Colonial Youth, 1915–1938

Abstract

Gabriel¹ Kingsley Ozuomba Mbadiwe was born on March 15, 1915,² in the village of Oneh, Orumba local government, in the present-day Imo state, part of the Igbo heartland. This was only a year after British imperialism had created a new political unit called the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, in which he was to become a major, dynamic political actor until his death in August 1990. But in 1915 few Africans in Nigeria knew about or cared for this artificial British administrative superstructure.³ The single most important factor determining the boundaries of Nigeria had been the competition between the British and two other European powers—France and Germany—in their scramble for African territory. Certainly, the British considered Nigeria one of its prized possessions: It was easily the largest and most populous of its African colonies. As yet, however, the loyalties of the peoples of Nigeria were firmly centered on the villages, clans, and ethnic groups, and, at most, extended to the traditional states. Indeed, among Nigeria’s 250 major cultural/linguistic groups, there had been, traditionally, serious external as well internal conflicts. This had certainly been the case with the three largest ethnic groups, the Hausas, the Yorubas, and the Igbos, which dominated, respectively, the north, the southwest, and the southeast of Nigeria.