Umu Biafra: Udo diri unu.

I am sure you remember the TV ad about teachers featuring a little boy saying: `They said it would never be done. But what do they know? They said man would never fly. But what do they know?'

They also said the sun would never set on the British empire. But what do they know? That Hitler's third reich would last a thousand years; that Soviet communism was the wave of the future; that South African apartheid was indestructible. But what do they know? Even most Americans once believed they could never win the war of independence against Britain, the mightiest power on earth at that time. But what do they know? And that even if they won, the American experiment with the world's first truly republican government would end in disaster.

The views of the American anti-independence movement was summarized in two books, Charles Inglis'sThe True Interest of America Impartially Stated and James Chalmer's Plain Truth, both published in Philadelphia in 1776. Both men built their anti- American case on a vigorous defense of the English monarchical constitution, the social dangers of republicanism and the inability of the American people to sustain a republican polity. According to them republics had always been torn to pieces by factions and internal divisions, tumults which Americans would never escape. "All would be unhinged," warned Inglis, "(and) the greatest confusion, and the most violent convulsions would take place." Chalmers predicted "a dreadful anarchy resulting from republicanism, leading to a Cromwellian dictatorship."

According to these jeremiads America would witness commercial chaos and agrarian laws limiting the possession of property: "A war will ensue between the creditors and their debtors, which will eventually end in a general abolition of debts, which has more than once happened to other states on occasions similar."

Opponents of independence argued that a republican form of government "would neither suit the genius of the people, nor the extent of America." They said that Americans were properly Britons with the same "manners, habits, and ideas of Britons." Thomas Paine, a pro- independence activist, they scoffed, "had promised Americans the restoration of the golden age if they became republicans." But until Paine could give them "some assurance that may be relied on, that ambition, pride, avarice, and all that dark train of passions which usually attend" were absent from the American soul, his audience would only "doubt the truth of his assertions." Calling the potential American republican system " a little better than a Government of Devils," one of the pro- British activists warned that it was "prudent not to put Virtue to too serious a Test." Republicanism, they cautioned, was an "ideal" principle, a mere creature of "warm imagination."

Indeed the words and activities of the pro-British and anti-independence Americans are not unlike those of their Nigerian counterparts who support Nigeria and oppose Biafra. They are indeed so similar. For eventhough history does not repeat itself (each historical event is unique) it does imitate itself.

The opponents of American independence were on the wrong side of history; and so are today's anti- Biafra agitators. Our consolation, however, lies in this historical reality: "Cynics and pessimists don't change the world. It is the optimists, the hopeful, the dreamers. People who dare to dream change things."

A lutta continua.