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Present-day Nigeria - defined geographically as the basin of the great Niger River flowing into the South Atlantic at the West African coast, is a country of some 120 million people of whom 47 percent are Muslim, 35 percent Christian and the remainder animists or pagans following native tribal rituals and religions. In the eighteenth-century the region was controlled by two powerful confederations of tribe the Oyo and the Aro whose political history involved a series of coups and conquests often marked by the deaths of the defeated oligarchies by the instrument of suicide.[1]
The incursion of Islamic traders and potentates from the North and East had resulted already in the establishment of a slave-trade by the time that the Portuguese arrived in the last years of the seventeenth century and, for the next hundred years, the Aro and Oyo confederacies fed slaves into a transatlantic market which populated the newly colonised regions of the Carribean and North America with millions of Africans and their descendants. After the Portuguese came the Dutch and after them the British, who accounted for two-fifths of the slave traffic in the eighteenth century - a traffic centred on the port of Bristol.
After the Abolition of Slavery in 1807 - following a moral campaign led by William Wilberforce - British merchants turned to ordinary trade and developed Lagos to handle the export of raw-materials and the import of manufactured goods exchanged with the former at great profit to the merchants. In 1879 the United African Company, founded by George Goldie (sometimes called “father of Nigeria” by imperialist historians) was transformed into the Royal Niger Company by an Act of Parliament. In 1861 Lagos was formally declared a colony, although a Parliamentary Report of 1865 urged British withdrawal from West Africa.
In 1884-85 a conference of European foreign ministers was convened at Berlin to prevent ruinous hostilities between the different European nations during the so-called “race for empire”. As a result of this, the Niger basin was acknowledged to fall within the British sphere of influence - a situation that reflected existing economic operations and the influence connected with them. British “rule” in Nigeria can thus be seen as make-shift and provisional from the outset rather than the result of a definite policy of imperial conquest.
Yet the element of political domination was real enough since military force was inevitably used to secure the hold of the trading companies on the territory; and this in turn brought about the political unification of the country - or, more precisely, the formation of a country called Nigeria within boundaries established by the Berlin Conference.
A series of military expeditions conducted by the Royal Niger Company culminated in the occupation of Benin in 1897 following the massacre of a British Consul with his entourage on the way to report on stories of human sacrifice in that city. Soon afterwards the Company was dissolved a Protectorate created in its place, ostensibly so that the conquest of the Caliphate of Sokoto could be effected with the necessary military force. was effected by the Royal West African Frontier Force created by Lord Frederick Lugard.
As High Commissioner during 1900-1909 and 1912-19 - in the interim he was governor of Hong Kong - Lugard administered the British Protectorate of Nigeria by means of “indirect rule”, a policy that permitted the emirs (i.e., former Arab-Islamic rulers) to continue in power in the North, although their local-government treasuries were placed under the direct authority of British administrators living in the areas in question. These were the District Officers of the Colonial Service, trained and appointed by the Colonial Office in London and subject to the Commissioner in the field.
District Officers were charged with tasks ranging from the construction of roads and hospitals to sentencing and execution of criminals in case of capital crimes. While education was high on the agenda, Christian missionaries were specifically excluded from the North as likely to disturb relations between the British and Moslem majority, and hence to disrupt the policy of indirect rule. The quest for indirect rulers in the South was less successful, resulting in recurrent conflict between British officials on the ground and the tribal Igbos.
Notwithstanding such difficulties, Lord Lugard effected the unification of Nigeria in 1914 and went on, in 1916, to establish a Nigerian Council which reflected a loosely federalist relationship between the main regions. By the 1920s, in the wake of World War I - during which Cary himself commanded men in Nigeria and the Cameroons facing their counterparts in German West Africa - nationalism had emerged among African lawyers, teachers and students, chiefly inspired by the American examples of Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois.
The West African Students Union founded in London in 1925 was the first of many such as the National Youth Movement led by H. O. Davies and Nnamdi Azikikwe - a grouping that agitated for Dominion Status (like Canada and Australia) in 1938. It was only after Azikikwe established the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in 1945 that a pan-national party was established, though this was soon answered by the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) promoted by the Muslim emirs. in 1951, Azikikwe formed the Action Group to defend the Yoruba interest against an Igbo majority in the National Council.
Throughout this period the Colonial Office was intent on setting up a workable constitution based on federal principles as soon as the political climate was deemed sufficiently stable to permit the British Government to extricate itself from the region. A House of Representatives was elected in 1954 with the balance of power in the hands of the NPC. In 1957 the Executive Council of Nigeria was merged with the Council of Ministers, drawing the reins of power closer together as the British colonial adminstration prepared to withdraw.
It is worth stressing that at no time was the move towards national independence in Nigeria characterised by nationalist violence, nor did the British government resist the development of local power. The preparation of a Federal Constitution for an independent Nigeria, implemented under a seal of the British Crown, was carried on by all parties concerned at Lancaster House in London, with the British Colonial Secretary in the chair. In the 1959 election of the enlarged House of Representatives that would comprise the ruling body of Nigeria, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of the NPC was invited to form a government.
The subsequent outbreak of the Biafran War in 1967 and the advent of military dictatorships is a complex tale of ethnic, regional and religious sectionalism exacerbated by the desire to control huge material resources. Of the resources over which they fought the most important has been oil. This was discovered in commercial quantities in 1956 after several decades of exploration by Shell and British Petroleum. One year before independence, facilities were constructed at Port Harcourt enabling export of this lucrative bonanza, and the scene was set for civil war.
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