Nigeria as a colony

After the British government assumed direct control of the Royal Niger Company’s territories, the northern areas were renamed the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, and the land in the Niger delta and along the lower reaches of the river was added to the Niger Coast Protectorate, which was renamed the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. Lagos remained the capital of the south, with Zungeru the new capital of the north. On January 1, 1914, following the recommendations of Sir Frederick Lugard, the two protectorates were amalgamated to form the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria under a single governor-general resident in Lagos. Between 1919 and 1954 the title reverted to governor.

Following Lugard’s success in the north, he set out the principles of the administrative system subsequently institutionalized as “indirect rule.” Essentially, local government was to be left in the hands of the traditional chiefs, subject to the guidance of European officers. Native institutions were utilized and interference with local customs kept to a minimum, although the British did not always understand the local customs. While this system had built-in contradictions, over the years the Nigerian system developed into a sophisticated form of local government, especially in the emirates and under the banner of “native administration,” which became the hallmark of British colonial rule in Africa.

Many changes accompanied British rule: Western education, the English language, and Christianity spread during the period; new forms of money, transportation, and communication were developed; and the Nigerian economy became based on the export of cash crops. Areas with lucrative crops such as cacao and peanuts (groundnuts) profited, while many people in different parts of the country had to migrate to work elsewhere as tenant farmers or use their newly acquired education and skills to work in cities as wage earners, traders, and artisans. Two tiers of government emerged, central and local. The central government, presided over by the governor-general and accountable to the secretary for the colonies in London, was more powerful but distant from the people. Local administration, where the colonial citizens typically experienced colonial authority, was based on the policy of indirect rule first developed in the north.

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. Traditional authorities were co-opted in the north, where the spread of Western education by Christian missionaries was strongly resisted by Muslim leaders. In the south the British occasionally created a political hierarchy where there had been none before; in most cases they ruled through those who were most malleable, whether these people had held traditional positions of authority or not. Because Western education and Christianity spread rapidly in the south and not in the north, development was much slower in the north, and the growing disparity between north and south later caused political tensions.

Further dislocation accompanied the outbreak of World War I. Locally this involved the immediate invasion of the German-held Kamerun (Cameroon) by Nigerian forces, followed by a costly campaign that lasted until 1916. Later Nigerian troops were sent to East Africa. (During World War II they again served in East Africa, as well as in Burma [now Myanmar].) In 1922 Kamerun was divided under a League of Nations mandate between France and Britain, Britain administering its area within the government of Nigeria; after 1946 the mandated areas were redesignated as a United Nations (UN) trust territory.

Although colonial rule appeared secure in the first two decades of the 20th century, the British struggled to keep control of their Nigerian colony and continued to do so until Nigeria became independent in 1960. The British, when faced with dissent, tended to grant political reforms in an effort to dispel the attractiveness of more-radical suggestions. Early on in colonial rule, for example, Nigerians protested the manner in which water rates and head taxes were collected. Nigerians also requested more political representation. The Nigerian Legislative Council was established in 1914 and was given limited jurisdiction; it was replaced in 1922 by a larger one that included elected members from Lagos and Calabar, although its powers also were limited and the northern provinces remained outside its control. A more representative system did not appear until 1946, when each geographic group of provinces had its own House of Assembly, with a majority of nonofficial (though not yet all elected) members; there were also a House of Chiefs and, in Lagos, a central Legislative Council. By 1919 the National Council of British West Africa, an organization consisting of elites across West Africa, was demanding that half the members of the Legislative Council be Africans; they also wanted a university in West Africa and more senior positions for Africans in the colonial civil service.

Beginning in the 1920s, a number of Nigerians joined other Blacks in various parts of the world to embark on the wider project of Pan-Africanism, which sought to liberate Black people from racism and European domination. In 1923 Herbert Macaulay, the grandson of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, established the first Nigerian political party, the Nigerian National Democratic Party, which successfully contested three Lagos seats in the Legislative Council. Macaulay was despised by the British, but he came to be regarded as the “father of modern Nigerian nationalism.”

After the 1930s, political activities focused primarily on ways to end British rule. A national party, the Nigerian Youth Movement, emerged in 1934, and its members won elections to the Legislative Council. After 1940, political activities were broadened to include more people. In 1944 Macaulay and Nnamdi Azikiwe, an Igbo who had been educated in the United States, united more than 40 different groups to establish the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC). The forces unleashed against the British were now diverse, including soldiers who had served in World War II, the media, restless youth, market women, educated people, and farmers, all of whom became committed to the anticolonial movement. Political leaders resorted to the use of political parties and the media to mobilize millions of Nigerians against the continuation of British rule.

The British answered this activity by attempting to create a more representational colonial system. The Macpherson constitution, promulgated in 1951, provided for a central House of Representatives, but friction between the central and regional legislatures, related to the question of where supreme party authority lay, soon caused a breakdown. In response to Azikiwe and other nationalists, the Lyttelton constitution of 1954 created a fully federal system, comprising the three geographic regions of Nigeria, the Southern Cameroons, and the Federal Territory of Lagos. Each region had a governor, premier, cabinet, legislature, and civil service, with the significantly weaker federal government represented in Lagos by a governor-general, bureaucracy, House of Representatives, and Senate.

The southern protectorate was divided into two provinces in 1939—Western and Eastern—and in 1954 they, along with the northern protectorate, were renamed the Western, Eastern, and Northern regions as part of Nigeria’s reconstruction into a federal state. Internal self-government was granted to the Western and Eastern regions in 1957. The Eastern region was dominated by Azikiwe and the Western one by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba lawyer who in 1950 founded the Action Group. Demanding immediate self-government, the Action Group was opposed by the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), which was composed largely of northerners and headed by several leaders, including Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. At its own request the Northern region was not given internal self-government until 1959, because northerners feared that their region might lose its claim to an equal share in the operation and opportunities of the federal government if it was not given time to catch up with the educationally advanced south. 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. After the Willink Commission examined and reported on this issue in 1958, independence was granted.