4 - Political and Economic Change in the War Years and after, 1939-49

Summary

The 1940's were a most eventful decade for Potts-Johnson and the Saro of Port Harcourt. Not only did the immigrant community witness a major global conflict with significant ramifications for township life, it began also to experience major transformations in its station as strangers in a Nigerian territory soon to be engulfed in major nationalist activity. Stranger status came under increasing assault and intense scrutiny, and profound questions regarding the longterm residence of nonNigerians in a politically independent territory began to be raised with a disturbing regularity. Before we review these significant developments, we must, however, set the Port Harcourt scene within the larger territorial context of the 1940's.

World War II was indeed a transformative experience of radical proportions for the people of Nigeria, and relations between the educated elite and the British officials would be profoundly altered by the territorial developments of these years. In West Africa generally, the aforementioned Youth Movements would progressively yield space to much larger and more diversified political groupings, which became the nationalist parties that led the challenge for independence. By 1941, the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) was swamped in a crisis of ethnic competition over the replacement of Dr. K. A. Abayomi, who had recently resigned from the Legislative Council. Ijaw and Yoruba factions, and their respective allies within the movement, were sharply polarised by this debate. The eventual selection of Ernest Ikoli, an Ijaw, as Abayomi's successor, led ultimately to the collapse of the NYM. The seeds of ethnic competition which would bedevil Nigeria's political development in the future were clearly being sown in these activities. Now unencumbered by NYM politics, Nnamdi Azikiwe would exploit the conditions of austerity generated by the war, and the resultant general worker's strike of 1945, to further advance his national political credentials. The strike by employees demanding higher cost of living allowances in an inflationravaged Lagos, had come precisely two months after the publication of Governor Richard's constitutional proposals for the territory, and the introduction of the socalled “obnoxious ordinances” into the statutes. With scarcely any consultation with the African leadership, the Richards constitution was peremptorily introduced in 1947. It had the principal effect of incorporating Northern Nigeria into the Legislative Council, and instituting a system of regional advisory councils for the northern, eastern, and western provinces, under a very limited franchise that was certain to draw the ire of the educated elite.