The case for renaming my state capital, by Donu Kogbara

This thought-provoking and slightly edited article, which first appeared in a publication called NewAfrican, was written by my friend and former BBC boss Onyekachi Wambu, a distinguished London-based author and filmmaker.

Why do we continue to cling to the colonial names bestowed on our towns and cities? We do this even when the officials after whom these names given later disgraced themselves. The issue around Port Harcourt is a classic test case.

What would you do if one of your most important cities was named after a paedophile? Change the name, surely, or continue wearing it as a sordid badge of honour?

I asked that same question in the November 2015 issue of New African

(Harcourt must fall. – Free Online Library) about Port Harcourt, my birthplace, capital of Rivers State, and the important oil city of the Niger Delta. Remarkably, eleven years later, Port Harcourt is still there. Now Kio Amachree, an Old Etonian, a Kalabari (an Ijaw subgroup) son of the Delta and indefatigable anti-corruption campaigner, has taken up the cause. Amachree has written repeatedly demanding that Rivers State remove the name of Lewis Vernon Harcourt, the British Colonial Secretary, after whom Frederick Lugard, British imperialist and first Governor General of modern Nigeria, named the new port in 1913. The history is almost comical in its colonial arrogance. Lugard wrote that, “in the absence of any convenient local name”, he wished to call it Port Harcourt. Yet local names existed. Indeed, Lugard’s own correspondence referred to Diobu or Iguocha. Harcourt, who never visited Nigeria, graciously replied that it gave him pleasure to have his name attached to the port. Some pleasure. More than a century later his name remains attached to one of Nigeria’s great cities.

And who was Harcourt? A Colonial Secretary from 1910 to 1915 and a man whose sexual behaviour towards the young was notorious within his social circle. Historical accounts record allegations involving both girls and boys. Harcourt died in 1922 after taking an overdose of sleeping medication, amid rumours of suicide as allegations concerning his abuse of one child threatened to become public. But Nigeria, which owes Harcourt absolutely nothing, continues to honour him. Why?

Amachree’s recent campaign identifies something even more disturbing than a colonial hangover. Local communities who know the name should go cannot agree upon what should replace it. The Ikwerre people have their claims and names. The Okrika and other Ijaw communities have theirs. Arguments over Iguocha and other competing historical claims quickly become arguments over ownership, indigeneity and ethnicity.

And so, disgracefully, the competing groups achieve the one result none presumably intends: Harcourt wins. The dead English aristocrat remains on his pedestal because living Nigerians cannot agree who should replace him.

Amachree’s sensible proposal is therefore to separate the two questions. First decide whether Harcourt deserves the honour. Remove the name. Then debate the replacement. Why should agreement on the second question be a prerequisite for doing the obviously necessary first, he asks? There is something here which goes far beyond Rivers State. It symbolises a peculiar African stasis. We complain about colonial inheritances, yet when the moment comes to replace them we sometimes discover that an African alternative requires agreement between Africans – and that proves more difficult than leaving the European inheritance untouched. The wider country, Nigeria itself, offers the grandest example. English remains the official language, not because Nigerians lack languages of their own, but because choosing one indigenous language nationally would immediately raise profound questions among a country containing hundreds of languages and powerful competing ethnic identities. The colonial language consequently becomes the supposedly neutral meeting ground.

Even the country’s name follows us from colonial rule. ‘Nigeria’ was proposed in 1897 by British journalist Flora Shaw, girlfriend, and later the wife of Frederick Lugard, as a convenient designation for Britain’s territories around the Niger.

There is an extraordinary irony here.

Lugard could find “no convenient local name” for Port Harcourt, so an Englishman’s name survived. Nigeria cannot readily substitute English with an agreed indigenous national language, so English survives. And the country itself continues under a name devised in London for administrative convenience. This lack of seriousness was itself challenged in 1959 by the great activist and social reformer, Tai Solarin, who suggested a change of name for Nigeria as the country edged towards independence on October 1, 1960. Recalling how the Gold Coast next door was rebranded with the name of a great West African empire, he wanted Nigeria to be called Sabo-Songhai. Sabo means new in Hausa.

According to him, “The name ‘Nigeria’ is a twin brother (or sister) of the word ‘Nïgger’ and the fumes are too suffocating. I therefore suggest that as soon as possible after October 1, 1960, we have our rebirth in the compound name, ‘Sabo-Songhai.’

Of course, as we know, nothing happened. The problem in Nigeria is no longer simply what Europeans imposed. After more than 60 years of independence, the question is what Africans choose to retain.

In the case of Port Harcourt, Amachree has particular standing in making that challenge. He invokes his father’s involvement in the struggles surrounding independence and the creation of Rivers State, and now campaigns relentlessly against what he regards as the corruption and institutional paralysis afflicting Nigeria.

His Port Harcourt campaign therefore asks a deceptively simple challenge to his people? Can Rivers State agree on nothing except inaction? He agrees that the Ikwerre, Ijaw, Okrika, Kalabari and everybody else should argue passionately about the eventual name. That argument belongs to them and should be settled by them.

But Harcourt does not. The truly humiliating outcome would be for every community to agree that Lewis Harcourt has no business possessing their capital, yet remain so divided that they continue honouring him indefinitely.

My 2015 article ended by asking why Nigeria continued to keep Harcourt on his pedestal. Eleven years later, Kio Amachree is pressing the same point. Perhaps the greater scandal now is not that the British put Harcourt there. It is that Nigerians still cannot agree on how to take him down. Exposing, in its own small way, how they were conquered in the first place.

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