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Harmattan, a Wind of Change Carolyn Johnston Is the Daughter of Tim and Berrice Johnston and She Spent Much of Her Childhood in Northern Nigeria

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Harmattan, a Wind of Change Carolyn Johnston Is the Daughter of Tim and Berrice Johnston and She Spent Much of Her Childhood in Northern Nigeria Harmattan, A Wind of Change Carolyn Johnston is the daughter of Tim and Berrice Johnston and she spent much of her childhood in Northern Nigeria. She is an integral part of the story and has edited her parents’ letters with skill and sensitivity. The collection is much more than a fond duty to parents – it is both a love story and a significant contribution to the documentation on the end of empire. Harmattan, A Wind of Change Life and Letters from Northern Nigeria at the End of Empire Edited by Carolyn Johnston The Radcliffe Press LONDON • NEW YORK Published in 2010 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Carolyn Johnston 2010 The right of Carolyn Johnston to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 978 1 84885 143 6 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset in Caslon by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London Printed and bound in India by Thomson Press India Ltd CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 5 The Land and the People 5 Sokoto 1936–37 9 Oturkpo 1938–39 30 Chapter 2 47 England and Malta 1941–45 47 Chapter 3 74 Nassarawa 1945–46 74 Chapter 4 107 Sokoto – The early 1950s 107 Birnin Kebbi 123 Sokoto again 128 Chapter 5 141 Kano – The mid-1950s 141 Chapter 6 176 Kano and Kaduna 1957–59 176 Kaduna 1958 186 Kaduna 1959 198 Chapter 7 206 Kaduna 1960 206 Envoi – Tim and Berrice remembered by friends and colleagues 241 Notes 251 Glossary 257 Abbreviations 261 Constitutional Progress 263 Biographical Notes 265 Bibliography and Further Reading 269 Index 273 For Andrew and Tim and Ellie and Olivia LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Tim during his first tour in Sokoto 11 2. Maiholi with Dela and junior wife and children 14 3. Crossing a river 28 4. Tim and colleagues 'with the evidence' in Oturkpo 35 5. Berrice during her first tour in Nassarawa 78 6. Tim on Walkiya 125 7. Tim with Peter Scott in Birnin Kebbi 126 8. Berrice and Carolyn looking over the garden 127 and fadama in Birnin Kebbi 9. Carolyn and friend Iggy in Birnin Kebbi 128 10. Tim, Berrice, Carolyn and the noble Aunt Charlotte 130 11. Berrice in Sokoto in the early 1950s 133 12. Sarkin Gardi and his snakes 135 13. The children of Sokoto at a birthday party 137 14. Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, Premier 164 of Northern Nigeria 15. The Residency, Kano 179 16. Tim in 1966 250 ix INTRODUCTION In the early years of the twentieth century West Africa was known as ‘the white man’s grave’ because each year one in five Europeans either died or had to be invalided home. People living and working in the remote areas could be a hundred miles away from the nearest doctor and when sickness struck the only way of contacting him was to send a runner with a message. The doctor then had to make his way – on horseback, bicycle or on foot – along narrow bush paths, and in the rainy season there would be rivers to negotiate as well, so by the time he arrived the patient had often given up all hope and died. Apart from the health considerations and primitive communications, many Europeans lived in one-man stations with no immediate help and few comforts other than basic camping equipment, and it could be a very lonely life. So why would anyone want to go and work there? For Tim Johnston it was a case of wanting to do something constructive and worthwhile on the one hand, and following the family tradition on the other, for his father James and two of his uncles had served in the Indian Civil Service. Tim, the youngest of five children, was born in Belfast in 1913 when the family were on leave. He was christened Hugh Anthony Stephen and how he got his nickname is an amusing family tale. During the voyage home from India his sister Alma, aged three, befriended the ship’s cat which was called Tim. Back home in Belfast she missed her little companion and when she asked if she could have her own Tim, they put her new baby brother in her lap and told her: ‘Here you are, here’s Tim’. The name stuck. Tim spent the first five years of his life in the Punjab and was then sent to boarding school in England. When they were growing up the five children rarely saw their parents and spent school holidays with various aunts and uncles. Luckily for them, Tim and 1 CAROLYN JOHNSTON Alma usually stayed with their mother’s cousin Iva Sturton whose husband John was the vicar of Market Lavington in Wiltshire. They lived in the large Vicarage which, in Tim’s words, was: ‘a terrific house to play Murders in, because it has two staircases, and a passage upstairs which makes a complete circuit’. The Sturtons had no children of their own and Iva loved having them to stay. She was a very special person and they were devoted to her. At a very young age Tim set his heart on working in Africa. After gaining his degree at Brasenose College he stayed on at Oxford to do the Colonial Administrative Service course and having completed it in the summer of 1936 he set sail for Nigeria. His first tour was in Sokoto, in the north-western corner of Northern Nigeria where the landscape is savannah and where daytime temperatures in the hot season soar to 45°C and do not come down below blood-temperature until late at night. His second tour, by contrast, was in Oturkpo near the Benue River, a land of thick forests and high humidity. Soon after war broke out in 1939, Tim secured his release from the CAS and returned to England. He joined the RAFVR and was trained to become a fighter pilot. In 1941 he met and fell in love with Berrice Lincoln and they were married the following year after he had served in Malta where he was awarded a DFC. Berrice’s background was very different from Tim’s. Whereas he came from a professional, highly educated and privileged family, she had had to leave school when she was only thirteen years old because her father had abandoned the family and her mother was unable to pay the school fees. Berrice never saw her father again, which must have been traumatic for her as they had been very close. On her fourteenth birthday she started work in a dress shop and a few years later she joined the ATS. Throughout the war, and after it, Tim and Berrice wrote hundreds of letters to each other, which are the basis of this book. In 1991 Berrice told me: I’m in the process of re-reading the letters that Dad and I wrote to each other – incredible how so many survived our frequent postings in the war and the vagaries of the mail. Some day you will probably read the letters and you will understand that I was the most fortunate woman in the world to have loved, and been loved 2 Harmattan, A Wind of Change by, Dad. And you will see how, at my request, he helped so patiently to fill in the gaps in my education. After the war Tim returned with her to Nigeria and they were sent to Nassarawa, a one-man station. Subsequently they were in Makurdi, Kafanchan, Birnin Kebbi and Sokoto where Tim became Resident. In the mid-1950s Tim was posted to Kano, first as Senior District Officer and then as Resident. It was there, in 1956, that they received the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on the last day of their Royal Tour of Nigeria. The following year Tim became Permanent Secretary to the Premier of Northern Nigeria, Alhaji Sir Ahmadu Bello, and Head of the Northern Civil Service. Two years later he was made Deputy Governor of Northern Nigeria and when the Governor went on leave he was the Officer Administering Government. Nigeria gained its independence in October 1960 and Tim retired from the service at the beginning of 1961. He then took charge of the Overseas Service Resettlement Bureau in London, which helped officers returning from the Colonies to find further employment. He also found time to write two serious books, The Fulani Empire of Sokoto and A Selection of Hausa Stories, as well as Zomo, the Rabbit, a book of Nigerian stories for children, published under the name Hugh Sturton. He was working on another book about the explorer Denham when he died. Denham in Bornu was later completed by David Muffett. Had Tim not died so prematurely – two days after his fifty- fourth birthday – he would undoubtedly have written a memoir.
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