Abstract
This paper exams the relationships between colonial and post-colonial India and Nigeria before and after her independence from Britain, especially in the sphere of politics and economics, and contrasts these with the experiences and contexts of the Far East Asian countries. It sees Africa’s relationship with emerging Asian countries as structurally the same, especially in the field of the economy, but different and unique in the spheres of exchange of ideas and culture; and, that there are lessons regarding Nigeria’s, nay Africa’s, development possibilities theoretically and practically that could be gained. This paper focuses on these interactions, relations and exchanges and their impact, lessons and potentials. It argues that India had since the turn of the twentieth century been an exemplar for Nigeria in the spheres of politics and the economy in a number of ways, notably anti-colonialism, post-colonial identitarian politics and non-alignment, socialist or nativist illiberality, et cetera; and that this contrasts with the Far East’s developmentarian liberality in the sphere of the economy and relatively less identitarian politics with attendant results in terms of accomplishments in the fields of development.
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Notes
- 1.
I should say, though, Azikiwe did not have the asceticism and renunciation that was associated with Gandhi and which he weaponised and deployed against the British in the form of hunger strikes to raise public awareness and force the British to change policies.
- 2.
Nigeria joined NAM in 1964, three years after it was formed in 1961; within ten years of its formation (which approximates the decade of independence in Africa), some thirty-six African states joined the NAM.
- 3.
Numerous Nigerian military officers were sent to India for training. In a sense, this movement to India was a factor in the failure of the first coup in Nigeria in January, 1966 (see Ademoyega 1981: 64 and 69). The NAM nations were engaged in as many bilateral and multilateral relations (South-South relations) as they could muster as a counterpoint to relations with former colonial powers. The military was a sphere in which self-reliance (of the South) was highly desirable.
- 4.
A good example of this nativist illiberality can be seen in Patrice Lumumba’s impromptu and unscheduled speech against the King of Belgium in the Independence Day celebrations of Congo. Lumumba, being the Prime Minister, was not supposed or scheduled to respond to the address of the Belgian King, according to protocol. The King, however, had given a speech in which he lauded the contributions of the Belgians to the making of Congo and called for collaboration between the two states in the post-colonial era. Lumumba immediately intervened before the President of Congo, Mr. Joseph Kasa Vubu, could give his response, and gave a speech rebuking the Belgian King that was widely interpreted as insulting given the context. His speech recounted the racisms, oppressions, brutalities, deaths, exploitations, etc., that the Belgians had visited on the Congolese, which the Congolese, after much suffering and death would happily be free of. The Belgians from the speech were not a force for civilisation, as claimed by the King, but a retrogressive force (see “Democratic Republic of the Congo: Marred”, The Guardian, July 1, 1960). The Belgian King left the scene immediately in fury and the ceremony derailed, though not permanently; the King was persuaded to rejoin the ceremony after about some two hours. This diplomatic gaffe indicated that Lumumba was most likely to see the levels of profit required to attract and keep Western capitalist investments, not as incentives to attract Western interests but as a continuation of Western capitalist, colonialist exploitations. Belgium, the USA and other Western powers went on to support the secessionist movement in mineral-rich Katanga province, against Lumumba, and through this group, killed him, after which civil war and the retrogressive Western-supported dictatorship of Mobuto followed. This happened to Lumumba because he had no powerful globally having declared that he was not a communist and hence having no binding alliance with the Soviet Bloc. India was not strong enough to come to his rescue.
- 5.
Yin and Yang are inseparable Taoist principles that underlie all change in the universe. Yin is negative (female) and Yang is positive (male); the one dovetails into the other. With these, any given change is seen as a transition from negative to positive or vice versa. Further, things do not remain forever positive or negative; they would always transit from negative to positive and back again. This sort of thinking can readily enable one to realise that states, causes, events, ideas, etc. do not remain intrinsically negative or positive but transit from one of these states to the other in their total effects in given situations. There are, of course, African ideas that encourage changes in thought and orientation as circumstances change, such as the Igbo adage “aroyalia egwu, aroyalia akwa”, literally, “when the music tunes and choreography change, the costumes of the dancers change”. Such ideas, however, do not have the status of fundamental philosophical principles that characterise reality generally as the Yin-Yang, and so are likely to be less impactful on behaviour and agency.
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Agbakoba, J.C.A. (2020). Indian Influence on Nigeria’s Development: Challenges, Lessons and Possibilities. In: Anthony, R., Ruppert, U. (eds) Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_5
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