NIGERIA: Ready for the Queen

"A couple more royal visits and this town might look like something," growled a Scotsman in teeming, steaming Lagos last week. Never had the capital of Britain's biggest (373,250 sq. mi.) and most populous (32 million) African dependency undergone such a face-scrubbing as that which was preparing it for the arrival this week of Queen Elizabeth II.

Roads were being widened and resurfaced, ancient potholes filled up. Grey top hats were on sale for the first time in a Lagos department store. In a city nightclub, a hot combo was rocking to the beat of a new boogie tune: Elizabeth R, Eight to the Bar, and at a local parking lot, a small, bald man, freshly arrived from London, was busily tuning up a gleaming Rolls-Royce, to put it in prime form for the Queen's ceremonial drive. Altogether, nearly $3,000,000 was being spent for Nigeria's first visit by reigning British royalty. Oddly enough, the avidly nationalistic Nigerians seemed happy enough to spend it.

All-Black Nation. Cursed beyond most corners of Elizabeth's empire with a hellish climate and a poverty that festers through vast acres of its capital city in some of the world's most squalid slums, Nigeria is nevertheless an optimistic and happy land. An all-black nation whose non-African residents number only 16,000, it has no notion of the meaning of apartheid or Jim Crow. Eager for and already well on its way to self-government, Nigeria bears no grudges. "Why should we be anti-British?" Nigerians are likely to answer if queried. "We're more or less British ourselves."

Under the gradually slackening reins of colonial dominion, Nigeria has achieved a high degree of national prosperity. In 1954 its favorable trade balance of exports (cocoa, palm oil, peanuts) over imports reached a record $100 million. Even among the slums and squalor of beggar-strewn Lagos there are startling evidences of a middle-class prosperity: neat two-story homes in Ikoyi suburb, equipped with every modern convenience; a ramshackle bar in Shopono Street doing a hotcakes business in the best imported beer at 35¢ a bottle. A block from Ibadan's new University College, Nigerian necromancers sell dried mice, parrot beaks, snake fangs and yellow and blue face powders. On Sundays and pleasant evenings in Lagos, the folk who dress by day in rags emerge, as if by magic, in natty slacks and clean, yellow nylon sport shirts for an evening at the movies. And amid Nigeria's poverty, there are reportedly more African millionaires than in all the rest of the continent.

Divided Into Three. So far, Britain's efforts to set Nigeria free have been hampered largely by the Nigerians themselves. Known to its intimates as Sweatpot-by-the-Sea, Lagos today is the capital of a loose federation of three largely autonomous regions: the rural Christian and pagan Eastern Nigeria of the Ibo tribesmen; the Christian and pagan West of the Yoruba, rich with cocoa profits; and the Moslem North of the Hausa and Fulani, where powerful emirs struggle to protect the traditions of a feudal past. Each section hates and distrusts the others. Her Majesty's government has offered Nigeria various plans for independence, but, says one native minister: "We are not ready."