#NigeriaInConflict | #ForgottenWitnesses
Don Kenobi:
You think you know your country. Then you realise you’ve visited less than a quarter of its states...
You think you know the world....
So how is it that you know next to nothing about your own country?
Or of those who loved her passionately before you?
Those to whom no plaques or monuments in their honour doth stand?This book, Nigeria in Conflict, was written by one of such men.
A book every Nigerian should buy — and read.
Why This Matters: You’ve probably never heard of Dr. Robert Collis - but here was a man who helped build the very foundations of medical education in Nigeria —Ibadan, Lagos, Zaria — and yet, he remains largely forgotten.
He saw our leaders up close, our fractures before the fall, our early promise and our lingering curse.
To read him is to rediscover Nigeria through a foreigner’s eyes —
and perhaps, see her more truthfully than ever before.
From the Author’s Preface – Dr. Robert Collis
“I came to Nigeria in 1957 to help start the new medical school at Ibadan as Head of the Paediatric Department.
Later I formed the Institute of Child Health with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation and the United Africa Company,
establishing a centre for nutrition research at Ibadan and clinical branches in the regions.”
“After Independence, I was asked by my old pupil, Dr. Majekodunmi, then Federal Minister of Health under Prime Minister Balewa,
to come to Lagos and help set up another medical school. Later, during the Nigerian troubles,
Ishaya Audu — once associate professor in my department and now Vice Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University —
asked me to come north and help him start yet another medical school in that vast region,
as big as France, home to thirty million people.”
“He felt that Nigerian medical schools were turning out first-class doctors by Western standards
— but not men oriented to work for their own people in the primitive conditions prevailing across much of the country.”
On the Mission
“Again I accepted, and we began designing a new curriculum —
one that would produce doctors equal in standard to any in the world,
yet far more capable of handling the realities of Nigerian medicine.”
“During these years I became the senior children’s doctor in the country —
really in the whole of the West African coastal area —
and as a result, I was asked to see the children of many leading Nigerians:
Balewa, Awolowo, General Ironsi, the Emir of Katsina, and others.”
“This gave me an exceptional view of their personalities.
When a father brings you a sick child — particularly a very ill one —
the façade falls away, and you see the man as he truly is.”
A Doctor’s Nigeria
“After some years, I wrote A Doctor’s Nigeria,
published in London and in New York under the title African Encounter,
describing the country as it was before Independence.”
“In writing it, I travelled across the regions —
meeting leaders, observing the tribes,
and in a chapter called ‘The Cruel God’,
I drew attention to the ancient worship of a cruel face of God
— the old forest cults of the Bight of Benin —
and the latent cruelty and violence that sometimes erupted in our collective history.”
Inside Nigeria
“I can claim to have got ‘inside’ Nigeria —
to have seen the true facts leading to the civil war.
I’ve written without propaganda, party, or tribal loyalty.
The facts may shock those blinded by the extraordinarily efficient Biafran propaganda machine.
But I am a doctor, not a politician.
I belong to no party, no tribe, no region.
Except in health, I have no axe to grind.
My only endeavour is to tell the truth.”
— Robert Collis, Nigeria in Conflict (Secker & Warburg, London, 1970)
Excerpts (Robert Collis)
Here it is with more, shorter paragraphs for easy reading (text unchanged, only line breaks added):
I came to Nigeria in 1957 to help start the new medical school at Ibadan as Head of the paediatric department.
Later I formed the Institute of Child Health with the help of the Rockefeller foundation and the United Africa Company, establishing a centre for nutrition research at Ibadan and clinical branches in the regions.
After Independence I was asked by my old pupil, Dr Majekodunmi, who had become Federal Minister of Health in Prime Minister Balewa’s Government, to come to Lagos and help him set up another medical school there.
Later still, during the Nigerian troubles, Ishaya Audu who had been associate professor in my department in Lagos and who now had become Vice Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello university at Zaria in the North, had asked me to come and help him set up yet another medical school in the vast Northern area, as big as France, and containing 30 million people.
He felt that so fat the Nigerian medical schools had tended to turn out first class doctors on the standards of developed countries but not men oriented to work for their own people in the primitive conditions prevailing in large areas of the country.
Again I accepted and we have been working on a new curriculum which we hope will turn out as good a standard of doctors anywhere in the world, but also men whose practical knowledge of dealing with conditions in Nigeria and all sorts of medical emergencies will be far superior to those turned out by other medical schools.
During these years I became the senior children’s doctor in the country, really in the whole of the West African Coastal area, and in consequence I was asked to see the children of most of the leading Nigerians such as Balewa, Awolowo, General Ironsi, the Emir of Katsina and many others.
This gave me an exceptional view of their personalities.
When a father brings you one of his sick children, particularly when they are very ill, your relationship with him is very close and it is possible as a rule to see through the façade that most men carry in everyday life.
Also as a professor in the Universities, I got to know all the leading Nigerians in the academic world, such as vice chancellors Dike and Njoku and professor Joe Edozien, Dean of the Ibadan Medical School (all Ibos), as well s Professor Thomas (Mid-West), provost of the Lagos Medical School, and a host of young men rising rapidly in the medical world, like Professor Koye Ransome Kuti.
After some three years in Nigeria, I wrote a book A Doctors Nigeria, published by Secker & Warburg in London and under the title African Encounter by Scribner’s in New York, in which I described the country as it was under the British Raj before independence.
In writing that work I travelled all over the country, getting to know the differences between the tribes and meeting most of the Nigerian leaders at that time.
In the final section of the book where I was analysing the underlying tensions in the country, I drew attention in a chapter called ‘The Cruel God’ to the worship of the cruel face of God practised widely in the past by the forest peoples of the Bight of Benin.
This included human sacrifice on a gigantic scale, indicating a subconscious tendency to cruel violence in the peoples of that area which as we have seen lately in other parts of the world may prove the percusor of cruelty, violence and hatred by one section of mankind against the other.
Indeed I can claim during these years to have got ‘inside’ Nigeria and to be in a position to know the true facts which led up to the Nigerian civil war.
I have tried in these pages to give a true picture of the events, which I have witnessed here, uninfluenced by propaganda, party or tribe.
The facts, which I describe here, may come as a shock to some people who have been blinded by the extraordinarily efficient Biafran Propaganda machine.
The facts I describe and the conclusions I have drawn are those of a doctor.
I have no axeto grind or future career to build up in Nigeria.
I belong to no Party, I am the supporter of no Nigerian Tribe or Region.
Except in health matters, which I have studied carefully and feel deeply about, I am not myself involved in the Nigerian Troubles and my only endeavour in this work is to present the truth.
Robert Collis
Page 17
“…From the beginning of the new hospital, there was a great deal of friction between Heads of departments and indeed everybody else.
This was partly due to the climate and partly due to the fact that the staff were drawn from many different medical schools all over Great Britain and Ireland and in consequence had different approaches to medicine, different loyalties.
Some of the rivalries were very petty but made life uncomfortable all round.
Then there was at that time, an undercurrent of friction between the Nigerians and the expatriates.
The Nigerians felt they were not allowed to advance to high positions fast enough, while the expatriates were equally subjective, fearing the loss of their own positions and putting forward arguments for maintaining themselves at the top, such as the paramount necessity ‘to maintain standards’.
I thought I had come to help the Nigerians create a University Medical School for themselves but sometimes, it seemed to me, I was helping to maintain a group of young expatriates in positions which they would be unable to sustain at home.
When I showed rather more sympathy for the young Nigerian doctors in their difficulties than for their expatriate colleagues, I was accused of being ‘pro-African’.
The paediatric department consisted of a very high-powered group of young paediatricians.
The senior lecturer (just appointed) was an Englishman belonging to the middle class whose general attitude to life is perfectly described by a heading in one of the English papers at the time concerning the strike of the crews of the cross-Channel packet boats: — ‘Continent Isolated’.
The other lecturer, a South African, who had been classified as coloured although he looked like any other South African of Dutch extraction, was a brilliant young doctor of great promise.
There were two lady doctors, one a New Zealander, plump and very good looking; the other English, tall, slender, and equally attractive.
The English girl was quite remarkable. She learned Yoruba, a feat that almost nobody else had succeeded in accomplishing.
She ran a notable clinic for the malnourished children of Ibadan with a patience and a love that will be remembered by the children she served all their lives.
Both these girls had recently passed the highest exams in London and hence I found myself in no easy position with this group whose knowledge of the latest advances in biochemistry and medical science exceeded mine and whose whole approach was different.
I had been trained to diagnose using my hands and ears. They would not make a diagnosis without a complete protocol of X-rays and half a dozen laboratory tests.
Even urines were sent down for routine examination instead of being tested in the wards.
This might be alright in London, I felt, but seemed very poor training for our young Nigerian doctors who would have to work in hospitals, possibly alone, certainly without these facilities.
At first, however, all went very smoothly. The new hospital was beautiful to work in and there was time to think.
But soon the mothers of the Ibadan children found us out.
The parents of the thousands of sick children in the old town heard of the new beautiful university hospital clinic and began to come in large numbers.
Soon the general practice clinic, the casualty department and every one of our paediatric clinics were crowded to the doors.
Mothers began to arrive at 4 a.m. so as to be first in the queue with their desperately sick children.
So far we had only one children’s ward open. It soon became like a casualty clearing station; children died on the way to our clinics, in them, on the stairs and in the ward.
We had to clear cases out so as to get beds for those sicker still.
Often we sent them out too soon and they came back dying.
The frustration of the situation was awful.
We were supposed to be a Teaching hospital with high standards, including the right attitude to research, but we found ourselves treating an endless queue of children suffering and dying from diseases which need not have occurred — and were completely powerless to do anything intelligent about it except sit in the growing heat of the day in a stifling outpatient department.
Only one thing sustained us all: the entrancing beauty of the Nigerian children, their complete acceptance of us as their saviours and friends, and the trust of their mothers.
I remember once coming into the ward of the senior lecturer late one afternoon.
As a rule his cold, deprecating, rather disapproving manner irritated me.
Now I saw him sitting at the table in the centre of the ward with one small black person at his knee, surrounded by a group of others.
Gone was the tension in his face. It shone with a simple gladness.
During my first year at Ibadan one day a young man, a houseman in one of the other departments, came to me as I was leaning on the rail at the edge of the balcony of the third floor, where the paediatric department was housed.
He was slender, not very tall, and his face was youthful but possessed strength; his gaze was direct.
‘I want to be a children’s doctor and become a paediatrician,’ he said.
He told me he came from Zaria in the North, that he had been educated at the Yaba higher college, Lagos, at Ibadan University, and done his clinical medical work in my old school, Kings College Hospital, in London.
We discussed ways and means while we gazed out across the courtyard below at the most splendid flame tree whose mass of crimson blossoms excited the mind.
He said that he must get the coveted membership of one of the Royal Colleges of Physicians, and that as he realised that the examination would be largely in adult medicine, he had decided to concentrate on Medicine first.
When this was accomplished he would then like to work under me.
As he spoke I looked at the young man before me and felt in the presence of a personality whose manner was a most unusual mixture of humility and strength.
He said that he was a Northern Hausa and that his father had been the first Christian in Zaria.
I realised that here was a young man of complete integrity and a very high degree of intelligence, which was activated by a driving force, founded on vitality.
Naturally I promised him my full co-operation and a place in my department as soon as he was ready.
This was the first time I met Ishaya Audu, who was later to become Vice-Chancellor of the Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, and one of the leaders of the new Nigeria….
Page 22
I have described my Nigerian travels elsewhere and will only say now, looking back, that in the years before independence I found Nigerians of all tribes warmhearted people capable of the highest and lowest human qualities.
Generally it was the contrasts which surprised me most.
At one moment, you would be discussing modern science or economics with a group of erudite men from the North, East or West in exactly the same way as you would be in Boston or Dublin; at the next, you found yourself in the middle ages trying to explain to a closed mind that cows’ urine fermented with tobacco leaves, or the burning off of the soles of the feet in the fire, were the wrong treatment for feverish convulsions.
One day you would be living exactly as anywhere in the civilised world, and the next perhaps visiting a tribe whose women wore no clothes at all.
What stood out most of all was the passion of the people to learn — particularly in the South, and very particularly in the Eastern Region.
Here there seemed to be a school every five miles.
I learned, too, the devastating effect of the damp heat on human energy which, when combined with recurring fever, devitalises to such an extent that the work potential of everybody from the university professor to the messenger is reduced, or shall we say, cannot be sustained for more than a limited period during any one day.
Hence it is quite useless to compare work standards in, say, Belfast and Port Harcourt.
Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from the journeys in Nigeria was that it is an entirely artificial country born out of the womb of an international Western conference.
It did not consist of a geographical or ethnological area.
History had not welded its tribes into one national group.
The average villager in Nigeria cannot be regarded as a Nigerian first and a member of his tribe second.
Indeed, his immediate family holds almost all his loyalty, his tribe comes next, and the idea of being a Nigerian national comes very much third.
During this period, I met a number of the most notable men in Nigeria.
Each of these leaders spoke to me with great candour.
Balewa, sitting in his mother's house in Bauchi (he had just become Prime Minister), spoke of the desperate job it was going to be, when the British left, to hold the country together.
He spoke of the need for a strong Federal Government and obviously feared the power of tribalism in the regions, which might undermine all attempts to produce a unified country.
He spoke with calm dignity, but even then I wondered if he had the strength — mental or physical — to last out the course before him.
I only met Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, once.
On the occasion when I saw him, he was visiting the teaching hospital at Lagos and came to my children's department.
Here I was introduced to him and we walked together along the splendid corridor connecting the various wards.
He was a big man physically and mentally, emanating an aura of boundless vitality.
He was some six feet tall with a magnificent headdress of the turban and chin-covering variety made of silk, and dressed in flowing robes down to his feet.
He spoke cultivated English and talked to me in a manner which made me feel at ease — and in the presence of a leader of society who was interested in my subject and knew what he was talking about in a more instructed and intelligent way than the usual great personage of hereditary breeding or leadership.
Since then I have heard many varying accounts of his exceptional powers of work, his feudal conservative Moslem beliefs, his pride and his bravery — not to speak of different stories of his assassination.
When I met Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, then Premier of the Eastern Region (later to become President of the Federation), he exhibited his well-known charm, but even this, and all his tact, were unable to disguise his antagonism to the other Southern leader, Chief Awolowo.
Was this just Ibo versus Yoruba, or was there something else — deeper, more personal?
I wondered at the time.
Later, when I saw a certain amount of Awolowo and his family, I began to understand that he and Azikiwe were incompatible — each with a mind held closed against the other, almost for fear of losing their own confidence in the rightness of the course each had embarked upon.
On one occasion only I talked with Awolowo on political matters in his house at Ibadan.
He spoke for nearly an hour of his political plans.
His extraordinary confidence was perhaps the most lasting impression I gained from this talk.
He believed he had around him a group of men not only capable of governing the Western Region, but the country as a whole.
He honestly seemed to believe that he could win the Federal general election.
I knew very little about the internal politics of Nigeria at that time, but I noted his overwhelming belief in himself and his party which even then didn't seem justified, as two and two do not make five — and the fact that his supporters were in the minority in the country was obvious even to a newcomer like myself.
I also noticed that while he spoke to me, a number of big men made bigger by their flowing agbada robes, lounged in and out of his sitting room, sat down in armchairs, nodded to the Chief, called for drinks, ignored my presence — behaved, in fact, like members of a close society.
“Perhaps a little like gangsters in an American film,” I noted in my diary.
He was quite charming to me, and I find it hard now, in spite of the Lagos High Court which tried him in 1963, to believe in his treason plot that landed him in gaol.
At that time, the Western and Eastern Regions were already self-governing.
That is to say, the Yorubas and the Ibos were in charge of their own affairs, and the British Governor was no longer responsible for acting in matters of policy on the advice of his mainly British advisers, but now on the advice of his Western or Eastern Ministers.
At the same time, the regional civil services were being rapidly Africanised, though the system of Government as it had been evolved in the British colonies was not changed economically or in any other fundamental way — only a new set of Nigerian civil masters took the place of the previous British masters.
In other words, the colonial method of government continued — the main difference being that the new Nigerian masters had not been taught the essential rules of a governing class (in England, by cricket at their public schools) — and consequently, almost immediately turned from the path of disinterested public service to that of private gain.
As yet, however, I was too new in Africa to appreciate this danger and, as an Irishman, I welcomed what appeared to be the end of British colonial rule, imagining that what I saw in Ibadan, the regional capital of the wealthy Western Region with its tens of million pounds of reserves in the Cocoa Marketing Board, was the birth of a new national group within a bigger national federation.
Only in health matters I was already disillusioned.
In this field, I was able to see through the sham and realise immediately that if anything, the health services were worse under Nigerian directors than under British.
There was the same dead hand in the Ministry of Health — the in-tray and the out-tray.
The titles might have changed, but the hierarchy was just the same.
Everything was run centrally through the “correct channels.”
Indeed, the new Nigerian medical hierarchy seemed to find the colonial methods of delay ideal for their need to cover up their own deficiency and those of the medical services in general.
What surprised me most, however, was the complete lack of initiative in the new Nigerian medical directors, Ministers of Health as well as their civil servants.
It was obvious to anybody with the slightest sensitivity that the health services for the poor were almost non-existent — that their sufferings were frightful, particularly the children, who were dying in thousands of diseases which were preventable and curable.
These men had received their training in countries which had evolved proper medical services for everybody, rich and poor alike.
They had seen what modern medicine could do — but they were content to sit in their offices and simply follow out the routine of the old discredited colonial system themselves, without even trying to make a proper health plan for the future.
It soon became apparent to me that it was a waste of time trying to influence those in charge of the health care services in the Western Region to do anything to relieve the appalling suffering and death occurring daily among the children of the poor Yorubas.
From what I saw of the other Regions on my travels around the country, the same held there, though at this particular time, the Northern Region had not yet obtained Regional independence and the medical services there were still colonial and manned by expatriates.
NIGERIA IN CONFLICT — Robert Collis (1970, Secker & Warburg, London)
