The Bloody Birth of Colonial Nigeria:
The British amalgamated Nigeria into a single country to serve their economic objectives of exploiting and looting agricultural and mineral resources. Nigeria was seen as Africa’s biggest source of industrial raw materials and market for British products. To establish this commercial empire the British, in the 1849, appointed John Beecroft the first Consul of the Bights of Benin and Biafra stretching from Calabar to Sierra Leone. The Consul coordinated the military annexation of Lagos in 1861 and the kidnapping, kangaroo trial, and exiling of King Perekule (Pepple) of Bonny in the 1860s. The British also kidnapped Jaja of Opobo, tried him overseas and exiled him to the Caribbean islands in the 1880s.The quest for the restructuring of the Nigerian political system has been made relentlessly since the 1914 amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates by the British colonial conquerors. The British employed violence and military might to defeat opposition to their take-over of native lands. Bloodshed and widespread destruction resulted from the final overthrow of indigenous political authorities at the time. The effects of the British action are still haunting Nigeria till this day.
The British occupied Lagos in 1861, but they could not penetrate the Ijebu heartland because the Ijebu fought gallantly to stop them. Ijebu area was finally overrun about the late 1800s. The wars between the British invaders and Madam Tinubu of Lagos are still remembered. Madam Tinubu was the first Nigerian female heroine of the anti-colonial revolution. In the following decades the British colonial plunderers had prolonged conflicts with the Egba to the north-west of Lagos, and their territory was consequently annexed to the British empire.
The attack on Nana Olomu of Itsekiri in 1894 was also high drama. From his fortified town of Ebrohimi on the Benin River. Nana was a great merchant with an international reputation. He spoke about seven languages, including Portuguese and Spanish. His forces held the British at bay for three months. The town fell and Nana managed to get to Lagos via lagoon routes. He was arrested, tried deported to and tried in the Gold Coast, now Ghana. After Nana the only opposition was the Benin Empire, one of the oldest and most advanced in Africa. On February 17, 1897, the British expeditionary vandals entered Benin City, destroyed it with fire, and looted thousands of ivory and exotic art works. The Benin monarch, Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, was arrested, handcuffed, dethroned, and sent on exile to Calabar where he lived and died in 1914. Nogbaisi’s Urhobo ally, Ovie (King) Oghwe of Agbarha-Otor was similarly arrested and exiled to Calabar where he died. That year, the British completed the amalgamation of the country.
The record of conquest and looting was inherited by the Royal Niger Company (RNC) that was granted trade monopoly in 1885. It was headed by Tubman Goldie. The Company that later became United African Company (UAC) signed trade treaties with kingdoms and peoples and operated as a government. The treaties were unfair to the native people. When some kingdoms protested against the injustice they were attacked by the armed troops of the Company. In 1885 the Company created the Oil Rivers Protectorate comprising most areas of coastal Nigeria. The protectorate was the first building block of what developed to the colony of Nigeria.
In 1884/85, European colonial nations held their conference in the German city of Berlin. They resolved to carve up Africa into colonies and economic vineyards. With this mandate Britain took steps to take over all areas of Nigeria. Other European imperial nations were determined to annex Nigerian territories. The French were advancing from the west and north of the area; they eventually grabbed Dahomey (Benin Republic) in the west and Niger and Chad in the north. The Germans were penetrating from the east via Cameroon, their colony. These imperial rivalries made the British to hasten their take-over of Nigerian lands. For this reason, the charter of the Royal Niger Company was revoked in 1900. Two countries emerged from the process of colonisation: (1) Protectorate of Northern Nigeria and, (2) Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. Captain Frederick Lugard was the general colonial overseer from Lokoja as the capital.
Lugard had been a security staff of the Royal Niger Company. In this capacity, he was deployed regularly to raid and destroy uncooperative kingdoms and groups, and to massacre innocent peoples who resisted. Lugard’s “Taliban” forces invaded, conquered, killed, and plundered the lands of the people of Nupe, Igala, Gbagyi (Gwari), Egbira, Kebbi, and Sokoto. In 1904, Lugard’s forces finally defeated the resistance armies of the Sokoto jihard, executed their leaders, sacked and burnt many settlements, and turned most of the population into refugees. Royal majesties were not spared; thus, he exiled to Lokojo the Emir of Zaria, Aliyu Dan Sidi, because the Emir composed poems to denounce the British occupation of Hausaland. In March 1906, Lugard’s brigands downed in blood anti-British militants of the “Saturi” rebellion in Sokoto Province; thousands of the survivors, mostly women and children, were evicted and enslaved. It was Captain Lugard who forcefully drove out the Gbagyi (Gwari) people from their homelands in Kaduna which he intended to use as Nigeria’s capital. More than 100 years later, the victims of Lugard’s pogroms are still being hunted and killed like wild animals in Southern Kaduna.
Captain Lugard had been appointed High Commissioner for the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria in 1900. To enhance his curriculum vitae as an official terrorist, Lugard was sent to Uganda in East Africa and Hong Kong in China to massacre people who were against the imposition of British rule. He returned in 1913 to start the draft of the documents for the amalgamation of the two Nigerian Protectorates into a single country.
God Was Not Involved in the Amalgamation Robbery:
Those who say that God had a purpose for cloning Nigerian peoples into a single country are guilty of blasphemy. God had no hand in the stealing of peoples’ lands and resources to make the Nigerian colony. Rather, Nigeria was created by British military adventurers and capitalist plutocrats to generate maximum profit from the exploitation of human and natural resources. The economic motive for creating Nigeria is evident in the final process of the amalgamation that started in 1900. The British faced a dilemma at this point. The British knew that the Northern Protectorate was financially famished and could not generate the public revenue for running its administration. There were practically no tax payers and commercial firms to pay tax. The Colonial Office in London did not want British tax payers to bear the burden of subsidising an African colony that could not raise taxes internally for its survival.
But Southern Nigeria already had business conglomerates many employees, commercially viable cities, staff of government and private institutions, and ports yielding export and import duties. To get revenue to subsidise the insolvent Northern Protectorate, the then Colonial Secretary, Lord Lewis Vernon Harcourt, made a proposal on how to sacrifice Southern Nigeria to subsidise Northern Nigeria. In his memorandum on the matter, Lewis Harcourt declared triumphantly thus:
“We have released Northern Nigeria from the leading strings of the Treasury. The promising and well conducted youth is now on an allowance on its own and is about to effect an alliance with a Southern lady of means. I have issued the special licence and Sir Frederick Lugard will perform the ceremony. May the union be fruitful and the couple constant.”
The piratical intentions of the 1914 amalgamation are revealed in Lewis Harcourt’s use of romantic and conjugal images in describing the coupling of Northern and Southern Nigeria. The indigent “promising and well conducted youth” is Northern Nigeria (husband) while the “Southern lady of means” refers to Southern Nigeria (wife). In plain terms, the British gave Southern Nigeria as wife/property to Northern Nigeria as husband/exploiter. It is noteworthy that in 1898, a British female journalist, Flora Shaw of the Times of London, who was Lugard’s girlfriend/concubine (later his wife), had suggested that the name of the emerging country be called “Nigeria”, that is, “lands of the Niger”. Both Fredrick Lugard and Lewis Harcourt got rewarded for their chivalric gamble: Lugard became the Governor-General of Nigeria and Harcourt was decorated by naming the new port town in eastern Nigeria after him, that is, PORT HARCOURT.
True to the prayer of Lewis Harcourt, the union between Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria has been “fruitful” for 100 years for foreign business exploiters and their Nigerian associates. But the union has been unfruitful and harmful to the people of Southern Nigeria. Southern Nigeria is still paying the bulk of the bills for running governments in the northern states of Nigeria.
In 1939, the British created three Regions and made the Northern Region larger than the Eastern and Western Regions put together. This was done to perpetuate the supremacy of the “Northern” elite during civil and military regimes. It is military governments dominated by the Northern elite that destroyed Nigeria’s federal system from the 1960s. The struggles and agitations for federalist restructuring going on since 1940s are aimed primarily to liberate Nigeria from the 100-year-old yoke of politico-military slavery.
G.G. Darah is Professor of Literature in English at Delta State University and a specialist in African literature and folklore. He has taught at Obafemi Awolowo University. He is at the vanguard of restructuring of Nigeria.
