Escape From (And Return To) Nigeria

Recently, I went a talk at Princeton University by Bob Criso, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria during the 1960s. In the fall of 2008 he had returned to Nigeria with a group of other former Peace Corps volunteers.

My mother had written an article about him for the local paper and wanted to go see him talk.

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and in many ways serves as a microcosm for the continent’s problems. A former British colony, the country is split into three main tribal groups, the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the West, and the Igbo in the East. Beyond that, there are hundreds of other smaller tribal groups throughout the country. The Hausa-Fulani are Muslim and adhere to shariah law, which creates conflict for the non-Muslims living in their area. Nigeria won its independence in 1961, but the government has been incredibly unstable resulting in a series of coups throughout its relatively short history. The geography runs the gamut from a tropical coast to savannah to desert in the north. The capital has been moved to Abuja, a city in the middle of the country, from the former capital of Lagos, which was on the coast, in order to promote more unity in the country.

Criso arrived in Nigeria in May of 1966. He lived in a small mud-hut Igbo village named Ishiago with no running water or electricity. He taught at a boarding school established like Irish missionaries. He also built the school library, headed a chicken raising project, and marketed pottery. Many of the students at his school were very bright and won scholarships to study abroad. Criso described his village as remote, but not primitive, noting particularly the sophisticated pottery.

Criso was in Nigeria when the Nigerian Civil War broke out. After the Igbos seized power in the central government, random violence and killing broke out against them in the northern part of the country. Seeking safety, Igbos throughout the country flooded back to their homeland in the east carrying horrible tales of pregnant women being cut open and hacked up bodies. The Peace Corps volunteers and the Africans kept track of what was going by using transistor radios to listen to the BBC (no domestic source of news was reliable). The Hausa students at Criso’s school had to be snuck out of the village so that they wouldn’t be killed.

One day, while Criso was teaching class, two jeeps pulled up the school and told him that the school would be shut down and that the students must return to their villages to be conscripted into the army. At that point, many Peace Corps volunteers had the left the country and the Peace Corps had given Criso a van to pick up five people and told him that if their was ever trouble he should wait for instructions. At that point he droved to a town 35 miles away where there were two other volunteers and on the way he realized that there must be a war going on. He encountered roadblocks manned with militiamen with machetes who were especially suspicious of whites. The eastern part of Nigeria had seceded and became the country of Biafra.

Criso succeeded in getting to the town where he was headed, but he could not go any further, so he picked up the two volunteers and brought them back to his house. When he returned a mob surrounded his house and two men came to the front door and questioned him about the other volunteers. They were particularly suspicious of one of the volunteers, and African American woman, because she was black, but not Igbo. When they asked to search the house Criso refused them and some men rolled a 50 gallon drum of kerosene under his house (the house was built on stilts to protect it from flooding).

At that point an elder in the village stood up on a tree stump to defend Criso and his fellow Peace Corps volunteers. Due to that and a heavy rain falling the crowd thinned out, although people still remained.

Three teachers from the school where Criso had taught came to the house to apologize for what was going on. They helped get the two other Peace Corps volunteers, who were terrified out of their minds, onto a train to get away.

The next day Biafran troops showed up to his house. Together they picked up a Peace Corps nurse. Criso remembers being shot at, at one roadblock. Eventually they got to the coast and were evacuated on the final boat of evacuees leaving Nigeria. Criso explained that his time in Nigeria had been a great experience, and that it had been very disappointing that one day a jeep showed up and it was over. He never had a chance to say goodbye to the friends he made their and he left all the African art he had collected and his personal photos behind. He spent 40 or so years yearning to go back.

In 2008 he finally got a chance to return. A group of Peace Corps volunteers who had served in Nigeria (all in the time of the Civil War, because that was the only time when the Peace Corps operated in Nigeria) flew into Lagos and traveled the county with armed guards. The groups met with tribal leaders of the three main tribes.

Nigeria is a country with almost no infrastructure. There is a lot of corruption and leaders put their money into Swiss banks instead of investing it in their own country. The North tends to be in better shape than the rest of the country, because they are in power. They group encountered no other tourists during their trip. Trains don’t run because of neglect and disrepair.

When they met with the Emir of Kano, in the north, there was an elaborate ordeal. The traditions went back hundreds of years with chanting and fancy clothing and lots of fanfare. There was a lot of opulence among the traditional leaders, especially thanks to the tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue (Nigeria is a member of OPEC). This hugely contrasted the poverty of the ordinary people. There were piles of garbage all over. Criso noted that this was different from the sixties, where, although people had been poor, the poverty hadn’t been so crippling. Many of the schools in the country have deteriorated, which was particularly disheartening to the Peace Corps volunteers who worked so with them.

The trip happened around the time of the American presidential election (the election actually occurred while they were there. The Nigerian people were very excited about President Obama. One of the volunteers had brought Obama bumper stickers, which were very popular items with the Nigerians. One man remarked that McCain might be a good man, but that he wanted to lead America and that Obama could lead the world.

Criso’s trip back to Ishiago was very emotional for him and proved to him the value of his work during his time in the Peace Corps. The town was a very different place from what he had left. There was a new paved road, it had tripled inside, there was a three story hotel, electricity, and a gas station. When he tried to find the school where he had taught, nobody knew where it was. However, finally he found the school, which had been transformed into a federal agricultural college. The guards would not let him inside, but when he explained who he was, somebody mentioned that they knew a student who had gone to the school. It happened to be a student that Criso remembered very well. Immediately, Fabian, his former student came to meet him, embraced him warmly, and started calling his fellow classmates, telling them about their former teacher’s return. Unfortunately, though, most of the students had been killed during the war. Some managed to survive the army, though, and others hid in the brush for three years.

One thing that this lecture made me wonder is why Africans had kept the arbitrary European boundaries when they declared their independence, instead of redrawing countries on tribal lines. Criso explained to me that a huge problem is that a great deal of the oil revenue came from Biafra. He also noted that the only ethnically homogenous country in Africa, Somalia, has some of the worst problem of civil war on the continent.

However, I’m still not convinced that there wasn’t a better way to divide Africa (or the Middle East for that matter) that wasn’t the arbitrary borders drawn by Europeans. On the other hand, now I have wrestle with the fact that dividing the countries by tribe wouldn’t work, either.