NIGERIA COUNTRY READER TABLE OF CONTENTS Rudolph Aggrey 1951-1953 Public Affairs ...

481 Pages·2012·2.97 MB·English

NIGERIA

COUNTRY READER
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Rudolph Aggrey 1951-1953 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Lagos

Lewis D. Junior 1951-1953 Consular Officer, Lagos

Howard R. Simpson 1956-1959 Information Officer, USIS, Lagos

Stephen Patterson Belcher 1957-1963 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Lagos

Samuel Clifford Adams Jr. 1958-1960 Chief Education Advisor, USAID, Lagos

Ulrich Haynes, Jr. 1960-1961 Assistant to the Regional Director for West
Africa, Ford Foundation, New York

Vernon C. Johnson 1960-1962 Agricultural Officer, Lagos

Cecil S. Richardson 1961-1962 Staff Aide, Lagos

David Shear 1961-1963 Program Analyst, USAID, Lagos

Joseph N. Greene, Jr. 1961-1963 Deputy Chief of Mission, Lagos

Bernard Francis Coleman 1961-1964 Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer, USIS,
Lagos

William Haven North 1961-1965 Assistant Director of Program, USAID,
Lagos

William E. Reed 1961-1968 Regional Assistant Director, USAID, Ibadan

Charles O. Cecil 1962 Experiment in International Living, Ibadan

Charles J. Montrie 1962 International Relations Officer, Washington,
DC

Nelson C. Ledsky 1962-1964 Consular/Economic/Political Officer, Enugu

Clinton L. Olson 1962-1966 Deputy Chief of Mission, Lagos

Robert P. Smith 1962-1965 Principal Officer, Enugu
Miles Wedeman 1962-1968 Head of Capital Development and Finance,
USAID, Africa Bureau

Everett L. Headrick 1963-1968 Agricultural Program Assistant, USAID,
Kaduna

Harold M. Jones 1963-1968 Program Officer, USAID, Samaru

Larry Lesser 1964-1965 Peace Corps, Enugu

Horace G. Dawson, Jr. 1964-1967 Cultural Affairs Officer, USIS, Lagos

C. William Kontos 1964-1965 Emergency Deputy Assistant Secretary,
Lagos

Owen W. Roberts 1964-1965 Political Officer, Lagos

Robert Rackmales 1964-1966 Foreign Service Generalist, Lagos

Clarence Swift Gulick 1965-1967 Program Officer, USAID, Lagos

Donald Petterson 1966-1967 Political Officer, Lagos

William E. Hutchinson 1966-1968 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Lagos

Robert P. Smith 1966-1969 Nigeria Desk Officer, Bureau of African
Affairs, Washington, DC

William Beverly Carter, Jr. 1966-1969 Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs,
USIS, Lagos
1969-1972 Deputy Assistant Secretary for African
Affairs, Washington, DC

Vernon C. Johnson 1968-1970 Deputy Director, USAID, Lagos

Marcus L. Winter 1968-1971 Junior Officer Trainee/Agricultual Officer,
USAID, Lagos

Howard Frank Needham 1969 Deputy Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Lagos

Richard L. Stockman 1969-1970 Nigeria Desk Officer, Washington, DC

Gordon W. Evans 1969-1970 Assistant Programs Director, USAID, Lagos

Samuel S. Rea 1970-1971 International Relations Officer, USAID,
Washington, DC
Benard Lavin 1970-1971 Deputy Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Lagos

Edward W. Mulcahy 1970-1972 Deputy Chief of Mission, Lagos

Henry L. Clarke 1970-1972 Economic Officer, Lagos

John Hummon 1970-1972 Deputy Mission Director, USAID, Lagos

Howard K. Walker 1970-1973 Political Officer/Consul, Lagos

Jack Shellenberger 1970-1973 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Lagos

Victor D. Comras 1971-1972 Economic Reporter, Ibadan

Frederick E. Gilbert 1971-1973 Evaluation Officer, USAID, Lagos

James P. Thurber, Jr. 1971-1973 Assistant Public Affairs Officer, USIS,
Lagos

Andrew Steigman 1972-1975 Political Counselor, Lagos

James K. Bishop, Jr. 1972-1976 Deputy Director, West Africa, Washington,
DC

Cliff Southard 1973-1974 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Lagos

Julius W. Walker, Jr. 1973-1974 African Affairs, London, England

W. Garth Thorburn 1973-1977 Agricultural Attaché, Lagos

Donald B. Easum 1974-1979 Ambassador

Harry A. Cahill 1975-1978 Economic Counselor, Lagos

Samuel B. Thomsen 1976-1979 Cultural Attaché, USIS, Lagos

Robert J. Kott 1976-1979 Nigeria Desk Officer, Washington

Paul Good 1977-1979 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Lagos

Kathryn Clark-Bourne 1977-1979 Political Counselor, Lagos

William C. Harrop 1977-1980 Deputy Director, Bureau of African Affairs,
Washington, DC
S. Douglas Martin 1978-1980 Economic/Commercial Counselor, Lagos

Peter David Eicher 1978-1980 Political Officer, Lagos

Helen Weinland 1978 Nigeria Desk Officer, Washington, DC
1979-1981 Political Officer, Lagos

Parker W. Borg 1979-1981 Country Director, West African Affairs,
Washington

Theodore A. Boyd 1979-1981 Branch Public Officer, USIS, Kano

Stephen Low 1979-1981 Ambassador

Carl C. Cundiff 1980-1983 Economic Counselor, Lagos

George G.B. Griffin 1981-1984 Commercial Counselor, Lagos

Nicolas Robertson 1981-1984 Office of African Affairs, West Africa,
USIA, Washington, DC

Leon Weintraub 1982-1984 Political Officer, Lagos

Christopher E. Goldthwait 1982-1986 Chief, FAS Office, Lagos

Robert Rackmales 1983-1985 Principal Officer, Kaduna

Thomas R. Hutson 1983-1985 Regional Consular Officer, Lagos

Keith L. Wauchope 1984-1986 Deputy Director, Francophone West Africa,
Washington

Claudia Anyaso 1984-1986 Cultural Affairs Officer, USIS, Lagos

Joyce E. Leader 1985-1988 Political Officer, Lagos

Princeton Lyman 1986-1989 Ambassador

David Blakemore 1987-1990 Deputy Chief of Mission, Lagos

Nicolas Robertson 1988-1991 Cultural Attaché, USIS, Lagos

Leon Weintraub 1990-1992 Nigeria Desk Officer, Washington

Nicolas Robertson 1991-1993 Office of African Affairs, USIA,
Washington, DC
Bruce F. Duncombe 1991-1993 Economic Counselor, Lagos/Abuja

Helen Weinland 1991-1994 Consul General, Kaduna

Tibor Peter Nagy, Jr. 1993-1995 Deputy Chief of Mission, Lagos/Abuja

Claudia Anyaso 1993-1997 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Abuja

Leonard H. Robinson, Jr. 1994-1997 Private Law Practice, Washington, DC

Lawrence Cohen 2000-2002 Economic Counselor, Lagos

Leon Weintraub 2000-2002 Deputy Director, West African Affairs,
Washington

Claudia Anyaso 2002-2006 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Abuja

RUDOLPH AGGREY
Public Affairs Officer, USIS
Lagos (1951-1953)

Rudolph Aggrey, whose father came to America from Ghana at the turn of the
century, grew up in an international home, with frequent visits from persons from
Africa. He entered the USIS in 1951. His career included posts in Nigeria,
France, Zaire, Senegal, Gambia, and Romania. He was interviewed by Jack
O'Brien on August 13, 1990.

AGGREY: So when it came time for me to say yes or no to whether I would submit an
application for the Foreign Service, as a staff officer, I could find no one to help me say no and
everyone to help me say yes. And finally, I opted for Lagos, Nigeria.

Q: Now you were there from what period to what period?

AGGREY: From 1951 to 1953, a little over two years on post.

Q: Now that was a small post in those days. You had more than one title?

AGGREY: Well, it was a small post. It was a consulate general. It was before independence. It
was one of the pioneer USIA posts in Africa. And it had been a one-American post before I
arrived. I arrived as a second American, shortly to be joined by a third, who was the secretary.
But two months after I arrived, the public affairs officer, who was Brent Null, left to be
transferred to Spain. And I was appointed as acting public affairs officer two months after my
arrival in my first post. And I held that position for maybe nine months before another public
affairs officer arrived, who was Jack Jones.

LEWIS D. JUNIOR
Consular Officer
Lagos (1951-1953)

Born in Kansas, Lewis Donald Junior entered the Foreign Service in 1950. Mr.
Junior's various assignments included Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Ethiopia, and
Nigeria. Mr. Junior was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy on May 21, 1991.

Q: Where were you assigned first?

JUNIOR: Lagos.

Q: Was it called Nigeria then?

JUNIOR: It was the Colony of Nigeria. It was on its way toward independence, under British
tuition. But the consulate general in Lagos was different, although certainly not unique, in that
we reported directly to Washington. We had no embassy, as such, to report to, so it gave it a
somewhat different coloration. Not that anybody in Washington cared about that part of the
world at the time.

Q: What was the situation in Lagos and Nigeria at that time?

JUNIOR: The British were making what then seemed to be, and in retrospect certainly was, a
major, valid, honest effort to get out of Nigeria without leaving total chaos behind. The tribal
tensions were something that they had to deal with most carefully, and they were trying to
develop a governmental structure which would give them some flex and which would absorb a
lot of that stress. And of course later on we saw that it didn't quite work, but it almost did, and
the structure is still essentially there, accommodating the needs of the north, east and the west.

Q: What was the staffing like? Who was in charge? How did it operate?

JUNIOR: We had a staff of five or six Americans, two of whom were secretaries, one an
administrative type, two vice consuls, and a consul general. The consul general was named
Archie Childs, and he was one of those, happily few, persons who have been brought into the
Foreign Service under the so-called Manpower Act. Other than being a nice man, he was totally
unqualified for the job, and was succeeded later by another officer, by the name of Keeler, who
was a professional, but not a nice man. However, he was certainly more competent than his
predecessor, and the consulate general worked better under him.

Q: What were you doing, you and the consulate?

JUNIOR: As the junior consular officer, the vice consul, I did almost exclusively consular work:
visas, immigrant, non-immigrant, and passports, and other kinds of citizen services. Later on, I
did some economic reporting and some political reporting. There was what we now call a USIS
post there, with two officers, the second of whom was Rudy Aggrey.

Q: Oh, yes.

JUNIOR: Rudy was, for a good part of our tour there, my roommate, so we worked a lot
together, and I benefited when I did political reporting from the fact that he was certainly a
persona grata among practically all of the Nigerians in the political world.

I think it's worth noting as a sidelight here that , the American-born son of an of West Africa, a
well-known educator here and in West Africa, was assumed by the major politicians, and minor
politicians, to be loyal to West Africa and to Nigeria because his name was , and they had a long,
hard battle to take on board the fact that his primary loyalties were to the United States. So my
recollection is that he spent a good part of his time peddling backwards, trying to get out of their
clutches lest he be co-opted into their political schemes.

Q: Was there much consular work there for Americans? Because there wasn't the Nigerian
immigration that later developed, was there?

JUNIOR: There was a substantial volume of consular work. I'm sure that we didn't do it very
efficiently, because these were the times when the Xerox machine didn't exist (there was some
kind of a copier), and documentation was difficult; there was a certain amount of fraud that had
to be checked out. Communications in the country were very slow, things got lost in the mail and
so forth. So it took a number of man-hours just to process a non-immigrant visa. An immigrant
visa, of which there were relatively few, took some days, man-hourwise.

Q: What was the atmosphere like? Here was a country that was getting ready to become
independent; and particularly in the earlier days, in interviews I've had with people who served
in Africa, they found that they really had very little contact with the black population, and this
sort of thing was frowned upon often by the head of the post and certainly by the British colonial
authorities. How about this in Nigeria at the time?

JUNIOR: It's a mixed bag. It would have been very easy to have had minimal contact with the
Africans, with the Nigerians, but fortunately the senior vice consul was a man with one or two
Foreign Service tours behind him, and he appreciated the fact that we were in a country in
transition, and he quietly led us and his superiors to a greater degree of contact with people we
identified as being those likely to emerge as leaders.

I can recall one evening when we had... leaders, plus two or three of the newly designated
members of the Nigerian Supreme Court to dinner. The British sort of blinked their eyeballs at
this, because even they, at that point, hadn't got around to deciding that these people were proper
invitees into their parlors, so it was fairly progressive.

Q: You sort of alluded to it, but what was your feeling towards the interests of the Department of
State in whatever one was reporting, or just in an African post in general?
JUNIOR: Remote. There was very little feedback that I could ascertain from Washington. We
had our... whatever they called the CERP requirements at the time.

Q: That's an economic...

JUNIOR: Regularly scheduled economic reporting form. And if you didn't get one of your CERP
reports in, somebody, a minor bureaucrat in the Commerce Department, would trigger a telegram
sort of saying, "Where is it?" But when it came to charting out the British progress in
establishing a kind of structure that might survive -- the problems among the various tribal
groups and so forth -- I think if we had done half the reporting that we did, Washington would
never have minded a bit.

Q: There were no delegations coming around to see what was going on that you can recall?

JUNIOR: So far as I can recall, there was never one congressional delegation, and very few
others.

Q: You were in Lagos from 1951 to 1953, and then you went to Palermo.

JUNIOR: I was fired in Lagos.

Q: You were fired in Lagos? Was that a RIF, a reduction in force? How did that hit you? What
happened?

JUNIOR: Well, I had been offered a staff job in Nigeria, and I had hoped that since I had done a
decent job there, that they would see my sterling merits and offer me something else. But... I had
adjusted to that... status, reluctantly, but not without great difficulty.

Q: Well, I think it was pretty much the pattern, that the RIF went out and then, immediately,
cooler heads prevailed, sort of put it back together.

JUNIOR: I don't like people who have conspiratorial views on how things work, but I had a
conspiratorial theory here. I can't fail to believe that the powers that be in Washington,
specifically the Department, knew that they had to come up with the numbers to satisfy the
Eisenhower pledge about cutting the ranks of government. But I also think that they could not
possibly have failed to see that the newly passed Refugee Relief Act would require large
numbers of the officers they were concurrently firing. But these guys didn't count, because they
were under special legislation and would be "let go" when that expired. So I considered it was a
total flimflam.

HOWARD R. SIMPSON
Information Officer, USIS
Lagos (1956-1959)
Howard R. Simpson was born in 1925 and raised in Alameda, California. In
1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in the European Theater. He
returned to the United States in 1945 and continued his education in California
and Paris, France. Mr. Simpson joined the Foreign Service in 1951, where he
served in Vietnam, Nigeria, France, and Algeria. He was interviewed by Charles
Stuart Kennedy on January 10, 1994.

Q: For the record, these are reports that are written supposedly to tell you what a post is like but
often they're also written to help explain why extra money should be paid to people going to
them so that there's a built in bias to make it look more difficult than it is.

SIMPSON: Well the post report on Kathmandu mentioned that you should bring Coleman
lanterns and rat traps and as we had a new born child that didn't look too good. And the post
report on Nigeria went to great lengths to talk about the Yacht Club and the Island Club and this,
that, and the other thing. So anyway we ended up going to Nigeria.

Q: You were there from '56-'59. What were you doing in Nigeria?

SIMPSON: Well I was the Information Officer, there was the PAO, the Information Officer and
the Cultural Officer and at that time Nigeria was still a British colony so it was a Consulate
General in Lagos, and a lot of our work was just seeing that official American press releases and
speeches and visitors were exposed to the Nigerian media and met Nigerian leaders in various
fields. And we also produced a monthly magazine that was aimed mostly at students on
education and culture and things like that. We contributed to what was known as the African
newsreel which meant that each post in Africa was tasked to contribute footage on specific
subjects that was produced in Washington and sent back to different African posts. And I
directed a couple of features on that and traveled a lot. And Nigeria was a difficult country
because you could see once again that things were not working out as well as they might. The
Muslim north was one thing and you had the southerners, the Yoruba and Ibo, none of them
really got along very well. And the army was a big problem because most of the combat troops
were Muslims from the north and the officers were Yoruba or Ibo, much better educated and this
was the beginning. You could see what might happen when independence came.

Q: In the first place you came with obviously considerable baggage coming from Vietnam which
was a colonial country going down the tubes. I mean how did that...were you sort of looking at
things ala Vietnam in a way to begin with to see ...

SIMPSON: I guess I was, because I'll tell you one thing, we had very grave doubts whether we'd
done the right thing in coming back to the government when we got there because of the living.
We'd moved 6 times within a one year period. The housing just wasn't available and we occupied
these little government flats and had to move out and the heat was very rough. And having a
baby was another thing. And there were, almost all the officers at the Consulate were bachelors,
so my wife was on her own more or less. But one thing that I immediately noticed when I got
there was that I made a lot of good contacts with the British, with the police, with the Army. And
it became obvious that if anything was going to hold Nigeria together when independence came,
it would be the Army. Not only because it had the power and the strength but also because it had
a cohesiveness that didn't exist among the various tribes. At least these people were serving
together and if that could be strengthened then that would be something to build on and we made
a great effort. This was probably a fall-out of the Vietnamese experience, doing some films on
the army in coordination with the British and the Nigerians and showing these films. Not only to
the army but to the general public: the fact that Yorubas, Ibos and Hausas could serve together,
that sort of thing. And I think a certain cynicism was there too, watching the British prepare to
depart, hating every minute of the thought, and hanging on to some of the old colonial traditions
that we at the time, not only thought antiquated but, you know, so outdated.

Q: What were some of these things?

SIMPSON: Well there were things like the governor's house, the garden, the parties and all that
where certain things were expected and women were suppose to dress in a certain way and you're
suppose to arrive well before the time. Of course the Americans, well some of them, rebelled
against this sort of thing. Some had a more tolerant attitude, you know, the sun sets on the
empire and all that rot and why create a problem and a lot of the British, who could see more of
the future, who could see Africa, well it didn't bother them too much and they didn't really take
part. But there were some really hard back old colonial types who just didn't want to admit that it
was all over.

Q: When you went out in '56 was it an accepted thing that Nigeria was going to be independent
that time as far as the British were concerned. Was there a sort of a time table?

SIMPSON: Yes there was but I can't remember what it was exactly.

Q: It was in the cards, did we have a Consul General there at that time? Do you remember who
it was? What was sort of the attitude of, before you went out whatever briefing you had there. I
mean were we looking upon this as, boy this is going to be fun, boy we're going to be in a sort of
new nation and we're an ex-colonial group coming out there or was this: God we're a people
sort of absorbed in a colonial atmosphere and whites getting certain perks.

SIMPSON: I think there was a little of that when we first got there, some of the officers had a
strange attitude, a sort of paternal attitude towards the Nigerians and a great sort of, you wouldn't
call it an inferiority approach, but the British impressed them very much. Their uniforms and
being king of the hill and some Americans, very few, but some, almost became as if they were
British themselves. But that began to change after a short period of time and I think a new
African specialist group was developing and coming out there and so you had people coming in
who realized that a big change was taking place in Africa and we had better be in on the roller
coaster as it got started. And that handled right, and I think a lot of these people were very naive,
but they thought innocently at the time that Nigeria would be one of the great leaders of Africa,
as a symbol of what could be done by Africans.

Q: But what about contact with the Nigerians themselves how did this work?