Before he became the voice of a new nation, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was a schoolteacher, a writer and a man whose preference for simplicity followed him all the way to the highest office in the land. Sixty years after his death, the photographs and fragments he left behind tell a story larger than politics: of the kind of country Nigeria once imagined it might become.
There is something almost disorienting about looking at old photographs of Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.
Not because the clothes are unfamiliar or because the Nigeria around him has disappeared. It is because the man in the photographs does not quite resemble what Nigerians have come to expect power to look like.
There are no dark glasses.
No enormous convoy.
No theatrical display of wealth.
No visible effort to persuade the camera that an important man has entered the room.
Instead, there is the familiar white robe, the turban, the spectacles and that slightly restrained bearing of a man who often seemed almost uncomfortable with the magnitude of the office history had handed him.
This was, after all, the Prime Minister of Africa’s most populous country.
And on October 1, 1960, it was his voice that introduced independent Nigeria to the world.
‘At last our great day has arrived,’ Balewa told the country, ‘and Nigeria is now indeed an independent sovereign nation.’
The words have survived.
So has the voice.
Measured, deliberate, unmistakably Northern Nigerian and remarkably controlled, it was a voice made for radio. Balewa’s command of spoken English and his gift for oratory would eventually earn him the famous description ‘the Golden Voice of Africa.’
But the remarkable thing about that voice is where it began.
It began not in a palace, a military barracks or one of the great political dynasties of colonial Nigeria.
It began in a classroom.
The Schoolteacher
Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was born in December 1912 in what is today Bauchi State.
His early education combined Qur’anic learning with colonial schooling before he proceeded to Katsina Higher College, one of the institutions that produced a generation of Northern Nigeria’s early educated elite.
He trained as a teacher.
That fact deserves more attention than it usually receives.
Before Balewa learned how to govern, he learned how to explain.
Before he addressed parliaments, he addressed classrooms.
Before diplomats listened to him in London, Washington, New York and Addis Ababa, children listened to him in Bauchi.
He joined Bauchi Middle School as a teacher and eventually became its headmaster. In 1945, he was among a small group of Northern Nigerian teachers selected to study at the University of London’s Institute of Education. He returned to Nigeria and worked in education before politics gradually claimed him.
Something of the schoolmaster never left him.
Listen carefully to Balewa’s surviving speeches and there is surprisingly little flamboyance. He explains. He reasons. He moves from one proposition to another.
His politics could be cautious-sometimes excessively so-but his language was rarely careless.
It is perhaps why, even now, listening to Balewa can feel like hearing another political civilisation.
The Prime Minister Who Was Also a Novelist
There is another Balewa whom political history has almost completely obscured.
The writer.
As a young man, long before independence, Balewa wrote Shaihu Umar, one of the important early works of modern Hausa prose fiction.
The story follows the extraordinary life of its title character through separation, enslavement, displacement, faith and eventual spiritual maturity. Its world is recognisably Northern Nigerian and Islamic, but its concerns-loss, fate, suffering, goodness and human endurance-are universal.
The work was later translated into English by the distinguished Hausa scholar Mervyn Hiskett.
It is an extraordinary footnote to Nigerian history.
The man who would become the country’s first Prime Minister had already imagined lives on paper before he was entrusted with millions of actual ones.
Today Nigeria tends to separate its politicians from its intellectuals, and its political culture rarely expects those who govern to possess a literary imagination. Balewa belonged to an earlier tradition in which teaching, writing, public argument and politics could still inhabit the same person.
That perhaps explains something about the precision of his language.
Words mattered to him.
And in 1960, words suddenly mattered enormously.
The Night Nigeria Became a Country
Imagine Lagos at midnight on September 30, 1960.
Union Jacks were coming down.
A new green-and-white flag was going up.
Fireworks exploded over the city. Dignitaries had arrived from across the world. Crowds filled the streets. After decades of colonial government, an enormous and complicated territory assembled by Britain was becoming a sovereign state.
And at the centre of the ceremony stood a former schoolteacher from Bauchi.
Balewa understood the symbolism.
‘Words cannot adequately express my joy and pride,’ he said, at being the Nigerian privileged to receive the constitutional instruments of independence.
But what is striking when the speech is read today is its absence of triumphalism.
There was pride, certainly.
But there was also anxiety.