexibility.” All kinds of stresses arose to create conflicts in these mixed marriages. Family customs accounted for many of them and the climate—very hot and humid—became unbearable for some of the women.

“A few of the wives we met could not adjust and went back to England, but their children belonged to the father under Nigerian law and had to stay with him,” she said.

Polygamy was customary. A man could have as many Wives as he could afford, unless he was married to a European under the law of a foreign country which

ruled one woman for one man.

Many of their Nigerian friends had spent five to 10 years studying at English or European universities and returned home with the Western point of view. Young educated Africans who went back to their own countries were often torn between their newly-acquired Western culture, of which they were now part, and the African culture, with its tribal superstitions, they had inherited. “This conflict is the theme of most of the young African writers,” she said. Mrs Callaway, who comes from Montana, worked for a year on the editorial staff of the fashion magazine, “Mademoiselle,” in New York. She graduated M.A. in English from Smith College, Massa-

chusetts, then went to England, where she attended what she calls a “quickie course for Americans” at Oxford. There she met her husband.

Dr. Callaway is in Christchurch after 18 years overseas to visit his mother, Mrs M. Callaway, Fendalton, his brother, Mr J. S. Callaway, and to introduce his wife and four children. They will spend three weeks here then visit another of his brothers in Australia before going to the United States and eventually back to Nigeria.