By
This YEAR marks the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Aminu Kano. Mallam Aminu (Mallam is an honorific given to Muslim scholars) lived a life steeped in the austere traditions of Nigeria's arid, hierarchical north. He learned the Koran from his uncle, the personal imam to the emir of the city of Kano. By adulthood, Aminu's own mastery of Islamic ritual had attained such renown that, when Nigerian leader Murtala Mohammed was assassinated in 1976, Mallam Aminu was asked to oversee his burial.
But Mallam Aminu is best remembered not as a defender of traditional authority but as its fiercest critic. Northern Nigeria, since its conversion to Islam in the fifteenth century, had been divided into vast, centralized emirates--governed through strict, pyramid-like hierarchies led by an emir or sultan. For the British, who conquered Nigeria early in the twentieth century, the emirate system was a godsend. A fragile political consensus underlay Britain's bid for African empire, and that consensus depend ed on keeping empire cheap. The way to do so, colonial authorities decided, was to keep traditional African political systems in place and sprinkle a few British administrators on top. The less African society changed, the less it would cost to rule. It w as in northern Nigeria, with its clear lines of indigenous authority, that this policy of "indirect rule" reached its apogee. British administrators discouraged missionaries from traveling to the region, fearing that Christianity would undermine the authority of the emirs, and they refused to introduce Western education. Today, we usually associate colonialism with cultural supremacy and invasion, but indirect rule was actually a grand experiment in coercive cultural relativism.
For northern Nigerian nationalists seeking to throw off the British yoke, indirect rule posed a peculiar dilemma. In colonies where Europeans deposed traditional rulers, independence movements could claim that foreign rule was both immoral and inauthentic --it was illegitimate both because it violated universal moral principles and because it was foreign. Indirect rule, on the other hand, was grounded in the language of autonomy and authenticity, and many emirs supported it. And so northern Nigerian nationalists divided into two schools. One school maintained that indirect rule was inauthentic despite its guise--because the emirs were sullied by their interaction with the colonialists. The second school made a more radical argument. It discarded the claims of authenticity altogether and argued that the problem was immorality alone--the immorality of a colonial administration and an emirate leadership that conspired to deny freedom. The central issue was not whether northern Nigeria's political system was indigenous but whether it was just.
This second school remains associated, to this day, with the name of Aminu Kano. He struggled to introduce secular learning into northern schools, to give women the vote, and to protect northern Nigeria's Christian minority. He condemned the authoritarian interpretation of Islam propagated by both the emirs and the British, arguing that "an ideal Islamic state is a democratic republic in which the people choose the best man to administer the affairs of state." And, time and again, he was rebuffed by British administrators who said such notions violated local custom. For the British, feudalism was northern Nigeria's culture, and London's emissaries strongly doubted that ordinary Nigerians could even conceive of something different. Lord Lugard, the architect of indirect rule, put it this way: "It is a cardinal principle of British colonial policy that the interests of a large native population shall not be subject to the will ... of a small minority of educated and Europeanized natives who have nothing in common with them, and whose interests are often opposed to theirs."
I was reminded of that remark last week during a phone conversation with Adonis Hoffman, senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and sometime "adviser" to the dictatorship of the recently deceased General Sani Abacha. Hoffman said he had been to Nigeria recently and found that "most Nigerians, outside of places like Lagos, are very rural. The average person didn't care about politics. They were very concerned about their subsistence. These were the real political conditions." Whether the Nigerians Hoffman met might not have been pretending to be a bit more apathetic than they really are--after all, they live under a government that sentences public critics to death--is not the point. Hoffman's words reveal how much the spirit of indirect rule remains with us and deforms our moral clarity when it comes to countries like Nigeria.
During the five years since the Nigerian military annulled Moshood Abiola's apparent election victory, Clinton administration policy toward Nigeria has been unusually pathetic. Nigeria, which relies overwhelmingly on its oil exports, is one of those few countries where tough sanctions might actually have mattered, yet the Clintonites steadfastly refused to impose them. They waited for the Europeans, or the South Africans, to take the lead. When nobody did, they hunkered down and began hinting that maybe reinstating Abiola wasn't really so necessary after all.
The Clinton administration's cave stemmed partly from pressure from oil companies that make money in Nigeria. But there's more to it than that. The Nigerian government mounted a vigorous public relations effort in the U.S. And its apologists have asserted again and again that, while Nigeria has its problems, the country is figuring things out according to its own culture and that anything done under foreign pressure would be artificial and inauthentic. As Hoffman wrote in Foreign Policy in 1995: "The United States must be careful not to impose its notions of democracy on a country with traditions, objective conditions, and expectations that are markedly different from its own." The premise is that Nigerian culture is indivisible--you either respect it or you violate it. In this age of Samuel Huntington, the Nigerians have realized that invoking the clash of civilizations can drown out the sound of clashes within them.
The appeal of such rhetoric is that it sounds humble and restrained--the opposite of imperialist. Which makes it all the more important to remember that the language the Nigerian military employs to justify its oppression in Nigeria today is exactly the language the British used to justify their oppression a half-century ago. Multiculturalism isn't necessarily new and it isn't necessarily anti-imperialist. Sani Abacha, and his military successor Abdulsalam Abubakar, are walking in the footsteps of Lord Lugard. It's time the Clinton administration took up the path of Aminu Kano.
June 2002