The year was 1947; the time about three o'clock in the afternoon. My Umuahia Government College cricket teammates and I were waiting at the Asaba wharf for the Shanahan to ferry us across the River Niger to Onitsha. Suddenly someone pointed to the other side of the road from where we were standing. "Isn't that Orizontal, there by the pleasure car?" I looked across the road and saw and recognized him at once. He was truly a sight for sore eyes, tall and magnificently built, broad-shouldered, and impossibly handsome. His familiar double-breasted jacket, ash-gray in color, was so long it reached down to mid-thigh. It was the first time I had actually seen the man so close I could have walked across the road and touched him.

Prince Abyssinia Akweke Nwafor Orizu, scion of the royal house of Nnewi, was one of the sons of Eze Ugbonyamba, Igwe Orizu I. Soon after his return to Nigeria from America, in the mid-forties, he became universally known as Orizontal. This was a play on his name and the word horizontal, because he espoused what he termed horizontal (typically American) education, as opposed to the vertical or perpendicular (typically British) education.

He wrote and talked endlessly about this. His book, Without Bitterness, was a classic of its time. In America, he said, education was available to all and was broadly based. In sharp contrast, in Britain, education tended to be too narrowly focused, and was the privilege of relatively small numbers. I understood this to be mainly in reference to tertiary education. This, he explained, was why he had made it his life's work to correct what he perceived as the pernicious influence of British educational ideas on Nigeria and Africa.

The American Council on African Education, his brainchild while he was still in America, obtained numerous tuition scholarships from various American sources for the benefit of African students. My views and appreciation of this great son and prince of my home town, Nnewi, are based, force majeure, almost entirely on my recollections of the man. I happen to be married to his niece Ethel, the second daughter of his elder sister, Mrs. Victoria Uduego Obi, wife of Onunekwulu-Igbo, Chief Z. C. Obi.

Orizu was a controversial figure. In all he did, he had his detractors, and they were many. One of my high school teachers, with a penchant for quoting Shakespeare, was fond of saying that Prince Orizu was all sound and fury, signifying nothing. There were those who saw him only as a showman. And others who doubted the authenticity of his scholarships.

Nigeria's British colonial rulers openly scoffed at his educational philosophy and his message. The same authorities convicted him on charges of financial fraud, relating to these same scholarships. Notwithstanding which, hordes of young African students benefited from his efforts. On the day I saw him at the Asaba wharf, he was traveling to Lagos with one of those scholarship winners. In time, he received a full pardon from the President of an independent Nigeria.

He was in the forefront of the struggle for Nigeria's independence, alongside Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik of Africa, and Owelle of Onitsha). He belonged to that breed of American-educated Igbo men (Mbonu Ojike and Ozumba Mbadiwe were two of the others), whose brand of anti-colonial activism contrasted somewhat with the more staid approach of such British-educated luminaries as H. O. Davies, S.L. Akintola, and even Obafemi Awolowo. Like Zik, Nwafor Orizu was nationalist in his outlook. So were Mbonu Ojike and Mbadiwe. Unlike them, Awolowo and Akintola, at least from my perspective, were more narrow in their political orientation, though they fought just as hard against British imperialism.

On the attainment of independence on October 1, 1960, Nwafor Orizu became the first President of the Nigerian Senate. This placed him in line to assume the Acting Presidency of Nigeria when Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe traveled out of the country in January 1966. That same month, a group of Nigerian army officers, under Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, struck. It was the first coup d'etat by the Nigerian military; tragically, the first of many. In the confusion that followed, Nwafor Orizu, as Acting President, was obliged to hand over power to General Aguiyi Ironsi, Officer commanding the Nigerian Army.

The General, who had not been a party to the coup, took over the reins of government with the mandate to restore order. What followed turned out to be the sordid and tragic history of a sequence of cataclysmic events that entrenched the army in power and brought Nigeria to its knees in everything that was, and is, important to the weal of the nation. A civil war was fought, 1967-1970 between Biafrans and the rest of Nigeria. General Gowon, the then military ruler, desperately seeking compromise and redemption, declared it a "no-victor, no-vanquished" civil war. Afterwards, Orizu faded from the political scene from the moment he transferred power to Aguiyi Ironsi. But he remained an educator. Before the civil war, which started in July 1967, he had set up a high school, the Nigerian Secondary School, in Nnewi. He remained its proprietor till, after the defeat of Biafra, the state government took over all the schools.

Twenty-nine years later, at the age of eighty-four, he died in March 1999. Now, he belongs to the ages. Nwafor Orizu was, at once, imperial in bearing, and a charmer. My other personal recollection of him was the day I stood on the steps of my father's house in Nnewi. This was some four or five years after my earlier encounter with him in 1947. I was an undergraduate student of the University College, Ibadan. He was walking past our house when he saw me. He stopped, turned and came and chatted genially with me for at least a half-hour before he continued on his way. I knew, after that conversation if I did not know it before, that he had a very persuasive tongue.

The topic of our conversation was mainly to do with the nature and purpose of the Ibadan university college, then only in its third year of existence. I do not recall exactly what he said about Ibadan. I only remember that, at the end of that half hour, I fervently wished he had been invited to help shape and structure the university college, which had seemed, to some of us at the time, a reluctant creation of the British colonial office.

He may have had the physical attributes of an Adonis, favorite of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Since he had his human frailties, there are differing perspectives about his private legacy. I appreciate him for his contributions to Nigeria, his activism in education, charm and ready wit.
Momah, based in Somerset, New Jersey, is a member of the NUSA (Nnewi USA), an umbrella organization of the sons and daughters of Nnewi in the United States.

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