Press: Nigeria’s Free Press

Independence is often a searing experience to new nations, bringing on along with the proud new flags, inept governments, shattered economies, confused people and misery all the deeper because exposed by freedom. But on Africa’s west coast, the continent’s newest and largest free state, Nigeria, last week was settling down to self-government with the same solid serenity that had marked its birth a fortnight ago. It is no coincidence that peaceful Nigeria possesses the freest and most responsible press in black Africa.

Even by Western standards, the quality of the Nigerian press is good. Despite a national literacy rate of only about 15%, the country prints 20 daily newspapers and 36 weeklies, with a circulation approaching 755,000. Copies of the leading dailies, going out by motor lorry and dugout canoe, eventually reach even the remotest regions—a much-needed unifying influence on Nigeria’s mosaic of 250 tribes. And by being free itself, under the long years of benevolent British tutelage, the nation’s press has taught Nigerians valuable first lessons in the meaning and the duties of freedom.

Slugging Matches. Until 1937, Nigeria’s few newspapers played a minor role in the national life, hardly going beyond their mid-igth century origins as shipping news and commercial circulars. But that year a fiery young Nigerian named Nnamdi (“Zik”) Azikiwe returned from the U.S., where he had studied political science and journalism at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and founded a new daily in Lagos, the West African Pilot.

Zik jolted Nigerian journalism out of its somnolent past. As Premier of Nigeria’s Eastern Region, Zik aspired to lead the way to national independence—and to become free Nigeria’s first Premier. So in the Western Region did rival Premier Obafemia Awolowo. Their press became their weapon: with Zik’s Pilot expanded to five papers, and with a ten-paper group owned and controlled by Awolowo’s Action Group party, Nigerians were treated to the regular spectacle of Awolowo and Zik slugging it out fiercely and brightly on their front pages.

News for the Natives. But along with Zik’s polemics went a modest daily dose of unadulterated news. In 1947, observing with interest the growing Nigerian appetite for news, British Tabloid Publisher Sir Cecil Harmsworth King (the London Daily Mirror-Sunday Pictorial group) picked up the Daily Times, an unimpressive Lagos paper of 7,000 circulation, which had stayed out of Nigeria’s East-West war.

King shrewdly kept it that way with such success that his Times today has the largest daily circulation in Nigeria—113,-ooo. A Sunday edition, introduced in 1953, has soared past 140,000. King’s papers are for and by Nigerians. Eleven years ago there were ten Europeans and 100 Nigerians on the staff; today his group employs six Europeans and 563 Nigerians.

King’s success has had a pronounced effect on the course of Nigerian journalism. In 1958, Awolowo’s Amalgamated Press hired Editor Louis Martin of the Chicago Defender, a Negro daily, as editorial adviser and gave him a free hand. By relegating partisan political stories to a “battle page,” expanding news coverage and launching a Sunday paper, Martin boosted the chain’s overall circulation by better than 20% before returning to the U.S. last August. Since then, Canada’s Roy Thomson, who, with 28 papers in Canada, eight in the U.S., eleven in Scotland, five in Wales and 21 in England, is about the nearest thing to an international press lord, has acquired a 50% interest in the Awolowo chain. Thomson showed up in Nigeria on Independence Day with a pledge to give his new property plenty of money—but no editorial interference.

As it happened, both Zik and Awolowo were defeated in their primary political ambitions; the Premier of Nigeria is the north’s Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. But the papers founded by Zik and Awolowo led the way toward independence, and have helped school Nigerians in what to do with their independence now that they have it.