Nation states are analogous to human beings; they are conceived and are born after an appropriate gestation period. Thereafter, their parents and well-wishers watch them with keen interest as they grow from infancy to adolescence in the hope that the young nations will survive to mature old age. Unfortunately, sometimes tragedy befalls the nations and they teeter on the brink of collapse. Such is the misfortune of the nation, which is portrayed in Sunset at Dawn, a historical novel that is based on the Nigeria/Biafra civil war.

Like a human being, the nation state of Nigeria was conceived during the Berlin conference of 1884/85. It was at this meeting that various European states allocated to themselves portions of the continent of Africa as their colonies. In this manner, Britain was allotted the territory that she later named Nigeria. The gestation period lasted 29 years, that is, from 1885 to 1914, during which time Britain ruled the Northern and Southern sections (protectorates) of Nigeria as separate entities. The date of birth of Nigeria as a nation state was 1914, since that was the year when the British colonial government amalgamated the two protectorates into one entity. Yet, the colonial government did not institute one administrative system for the entire nation. Rather, it administered the two units differently. In the South, it encouraged Christian missionaries to establish churches and schools as Westernizing influences, while in the North it established a system of indirect rule that operated through the existing feudal organization.