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A Matter of Chance. The man who rules Nigeria today is two years older than his country. He was born simply Abubakar, the child of Yakubu, a minor official in the regime of the emir of Bauchi. (According to northern custom, he later added to his given name that of his village—Tafawa Balewa.) Though Abubakar was not of the mighty Fulani—his family belonged to the Geri tribe—his father's position won him the rare privilege of schooling in a region almost totally illiterate. After secondary school he was even able to get into Katsina Teachers' Training College, normally open only to sons of the northern feudal elite.
Armed with his rare education, Abubakar returned to the windswept Bauchi Plateau and settled down on the staff of a Boys Middle School; he was a born teacher, and might have spent his life there except for a chance remark by a friend, who said that no northern Nigerian had ever passed the examination for a Senior Teacher's Certificate. Piqued by this reflection on northern intelligence, Abubakar took the exam and, to the astonishment of southern colleagues, passed it with ease. Impressed, London University's Institute of Education granted him a scholarship in 1945.
Ferment at Home. Uninterested in politics, Abubakar stuck to his books, never met such hot-eyed young nationalists as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, who were also in London then. When the BBC sought a Nigerian to read Nigeria's new 1946 constitution on its overseas service, Abubakar willingly took the job but had, he later confessed, not the slightest idea what the document he had read was all about.
Back home, there were plenty of noisy young men who did. Noisiest was the flamboyant Nnamde ("Zik") Azikiwe, a nimble Ibo spellbinder who had spent nine years in the U.S. working as a coal miner, professional boxer and gatherer of university degrees (Lincoln University, the University of Pennsylvania). Returning home, he became the loudest advocate of an independent, united Nigeria. Under the rising pressure, the British agreed to set up—as "advisory" bodies only—local Houses of Assembly in all three regions, plus a federal legislative council.
A Mere Intention. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was hardly back from his year in London when the northern emirs, suddenly confronted with the need to find literate occupants for the northern seats in the federal assembly, pressed him into service. Like the emirs themselves, Abubakar started off with the fear that in a unified Nigeria the backward North itself would be swamped by the vigorous, better educated South. "Nigerian unity," he told the assembly, "is only a British intention for the country. It is artificial, and ends outside this chamber!"
With Zik & Co. sowing the seeds of rebellion in the South, the days of British rule in Nigeria were clearly numbered. But at conference after conference, the bemused British could only sit apart and smile as the Africans themselves delayed independence by interregional quibbling. Not until 1951 did the shape of the ultimate solution begin to appear: in return for accepting a federal legislature with real power, the North would get as many seats as the East and West combined.