Governor Richards had sent a similar, damaging 13-page memorandum about the NCNC and its leadership to the Colonial Office in August 1946. He presented Azikiwe as harbouring a bitter hatred of the whiteman with a commitment to a persistent editorial policy which was bitterly opposed to government and lacking any scruples in his use of lies and misrepresentations to further his propaganda campaign. He dismissed OlorunNimbe as an 'ill-mannered and ill-tempered and utterly unscrupulous communist sympathizer', while Imoudu, the militant trade unionist who led the Nigerian General Strike of 1945 (Oyemakinde, 1974, 1975), he described as 'an unbalanced orator' ofthe Hitler type with 'a great facility for whipping ignorant crowds into a frenzy'. Richards' denigration of the NCNC leadership arose from the latter's call for the rejection of his constitution, and for election by ballot, which he considered unreasonable in a largely illiterate community in which many natives went 'unclothed, where cannibalism is still practised, where secret societies based on juju can still indulge in mass murder' and in which organized labour leaders invoked 'juju to impart discipline', even as 'the vast populations of the Moslem Emirates are only just emerging from the eastern feudalism of the Middle Ages' (Pearce, 1981