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Palm Oil & Slaves. A steaming chunk of West Africa, Nigeria's topography ranges from mangrove thickets, lagoons and rain forests in the south to lofty plateaus and arid plains in the north. Leader of the north's Moslems is proud, turbaned Sir Ahmadu Bello, whose religious title is the Sardauna of Sokoto. Eight years ago the Sardauna sent able Abubakar to Lagos as his agent because the Sardauna himself felt he had more important things to do at home among the Hausa and Fulani tribesmen. Only its huge (18 million) population and sprawling area (three-fourths of the country) provide the relatively backward north with its titular balance of power in Nigeria's loose federation over the two big tribes of the more advanced south, the solid Yoruba town dwellers of the West ern Region and the flamboyant, aggressive Ibo in the rural east, who encountered the civilizing influence of Europe at an early date.
First the Portuguese, then the Dutch, Danes and British moved in to start the scramble for pepper, ivory, palm oil and slaves. It was the British who remained, represented by ship captains, merchants and the "palm-oil ruffians," who trudged upcountry through swarms of mosquitoes, dropping off bags of cowrie shells and cases of cheap gin as payment to local chiefs who agreed to fill metal drums with palm oil and send them floating downstream to the coast. More whites died than lived, and for generations the place was considered uninhabitable for Europeans. The Governor's residence in Lagos, wrote a visitor in 1863, was little more than a "corrugated iron coffin," for at that time the consuls were dying at the rate of one a year.
TV in the Slums. "Our greatest ally was the mosquito, for it kept the white man away," cracks Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Yoruba leader and spokesman for the Western Region in the opposition's front bench in the federal Parliament. Today, only some 14,000 whites live in the entire country, and in such cities as the west's Ibadan (pop. 500,000), with its bright new university just outside the town's sea of tin-roofed shacks, or the north's ancient, fabled Keno (pop. 130,000), a non-Nigerian is seldom seen, although the health perils and discomforts have largely disappeared. In Lagos (pop. 350,000), the federation's coastal capital, even the poor wear bright nylon shirts and drink cold beer at dingy slum dives that boast gleaming refrigerators and blaring radios, while a few miles away, ragged Yoruba villagers live in huts and chop the soil with primitive wooden hoes.
Nigeria is not only the most populous but is on the way to becoming the richest of the new African states. Tarred roads connect all the major towns. Ibadan has the first TV station in Africa; Enugu (pop. 63,000), bustling capital of the Eastern Region, Zik's center of power, will soon inaugurate a TV station of its own, and a new university nearby is ready for students. Revenue from palm oil and kernels, cocoa and peanuts already has boosted exports to $460 million a year; to reduce the overwhelming dependence on agriculture, Sir Abubakar's men hope to develop iron ore, lead and zinc deposits, even talk of building a steel mill to supply West Africa's needs. Oil already pours out of Shell's wells along the Niger River delta, and the flow of Nigerian crude may reach 500,000 bbl. a day by 1970.