These Were My Father’s Muslims

 

Sardauna and Girls EducationAlmost half a century ago today, on January 15, 1966, two of my family’s dearest friends were murdered.

Alhaji Sir Ahmadu Bello (pictured above) was the Premier of Northern Nigeria and Sardauna of Sokoto.

Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (ATB) was the first (and so far only) Prime Minister of a Nigeria that had achieved its independence from Britain on October 1, 1960.

Both men had come to their political careers after training for, and teaching in, Northern Nigerian schools, but their backgrounds were very different. ATB was a “commoner,” and not part of the ethnic or religious hierarchy of the North. Sardauna was from ethnic royalty, a member of the family of heirs to the large Sokoto caliphate.

Both men were bright, articulate, and spoke flawless English. ATB was a serene man of immense personal dignity. Sardauna was ebullient and jolly, although he was shy and could be standoffish or brusque with strangers. Both men were Northerners to the core, and had dedicated themselves to bridging divisions among the Northern ethnic groups and to keeping the large Northern region’s controlling interest in the national political system. Doing so proved difficult for many reasons, and probably had a direct bearing on later events.

Each man was devout in his religious observances, and both had completed the Hajj to Mecca, as indicated by the title “Alhaji,” which always preceded the one given them by Queen Elizabeth when she invested them both as Knights of the British Empire.

Sardauna, and his head wife, were shot in a massacre at their home.

I don’t know where ATB was when he was shot. His body was left by the side of the road and found six days later, having been chewed upon by (one can only hope, in these circumstances) wild dogs.

I was enjoying the Christmas break from my boarding school in Malvern at the time, and I remember my mother sitting on the stairs at our home in Worcestershire, listening to the news on the radio with her head in her hands and tears streaming down her face.

I remember the solid silver ring that Sardauna had made as a gift for her. There were two of them cast. One for my mother, one for Sardauna. Then the mold was broken.

I remember Sardauna jabbing my father playfully in the ribs and telling him that I, at the age of about seven, already spoke better and more fluent Hausa than Dad (a huge exaggeration, but one which made the two of them roar with laughter and my heart swell with pride).

I remember understanding that both men had been killed in such a way that made it harder to fulfill the ritual funeral observances of their religion.

Because they were Muslims.

I spent almost all of the first nine years of my life in Northern Nigeria, in and around towns with names that resound today to anyone who follows the news—Maiduguri. Kano. Mubi (where my sister was born). Gwoza. Kaduna. Sokoto. Biu. Numan.

My father administered large swaths of the country on behalf of the British Colonial Service until Nigerian independence in 1960. He then stayed on for almost another three years, working for the Nigerian government itself, with a mandate to clean up some rather unsavory doings by an influential regional chieftain. Dad’s work resulted in said chieftain ‘abdicating’ and going into exile, after which we stayed in Nigeria for a few more months before returning to England, and then moving — permanently in my case — to the United States.

I remember my early childhood as idyllic. I suppose we were the ‘oppressor’ in a strange land. We had servants, and the servants were Nigerians. Dad was doing the work of the imperialist Brits.  The natives were supposed to be seething with resentment

But I saw none of that. No doubt there were colonial administrators who regarded the Africans as inferior and their own jobs, with their heel on the natives’ throats, as somehow divinely inspired. But my father wasn’t one of them. And he didn’t teach his children those things either.

I only remember, with love and respect, my friends.

Ahmadu, and his chief wife, Gwama, who traveled with us from place to place, who kept the house in order for us, and who were always ready for a game of hide-and-seek. Yusufu, only a year or two older than me, who taught me how to climb trees. Amina, the daughter of Ahmadu and Gwama, who was particular friends with my younger sister. Adamu, the rather eccentric cook, who always had a lit cigarette dangling from his lip with the ash about to fall off, who made the most spectacular bread in a wood-fired oven, and who also did wondrous things with the mangoes and paw-paws that we picked off the trees growing in the garden. Gabby, who worked in that garden, and Ango, who saw to  the horses.

(My father, who had been in Nigeria since 1948, brought my mother out as a new bride in 1950, to a little house in Katabu. Shortly thereafter, it burned to the ground, a victim of an out-of-control fire that spread from a prison gang’s efforts to clean up the roads and burn the resulting brush pile. My parents were on ‘tour’ throughout the region at the time, but Dad never tired of telling of Ango’s bravery in rushing headlong into the burning building, heedless of his own personal safety, to retrieve what he thought Mum and Dad would regard as the most valuable object inside–the mosquito net that covered the bed).

I remember their laughter, their kindness, their hard work.

I remember their love of children, and their horror when my mother spoke sharply to one of us, or corrected our behavior in a way they thought was too harsh.

Of course, some space, and some time, had to be allocated  for our friends’ religious observances.

Because they were Muslims.

I remember, the year after independence, attending the Kaduna Capital School (for the equivalent of second grade). The teachers (both men and women), and my classmates (both boys and girls), were almost all Northern Nigerians, and almost all, Muslims. I felt very much at home.

(Two years later I learned what it was to be a fish out of water when my teacher at Edward Devotion School in Brookline, Massachusetts, sniffed and made a disparaging comment when I told her how I’d been schooled up to that point. A few weeks later she deposed me from my office as class ‘secretary,’ to which my new fourth-grade schoolmates had elected me, because I’d had whooping cough, and had missed a couple of weeks of school. She appointed her favorite in my place. As must be evident by now, I’ve never forgotten her meanness of spirit towards a little girl who was desperate to belong in what was, to her, an alien land).

And I remember an entire cavalcade of tribal leaders and government officials who dropped in and out of the house at all hours of the day and night, sometimes openly, sometimes oddly surreptitiously.

Some came for the parties that my mother organized. I may be the only person still alive who remembers the ‘Emir of This,’ the ‘Waziri of That,’ and the ‘Sultan of The Other,’ enjoying hearty games of Charades and Pin the Tail on the Donkey, laughing uproariously, and dancing cheek-to-cheek with my mother, to music (Glenn Miller and Guy Mitchell were particular favorites) played on the old blue wind-up gramophone.

Of course, no alcohol was served.

Because they were Muslims.

Some came quietly to discuss political matters. Coup attempts. Corruption. Tribal and ethnic infighting. Election reform. The road to independence. Difficult, and sometimes dangerous, jobs for Dad.

When I was three, in a ceremony that followed local ritual and custom, Sardauna formally adopted me. I had already been given a Hausa name ‘Hawa (the Arabic word for ‘Eve’) Numan,’ named for the Nigerian town in which my father was stationed when I was born. In 1957, my father was engaged on one of those ‘difficult and dangerous’ jobs, and Sardauna wanted everyone to know that the family was under his protection in case something went wrong. Seven or eight years later, when the above-mentioned, extraordinarily unhappy and bitter, exiled chieftain put it about (falsely) that he’d had Mum and Dad killed in a car crash in England, Sardauna was one of several people who contacted my grandparents to make sure that someone was taking care of me, and of my three-year old sister.

I remember.

At the time of their deaths, Sardauna and ATB were the most powerful men in Nigeria.

Were they perfect? No, they were not.

Did they conform in all ways to our ‘enlightened’ Western ideals and beliefs, and might we find some of their views problematic today? No, they did not, and yes, we might.

Would Nigeria have prospered over the last half-century if they had lived? I don’t think it’s possible to know.

But I do know that the Northern Nigeria of the early 1960s was a place in which slavery, and most of what we regard as the more barbaric aspects of Sharia, had been all but consigned to the ash heap of history, one in which the traditional was beginning to meld, peacefully and effectively, with the modern, and one in which all the young country’s young Muslim citizens, both male and female, were enthusiastically encouraged in their education by the two most important Muslim leaders in the nation, the Sultan, and the Sardauna, of Sokoto.

And I’m certain that both Sardauna and ATB would have been horrified by the events in their beloved North today.

While Dad enjoyed a close friendship with both men, he and Sardauna forged an almost brotherly kinship that continued, after we left Nigeria, through a lively letter-writing exchange that ended only a couple of weeks before Sardauna’s death (the last letter Dad received from him, in December of 1965, was written on a Christmas card.  Ponder that).

Shortly thereafter, Sardauna, along with his good friend Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, was murdered.

Because they were Muslims?

Many believe so. It was a fact, widely reported at the time, that their assassins, members of the Nigerian Army, were not.

What is indisputable is that the events of January 15, 1966 set in motion what was to become the Nigerian Civil War, continued through what was perhaps the world’s first real-time, socially-networked ‘humanitarian crisis’ — the Starving Biafran Children — and eventually led to the basket-case nation that is Nigeria today.

And we could argue vigorously about what happened, why it happened, who was responsible, who interfered and why, and whether things could have turned out differently. That is a fight that I am almost always willing to pick, and rarely back away from if others start it without me.

But not today.

Today, I remember my friends.

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  1. user_1938 Inactive
    user_1938
    @AaronMiller

    She: Clearly, something has been going horribly wrong in Islam for quite some time. And it is not just a few mindless fanatics and/or lunatics who’ve hijacked it. There’s a systemic problem that is fomented, nurtured, and then outsourced, worldwide.

    However, even today, there are Muslim leaders, even in Nigeria, who swim against the tide.

    However the problem began, it seems generally agreed that Saudi money and Wahhabist schools are driving factors for the spread of hate and violence throughout the world. And however many allies we have among the Muslim communities of Nigeria and other nations, our political leaders continue to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally government.

    I don’t see much hope until our leaders are willing to acknowledge that as a problem.

    • #61
  2. Petty Boozswha Inactive
    Petty Boozswha
    @PettyBoozswha

    Thank you for this wonderful piece.

    • #62
  3. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    She:Clearly, something has been going horribly wrong in Islam for quite some time. And it is not just a few mindless fanatics and/or lunatics who’ve hijacked it. There’s a systemic problem that is fomented, nurtured, and then outsourced, worldwide.

    Salman Rushdie says:

    … there had been “a deadly mutation in the middle of Islam”.

    “This is not a random mutation… This has been a mutation that a lot of work has been put into. Governments, from the Sunni side the Saudi government, on the Shia side the Iranian government, have been putting fortunes of money into making sure that extremist mullahs are preaching in mosques around the world, and in building and developing schools in which a whole generation is being educated in extremism — and trying to prevent other forms of education.”

    • #63
  4. user_233532 Inactive
    user_233532
    @NancySpalding

    Reading this was a wonderful experience, tying together as you do what I know about that earlier time, what I grieve as I read about the horrors there now, and what I experienced in living in Jos (Plateau state, middle belt) for a year, 90/91, teaching on a Fulbright… There were scary times, my daughter turned 13 there, and the people were very real, and far more gracious & welcoming to an awkward stranger than Americans would have been. Muslim & Christian mattered, but little of the radicalization of the past few years was evident, and what there was came from the manipulation of politicized imams.

    It is so much easier to break a society, to exacerbate divisions, than to repair those divisions… Who benefits from the divisions? Not the people… Such divisions let in monstrous devils, which wander the land looking for the unwary to devour.

    Again, thank you.

    • #64
  5. user_645 Member
    user_645
    @Claire

    She:atb

    Some of you may be interested in the Independence Day speech that was given by Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the Nigerian Prime Minister, on October 1, 1960.

    You can find it here.

    ATB was also featured on the December 5, 1960 cover of TIME magazine, headlining an article titled “The Other Africa: Independence Without Chaos.”

    Unfortunately, the TIME article itself is behind a paywall.

    It is, however printed in its entirety, here. I’ve read the TIME article. I think this is reprint is correct and complete.

    I’ll just quote one paragraph from it:

    His moment of enlightenment came in 1955, when Abubakar journeyed to the U.S. to find out whether what the U.S. had done to develop water transport on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers could be applied to the sand-clogged Niger. One night, as he sat in a Manhattan hotel room, he got to thinking about what he had seen in the U.S. His thoughts as he recalls them: ‘In less than 200 years, this great country was welded together by people of so many different backgrounds. They built a mighty nation and had forgotten where they came from and who their ancestors were. They had pride in only one thing–their American citizenship.” That night he wrote to a friend in Nigeria: “Look, I am a changed man from today. Until now I never really believed Nigeria could be one united country. But if the Americans could do it, so can we.”

    My father always spoke of Nigeria as the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire.

    The failed promise of the country that I love breaks my heart.

    I understand that feeling so well.

    • #65
  6. Mole-eye Inactive
    Mole-eye
    @Moleeye

    What wonderful, extraordinary memories you have, She.  Such excellent friends do deserve to be remembered.  Then please tell us more.

    • #66
  7. Red Feline Inactive
    Red Feline
    @RedFeline

    iWc:I continue to wish that Britain had stayed in Africa. Another few decades probably would have turned the corner for the continent.

    I’m so glad to hear you say this, iWc! Certainly in British Africa there was free education for all children, black and white. It takes time for change, and the black people were just beginning to make it. I had many black friends say to me that they wished the Brits would stay where we were in what had been Northern Rhodesia, became Zambia. The copper mines were the only economy, and the black people were coming out of the bush to work on them. Not too long after Independence in 1964, they closed down because too many white people were given the “copper chopper”. It takes very specialized skills to run mines, and the black people had no engineers, or people with the necessary skills.

    Our black friends could see what was coming, and didn’t like it.

    • #67
  8. iWc Coolidge
    iWc
    @iWe

    One of the problems was that while the British Empire really was generally benevolent, much of Africa was colonized by Belgium, France, Germany, etc. And I am not aware of much evidence that their involvement was good for Africa – quite the contrary.

    Anti-colonialism throws out the British baby with the European bathwater.

    • #68
  9. She Member
    She
    @She

    Comment on #68–I’m not even sure that the phenomenon I experienced in Nigeria was widespread throughout other British colonies. I do know that we’re very proud of Dad’s service, and that of our many friends both British and Nigerian, there. I’m rarely accused of wearing blinders, being a Pollyanna, or suffering from an abundance of naivete, but I really believe it was something special.

    • #69
  10. user_645 Member
    user_645
    @Claire

    And we could argue vigorously about what happened, why it happened, who was responsible, who interfered and why, and whether things could have turned out differently. That is a fight that I am almost always willing to pick, and rarely back away from if others start it without me.

    But not today.

    It’s no longer the day you wrote this. I wonder if you’d like to make the arguments above? I want to hear them. This is a huge hole in my understanding of what’s happening in the world. You sound like someone whose answers to those questions would be well worth hearing.

    • #70
  11. She Member
    She
    @She

    Claire Berlinski:

    And we could argue vigorously about what happened, why it happened, who was responsible, who interfered and why, and whether things could have turned out differently. That is a fight that I am almost always willing to pick, and rarely back away from if others start it without me.

    But not today.

    It’s no longer the day you wrote this. I wonder if you’d like to make the arguments above? I want to hear them. This is a huge hole in my understanding of what’s happening in the world. You sound like someone whose answers to those questions would be well worth hearing.

    Claire, I am humbled that you say this.  And I will do my best.  I’ve been thinking about whether I really have anything to say that others will want to hear, and if so, how to approach it.  Thank you.

    • #71
  12. Nanda Panjandrum Member
    Nanda Panjandrum
    @

    She: …whether I really have anything to say that others will want to hear, and if so, how to approach it.  Thank you.

    She, *whether* we *want* to hear it or not, we *need* to hear it – in your own way, in your own time…I await this eagerly, too!

    • #72
  13. She Member
    She
    @She

    Thank you so much to everyone who’s asked for more.  I need a two or three weeks.  I’ve got a couple of little posts on other matters that I’m working on, as well as the usual sorts of family calamities that beset us at Chez She, and a staggering series of veterinary upsets involving cats and dogs, but, thank the Lord, not sheep or goats (Yet.  Knock on wood).  And thanks to my wonderful small-animal veterinarian, who actually runs a tab for me, so that we only have to settle up periodically.

    Things are also moving a little slowly because I simply will not take the easy way out and write a post on Nigeria that starts out “Oil, Oil, Oil,” and, oh, by the way, “Starving Biafran Children.”

    Because 1) that’s just bait, and 2) that’s not where it begins.

    I hope I don’t let you down.

    • #73
  14. AUMom Member
    AUMom
    @AUMom

    She:Thank you so much to everyone who’s asked for more. I need a two or three weeks. I’ve got a couple of little posts on other matters that I’m working on, as well as the usual sorts of family calamities that beset us at Chez She, and a staggering series of veterinary upsets involving cats and dogs, but, thank the Lord, not sheep or goats (Yet. Knock on wood). And thanks to my wonderful small-animal veterinarian, who actually runs a tab for me, so that we only have to settle up periodically.

    Things are also moving a little slowly because I simply will not take the easy way out and write a post on Nigeria that starts out “Oil, Oil, Oil,” and, oh, by the way, “Starving Biafran Children.”

    Because 1) that’s just bait, and 2) that’s not where it begins.

    I hope I don’t let you down.

    I will wait—patiently for the most part—because you have things to say that I need to hear.

    • #74
  15. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    She: Today, I remember my friends.

    Thanks.  And I’m sorry.

    • #75
  16. She Member
    She
    @She

    Flicker (View Comment):

    She: Today, I remember my friends.

    Thanks. And I’m sorry.

    Thank you.

    • #76
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