Nigerians reflected on the seductive power and deadly potential of India’s independence (Service 1948c). South Asian events had an immediate impact on West Africa, and that impact was felt in direct and wide-ranging ways. This article argues that the regional importance of South Asian events extends far beyond the better understood question of ideological influence between Indian and African politicians (Mazrui Reference Mazrui2017). It explores two anxieties that preoccupied Nigerians in 1947–48: the idea of an African Gandhi, and the spectre of national disintegration represented by Pakistan’s birth. By exploring Nigerian ideas around these two themes, this article reveals that South Asian politics were followed and analysed by individuals far from the rarefied circles of internationally educated nationalist elites. It argues that Nigerians’ references to South Asia were intimately connected to their reimagining of a future national politics in West Africa, including the shape and social identity of a putative independent nation. For good or ill, Nigeria truly appeared to have the potential to become a second India.
Viewed through the lens of the Nigerian press, the significance of Indian independence was not primarily ideological, nor was it straightforwardly pro-nationalist. Instead, it focused on questions integral to the future functioning of a Nigerian nation state, including the conduct of Nigerian statesmen, the desirability of regionalization, and the ability to reconcile competing ethnic and religious constituencies in a single nation state. Reference to South Asia became woven into seemingly unrelated debates in the Nigerian press. These represent an unacknowledged dimension of a wider contemporary discussion surrounding the definition of a potential Nigerian nation found in a Nigerian press that was increasingly politically diverse and technologically sophisticated (Coker Reference Coker1968; Daramola Reference Daramola2015). As Adebanwi has shown, Nigerian print culture provided the pre-eminent forum for ‘narratives of what constitutes a nation’ and for the competition of interests between divergent regional, ethnic, ideological and religious groups (Adebanwi Reference Adebanwi2016: 5). In 1948, as in the later political crisis of 1953, Nigerian newspapers became major actors in a ‘press war’ that framed the debate between the pro-National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) West African Pilot and the Action Group-aligned Daily Service. In Northern Nigeria, commentators saw events in South Asia in distinct ways, including in terms of the challenges of carving out a regional nationalism beyond Southern influences and relating to the region’s experience of colonial rule.
Before continuing, a qualification is required regarding what we mean by Nigerian perceptions of events in South Asia. It is true that in some instances contributors to the Nigerian press, whether African or South Asian, offered sustained and well-informed analyses of events in Asia. Others, however, were content to appropriate brief references to Asia for their own purposes, sometimes with almost no reference to the specificity of events on the subcontinent and displaying errors of spelling or fact when covering South Asian affairs. While it might be tempting for historians to disregard these contributions as simply ignorant of matters in Asia, this article argues that this would be a grave error. Casual appropriations are just as important as more formal analyses to our understanding of South Asian events in Nigeria. These, in turn, integrate with historians’ increasingly globalized understandings of the legacies of events such as Indian Partition (Dubnov Reference Dubnov2016; Dubnov and Robson Reference Dubnov, Robson, Dubnow and Robson2019). It is true that other moments of Asian independence, such as Burma in 1948, also had an influence in Nigeria, but South Asia spoke to specific historical, interreligious and cultural anxieties in a way that other examples did not.
This article draws much of its source material from the press, particularly the nationalist Pilot, the Daily Service and the conservative Nigerian Daily Times. After examining Indian engagements with West Africa, it then explores two dimensions of the impact of Indian independence in Nigeria: the invocation of Gandhi in critiques of Azikiwe, and the Nigerian debate over ‘Pakistanism’. Although it deliberately sets out to include both North and South within its analysis, this article does not aim at geographical comprehensiveness.
South Asian influences in 1940s West Africa
Studies of East and West African responses to Indian independence and nationalism have largely focused on the dissemination of nationalist ideas from India to Africa. In older literature, this influence is conceived as political and ideological, while, in more recent research, attention has focused on economic and developmental thought, with some emerging work additionally exploring defence and security (Mawdsley and McCann Reference Mawdsley and McCann2011; Paliwal Reference Paliwal2021: 914). While historians have long focused on the writings of political elites, in East African history they have also examined accounts of India in the East African press (Brennan Reference Brennan2011: 42). West Africa typically plays a more minor role within a literature that has devoted more attention to East African regions with significant South Asian populations (Aiyar Reference Aiyar2015). Gandhi has been understood as a crucial influence on nationalism in Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi (Muponde Reference Muponde2008: 164; Kyle Reference Kyle1969; Addo-Fening Reference Addo-Fening1972; Mazrui Reference Mazrui2017: 14). Nehru also had a practical role in facilitating trade and economic links with African nations in the 1950s (McCann Reference McCann2013: 258; Reference McCann2010: 465).
In Nigeria, Indian politics constituted a significant and largely unacknowledged focus for political elites. Although this interest coalesced around the writings of Gandhi, it also included the Indian National Congress (INC) and statesmen Nehru and Jinnah. Nigerian intellectuals such as Sa’adu Zungur introduced their readers to Indian thinkers and texts through quotations and commentaries. West Africans were already observing India during the 1920s and 1930s, although the subject remains largely unresearched. Garveyite influence in West Africa potentially encouraged interest in Gandhi, while the Egyptian-born Nigerian nationalist Dusé Mohamed Ali undertook activism on behalf of Indian nationalist causes (Coleman Reference Coleman1975: 162; Grant Reference Grant2008: 339). The INC ‘provided some inspiration’ for the formation of the National Congress of British West Africa (Olusanya Reference Olusanya1973a: 33). During the 1930s, Indian affairs were explicitly discussed by Nnamdi Azikiwe in his influential 1936 work Renascent Africa, while Obafemi Awolowo recounted in his autobiography how he had developed his interest in Indian politics through visiting an Ijebu-owned Lagos bookstore that sold many books from the subcontinent (Azikiwe Reference Azikiwe1968: 274; Awolowo Reference Awolowo1960: 173). The nationalist Julius Ojo-Cole even wrote a textbook devoted to Gandhi during the mid-1930s (Olusanya Reference Olusanya1973b: 98).
South Asian communities played a significant role in West Africa during the interwar years, particularly in cities such as Lagos. Their history is not directly linked to Nigerians’ own fears about nationhood, but it provides a direct material context. The Muslim Ahmadiyya community constitutes one of the best documented examples of Indian interaction with Nigerian society in the early 1920s, with the arrival of Indian missionaries such as Maulvi Abdul Rahim Nayyar (Shankar Reference Shankar2021: 14; Hanson Reference Hanson2017: 134). The leadership of the Lagos branch became increasingly Nigerianized during the mid-1940s (Hanson Reference Hanson2017: 113–17; Reichmuth Reference Reichmuth1996: 365). Commerce represents a significant aspect of South Asian participation, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s. Indian businesses in Nigeria formed ‘an entrenched business community’. The firms of J. T. Chanrai & Co. and Messrs K. Chellaram & Sons focused particularly on the colony, while the Gold Coast branches of Dialdas and Chanrai closed during the Depression (Markovits Reference Markovits1999: 883; Reference Markovits2000: 208; Merani and Van der Laan Reference Merani and Van der Laan1979: 240). Sindhi merchants such as Chellaram imported 700,000 yards of artificial silk and cotton piece goods in 1933, accounting for almost 1 per cent of the market. Indian firms became the main suppliers of Japanese textiles in the region by the 1930s; the latter activity attracted colonial government attention after quotas were imposed on these textiles from 1934 (Markovits Reference Markovits2000: 210).
Indian political events made a direct mark on Nigerian soil. This can be seen in the practical impact of independence itself (Pilot 1947a). To mark the event, Indian-owned businesses closed for the day, and Indian shops along the marina hoisted the flag of the new nation (Pilot 1947b; 1947c). The firm K. Chellaram & Sons threw a party celebrating events at their premises at 4 Hagley Street, Yaba, with traders Gidwani and Dawswherri flying the tricolour Indian flag and a compatriot performing the Indian national anthem. At the celebration, Indian guests saluted and sang Bharat-Mata-Ki-Jai (‘May our mother country live long’); speeches and a group photograph were held in the gardens (Pilot 1947a). The festivities were not limited to Indians; Nigerian notables attended the Chellaram reception, including the nationalist NCNC representatives Oged Macaulay, S. A. George and Fred U. Anylam (Pilot 1947d). The NCNC later sent a message of support to the Indian and Pakistani governments (Pilot 1947e). It is rarely appreciated that the NCNC had direct connections with Indian politicians even before independence. Nehru invited the party to send a delegate to the Inter-Asian conference in March 1947, although the NCNC could not attend; the existence of such an invitation illustrates the potential for Nigerian politicians to engage in politics across the global South before the Bandung era. One Muslim hotel owner commented to the Pilot that the episode ‘show[ed] that the coloured people have started to think for themselves’ (Pilot 1947a).
‘The next India’: a Nigerian parallel
To better assess Nigerians’ engagements with Indian and Pakistani politics, we need first to appreciate the general position of India in Nigerian journalistic discourse of the time. Parallels between India and Nigeria abounded. This was a period when India and Nigeria were already being subsumed into a general category of the non-white world that remained distinct from the development of ‘increasingly singular notions of Blackness and Indianness’ (Shankar Reference Shankar2021: 104). As Olusanya argues, India’s nationalist movement was ‘particularly significant for Nigeria because India was a coloured nation’ (Olusanya Reference Olusanya1973a: 33; Reference Olusanya1965). It is also possible that wartime journalism about Asia in both Southern newspapers such as the Pilot and in the Northern Gaskiya had fostered public awareness of the region (Mora Reference Mora1989: 162–3).
Nigeria was believed to be rapidly becoming ‘a second India’, to use George Padmore’s term (Times 1947d). Reader A. Ladejo wrote to the Daily Service, arguing that, ‘with India gone’, Nigeria was now ‘the largest and wealthiest territory’ (Service 1946). ‘A great deal of attention’ in Nigeria, the Nigerian Daily Times reflected in 1946, was focused on India, and ‘for many years’ West Africans had followed Indian politics ‘with very keen interest’ because ‘there has always been a feeling’ that the subcontinent represented ‘a model’ for the ‘future shape’ of Britain’s West African colonies (Times 1946b). Elsewhere, the newspaper contended that India’s history could ‘teach us in this country’ about ‘the constitutional problem’ (Times 1946b). The biographies of Gandhi and Nehru led the Pilot to make direct comparisons with Nigerian nationalism, and to praise the ‘tenacity of those who kick against the wall that is our nationalism’. British mockery of Gandhi showed Nigerians how ‘we who advocate Nigerian independence’ must steel themselves for ‘personal indignities, group hatred, victimisation, and even bodily torture and death’ (Pilot 1947f).
India’s press was often the focus of coverage. One S. Ola A. Sonibare wrote to the Daily Service arguing that Nigerians should emulate the Indian press. They should, Sonibare argued, ‘voluntarily borrow a progressive leaf from the Indian pressmen of goodwill’. This imitation of the Indian press would have the salutary effect of allowing Nigerians to stop themselves and Nigeria from becoming ‘pawns on the chessboard of imperialism’ (Service 1948c). India’s history of communalism and caste formed a brake on unconditional identification. ‘There is nothing’ in Nigeria, warned one journalist, ‘that approximates … even remotely, to the caste system of India’ (Times 1946a). Awolowo felt that, unlike in India, there ‘was no communal strife in Nigeria’ and ‘all the linguistic groups in Nigeria lived in harmony one with another’ (Awolowo Reference Awolowo1960: 162).
Commentary on India took on distinct forms in Northern Nigeria. The Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo newspaper ran a series of three articles under the heading ‘India has given Nigeria some examples: let us select the appropriate and leave the undesirable’ (Indiya Ta Bai Wa Nijeriya Misalai: Mu Zabi Na Zabe, Mu Bar Na Bari) (Gaskiya 1947a; 1947b; 1947c; 1947d). Several factors influenced Northern responses, including Northern nationalists’ desire to delineate an independence movement specific to local politics and culture (Dudley Reference Dudley1968: 78–90; Paden Reference Paden1973: 277–90). These differences can be discerned earlier in the decade, such as in Abubakar Imam’s critique of Azikiwe after the 1943 West African editors’ delegation to London (Coates Reference Coates2025). Sa’adu Zungur’s poem Arewa: Jumhuriya ko Mulukiya or ‘The North: Republic or Monarchy’, published around 1949, represented an influential statement of the reformist position (Abdulkadir Reference Abdulkadir1974: 8; Olusanya Reference Olusanya1967: 129). Zungur was a key influence in connecting Southern nationalism with Northern thinkers.
Zungur identified multiple connections between India and Nigeria. He had informed a 1948 NCNC convention that ‘[w]e should take a lesson from India’, and the following year he asked whether Nigeria was on ‘the trail of India’ (Pilot 1949c; Yakubu Reference Yakubu1999: 159, 199). He explained how the damaging consequences of British colonialism in Northern Nigeria were born under the Raj. Drawing on examples including the underdevelopment of agriculture and the encouragement of industrial status, Zungur reminded his readers how these unfolded in a parallel to ‘India and Burma’ (Yakubu Reference Yakubu1999: 204). He contended that the psychological and cultural burdens of colonialism had South Asian precedents. Informing readers in the Pilot that British manipulation of naming conventions derived from an Indian precedent, Zungur singled out the British preference for avoiding the Hausa term nasara (referring to the Arabic term for Christians), instead preferring turawa (traditionally a Hausa term for Tripolitanian and Algerian Arabs) (Yakubu Reference Yakubu1999: 209). Turning to the 1857 Indian Mutiny, Zungur explained how this had been the product of a ‘united revolt of oppressed colonial subjects’. Zungur also drew directly on Indian texts, mediating them for African readers. Quoting from London-based Indian nationalist Krishnarao Shivarao Shelvankar’s 1940 book The Problem of India, which had been banned on the subcontinent, Zungur warned his readers that North/South divisions within Nigeria must be understood in relation to British policy and communalism in India (Yakubu Reference Yakubu1999: 214; Shelvankar Reference Shelvankar1940; Visram Reference Visram2002). Zungur focused not only on the past; he also explained how a similar division was exacerbated by the appearance of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, which ‘appeals to the tribal prejudices of the Yoruba people’ (Yakubu Reference Yakubu1999: 214).
An African Gandhi?
Who would be Nigeria’s ‘Gandhi’? We will see that this question evoked heated debate, with multiple candidates, as well as those meriting a negative ‘anti-Gandhi’ label. Africans engaged with Gandhi ‘as a pragmatic philosopher’, and his thought ‘captured the imagination of many Nigerian leaders’ (Olusanya Reference Olusanya1973a: 34; Shankar Reference Shankar2021: 95). Yet few historians have examined how Gandhi was mythologized within Africa. Gandhi’s image was reimagined and remade by Nigerians, an appropriation based around local priorities and concerns, particularly focusing on the quality of Nigerian nationalist leadership.
Nigeria’s Gandhi had a mobile history. Earlier in the 1940s, the Nigerian press devoted editorials to Gandhian thought (Pilot 1945; Eastern 1944). This reflected the fact that, as Devji admits, Gandhi could be seen ‘as being more of an imperial than a national figure’ (Devji Reference Devji2012: 10). I chart this mythological career of Gandhi within Nigerian politics of the late 1940s. As historians of the subaltern studies school have demonstrated, such regional and popular ‘imaginings’ of Gandhi constituted an important dimension of his power. ‘For who,’ Amin contends, ‘if not India’s peasants, with their adoration and regard for Gandhi, made him into a Mahatma?’ (Amin Reference Amin1995: 1; Reference Amin and Guha1988: 339). Gandhi himself has often been understood as mobilizing ‘the showman’s touch’ to facilitate widely divergent interpretations of his thought (Young Reference Young2001: 354). While this article challenges a too Gandhi-centred account of Indian influence in Africa, particularly in the light of ongoing controversies about Gandhian racism towards Africans, it nonetheless demonstrates that Africans played a key and defining role in remaking Gandhi in locally comprehensible terms. Nigerians actively appropriated Gandhi’s image to articulate their ideas of domestic Nigerian politics. In doing so, they formed a local, Nigerian body of commentary and myth based around Gandhi.
The ‘Nigerian Gandhi’ was initially a flexible mantle. Interwar Nigerian nationalist Herbert Macaulay enjoyed the title earlier in the 1940s, but it was ultimately Azikiwe who came to personify the role for both supporters and critics. ‘Azikiwe will do the same [as Gandhi] for Africa,’ argued future Zikist Nwafor Orizu in 1944, claiming that the youth of West Africa looked upon him as the African Gandhi (Orizu Reference Orizu1944: 297–8; Olusanya Reference Olusanya1966: 323). To recognize Azikiwe’s suitability for this role, Orizu argued, it was not necessary to agree with his philosophy. After all, the ‘members of the [INC]’, Orizu reminded his readers, ‘do not necessarily agree with Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance’. He went on to state that ‘they acknowledge and follow him, because, despite their minor difference[s]’, they had the ‘one goal’ of independence ‘in common’ (Orizu Reference Orizu1944: 297). Gandhi’s moral or ethical project transcended political affiliation, Orizu implied. If the strength of Gandhi’s message ‘lay in its polyvalence and amenability to diverse understandings’, then Nigerian interest in the Indian leader during the late 1940s constituted a West African intervention in this continual renegotiation of the quasi-mythic nationalist (Banerjee-Dube Reference Banerjee-Dube2015: 298).
Gandhi’s hold on Nigerian imaginings was not monopolistic. On occasion, Nigerians’ gaze extended to other Indian nationalists, including Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose and Vallabhbhai Patel. Adelabu makes this point in his Africa in Ebullition, where he reflects on the extraordinary moral qualities of a pantheon of Congress politicians. ‘Indian freedom,’ he contended, would have remained unrealized in his time if ‘Gandhi had been only a patrician, Nehru just a scholar’, ‘Bose solely an orator’ and ‘Patel merely a thinker’. But freedom was achieved because all these figures transcended the ordinary: ‘Gandhi had the will to become a saint, Nehru the stamina to become a hero’, ‘Patel the gut to become a fighter’ and ‘Bose the courage to become a martyr’ (Adelabu Reference Adelabu1952: 41). Even amidst this pantheon of exclusively Hindu politicians, it was Gandhi who was anointed ‘saint’.
The 1947 NCNC delegation to London served as a focal point for refining Azikiwe’s supposedly Gandhian qualities. The delegation, which focused on obtaining the repeal of the 1947 Richards Constitution, attracted comparison in the Nigerian press to earlier INC delegations to London (Falola and Heaton Reference Falola and Heaton2008: 148; Orizu Reference Orizu1944: 297). Commenting on the delegation, barrister O. A. Alakija argued that ‘history will decide as in India’s case’ and reflected that it had already ‘decided whether former “fruitless” Indian delegations have failed or not’ (Pilot 1947g). Alakija reflected that Azikiwe’s experience paralleled how ‘the Indians were snubbed’ and how ‘Gandhi was called the “Eastern Fakir”’ by Churchill’. Addressing those who claimed that the NCNC was not representative of Nigerian opinion, Alakija recalled how ‘British politicians’ had suggested that ‘even the Indian Congress party as represented by Gandhi and Nehru’ was allegedly similarly unrepresentative of Indian opinion. Azikiwe’s leadership of the Nigerian delegation paralleled how ‘Gandhi met his Sovereign in his [loincloth]’ (Pilot 1947h).
Azikiwe also became an anti-Gandhi. For his critics, the Mahatma served as the very exemplar against which Azikiwe was deemed to have fallen far short. According to these critics, Gandhi represented moral probity and other positive values. These were profaned by Azikiwe’s alleged cynicism and greed. Reflecting on Gandhi’s life, the Daily Service observed, in a thinly veiled attack on Azikiwe, that while Nigerians wished to ‘learn … lessons from India’s success’, Gandhi differed fundamentally from his Nigerian counterpart. ‘India,’ it warned, ‘has no such political messiahs’ as those who ‘plagued the political waters of Nigeria’. Taking a swipe at Azikiwe, it noted the absence of an Indian ‘Lord of all that he surveys’, and critiqued ‘hus-hus politicians, whose stock in trade is false propaganda for the realisation of personal ends’ (Service 1948c). These unattractive behaviours contrasted, the Daily Service averred, with the ‘hard work’, ‘sincerity of purpose’ and ‘disinterested leadership’ that it identified in Gandhi’s life (ibid.). The Daily Service’s readers similarly shared few illusions about just how far Azikiwe had fallen from the Gandhian exemplar (Service 1948f; 1948i). One anonymous reader wrote to complain about an unidentified ‘Gandhi of West Africa’ who had, in a trajectory directly paralleling Azikiwe’s own career, ‘left the Gold Coast to establish his business family in Nigeria’. The reader continued to enumerate a list of qualities where Azikiwe fell short of Gandhi:
The Gandhi of India frowns on promoters of Gandhism [sic]: the Gandhi of West Africa encourages them.
The Gandhi of India is an Apostle of non-violence; the Gandhi of West Africa is an apostle of violence. He challenges his colleagues to boxing contests.
The Gandhi of India will never side one section of the people against the other; the Gandhi of West Africa ends his field and papers for the promotion of inter-tribal differences. (Service 1948g)
The piece rehearses familiar accusations in the heated conflict between the NCNC and Pilot, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) and the Daily Service, including the allegation that Azikiwe promoted violent activities and ethnic discontent (Service 1948n). Appealing to people to stop comparing Azikiwe to Gandhi, the reader even suggested that ‘the Hindus can declare a war on West Africa’ for besmirching Gandhi’s name. Another reader, initialized as A. R. K., explicitly identified Azikiwe in his negative comparison with Gandhi. Arguing that ‘you always deride and abuse the Yorubas’ and that ‘you like people to believe you are all in all’, A. R. K. observed that ‘the late Mr Ghandi [sic]’ was ‘of blessed memory’ and ‘was never reported to have recounted the good things he did for India’ himself. By contrast, in Azikiwe’s case, ‘it is always otherwise’ (Service 1948l). In the pages of the Daily Service, and among NYM supporters on the Egbe side of the 1948 press war, Azikiwe thus enjoyed the moniker of ‘false Gandhi’. His supposed transgressions were held to besmirch the image of Gandhi, who, conversely, came to stand for modesty and the seeking of a common cause.
Gandhi’s assassination in Nigeria
Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948 at the hand of Nathuram Godse created anxiety in Nigeria (Stein Reference Stein2010: 352; Khan Reference Khan2007: 180). It reflected a new and different future danger for Nigeria that did not lead to straightforward independence but unleashed potentially darker forces of disintegration. Azikiwe’s activities were particularly perceived as emblematic of decline. ‘We in this part of the world,’ warned an editorial in the Nigerian Daily Times, ‘have lately been playing with forces, the immense strength of which we do not possess even the rudimentary knowledge’ (Times 1948a). In a veiled warning to Azikiwe, it inveighed against demagogues who ‘have proved [that] they cannot control the mass when it is fed with inflammatory matter’ (ibid.).
The assassination triggered a mass meeting in Lagos, with the NYM organizing an assembly at Lagos’s Glover Memorial Hall the following day. It paid tribute to the deceased Indian nationalist (Service 1948a; 1948b). Speakers included H. O. Davies, the chair of the Lagos branch of the NYM, K. A. Aboymi and Adeyemo Alakija, as well as press representatives such as I. B. Thomas, editor of the Akede Eko, and the colonial PR officer Harold Cooper. Condemning Gandhi’s murder, the meeting resolved to send cablegrams to the prime ministers of India and Pakistan, because ‘Ghandi [sic] lived and died for India as a whole’. The messages offered the condolences of Lagosians, while condemning Gandhi’s death as ‘inexcusable murder’. A similar message was sent to Indians in Fiji, who replied thanking Lagosians (Service 1948d; 1948e). The Pilot also stressed the relevance of Gandhi’s assassination to African communities in Britain. In London, The Greater Tomorrow, a film by Nigeria’s K. O. Mbadiwe, then president of the African Academy of Arts and Research in New York, was screened before a gathering of several hundred African students to mark the event (Pilot 1948c).
The NCNC and the Pilot sought to consolidate their links to Gandhi’s legacy by positioning themselves in relationship to the assassination. The NCNC general secretary, Adeleke Adedoyin, sent his own message of condolence to Nehru. He identified Gandhi as the ‘bearer of [the] torch of liberty of oppressed peoples’, who served as ‘an inspiration to colonials everywhere’, and whose ideals of non-violence had ‘permeate[d] the surface of this atomic globe’ (Pilot 1948a). One Pilot editorial went so far as to compare Gandhi to Christ, while another favoured direct comparison with Azikiwe, arguing that the assassination was ‘the most stunning news the world has ever endured’. The Pilot further asserted that ‘the Mahatma liveth’ through the influence of non-violent resistance and continued to inspire those ‘on the thorny road to freedom’ (Pilot 1948b). It also warned of the ‘traitors of India’s unity’ who ‘shot their saviour while he was fasting’, a statement that deployed Gandhi’s assassination to challenge Azikiwe’s own brand of nationalism in Nigeria (ibid.).
Gandhi’s assassination made Nigerians newly anxious about the ‘another India’ analogy. It revealed the risks of false Gandhianism. In an article responding directly to a Pilot editorial of November 1948, the Daily Service claimed that ‘the significance of Gandhi’s fast-to-death lies in the fact that the INDIAN HERO constitutes a source of inspiration to his many followers’ (Service 1948s). Nigeria was different: the Daily Service reminded its readers ‘that Nigeria needs not martyrs but builders of a virile nation’. Such building blocks were not being laid by Azikiwe, who was lambasted for his failure to control the Zikists and for lacking in leadership. Contrasting Gandhi’s sacrifices with the behaviour of Azikiwe, the Daily Service condemned the fact that the latter was irresponsible and not focused on ‘the destiny of the country’. This was ‘where Azikiwe cannot stand the test of TIME’ (ibid.). ‘Let the youths of the country,’ the Daily Service demanded, ‘stop and think whether Nigeria abounds with men like Gandhi.’ The Indian leader’s moral qualities were evinced by his departure from his legal practice and donations from his own funds. The status and outlines of the ‘West African Gandhi’ myth changed considerably; while Macaulay initially served as a possible candidate, it was Azikiwe who rose to personify the mantle, for both his supporters and his critics.
Gandhi in Northern Nigeria
Gandhi enjoyed a distinctive career in Northern Nigeria, where the possibility of Irin Gandhi Na Nijeriya or ‘Nigerian Gandhi’ was also understood (Gaskiya 1947a). Events such as Gandhi’s assassination were covered locally (Gaskiya 1948a; 1948b). For Zungur, the Indian leader represented an attempt to pursue nationalism without manipulating communal and ethnic division. This contradicted the claims of Zikists such as Gideon M. Urhobo, who had blasphemously compared Muhammad to Azikiwe (Pilot 1949a). Rebuking Urhobo, Zungur explained how Gandhi (and by implication Azikiwe) could avoid the perils of communalism. Gandhianism, Zungur contended, ‘was never preached as a distinct religion’. It instead reflected the ‘warmest admiration’ for Muhammad and the Qur’an. Zungur explained how Gandhi’s autobiography, My Experiments with Truth, explored the impact of other religions, including the ‘influence exerted on him by Christianity’, particularly with reference to Tolstoy (Gandhi Reference Gandhi1982; Pilot 1949b; Yakubu Reference Yakubu1999: 196). This image of tolerant political thought was imperilled when:
some of [Gandhi’s] … fanatical disciples started to exaggerate his religious position and to preach the Gandhian political philosophy as a religious tenet, giving it the appearance of Hindu or rather Jain and Buddhist sources of inspiration. (Yakubu Reference Yakubu1999: 196)
Zungur saw this radicalization of Gandhianism as triggering a new separatism in South Asian Muslim politics and drawing on the example of the Khilafat movement (Metcalf Reference Metcalf1982). Neither Gandhi nor Azikiwe were religious figures, Zungur concluded; instead, they represented ‘nothing but a political creed’.
‘Nigerian Pakistanists’: Partition and the idea of Pakistan in Nigeria
West African responses to the birth of Pakistan have rarely been researched. At a practical level, the violence of Partition was well reported in the Nigerian press; from August 1946, Muslim unrest in Calcutta was followed by Hindu violence in Eastern Bengal, Bihar, and, by the summer of 1947, by attacks on Sikhs and Hindus in the western Punjab (Jalal Reference Jalal1995: 73). By 1948, up to 180,000 had died in the Punjab alone, and 12,000 refugees each day moved from East Pakistan to Western Bengal (Stein Reference Stein2010: 350–2; Talbot Reference Talbot1994: 975–6). Nigerian responses did not engage with the detail of Pakistani politics; rather, they articulated a general fear and anxiety. This affective engagement and the debate it engendered came to be known as ‘Pakistanism’. Although rooted in Nigerian political realities, the Pakistanism debate also engaged with what Qasmi has termed ‘the idea of Pakistan’ (Qasmi Reference Qasmi2019: 1104). In other words, it was not so much concerned with decoding events in the emergent Muslim state, but rather with interpreting the ‘ambiguous heritage and sheer abstraction’ of the very idea of Pakistan (Devji Reference Devji2013: 6).
Uncertainty about the future political development of Nigeria fired these preoccupations. Above all, the possibility of interreligious enmity preoccupied Nigerian observers (Times 1947a). The Times warned that, although it aimed for an independent Nigeria, ‘we will stand up against any move which we think might tend to reproduce conditions appertaining in India today in Nigeria’ (Times 1947c). It had, it claimed, ‘persistently struck notes of warning’, asking Nigerians to avoid provoking ‘domestic strifes of the kind still going on in India and Pakistan even with … independence’ (Times 1947b). For many Nigerians, the prospect of their country forming the next India began to take on a far more troubling meaning. To some extent, Nigerian reactions to Partition can be understood as part of a wave of global responses to these events. Historians of the Middle East have shown how local people translated events in the Punjab locally (Dubnov and Robson Reference Dubnov, Robson, Dubnow and Robson2019: 1–27; Kattan and Ranjan Reference Kattan, Ranjan, Kattan and Ranjan2023: 1).
‘Pakistanism’ as an idea
‘Pakistanism’ was a loose term; Nigerians and Indians resident in the colony penned stinging critiques of the way it was used. Even the very spelling of the term varied. As the Times complained in an acerbic attack, many commentators who ‘glibly’ used it ‘know practically nothing about’ South Asia and ‘often misspelt’ Pakistanism as ‘Parkistanism’ (Times 1948b). Others had more substantive objections, identifying the ignorance of South Asian affairs that they felt the debate demonstrated. M. A. Olajide of Ilesha Grammar School wrote to the Daily Service ‘as a student of contemporary Indian affairs’ to complain at ‘the loose way in which local politicians, soap box orators and half-baked journalists have been using the name Pakistan without any authority’ (Service 1948m). Complaining that such figures had ‘come to attach a derogatory meaning to what they call Pakistanism’, Olajide proceeded to regale the newspaper’s readers with facts about the new state. He warned: ‘It is yet too early for anybody much less for us in far away Nigeria, to sit in judgement over the 90 million odd inhabitants of Pakistan.’ Olajide advised other Nigerians that ‘we should not by any indiscretion incur the displeasure of the big and influential country like Pakistan’ (ibid.).
Olajide, and others like him, not only reflected annoyance at Pakistanism felt by those Nigerians well versed in South Asian affairs, but also demonstrated the very existence of such individuals in the reading public, including in regional towns such as Ilesha. The Pakistanism debate was seen as symptomatic of a more general international ignorance in Nigerian political discourse. The Daily Service worried about the ‘dangerous tendency’ among journalists to deploy the term ‘Pakistanism’ to oppose the Egbe. It scornfully decried the ‘crass ignorance’ of the entire debate, and its ‘gross disrespect’ to Pakistanis. ‘What is Pakistan,’ asked the Daily Service, and warned that ‘[p]erhaps a little industry’ would have assisted proponents of the term to ‘realise that Pakistan represents one of the noblest political ideals a people could aim at’ (Service 1948q). Although many critics of Pakistanism supported either the Egbe specifically or the regionalization at the heart of the Richards Constitution, their ranks also included Nigerians who were well informed in South Asian affairs and desired to build meaningful relations with the Pakistani state.
South Asian Muslims based in Nigeria themselves contributed to the debate over Pakistanism. Lagos-based Ahmadiyya missioner N. M. Naseem Saifi warned that the Pakistanism controversy could discredit Nigeria in the wider Muslim world (Service 1948o). ‘A section of the people in Nigeria,’ Saifi warned, ‘have for some time been ridiculing Pakistan and Mr Jinnah.’ Identifying the fast and loose stereotypes of Pakistan circulating in this debate, Saifi observed that commentators were behaving ‘very ignorantly’, but ‘not … maliciously, at this stage’. This misunderstanding had led ‘people here to [take] pride in forming anti-Pakistanism groups’ and in ‘calling their opponents Pakistanists’ (ibid.).
Pakistanism could isolate Nigeria, Saifi warned. The colony was ‘part and parcel of the Muslim World’ (Service 1948o). ‘May I advise the political workers in this country not to offend the Muslims by using Pakistan and Pakistanism derogatively?’ Nigerian Muslims had a duty to challenge Pakistanism, because Islam was ‘above all geographical boundaries’, and it was time for local believers to ‘acclaim the cause of the Muslims of Pakistan as their own’ and ‘rise to the occasion and demand respect’ for Pakistan (Service 1948p). For his efforts, Saifi, who later published his collected editorials on the subject in his book In Defence of Pakistan, found himself drawn into the press war (Shankar Reference Shankar2021: 73–4). He was criticized in the Pilot as a ‘newfound hero of the Daily Service’. ‘We in Nigeria,’ the Pilot warned Saifi, ‘are not fools as you take us to be,’ advising him to ‘go home and help to steer that ship of Jinnah’s Pakistan State which has a precarious destiny’ (Pilot 1948j). Writing to defend himself, Saifi expressed his shock that he could be attacked ‘simply because I have explained what Pakistan is (that even without mentioning any parties here [in Nigeria])’ (Service 1948r).
Jinnah and the threat of Pakistanism
A new debate emerged in Nigerian politics focused on Pakistanism. The term itself was often deployed in a free and poorly informed manner, even rendered as ‘Parkistanism’, as noted above. It raised the prospect of the ethnicization of Nigerian politics, and the possibility of regional division (Pilot 1948h). As with the West African Gandhi debate explored above, Pakistanism was used to lambast a diverse list of opponents, ranging from the Egbe and its supporters to the NCNC and Azikiwe. Yet, unlike the Nigerian Gandhi, few positively claimed the moniker Pakistanism. Most parties looked with alarm at the pursuit of territorial autonomy by Jinnah and the Muslim League (Moore Reference Moore1983: 531). The moderates did not so much endorse the fledgling Pakistani state as doubt the strategic sense in such a generalized and negative dismissal of the emergent South Asian nation. Pakistanism, they feared, offered an inauspicious foundation for the future international relations of Nigeria. Despite these voices of moderation, the Pakistanism debate had little connection with the practical realities of Pakistan itself. Rather, it articulated fears about the ethnic and religious cohesion of Nigeria.
The persona of Jinnah played a key role in the Pakistanism debate (Jalal Reference Jalal1994). This again did not relate so much to accurate commentary on the Pakistani statesman, but rather to an anxiety-laden invective on what Jinnah’s demand for partition represented for Nigeria. Jinnah attracted few supporters in the Lagos press. Upon his death, publications from across the political divide condemned the Pakistani leader as posing a dangerous precedent for Nigeria. The pro-government Times columnist Charles Bishop penned an account of the Pakistani statesman’s political career, focusing on his alleged culpability for ‘the breaking-up of India’ due to ‘passion and perseverance bordering on fanaticism’, placing him alongside ‘the arch-enemies of human freedom and solidarity’ and showing that he had ‘unfurled the black Ensign of Death’ (Times 1946c). On the opposite side of the divide, the Pilot remarked that Jinnah’s death provoked ‘mixed feelings’ in Nigeria, and that the leader had been unimpressive as ‘the author of a divided India’ (Pilot 1948g).
But above all, Pakistanism was deployed in a partisan sense and became incorporated into a pre-existing press war that flared with unprecedented ferocity during 1948. In this conflict between the NYM-owned Daily Service, a publication also sympathetic to the Egbe, and Azikiwe’s NCNC-aligned Pilot, both sides accused the other of Pakistanism. Thus, the Pilot accused the Yoruba political association, the Egbe, and its leader Awolowo of embodying Pakistanist Balkanization, while the Daily Service accused Azikiwe of using personality politics and Igbo ethnic awareness to promote just such a division within Nigerian politics (Adebanwi Reference Adebanwi2014: 53–4; Pilot 1948d). This was not merely a feuilleton war in any narrow sense, but rather a broader political debate waged through the news media. Pakistanism provides an unacknowledged dimension of a more general press debate that, as Adebanwi contends, revolved around competing narratives of the future Nigerian state (Adebanwi Reference Adebanwi2016: 16). ‘Pakistan’ had, in a very intimate sense, become a proxy for Nigeria itself.
Pakistanism represented a direct threat to the survival of Nigeria. ‘[W]e must reflect on the life of Jinnah,’ the Pilot contended. It focused especially on how the statesman’s life had ‘ended’ in ‘a doctrine of Pakistanism’. This ideology had ‘resounded … adversely’ in Nigeria, necessitating the paper to issue its ‘relentless condemnation’ (Pilot 1948e). By hindering ‘our crusade for a United Nigeria’, it actively endangered national survival (ibid.). One indication of the stakes, from the Pilot’s perspective, could be seen in a rally of 5,000 Yoruba in Onitsha, Eastern Nigeria, on 19 September 1948. Organized by the Yoruba Peju Society, the event reveals how the fears over Pakistanism could have an impact beyond the confines of Lagos. Superintendent of police E. A. Onluwole, speaking at the meeting, warned his audience to refrain from offering support to the Egbe, which was then establishing networks among Yoruba across Nigeria, and against involving themselves in the conflict between Yoruba and Igbo interests. ‘After stating that he was not in favour of Pakistanism in this country,’ the Pilot related, Onluwole ‘exorted [sic] the audience not to cherish any tribal feelings as long as they are all blacks and that all must co-operate for the benefit of the country’ (Pilot 1948l). While the Pilot likely deployed this account of the Onitsha meeting to further its own anti-Egbe propaganda, the report shows the extent to which Pakistanism was of concern beyond newspapers and Lagos during the summer of 1948. The word ‘Pakistan’ was, after all, ‘being bandied about … loosely in Nigeria’, conjuring up notions of inept leadership and ethnic division (Times 1948c).
Those who decried violent Partition, but supported some form of regional development, disputed any accusation that all regionalism necessarily represented Pakistanism. The Times distinguished between federalism and regionalism, on the one hand, and the violence of Partition, on the other. Drawing on the writings of Indian academic A. Appadurai, it argued that the Richards Constitution entailed regionalism and ‘the devolution of powers’, rather than Pakistanism (Times 1948d). This position was echoed by the Daily Service’s S. O. Shonibare, who drew on the examples of regional congresses including those of Bombay, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Madras. In India, Shonibare contended, ‘When an issue concerns the Bengali or Madrassi, it is purely a matter for their own congress party to handle and nothing to do with the All-India Congress.’ The latter body, Shonibare explained to his readers, ‘interests itself in … All-India matters only’. Drawing on this comparison, he claimed that ‘the same thing could happen here in Nigeria’ and that ‘the “Egbe Omo Oduduwa”, while interesting itself solely in all matters which concern the Yorubas, will readily join other regional groups’. This would have the effect of ‘forming a real healthy national party’ (Service 1948e). According to this model, the Egbe did not lead to Balkanization, because it could co-operate with other regionally based political groups. This potential for future interaction between regional parties on the model of India’s regional legislatures meant that criticism of regionalism was unfounded. Shonibare decried ‘the suggestion that the formation of the “Egbe Omo Oduduwa” was going the India–Pakistan way’ (ibid.). That regionalism did not equate to factionalism meant, Shonibare concluded, that critics of the Egbe were wrong to stigmatize the movement: ‘the Yoruba national movement is not a tribal onslaught just as the Ibo Federation [supportive of Azikiwe] is not’ (ibid.).
Defenders of the Egbe were infuriated by criticisms that they were ‘Pakistanists’. They felt that this ignored the federalist aspirations of their movement. ‘The charge of Pakistanism laid at the foot of the Egbe,’ argued Bode Thomas, ‘only goes to convince one that after all Zik is not half as politically enlightened as he claims to be.’ Thomas continued to stress how ill suited Pakistan was as a comparator for the emergent Egbe. ‘The word Pakistanism owes its origin to the events in India,’ he reminded his readers, ‘where as a result of Muslim demands that country was partitioned into two’; however, the ‘Egbe Omo Oduduwa on the contrary aims at the unity of Nigeria by Federation’ (Service 1948j).
The theme of the unifying potential of the Egbe was taken up by other defenders of the party. They drew on its formal organization, its structure, and its stated objectives. In a response to legislative council member Onyeama’s attack on the Egbe, the Daily Service explained that the term ‘Pakistanism’ was incompatible with a group that had such a level of political organization. ‘There has never,’ the Daily Service explained, ‘been anything suggestive of Pakistanism in all the official pronouncements and press releases’ of the Egbe. ‘No true and sincere love of freedom,’ it asserted, ‘can challenge the need for tribal solidarity and progress of the Yoruba race.’ In this context, the ‘Egbe Omo Oduduwa stands for unity in Nigeria by Federation’. The Egbe as a pro-federalist party was ‘as opposed to Pakistanism as daylight is to darkness’ (Service 1948h). Awolowo himself echoed this defence in a press release defending the Egbe, in which, under the sub-heading ‘Pakistanism’, he contended that the party was ‘not a separatist Movement’ and was ‘not in any way antagonistic to any person, party, or other ethnical groups’ (Service 1948k). Accordingly, the Egbe would participate in ‘a future United States of Nigeria’, united with other regional parties (ibid.).
Pakistan in Northern Nigeria
Pakistan was equally divisive in Northern Nigeria. The country had markedly different associations in the predominantly Muslim North. Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo editor Abubakar Imam had defended the rights of Indian Muslims on the verge of Partition, while others welcomed the idea of Pakistan. Ties deepened, with Northern delegates travelling to Pakistan during the 1950s to research legal reforms, and Ahmadu Bello later visiting the country in 1961 (Akande Reference Akande2023: 144; Schler Reference Schler2022: 128).
Zungur’s poem ‘The North’, published posthumously, includes a specific meditation on the destruction of Partition. This is not rooted in the dangers of Pakistan as such, but rather in the degree to which Zungur perceives a republic or secular government as damaging the prerogatives of pre-existing rulers:
Partition, Zungur contended, had scattered South Asian rulers and replaced them with a tyrannical ‘republic’. ‘Before, the number of their rulers exceeded five hundred’, but in the present ‘all [is] scattered’ and ‘it is as if they had never been’. For Zungur, who defended the continuing role of the emirs in Northern politics, the ‘evils of a republic’ well articulated what he saw as overly hasty Southern demands for independence (Abdulkadir Reference Abdulkadir1974: 73).
Zungur also engaged explicitly with the Southern Pakistanist movement, addressing a newly formed and youthful anti-Pakistan movement (Pilot 1948d; 1948f). Seeing opponents of Pakistan as supporting both ‘anti-separatism’ and ‘anti-Pakistanism’, Zungur reminded his audience that such division was partly the legacy of the death of Yoruba nationalist Macaulay. Branding the Egbe as ‘Apostles of Disunity’, he asserted that ‘the Bani Ya’aruba or Yorubas … are not credulous and disillusioned’, before decrying ‘Oduduwaism and its allied cults’ in Northern and Eastern Nigeria. Zungur explicitly undermined any effort to present Lagos as specifically Yoruba or necessarily purely Southern. All inhabitants of the city, Zungur contended, ‘fight against a common … enemy of imperialism’ and were ‘the inheritors of the Western Sudanese tradition’ (Pilot 1948f). Northern Mallam Yawa Bida also explicitly attacked Pakistanists, when he warned that ‘some leaders [such as Azikiwe] are showing us the road to follow’, but they were ‘disclaim[ed]’ due to ‘tribal discrimination’. Drawing on the Indian example, he warned: ‘Ghandi [sic] was an Indian leader but was he of the same tribe or family with the Indians? Nigerians think well’ (Pilot 1948k). Like Bida, Y. A. Sanusi drew on the Gold Coast to warn that ‘Pakistanists should now start to find shelter’ as freedom was approaching, as reflected by the growth of Ghanaian nationalism (Pilot 1948i).
Conclusion
Indian independence became closely intertwined with contemporary politics in Nigeria during the late 1940s. This was a period in which the future political fabric of Nigeria was up for grabs, and questions of regional, religious and ethnic difference were sources of considerable anxiety. Above all, events on the subcontinent offered both a blueprint and a foil for Nigerian political developments.
Although informed Nigerian opinion about South Asia existed, it is rarely acknowledged in subsequent historical research; many observers appropriated aspects of the situation in Asia into their own internal concerns inside Nigeria. As this article has shown, this in no way invalidates their response to these events, but rather can be compared to how individuals in Asia and elsewhere responded imaginatively to the myths and possibilities surrounding figures such as Gandhi and the birth of projects such as Pakistan. Gandhi came to embody both ideal leadership and allegations of ineptitude in Nigerian politics. Both true Gandhi and anti-Gandhi stalked the debate, while the Hindi name ‘Gandhiji’ was also appropriated to articulate Nigerian affection.
The Pakistanism debate represents the apogee of these engagements. The term made minimal reference to Pakistani events, but Pakistanism drew on the nation’s existence to stigmatize regional separatism. The Pakistanism debate is of significance for a second reason; it reminds us of the dangers of examining African responses to August 1947 in too India-centric a fashion. For better or worse, Nigerians were fascinated by the emergence of Pakistan. A cross-section of Nigerians engaged in debating South Asian events. These debates reflect a greater range of African agency and engagement than is apparent in studies of Indian ideological influence in Africa. West Africans were able to remake South Asia in their own imaginative terms and use Asian events to model the potential political futures emerging from decolonization.
Oliver Coates is Director of Studies for History and tutor at St Edmund’s College Cambridge. His recent research has appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History andItinerario. His bookAchille Mbembe was published in December 2024 in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series.
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