Following the official acknowledgment of Chief MKO Abiola as winner of the 1993 presidential election and the proclamation of June 12 as “Democracy Day,” Walter Carrington, former United States ambassador to Nigeria, has figured prominently on practically every roster of persons who deserve to be honoured for their momentous contributions to the struggle to re-establish government based on the consent of the people.
Carrington’s tour of duty coincided with a period when all the things Nigerians said could never happen in their country happened time and again. There was, first, the contrived confusion in the run-up to the presidential election, the capstone of a transition that had been eight years in the making. Then the annulment, the Interim farce, and the infernal Sani Abacha.
Through it all, Carrington lived up the title of his collection of his speeches, “A Duty to Speak” he released to mark his to 80th birthday. In that time of tyranny, he never flinched from speaking truth to power.
Among my many interactions with him, one in particular clings in my memory. It was the Fourth of July reception in 1997, marking the 221st independence anniversary of the United States.
Even for a time of year when the skies parted and seemed in no hurry to close up, the rain that fell that Friday morning was unusually heavy. And it threatened to wash out the most eagerly awaited event in the diplomatic calendar.
Then, it lifted just as suddenly as it had begun. The clouds dispersed, and bright sunshine suffused the landscape. A cool, crisp wind wafting across from the sea that provides a stunning backdrop to the official residence of the Ambassador of the United States dissolved the muggy heat of the preceding days. Nature in its mysterious ways had turned adversity to advantage.
By 4:30 p.m, the grounds thronged with guests. Everyone who was somebody, thought he was somebody or aspired to be somebody, was there. Stewards in their starched, snow-white uniforms drifted with clockwork precision from one cluster of guests to another, offering trays of tantalising snacks. Other stewards followed with cocktails.
In small and large groups, long-lost friends and comrades and colleagues carried on animated chatter about – what else – the latest barbarities that Sani Abacha and his confederates had visited on the people, the general hopelessness to which they had sentenced their compatriots, and the indifference of an international community daily terrorised by Foreign Minister Tom Ikimi’s gangsta diplomacy.
Freed at least for the moment from fear of being abducted, kidnapped, disappeared, mugged, or killed in a drive-by shooting, they compared notes, reviewed strategy and tactics,, and planned the way forward.
Some notorious secret and -not-so-secret agents of the Abacha regime had infiltrated the reception in one guise or disguise, but it was easy to keep them at bay or avoid them altogether.
All too soon, it was time for the main event.
Carrington took his place at the podium. One step behind him stood his elegant Nigeria-born wife Arese. To his right, a United States marine stood at ramrod attention, cradling the Stars and Stripes.
On the occasion of his country’s independence anniversary, Carrington began, nothing would be more fitting than revisiting the circumstances that had led British colonies in the New World to renounce foreign rule way back in 1776, and the very words that had inspired and sustained the struggle unto victory.
Whereupon he began to read in that resonant and sometimes haunting baritone, the storied text of the (American) Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with rights that, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among them, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter it, and to institute a new government.”
The authors of the Declaration never really held these propositions to be truths, of course, much less self-evident truths. Black people did not count as men and women, only as property to be bought and sold and put to the most brutal exertions. They had no rights whatsoever. More than There has been great progress. Carrington is himself a symbol of that progress. But in the daily lives of a great many black Americans, the “color line,” as Du Bois, called it, remains almost as formidable an obstacle in the 21st century as it was in the 20th.
On that day, however, in that place and at that time, the lofty ideals of the Declaration counted for much more than its inconvenient truths.
A hush fell upon the assembly.
“All experience has shown,” Carrington continued, his voice precisely modulated, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while the evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long line of abuses and usurpations evince a desire to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such a government, and to provide new grounds for their future security.”
It was as if time itself and indeed all the elements stood still, The only thing astir was that haunting, almost taunting, baritone, projected far and wide by the public address system and the wind.
But Carrington was not yet done.
“The history of the present king is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.
“To prove this, let the facts be submitted to a candid judge.
“He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions of the right of the people
“. . . He has incited domestic insurrection among us.
“A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
The hush had deepened with Carrington’s rendering of each line of the litany of woes residents of the American colonies suffered during British rule. But virtually every line reflected the barbarities the loathsome General Sani Abacha and his regime were visiting upon the Nigerian public.
By the time Carrington was done, the whole thing had taken on an unsettling resemblance to the proverbial calm before the raging storm. The assembled guests looked nervously at one another, shook their heads in sorrow and sighed deeply in despair and unspoken rage.
If Carrington had ended this command performance by saying nothing more electrifying than “Eminent sons and daughters of Nigeria, the future of your country lies in hour hands,” I suspect that most of the guests would have yanked off their ornately embroidered apparel and fancy suits and stormed Bonny Camp and Kam Selem House. And the revolution would have begun in earnest.
Abacha never forgave Carrington. The regime’s propagandists put it about that Carrington was embittered because the government had refused to “settle” him with a lucrative oil concession.
In reprisal, Abacha renamed Eleke Crescent, which threads the embassies and missions in Victoria Island, Lagos, for the Rev Louis Farrakhan, America’s bête noire and leader of the Nation of Islam. The official address of the U. S. Consulate, previously 2 Eleke Crescent, became 2 Louis FarrakhanCrescent.
To spite Abacha’s confederates, and in grateful acknowledgment of the ambassador’s support for the democratic forces at a crucial moment in Nigeria’s history, Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu re-branded the road Walter Carrington Crescent, the name it bears to this day.
In the back and forth, a bit of national history was erased. I gather that Eleke, for whom the street was originally renamed, was until his retirement a highly-regarded official who had served as a pillar of the Ministry of External Affairs in the years following independence. Curiously, no one seems to remember his first name.
But I digress.
As further reprisal, Abacha’s goons invaded a private residence where a reception was being held for Carrington on the eve of his departure from Nigeria, on the preposterous pretext that they had received reports that “armed robbers” were operating in the neighbourhood. When the guests relocated to another venue, the regime’s goons followed them there and dispersed them.
While all this was going on, the regime celebrated Carrington’s departure as a signal achievement of Ikimi’s “area boy” diplomacy.
Today, Abacha and his enablers are justly held in loathing abhorrence. But Walter Carrington who spoke truth to power in the time of tyranny stands splendidly vindicated.
Whatever the flaws of the men who wrote the American Declaration of Independence, its noble sentiments have inspired a nobler vision and animated struggles for freedom and justice across continents and generations.
Its words have not changed.
But on this Fourth of July, with Donald Trump in the saddle – Trump, the demagogic, xenophobic, race-baiting repudiation of almost every noble sentiment espoused in the Declaration, their resonance is much diminished.
- This is an expanded version of a previous column