Word: balewa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Round the green baize table in London's mirrored Lancaster House, Nkrumah. India's Nehru and Nigeria's Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa backed a proposal of Canada's Diefenbaker: they agreed not to press for a showdown on apartheid, provided that a communique permitted them to spell out. in general terms, their feelings about Verwoerd's racial policies...
...debased and mispronounced. His examples: the name of Guinea's President, Sékou Touré, is a corruption of Sheikh el Tarika (meaning chief of tribe); Mali's President Modibo Keita is properly Muadab Kita (meaning polite); Nigeria's Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa should be called Abu Bakr Abu Eleiwa (all proper names...
...rules Nigeria today is two years older than his country. He was born simply Abubakar, the child of Yakubu, a minor official in the regime of the emir of Bauchi. (According to northern custom, he later added to his given name that of his village-Tafawa Balewa.) Though Abubakar was not of the mighty Fulani-his family belonged to the Geri tribe-his father's position won him the rare privilege of schooling in a region almost totally illiterate. After secondary school he was even able to get into Katsina Teachers' Training College, normally open only to sons...
...Mere Intention. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was hardly back from his year in London when the northern emirs, suddenly confronted with the need to find literate occupants for the northern seats in the federal assembly, pressed him into service. Like the emirs themselves, Abubakar started off with the fear that in a unified Nigeria the backward North itself would be swamped by the vigorous, better educated South. "Nigerian unity," he told the assembly, "is only a British intention for the country. It is artificial, and ends outside this chamber...
Like everything else about him, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa's basic foreign policy principles are unpretentious: "We consider it wrong for the Federal Government to associate itself as a matter of routine with any of the power blocs . . . Our policies will be founded on Nigeria's interests and will be consistent with the moral and democratic principles on which our constitution is based." If Nigeria lives up to his words, Africa and the world will have cause to be grateful...