Zik Of Africa Quotes

In a 5 November leader article the West African Pilot vented its anger at Churchill’s words in the Commons: ‘That a British prime Minister could utter such a statement during an unparalleled destructive war which has cost Colonial peoples their material resources and manpower is, indeed, a revelation. What, now, must we expect our fate to be after the war?’120 Nnamdi ‘Zik’ Azikiwe, the editor of this pioneering Nigerian nationalist newspaper, also cabled Churchill requesting clarification of the discrepancy between Attlee’s statement and Churchill’s. Did the Charter apply to West Africa or not? Churchill gave instructions for a reply, which, echoing his Commons statement, claimed that the government’s Empire policy was ‘already entirely in harmony with the high conceptions of freedom and justice which inspired the joint declaration [i.e. the Atlantic Charter]’. Therefore, no fresh statement of policy on Africa was required.121 But his efforts were to no avail. In 1943 Zik travelled with a delegation to Britain and used the Charter as the basis for a demand for a timescale for complete independence.

French speakers went to France, while English speakers went mostly to African American institutions in North America. In the 1930s and 40s, more than 100 west Africans went to US universities, among them Azikiwe (‘Zik’) of Nigeria and Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, both graduates of Lincoln University. From among these overseas graduates came most of the leaders of the nationalist and independence movements that followed in the decades after the Second World War.