Viewing page 55 of 100

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

"NIXON DOCTRINE" AND AFRICA          OBATALA

it is still less surprising that these wars have been provoked, financed and militarily supported by one imperialist power or the other.
  It has been largely due to contradictions, conflicts of interest and disagreements among the imperialist powers themselves that the larger territorial units of Africa have been able to survive.  Nigeria provides a good example.  I recently paid a two week visit to the East Central State, the core of what used to be called the Eastern Region and the arena in which much of Nigeria's Civil War was fought.  During the time I was there, I managed to get a chance to talk with many Ibo people from all walks of life, including the Governor of the state and his commissioners.  From talks and interviews with members of this latter group, I was informed that a decisive factor in the war had been the winning of Nixon away from the side of Biafra by the Nigerian Federal Government and that this had been accomplished by assuring Gulf and Mobil Oil companies-both of whom were large contributors to Nixon's presidential campaign-that they would have exploration rights in the war territories once peace had been achieved.  Shell Oil had already received similar assurance in the early stages of this conflict; this together with the fact that British interest in Nigeria has traditionally been linked to that of the Hausa dominated North goes a long way towards explaining the British government's support for the Federal side.  In this particular instance, therefore, the policies of two major imperialist powers, Britain and the U.S., went decidedly against those of other imperialist powers such as South Africa, Israel, France and West Germany, all of whom saw their inter-est best served by the break-up of Nigeria and the creation of a small, conservative, overpopulated and land-hungry ministate whose economy had little hopes of ever growing to, say, much more than half the size of the budget of General Motors and other multinational giants with whom such states are expected to compete.  Such ministates can never become anything more than trading and consumer republics, and are utterly defenseless when poised against the political, economic and military giants.²  For people and territory (land) are the basic ingredients of national and international power; without them, the kind of massive armies that will have to be raised to deal with the incursion of imperialist powers such as South Africa, Portugal and the U.S. cannot be maintained and the kind of dynamic and industrial-ized economy that must form the bas of any genuinely independent state cannot be developed.  The idea of an "independent" national
______
  ²See Reginald H. Green and Ann Seidman.  Unity or Poverty: The Economics of Pan-Africanism, (Penguin Press, Baltimore, 1968)

53