Well, today, we are hosting Parisa of Inclusion and Selena Morton.
They will be speaking about their new book, An Expatriate Family in a Civil War.
Sally is publisher and head of Oxford Publishing Services.
She was educated at the University of Cape Town and she was arrested and in prison in place by every day African government.
She left, sadly, gang came to London, where she became the nearby Shinseki,
Okeechobee and Pantie Outputted and Tappet, her movement, where she met Robin.
She has also worked for the U.N. agency at Queen Elizabeth Hours, editing publications before seeking of power and fan excellent condition services.
Professor Cohen, he's currently a senior fellow at the centre Kellogg College of Thought.
He has taught at investors in it Berdahl by me, Hammarsten, hard to want to bet.
He's the author of several books, including Global Diaspora's An Introduction and Global Sociology.
So today we'll be talking about their new book, which is based on your experience in Imagine I I single.
Please join me in welcoming guest for today. So you're not.
I've been over to you. Well, thank you all very much for your introduction.
I have to admit to you that I thought it was going to be a book launch.
And what I think a book launch is that everybody gathers around with some wine and some money to buy cheap copies of the book.
And you have a nice party and you take it home and you read it.
Well, you did that to me as a book alone. This was very much more daunting.
I have to say, it's a first for me.
And I'd also like to thank Jemmy Alesina, who wrote the foreword and has been so supportive and so generous to us.
Jemmy is also from Ibadan and was one of Robert's students at one point this year, wasn't he?
Yeah. And he he we met him again when we were in South Africa recently, and that's where he's working now.
And the third person I'd like to thank is Leo Xining, for whom I once did it become Senegal, like years ago.
And to read, they helped focus.
He's posted several extracts from this book onto the Web site of the review of African political economy and has been awfully helpful in many ways.
Well, we had alluded to the books in his later two books.
Let me just quickly just display it for you. There it is.
And it's available on Amazon. Not that we want to give that wretched man, Jeff Bezos, more money than he already has.
I think he's got more money than half the countries in Africa put together.
But this is a good way of getting access to the book because it's available at least
on Kindle form all over the world and about in eleven countries to be printed.
And we've priced it at the minimum that Amazon would allow.
So you can tell us a little bit about the book and how it gets stolen.
Yes, well, it came into being because we came lock down and the first thing you think when you're
in lock down is maybe we should clear up some of those cupboards and file some drawers,
because I have we I live in particular fear that we going to drop dead and somebody is going to have to pay it all out.
So it started out with us looking through some stuff.
And I came across all these old letters from this period in our life in Nigeria.
And we thought, well, a lot of these are very interesting. They were about in a time that's long past.
It was 54 years ago that we went out. And the world is a very, very different place.
And people don't have letters anymore, don't write letters anymore.
So I thought that I would transcribe some of them.
So we had electronic versions and then we could throw out all the clutter.
And then this turned into a book which Robin and I wrote together or separately and together.
But some say it's a bit of a hotchpotch. It's very personal and it's also fairly analytical.
We're in the academic hasn't gotten his life, has done that here anyway.
So this was set fifty four years ago.
And Serena and I both had emerge out of South Africa and we were very engaged with the anti-apartheid movement in different ways.
But one, I was a student at the time at the NSC.
I was also very attracted to Pan Africanism and in particular the Nigerian and Ghana students that I had met.
They were fellow students, but in fact decided to do a PHC on the Nigerian labour movement, which was very active in 1964.
There was a big general strike and it looked as if there might be a turn to the left in Nigeria immediately after independence.
So that attracted me as a thesis topic. And I got very engaged in it, but both of us were very, I suppose,
close to the anti colonial movement and certainly into the and and anti written anti-racist movement, anti-apartheid movement.
And we decided to go out to do the research on my thesis, which was called something like Labour in Politics in Nigeria.
So I went, boy with that. That was eventually published as a book in 1972.
And you could look it up.
And if you which church leader and I set out on the elder Dempster line, which was the old fashioned way of doing West Africa,
the steam ships left from Lagos, Liverpool, got her away from Liverpool.
I had read she seemed to be the Hagar's. You could you could carry on seated, get into the wrong way, right?
Well, we sailed out. We went with some friends who were going as far as Ghana.
And one of them had a little baby, 10 week old baby.
And it got hotter and hotter and hotter. And we heard more and more rumours about what was happening in Nigeria.
And then we got to Ghana. And it seemed like just about everybody on the boat got off and left.
Carrying On2 to Lagos is sort of a ghost ship registry.
Really, like a ghost ship. Yes. And one of the stewards, somebody said to one of the stewards, you're looking very miserable.
And he said he was really, really worried about his friend, an Ebo steward who tried to get off in Ghana and they wouldn't let him.
And he was frightened that he was going to be shot and killed.
So I said, we can't have this. Let's go speak to the captain.
We were very young and very bossy and cheeky in those days.
And I remember going to see Captain Robert came with me.
And he said, we can't make these kind of concessions.
We have a good relationship with with the federal government.
And we can't we can't protect these people. And he didn't have to come anyway.
And I said, yes, but, you know, this is British territory and you've got to look after your crew.
And he said, well, I was in the war and it's not that bad being shot.
I said, well, I noticed you were shot anyway.
He came up as we were getting off the ship and he said he told me that they wouldn't be able to find him.
I don't know whether that's true or not, because we subsequently found out that people were shot, rounded up and shot.
But anyway, we got on the bus and we headed north in this very dusty road.
We were heading to the University of Ibadan, where I was about an hour's drive on Mars, the idea.
But I was heading north. I was attached to the Department of Political Science as a kind of research student, loosely affiliated.
That was the idea. And you actually thought you'd be.
Well, I needed to get a job. So we went to the institute. Yes.
I was expecting my first child there as well. And so I found a job at the Institute of African Studies and.
I was working there trying to transcribe some research, which was a comparison between your land and by here in cells, and it was to do with.
They were looking at the local religion and it was a very scratchy thing and it was quite a job.
But I've written a bit about some of the people in that centre and there was some fascinating characters there.
We used to have coffee every morning and get to know each other and get to gossip.
But it was while I was working at the Institute of African Studies that Ruth first turned up.
And we've devoted a whole chapter to Ruth first because she was an extraordinary person to have known and a very courageous and interesting person.
And she knew I was working there because of her association with anti-apartheid.
And I didn't really know her that well because she didn't suffer fools gladly.
So one kept one's counsel in her company and she would breeze in and she would breeze out.
And she was just so glamorous. She was impeccably dressed.
She had lovely shoes. She looked amazing.
Unlike her communist Trump. Yes, she had three pretty daughters.
And she had set up house in in London. And she had her parents living old Julius and Tinnie in the basement.
And I knew them a lot better than I did Ruth, because, oh, Julius used to come in and do the anti-apartheid accounts on a regular basis.
And so we knew him that way. But she suddenly turns up at the Institute of African Studies and said, look at my hair.
This is no place for a white woman. Can I come and live with you?
That's it. Okay. So she just moved in and knocked a dose of salts.
She and she was doing her research on a book she was writing called The Barrel of a Gun.
And she was wanting to do her research. And she was a very energetic.
She was extraordinary. And after supper every night,
we would sit down in our living room with its blue lino floor and its blue walls and the fan going around slowly stirring the hot air.
And she would move up every thing. Robert knew off of his head that she'd just interrogated him non-stop.
But we did become quite close to recession and we did get to know her very, very well.
And for the rest of her life, she had to. She became after that time.
She was a journalist and she was quite a high profile journalist on South Africa.
She made a documentary at the time called 117 Days, because she was arrested under that 180,
90 day, 90 day, and then it was nude in solitary confinement.
And she she made a documentary about that.
But and, of course, I suppose one should say, sadly, she was assassinated by the South African regime in a parcel bomb.
For those of you who didn't know the story when she was working in Mozambique. Yes.
Say it was a it was really a horror story at the end.
Oh, it's just that she made a terrific contribution to the anti-apartheid movement.
And, you know, I think we've said a little bit in the book about her, what she believed in, what she thought, how significant she had.
She wrote us a letter once and she said, you'd never believe my luck.
When I went to Sierra Leone, I would walk straight into a C o u p and she was so excited.
It all helped. Yeah. So well, anyway, well, Celina was at the Institute of African Studies, Ruth.
So I suppose stayed with us for a couple of months then. Yeah. And she did so decides that some came back and forth.
She went off to Lagos through a bit and she went up to the north. To the north.
And so, yes, I was then, as I said, a touch to the Department of Politics.
But as the war started to grind on, so that affected the department in a rather fundamental way for a start,
whenever a little bit of the former eastern region now called.
Biafra, the breakaway region, was liberated, quote unquote, by the federal government.
They would find somebody generally in our department to go and administer it.
So their first war, Poppy caeca, who was an equal guy, worked for our department, was when sent to administer one region and then Larry, a pebble.
Lawrence BIDU was then sent to another region near the Calabar, which had also been liberated.
And so the department, which I think should have numbered about eight or so people, was somewhat depleted.
And then very sadly, we lost a young chap the night life of me.
I can't remember his name. He'd only been there a couple of weeks and he was killed on the Lagos baton Regg, which was an absolutely nightmare.
A very, very scary read read. People just die by the dozens.
Had no accidents on it. I think it had something to do with the fact that we heard that lorry drivers were
putting brakes on the accelerator so they could cool their feet out the window.
And we did see well resolvable anyway.
So the point is that the problem of politics was much depleted and there they will be students eager as anything to be taught.
And so they decided or it was decided that I would have to adopt and forget about my research and teach the students.
Now, the person who made this decision was a chap called E you Essien.
And I asked him once, well, what is this EU stand for?
He said, well, is he a new rooms? So he was, you know, to me, see, too.
And he was a very distinguished Nigerian political scientist who had been educated, particularly in Chicago,
where he got very close to a larger Mohammed, who was the leader of the black Muslim community.
And he read this fascinating book. I'm going to flash it up on the screen now.
It's called Black Nationalism and the Rise and Fall of Black Muslims in the USA.
It was based on his very close, intimate awareness and relationship with this community and with this guy, Elijah Muhammad.
He was also the moment when he met his wife, who was very involved in the Black Power movement.
Her name was Ruby Maloney. And so they kind of drew us into their circle and one night invited Selena and me for a meal at their house.
And we couldn't quite figure out what this was about.
It seemed like a sort of unusual honour to be granted by him to these four junior people.
And then suddenly at the end of the meal, he said, well, you will have to lecture department.
And you could see that this was something that he was struggling a little bit with in his mind because perhaps he was a bit suspicious of us,
you know, did we where we are to, you know, bad, bad racial attitudes or whatever it was.
And he was reassured by that evening. So there we were.
We were taken into the department. I was teaching goodness knows how many courses history of political thought.
We used to call that from placatory NATO. We hit we then also also did something on comparative politics.
I was doing a comparison of India and France, Nigeria and goodness knows what else.
And I hardly knew anything about some of this material.
And so I used to race off to the library.
I didn't give a reading list to the students because sometimes they would beat me to the library and get the book
before I had a chance to read it and then rush back and say it was a great experience in learning how to speak and,
you know, without, you know, that much preparation. But I also wanted to just also highlight another very important figure in Nigeria at the time.
And that's Billy Dudley, who had an I think a Scottish father and a Nigerian mum.
And he was a very much the presence in the department then became property Nigeria's most distinguished political scientist afterwards.
At the time, he read the book, which I think was his P.H., gee, I'll again hold it up here so that people can see it.
It's called partisan politics in northern Nigeria. But in fact, he was from the Midwest.
He had good connexions in the Midwest and he was a real public intellectual.
He. He started a journal called Nigerian Opinion.
In fact, the very first almost my first publications were in Nigerian opinion was a kind of monthly or rather
erratically produced journal and new sort of a newspaper and used to be dished out in the street corners.
And that was great fun because, you know,
you got in touch with different elements of the community that you wouldn't really have met one way or another.
But Billy also was a little bit, what shall we say, daring in his personality.
So one day he persuaded me, I think. Against my better judgement, that we should go and have a look at the war front.
We were, of course, in the west here in Ibadan,
and we drove to the Midwest and sort of talk to soldiers and people much closer to where the war was happening.
And on the way back, it was at night.
For some reason, Billy decided we had to get back to Ibadan that evening and we had to pass from the local military commander,
which was good for a few miles for about 20 or 30 miles, because people knew who these guys were.
Guy was major so-and-so and he read the. They would read the pass and they would wave us through.
But then as we got further and further away from beneath him. So this chap's writ did not run and people didn't know who this commander was.
And I started getting more and more suspicious of us. And at one point got very angry and asked for my I.D., which I handed my passport to them.
And then the people at the roadblock, all state asked for Billy's I.D. and he said, well,
he didn't carry any I.D. because he was a Nigerian and because his mum was Nigerian and his dad was Scottish,
he was a bit lighter than most people in skin colour.
And they refused to believe that he was Nigerian and lined us up against the copper, seemed to be about to shoot us.
Fortunately, Billy spoke lots of pidgin and particularly worry pidgin, and it seemed to or calm down and we managed to get back to to Ibadan.
So that was our little experience. Would you want to say that a little bit about how the war affected us?
I think. Yes. Well, I mean, we didn't have actual fighting, you know, back when we were there.
But we did it did affect us in some ways in so far as they stopped or imports into Nigeria except for arms.
So we had a lot of difficulty getting supplies of things that we were used to.
They did have food, but they didn't have food. We were used to.
And it was quite different. I found it quite difficult to immigrate into Kingsway, which is a big departure.
Well, we went in to Kingsway and I was expecting this baby.
And so we went into Kingsway and I thought I'd kick myself out with the cradle and high chair and all the things you need for a baby.
And the only thing in the shop with is that was nothing else to shop for.
So we we had to get a local carpenter and he came along to our house.
People always coming to our house offering services. And he had support, Sears, Roebuck or some of the old catalogue, American American catalogue.
And he said you could make anything in the catalogue. So I selected a high chair and I selected a little rocking cradle.
And then shortly before the baby was due, these items arrived and the highchair was sort of all right.
It had an extra leg, which was just as well as suppose had five legs instead of all that gave it more stability.
But the cradle didn't rock. And Robin said very tactlessly about two weeks before our baby was due.
It looks like a coffin stretched for it. I got very upset.
So we have to decorate it. We decorated it.
We made a mobile to put above and. But that was so hard to sing.
And also the supplies of food was very difficult.
They didn't have butcher shops where you bought your meat packaged.
You have to go to the market and buy the life chicken. And I can't kill chickens.
I've never been able to. So. Oh, gosh.
It was just awful having to deal with it as well as snails.
You just couldn't find it very hard. I was very saddened when I came back and it was it was hard in that respect.
And there were lots and lots of roadblocks and there were also lots of rumours going around and people were quite scared.
And there was a there was a Swede who, funnily enough, I had met because in my earlier incarnation, I had gone to MU.
Work to demand most statue, Djata. And I had a cousin from Scotland who had married a Swede.
Swedish count. And they were in Maumee at the time and they used to entertain me and.
I remember meeting Count Fun Rosen at one of their parties to sort of.
And he joined the mercenary. He became a mercenary and was fighting on behalf of the Efron's.
Yeah. And then there were rumours that he had poisoned our water supply and things like that.
They were young. He had some, like, aircraft. Yes. And so he bombed the the Ibadan airport.
Yes. Yes. He was rumoured to have really believed it. I did.
Yes. Then he successfully knocked out a number of federal planes and other airports.
But it Ibadan Airport. All he did was kill a few cows.
I know the cows did wander onto the runway, but what they said was that what the rumour was,
that he had dropped some poisonous canisters into our water supply that they leili down just outside of that which fed us.
So for a while, we were sort of panicking and, you know, look at that, about three bottles of water in the fridge.
Yes, the water supplies were very erratic during the war. I don't care if they still are, but some.
One, two, three people said put the plug in the box and just leaves the tap on.
And then when the water comes on, you'll have a supply.
And as it was anyway, you had to boil the water for 20 minutes very vigorously and then put it through a filter.
So it was all quite a performance. They were a lot of water shortages.
But one New Year's Eve, we went to a party and we came back and the whole house was flooded.
Had a very good, thorough cleaning. We forgot we forgot to turn the tap off before we were docked and they gave us a New Year present of water.
Well, you were going to say a little bit about Randers birthday. Oh, yes. I had my baby there.
And that was big a big moment for me because it was my first child and it was quite an interesting experience.
I did say to that was actually a very good service at the University College Hospital.
Excellent service. Excellent, excellent obstetricians and people like that.
And we had a little clinic at a campus called the Georgia Clinic, which was run by Sandy.
Sandy boy, two good men of Africa. And he had his son.
I used to see his children come out from school and they used to roller skate around.
But his son became quite well-known, also called William Boyd.
And he was he he to run his campaign against rabies and things like that.
He was very good. And then there was also Shula Denny, whose father was the owner of a shop there, which was a very interesting case.
We'll tell you about in a moment. But anyway, on the day my due day, Miranda came and Robert took me and left me outside the hospital.
They wouldn't let him in. They didn't have fathers, wasn't a family affair.
And it was an awful day, I must say. The fourth of April, 1968 and when we came out.
Of the hospital, when I was being wheeled back off to giving birth to this exquisite child,
I thought the nurses were all crying and Martin Luther King had just been shot.
And they'd got the news. So my daughter has this feeling of an affinity with Martin Luther King.
And in fact, I'd seen him in London lecturing at Conway Hall.
I think it was. He came onto the stage with his whole family, was taken aback by that.
It was a very sad day and so I can always remember that.
And then we used to hear at night the soldiers being brought in,
the helicopters from the war front, and that was kind of brought the war home to us a little.
And the soldiers were all over the hospital. And then when they got better, they got they started to walk around the hospital, I suppose.
They got a bit bored and they used to come and sort of comment on the babies in the ward with their guns.
Well, I mean, that gives you some idea of living with these little.
Interesting. So if I suppose not, Hazard's really sort of the wee wee wee wee surmounted them quite easily.
It's not as if we were in danger or anything like that. So I think one shouldn't exaggerate the hardships that we suffered.
Of course, compared with many other people in the war. But I do provide also a little bit of an analysis of the war.
For those of you interested in that, it appears more as an appendix to the book.
But so you can skip it if you don't like it, if you rather have the much more lively Seiffert plot,
that stuff that Selina has provided and just ignore it.
But that just let let me perhaps make one or two general points about this.
I open the account a little bit with the story of how the Ekpo were, you know, trading minority.
They used to use the expression of middle man, minority or sort of sexist expression.
But that was the sociological jargon of the time who were spread, of course, all over Nigeria, mainly as traders.
And they in northern Nigeria tended to live outside the core areas in subgoal galleries and the Yes or Stranger Cortis.
And from time to time, there were outpace sometime outbreaks and sometimes very ruthless and murderous outbreaks of violence directed against him,
which what precipitated the war.
And in many people's mind, the story of the war is really the story of ethnic conflict or tribal conflict, to use an even older out dated expression.
And I tried to take that narrative on a little bit and say, well, hang on a second.
It wasn't only about that. There were all kinds of complex class elements involved.
There were differences between the north and the south.
They were religious conflicts going on that led in and sometimes obscured the the ethnic conflicts.
They were regional issues. And above all and I made quite a long story,
all of this in the analysis of the prelude to the war some forty 42 days before the crucial
period when there will very complex political manoeuvres between the principal actors involved,
which suggest not so much the story of has a group with one determined profile to get out of Nigeria and create this new secessionist concrete,
but rather a more complex,
very interactive relationship between different elements trying to create new alliances in the country in the hope that the South,
which was essentially a industrialised Christianised, mainly Christian community, would turn against the north.
And I described this as the greater south. That was the plan, a way to which Ojukwu and many of the people in the Igbo leadership were a party to.
So that's the sort of the hidden story of the Nigerian war.
And I suppose it does have some relevance now, again, because there is some sort of revival of the Biafra story.
And also, as it followed to a degree, I did choose a famous novel now The Half the Yellow Sun,
which had been turned into a movie, which to a great deal romanticises the story from the point of view of the Biafra.
And of course, it's a tragedy. And she depicts that terribly well.
But the. There is no complex analysis of how the war started.
It's just the assumption that, you know, the reference had the cause that was important for them to defend and some kind of defence was was,
as it were, completely plausible politically. So that's that's the sort of bit.
But I think the on the ground, one of the things that really intrigued us was the art and the drama.
And I think you wanted to say a little bit of boiling just blew our minds. I had no idea what artistic and talented country that was.
I mean, I've grown up in South Africa and there was no art even approximating what you saw in Nigeria.
They had the most amazing pottery and cloths and music and siete.
It was absolutely mind boggling.
They were so incredibly creative carvings and a lot of people were artists and they would come round to the house and sell their art.
And we used to buy it sometimes. And one day we went to a shop and we took Ruth first with us.
And that was just an incredible pace.
And we went to see Suzanne Vanga, who was an Austrian artist who became Nigerian, lived the rest of her life in Nigeria and eventually married.
She. She was married to early buyer, is a linguist, but that didn't last.
And she then married that oboe of a shop, HBO's chief drama.
And she gave us lunch. And the monkeys were jumping around on the table snatching food from us.
And she did such wonderful things.
So the Nigerian people with her in making every garage.
I mean, what a boring thing is a garage. It was so beautifully decorated.
Yes. And she had little shrines and sculptures that you'd come across on the road just peeping out from around the corner.
It was amazing. The ocean grove. I think it's now a UNESCO heritage and I think it's now a heritage site.
And so they revanche she revived the essentially the Yarber religious.
Yes. Shrines. Yes. And I think was recognised as a Yarber priestess in.
In. Yes. Towards the middle of her years there, I think.
Yeah. So I think I recall there was a wonderful moment when we were heading back and she said, yes, I was about I was about eight months pregnant.
And Suzanne Venga rushed up to us and said, can you take this back to them, to the zoo and in Ibadan?
And I'm not sure if I risk it. So Robyn was driving.
We had this little Ford Anglia. Yeah. Ruth, as I guess, was sitting in the passenger seat in the front.
And I was in the back seat with this back. I think it's called a desire for a thing restricting.
Yeah. Twitchiness similarly than. So we drove about 50 miles back or more.
I didn't know how it was and eventually got to the zoo and then went on to have this animal.
But we eventually persuaded them that they had to give shelter to this creature.
So that would that was some of the awesome medius. I think we nearly ended.
I think we've gone on long enough and we probably have. But I thought one of the things that might be helpful just to sort of concluded,
because we were wondering whether we were saying anything of any particular
significance and when when we were trying to sort of frame it in our heads,
we decided that, look, there's a very bifurcates view of this period where on the one hand,
there's this idea that there is a colonial history or imperial history and that,
you know, there is a history of people coming out and administering and dominating and so on.
And of course, we were opposed to that politically, but that's one narrative.
But on the other hand, there's a narrative of Veith anticolonial nationalist struggle.
And so the imperialist histories were opposed to the nation's histories.
And we found that, OK, maybe this is just a footnote in history that we were writing.
What we thought of was a sort of internationalist account, because what we saw, what we perceived ourselves as part of this Hornish.
Group of people who were very involved in the post-colonial anticolonial world, who had strong affiliations,
associations with Nigerian colleagues and friends and people who we met there and somehow were trying to effect some relationship.
It helped to build Nigeria. You may want to say something a little bit about that when they were just amazing people.
They were amazing people and their dedication to the country.
I think a little bit of Robin Horten who gave his whole life to Nigeria, didn't he?
It was absolutely amazing. And even Armstrong, who was my boss, set up the Institute of African Studies.
He spent the rest of he was an American linguist, in fact, and he spent the rest of his life in Nigeria and died there.
So it it captured quite a lot of people's hearts.
I have to say that. All right. Well, we're going to wind up here lined up.
So what do you have enough to hand over to you?
Thank you very much for that. Know, very engaging discussion of your time in Nigeria.