In the Eastern Region, appointed officials who were given "warrants" and hence called warrant chiefs, were strongly resisted by the people because they lacked traditional claims. Olatunji Ojo, "The Organization of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Yorubaland, ca.1777 to ca.1856", Bouda Etemad, "Economic relations between Europe and Black Africa, Giles D. Short, "Blood and Treasure: The reduction of Lagos, 1851", "Northern Nigeria: The Illo Canceller and Borgu Mail" by Ray Harris in. During World War II, three battalions of the Nigeria Regiment fought against Fascist Italy in the Ethiopian campaign. Armed resistance decreased in the 1920s but protest continued, "characterised by civil rights and civil . The Royal Navy bombarded Lagos in November 1851, ousted the pro-slavery Oba Kosoko and established a treaty with the newly installed Oba Akintoye, who was expectedly more amenable to British interests. The company interfered in the territory along the Niger and the Benue, sometimes becoming embroiled in serious conflicts when its British-led native constabulary intercepted slave raids or attempted to protect trade routes. A chief of Bonny in 1860 explained that he refused a British treaty due to the tendency to "induce the Chiefs to sign a treaty whose meaning they did not understand, and then seize upon the country".[14]. Read published a Memorandum on British possessions in West Africa, which remarked upon the "inconvenient and unscientific boundaries" between Lagos Colony, the Niger Coast Protectorate and the Royal Niger Company. [40] By 1893, most of the other political entities in Yorubaland recognised the practical necessity of signing another treaty with the British, this one explicitly joining them with the protectorate of Lagos. The political parties jockeyed for positions of power in anticipation of the independence of Nigeria. European colonialists had managed to quell the efforts by Africans to resist the establishment of colonial rule with one exception. Lost land and independence died of diseases that euro bring As a historical event, anticolonialism means the struggle against imperial rule in colonized countries, mostly during the first half of the twentieth century. Catholic missionaries were particularly active among the Igbo; the CMS worked among the Yoruba. In the north, for instance, legislation took the form of a decree cosigned by the Governor and the emir, while in the south, the Governor sought the approval of the Legislative Council. The Royal Niger Company had its own armed forces. They received attention from major parties before elections, at which time either a dominant party from another region or the opposition party in their region sought their alliance. Clifford also believed that indirect rule encouraged centripetal tendencies. Economic competition among these "houses" was so fierce that trade often erupted into an armed battle between the crews of the large canoes. The Colonial Office approved most of Lugard's plan, but balked at authorising him to pass laws without their approval. The pace of constitutional change accelerated after the promulgation of the Richards Constitution. [27] To produce all this oil, the economy of the southern region crossed over from mostly subsistence to the production of palm oil as a cash crop.[28]. September 24, 2021 at 9:40pm by jones.7592. Updated: 11/12/2021 Create an account The impact of colonialism in Nigeria could be discussed under political, economic, social, educational and religious aspects. Revolts in against water rates and the alienation of indigenous land in 1908 and 1911 served to unite native African elites and working class residents. In some cases, British assignment of people to ethnic groups, and treatment based along ethnic lines, led to identification with ethnicity where none had existed before.[84]. The seven men who governed Northern Nigeria, Southern Nigeria and Lagos through 1914 were Henry McCallum, William MacGregor, Walter Egerton, Ralph Moor, Percy Girouard, Hesketh Bell and Frederick Lugard. Thanks. He argued that the division into two separate colonies was advisable unless a stronger central government could bind Nigeria into more than just an administrative convenience for the three regions. He said that he did "not consider that their past traditions and their present backward cultural conditions afford to any such experiment a reasonable chance of success". The Anglicans and other religious groups had a conscious "native church" policy to develop indigenous ecclesiastical institutions to become independent of Europeans. Economic links among the regions increased, but indirect rule tended to discourage political interchange. It was guerrilla warfare in the case of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-60) and Zimbabwe's war of independence (1965-79); it was all . nigeria resistance to colonial rule. In 1912, Lugard returned to Nigeria from his six-year term as Governor of Hong Kong, to oversee the merger of the northern and southern protectorates. Portuguese Roman Catholic priests who accompanied traders and officials to the West African coast introduced Christianity to the Edo Empire in the fifteenth century. In November 1908, Bergheim reported striking oil; in September 1909, he reported extracting 2,000 barrels per day. Nigeria did not come into being until 1914, when the consort of a colonial Governor-General, Flora Shaw and her man, the fascist Lord Lugard willed and named Nigeria into being, with the dubious . He shows that, long before the growth of a mass independence movement in the wake of the second world war, there was considerable opposition to colonial rule. The Colonial Civil Service used intermediaries, as the Royal Niger Company had, in an expanded role which included diplomacy, propaganda and espionage. After initially adopting an indirect rule approach, in 1906 the British merged the small Lagos Colony and the Southern Nigeria Protectorate into a new Colony of Southern Nigeria, and in 1914 that was combined with the Northern Nigeria Protectorate to form the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. As a further step toward independence, the Governor's Executive Council was merged with the Council of Ministers in 1957 to form the all-Nigerian Federal Executive Council. "Separatist Agitations in Nigeria Since 1914." The British, when faced with dissent, tended to grant political reforms in an effort to dispel the attractiveness of more-radical suggestions. Similar status was acquired by the Northern Region two years later. The . Protestant missionaries tended to divide the country into spheres of activity to avoid competition with each other, and Catholic missions similarly avoided duplication of effort among the several religious orders working there. . His objective was to conquer the entire region and to obtain recognition of the British protectorate by its indigenous rulers, especially the Fulani emirs of the Sokoto Caliphate. Following the defeat of an unsuccessful foray by Consul General James R. Phillips, a larger retaliatory force captured Benin City and drove Ovonramwen, the Oba of Benin, into exile. The colonial period proper in Nigeria lasted from 1900 to 1960, after which Nigeria gained its independence. The Native Administration was headed by the traditional rulersmostly emirs in the north and often obas in the southand their District Heads, who oversaw a larger number of Village Heads. Nigerians also requested more political representation. The staff of this office came primarily from the British upper-middle classi.e., university-educated men, primarily not nobility, with fathers in well-respected professions. Unification meant only the loose affiliation of three distinct regional administrations into which Nigeria was subdividedNorthern, Western and Eastern regions. His mission failed, but Park and his party covered more than 1,500 kilometres (930mi), passing through the western portions of the Sokoto Caliphate, before drowning when their boats overturned in rapids near Bussa. [82], Oil exploration began in 1906 under John Simon Bergheim's Nigeria Bitumen Corporation, to which the Colonial Office granted exclusive rights. [55], Under the Colonial Office was the Governor, who managed the administration of his colony and held powers of emergency rule. The transfer of responsibility for budgetary management from the central to the regional governments in 1954 accelerated the pace of public spending on services and on development projects. [73] The spread of the disease was quick and deadly, with an estimated 1.5% of the population of Lagos falling victim. Whereas Lugard had applied lessons learned in the north to the administration of the south, Clifford was prepared to extend to the north practices that had been successful in the south. As its head, the master trader taxed other traders who were members of his "house"; he maintained a war vessel, a large dugout canoe that could hold several tons of cargo and dozens of crew, for the defense of the harbor. Others refused recruitment into colonial armies or labor forces.Jun 20 2017. Although per capita income in the country as a whole remained low by international standards, rising incomes among salaried personnel and burgeoning urbanization expanded consumer demand for imported goods. These changes included taking land from African people and giving it to the growing number of Europeans in the colonies. The operations of this force are still not fully known due to a policy of strict secrecy mandated by the British Government. Britain also annexed Freetown in Sierra Leone, declaring it a Crown Colony in 1808.[20]. Nigeria officially became a democracy on its independence from Britain in October 1960. Du Bois. 1. The superior weapons, tactics and political unity of the British are commonly given as reasons for their decisive ultimate victory. Consequently, in 1849, John Beecroft was accredited as consul for the bights of Benin and Biafra, a jurisdiction stretching from Dahomey to Cameroon. . [81] In 1936, of 6,259,547 income for the Nigerian state, 1,156,000 went back to England as home pay for British officials in the Nigerian civil service. Traditional authorities were co-opted in the north, where the spread of Western education by Christian missionaries was strongly resisted by Muslim leaders. Nigerian units also contributed to two divisions serving with British forces in Palestine, Morocco, Sicily and Burma, where they won many honours. By 1938 the NYM was agitating for dominion status within the British Commonwealth of Nations so that Nigeria would have the same status as Canada and Australia. A national party, the Nigerian Youth Movement, emerged in 1934, and its members won elections to the Legislative Council. Among the problems needing attention before the British would grant full independence was the minorities fear of discrimination by a future government based on majority ethnic groups. In the 1850s, quinine had been found to combat malaria, and aided by the medicine, a Liverpool merchant, Macgregor Laird, opened the river. Every Sultan and Emir and the principal officers of state will be appointed by the high Commissioner throughout all this country. Anticolonialism in the twentieth and twenty-first century refers to two interconnected concepts: a historical event and a critical analytic. It was a resistance movement whereby women in the Eastern Provinces of the British colony of Nigeria intended to reverse colonial policies that intruded on their political, economic, and social participation in local communities. Azikiwe had less interest in purely Nigerian goals than did Davies, a student of Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, whose political orientation was considered left-wing. The Delta streams were called "oil rivers". [16] Starting in 1740, the British were the primary European slave trafficker from this area. The Nigerian Resistance. In Nigeria, the British colonial administration found perhaps the longest-lasting resistance movement. Quiz. However, in October 1929 in Oloko a census related to taxation was conducted, and the women in the area suspected that this was a prelude to the extension of direct taxation, which had been imposed on the men the previous year. If the emirs accepted British authority, abandoned the slave trade, and cooperated with British officials in modernizing their administrations, the colonial power was willing to confirm them in office. 19, no. By an overwhelming majority, voters in the Southern Cameroons opted to join formerly French-administered Cameroon over integration with Nigeria as a separate federated region. Native institutions were utilized and interference with local customs kept to a minimum, although the British did not always understand the local customs. The charter allowed the company to collect customs and make treaties with local leaders.[12]. The NPC continued to represent the interests of the traditional order in the pre-independence deliberations. Independence was achieved on 1 October 1960. European slave trading from West Africa began before 1650, with people taken at a rate of about 3,000 per year. To prevent any united opposition to its authority, the British adopted a divide-and-rule policy, keeping Nigerian groups separate from one another as much as possible. After the 1930s, political activities focused primarily on ways to end British rule. [19] This scenario provided an opportunity for naval expeditions and reconnaissance throughout the region. In all three regions, minority parties represented the special interests of ethnic groups, especially as they were affected by the majority. [74] The disease first found its home among the many trading ports along the West African coast. It is not a unitary state with local government areas but with one Central Executive and one Legislature. In an era of globalization, leaders of "recognized" nations often discuss the development of indigenous resources without inviting aboriginal leaders to the table. We bind ourselves not to have any intercourse with any strangers or foreigners except through the said national African Company (Limited), and we give the said National African Company (Limited) full power to exclude all other strangers and foreigners from their territory at their discretion. Colonization of Nigeria. [31], Captain John Glover, the colony's administrator, created a militia of Hausa troops in 1861. The company received 865,000 compensation for the loss of its Charter. By the mid-1940s, the major ethnic groups had formed such associations as the Igbo Federal Union and the Egbe Omo Oduduwa (Society of the Descendants of Oduduwa), a Yoruba cultural movement, in which Awolowo played a leading role. 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