I’ll begin with a response to the Orbit online by a reader of this column last week who went by the name “Oladeji Y.” I’m far less troubled by the grammatical infelicities of his response as by his distortions and ignorance of historic facts. It reflects the quality of our education that at this level, awareness of Nigerian history is scandalously low among Nigerians. As a result, national discourse frequently slips into extremely vacuous ethnic and polemical diatribe. Oladeji Y rapidly makes the discussion of the “nationality” question his own comeuppance on the Igbo.

Well, here are a few facts: Azikiwe was not the first Igbo graduate of a university. There had been before him such people as Edward Blyden, who has been described as the “father of pan-Africanism,” who lived in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia. The fourth Chief Justice and fifth President of Liberia, Edward J. Roye, who had been educated at Ohio University in Athens was Igbo.

James Africanus Horton, educated at the Kings College of University of London and University of Edinburg was not only the first West African ‘surgeon  but this son of an Igbo carpenter in Sierra Leone also attained the rank of Colonel in the British Army in the 19th century.

These are just a few of the West African Igbo who had been highly educated, long before Zik was born. In fact, the lawyer in Calabar for whom Zik worked as a clerk after school at Hope Waddell was a Saro-Igbo, and there were many of such.

Perhaps “Oladeji Y”needed to discount the diaspora Igbo and meant only homeland Igbo. Even then, there would be Egbuna from Asaba, who graduated from a university before Zik. Zik himself had graduated, not in 1933 but earlier in 1930. By 1933, Zik had already earned two Masters degrees, one from Lincoln and another from the Ivy league University of Pennsylvania and had started his doctoral work in anthropology at Columbia.

By 1933, he was already the Head of the Political Science Department at Lincoln University where he was a lecturer and among the first to establish the field of African Studies in the United States. But why does it matter? Igbo resistance to European colonialism meant that they took cautiously to Western education, but once they crossed that line, they sent more people to school than any other part of Africa.

Before Azikiwe arrived on the scene, there had been Nigerian Youth Movement whose politics could be called moderate and cautious. Azikiwe returned and joined NYM and changed the tenor both of its discussions and its politics. He broke with NYM and was the founding Secretary-General of NCNC with the inimitable Herbert Macaulay as President. NCNC under Azikiwe was radical, left-wing and Socialist.

Under Azikiwe, NCNC created the momentum for the anti-colonial nationalist movement in West Africa, and, in fact, as Nwalimu Julius Nyerere declared in 1997. “Until we read Zik, my generation did not know that Africa was possible.”

The significance of Azikiwe is, therefore, not that he was the first Igbo graduate of a university; it is that he was the first Igbo to embody the face of Igbo modernism and change in the 20th century.  He awakened the dormant political will of an entire nation and led the fight for the political freedom of Africans in the 20th century from colonialism.

It is very true that Nigerians have forgotten this and have created convenient, quota-system heroes suitable to our ethnic tastes; and it is also not very strange that the generations that have come after Azikiwe do not know how those battles for freedom were fought, and are taking for granted the liberty won against the colonial empire; it is, in fact, clear that Nigerians not only take this right to be free for granted, but that those who came after Zik clearly do not know what to do with political freedom and the right to self-determination so forcefully argued by Zik from the inter-war years.

Yet, it must be pointed out, that there was a time when no Nigerian could live at the Government Reservations, or be treated in certain specially-designated European hospitals in Nigeria, or be served a drink in a hotel, or be promoted beyond a certain cadre or even admitted to the Administrative Services – or what they called the “European posts” in the Civil Service.

Nigerian entrepreneurs could not get bank credits from British-controlled banks, and, therefore, had very limited prospects for growing their businesses. Because memory of Nigeria’s dire condition under colonialism has faded – the extreme poverty; the limited opportunities; the limitations of individual rights; the simple fact that the individual is subservient to an alien will – Nigerians have developed a very skeptical relationship with their current nation. True, Azikiwe did mention the Igbo and their task for African freedom, but those who wish to quote Zik must quote him correctly.

This statement credited to Zik about the “Igbo and the God of Africa” was made at Aba in 1947 and is published in Azikiwe’s collected speeches by Cambridge University Press in 1962. This statement has been variously distorted and mistranslated by Zikophobes as a clear indication of Igbo “messianic nationalism” or Igbo ploy to dominate Nigeria. Well, for that matter, the Igbo have never been innocent bystanders in the evolution of the modern Nigerian nation, and have never claimed saintly interlocution of the idea of the nation.

Igbo have contributed both good and ill to Nigeria. It is just simply this however: it has always been in the highest interest of the Igbo to work to establish a nation founded on freedom and the equality of all citizens; on the rule of law that guarantees individual rights; on the values of merit and meritocracy; on the protection of lives and the security of all peoples within it; on the right to pursue prosperity and happiness within the limitless boundaries of nation and the sustenance of the egalitarian principle in a Democratic Republic.

On these have been the clash of values between the groups that constitute Nigeria: some wish to restore dissipated monarchies, some wish to live under the ethos of a modern republic.This clash of values is an important element in Nigeria’s national question.