The Lagos colony was later added in 1906, and the territory was officially renamed the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. In 1914, Southern Nigeria was joined with Northern Nigeria Protectorate to form the single colony of Nigeria.[2] The unification was done for economic reasons and the colonial administration sought to use the budget surpluses in Southern Nigeria to offset this deficit.[3]
Sir Frederick Lugard, who took office as governor of both protectorates in 1912, was responsible for overseeing the unification, and he became the first governor of the newly united territory. Lugard established several central institutions to anchor the evolving unified structure.[4] A Central Secretariat was instituted at Lagos, which was the seat of government, and the Nigerian Council (later the Legislative Council), was founded to provide a forum for representatives drawn from the provinces. Certain services were integrated across the Northern and Southern Provinces because of their national significance—military, treasury, audit, posts and telegraphs, railways, survey, medical services, judicial and legal departments—and brought under the control of the Central Secretariat in Lagos.[3]
The process of unification was undermined by the persistence of different regional perspectives on governance between the Northern and Southern Provinces, and by Nigerian nationalists in Lagos.[5] While southern colonial administrators welcomed amalgamation as an opportunity for imperial expansion, their counterparts in the Northern Province believed that it was injurious to the interests of the areas they administered because of their relative backwardness and that it was their duty to resist the advance of southern influences and culture into the north. Southerners, on their part, were not eager to embrace the extension of legislation originally meant for the north to the south.[3]
Administration
Governors
From its foundation, southern Nigeria was administered by a high commissioner. The first high commissioner was Ralph Moor. When Lagos was amalgamated with the rest of southern Nigeria in 1906, the then high commissioner Walter Egerton was made into Governor of the territory.[6]
When in 1900 the protectorate passed from the Foreign Office to the Colonial Office, Ralph Moor became High Commissioner of Southern Nigeria and laid the foundations of the new administration, his health failing, he retired on pension on 1 October 1903.
Egerton became Governor of Lagos Colony, covering most of the Yoruba lands in the southwest of what is now Nigeria, in 1903. The colonial office wanted to amalgamate the Lagos Colony with the protectorate of Southern Nigeria, and in August 1904 also appointed Egerton as High Commissioner for the Southern Nigeria Protectorate. He held both offices until 28 February 1906.[7] On that date, the two territories were formally united and Egerton was appointed Governor of the new Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, holding office until 1912.[8] In the new Southern Nigeria, the old Lagos Colony became the Western Province, and the former Southern Nigerian Protectorate was split into a Central Province with capital at Warri and an Eastern Province with capital at Calabar.[9]
When his predecessor in Southern Nigeria, Sir Ralph Denham Rayment Moor, resigned, a large part of the southeast of Nigeria was still outside British control. On taking office, Egerton began a policy of sending out annual pacification patrols, which generally obtained submission through the threat of force without being required to actually use force.[10]
When Egerton became Governor of Lagos he enthusiastically endorsed the extension of the Lagos – Ibadan railway onward to Oshogbo, and the project was approved in November 1904. Construction began in January 1905 and the line reached Oshogbo in April 1907.[11]
He favoured rail over river transport, and pushed to have the railway further extended to Kano by way of Zaria.[12]
He also sponsored extensive road construction, building on the legislative foundation laid by his predecessor Moor which enabled use of unpaid local labour.[13]
Egerton shared Moor's views on the damage that was being done to the Cross River trade by the combination of indigenous middlemen and traders based in Calabar. The established traders at first got the Colonial Office to pass rules inhibiting competition from traders willing to set up bases further inland, but with some difficulty, Egerton persuaded the officials to reverse their ruling.[14]
Egerton was a strong advocate of colonial development. He believed in deficit financing at certain periods of a colony's growth, which was reflected in his budgets from 1906 to 1912. He had a constant struggle to obtain approval for these budgets from the colonial office.[15]
As early as 1908, Egerton supported the idea of "a properly organized Agricultural Department with an energetic and experienced head", and the Department of Agriculture came into being in 1910.[16]
Egerton endorsed the development of rubber plantations, a concept familiar to him from his time in Malaya, and arranged for land to be leased for this purpose. This was the foundation of a highly successful industry.[17] He also thought there could be great potential in the tin fields near Bauchi, and thought that if proven a branch line to the tin fields would be justified.[18]
Egerton came into conflict with the administration of Northern Nigeria on a number of issues. There was debate over whether Ilorin should be incorporated into Southern Nigeria since the people were Yoruba, or remain in Northern Nigeria since the ruler was Muslim and for some time Ilorin had been subject to the Uthmaniyya Caliphate. There was argument about the administration of duties on goods landed on the coast and carried into Northern Nigeria. And there was dispute over whether railway lines from the north should terminate at Lagos or should take alternative routes to the Niger River and the coast.[19]
Egerton had reason on his side in objecting to the proposed line terminating at Baro on the Niger, since navigation southward to the coast was restricted to the high-water season, and even then was uncertain.[20]
Egerton's administration imposed policies that tended towards segregation of Europeans and Africans.[21]
These included excluding Africans from the West African Medical Service and saying that no European should take orders from an African, which had the effect of ruling out African doctors from serving with the army. Egerton himself did not always approve of these policies, and they were not strictly upheld.[22]
The legal relationship between the Lagos government and the Yoruba states of the Lagos Colony was not clear, and it was not until 1908 that Egerton persuaded the Obas to accept the establishment of the Supreme Court in the main towns.[23] In 1912, Egerton was replaced by Frederick Lugard, who was appointed Governor-General of both Southern and Northern Nigeria with the mandate to unite the two. Egerton was appointed Governor of British Guiana as his next posting, clearly a demotion, which may have been connected to his fights with the Colonial Office officials.[24]
Lugard returned to Nigeria as Governor of the two protectorates. His main mission was to complete the amalgamation into one colony. Although controversial in Lagos, where it was opposed by a large section of the political class and the media, the amalgamation did not arouse passion in the rest of the country. From 1914 to 1919, Lugard was made Governor General of the now combined Colony of Nigeria. Throughout his tenure, Lugard sought strenuously to secure the amelioration of the condition of the native people, among other means by the exclusion, wherever possible, of alcoholic liquors, and by the suppression of slave raiding and slavery. Lugard ran the country with half of each year spent in England, distant from realities in Africa where subordinates had to delay decisions on many matters until he returned, and based his rule on a military system.[25]
Governor of the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria
Economy
Colonial economic policy
The British economic policy for Africa at the time was founded on the belief that if African peoples were brought to embrace European civilisation with its emphasis on law and order their economic resources would be more effectively and thoroughly exploited to the benefit of all. It was optimistically and simplistically believed that the problem of African economic development was largely the problem of law and order; that once the slave trade was suppressed the chaos and anarchy believed to be the bane of life in Africa would disappear and African endeavour would be channelled to the collection of the national produce of the tropical forest for the satisfaction of European needs. The view came to be held that Africans by themselves were incapable of maintaining law and order to the level needed to bring about the much-desired economic revolution and that only European rule could do it.
It was not enough for the colonial power to impose and maintain law and order though. It was also necessary to promote and develop free movement and natural growth and trade. Also it was the generally accepted assumption that the economic efforts and products of a colony should supplement, rather than compete with or undermine, the economic efforts and products of the metropolitan country. This was a survival of the mercantilist system which had come to grief in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
The history of Nigeria can be traced to the earliest inhabitants whose remains date from at least 13,000 BC through early civilizations such as the Nok culture which began around 1500 BC. Numerous ancient African civilizations settled in the region that is known today as Nigeria, such as the Kingdom of Nri, the Benin Empire, and the Oyo Empire. Islam reached Nigeria through the Bornu Empire between and Hausa Kingdom during the 11th century, while Christianity came to Nigeria in the 15th century through Augustinian and Capuchin monks from Portugal to the Kingdom of Warri. The Songhai Empire also occupied part of the region. From the 15th century, European slave traders arrived in the region to purchase enslaved Africans as part of the Atlantic slave trade, which started in the region of modern-day Nigeria; the first Nigerian port used by European slave traders was Badagry, a coastal harbour. Local merchants provided them with slaves, escalating conflicts among the ethnic groups in the region and disrupting older trade patterns through the Trans-Saharan route.
Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, 1st Baron Lugard, known as Sir Frederick Lugard between 1901 and 1928, was a British soldier, mercenary, explorer of Africa and a colonial administrator. He was Governor of Hong Kong (1907–1912), the last Governor of Southern Nigeria Protectorate (1912–1914), the first High Commissioner (1900–1906) and last Governor (1912–1914) of Northern Nigeria Protectorate and the first Governor-General of Nigeria (1914–1919).
The Royal Niger Company was a mercantile company chartered by the British government in the nineteenth century. It was formed in 1879 as the United African Company and renamed to National African Company in 1881 and to Royal Niger Company in 1886. In 1929, the company became part of the United Africa Company, which came under the control of Unilever during the 1930s and continued to exist as a subsidiary of Unilever until 1987, when it was absorbed into the parent company.
Northern Nigeria was a British protectorate which lasted from 1900 until 1914 and covered the northern part of what is now Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria was an autonomous division within Nigeria, distinctly different from the southern part of the country, with independent customs, foreign relations and security structures. In 1962, it acquired the territory of the British Northern Cameroons, which voted to become a province within Northern Nigeria.
Colonial Nigeria was ruled by the British Empire from the mid-nineteenth century until 1960 when Nigeria achieved independence. The revolt and resistance of the enslaved Africans all over Europe and America led to the prohibition of slave trade in Nigeria. Britain annexed Lagos in 1861 and established the Oil River Protectorate in 1884. British influence in the Niger area increased gradually over the 19th century, but Britain did not effectively occupy the area until 1885. Other European powers acknowledged Britain's dominance over the area in the 1885 Berlin Conference.
Adiele Eberechukwu Afigbo was a Nigerian historian known for the history and historiography of Africa, more particularly Igbo history and the history of Southeastern Nigeria. Themes emphasised include pre-colonial and colonial history, inter-group relations, the Aro and the slave trade, the art and science of history in Africa, and nation-building.
Sir Herbert Richmond Palmer was an English barrister, who became a colonial supervisor for Britain during the inter-World War period. He served as a lieutenant governor in Nigeria, governor and Commander-in-Chief of The Gambia and governor and Commander-in-Chief of Cyprus.
Sir Ralph Denham Rayment Moor, was the first high commissioner of the British Southern Nigeria Protectorate.
Chief Christopher Alexander Sapara Williams was the first indigenous Nigerian lawyer, called to the English bar on 17 November 1879. In addition to his legal practice, he came to play an influential role in the politics of Nigeria during the colonial era. He held the chieftaincy title of the Lodifi of Ilesha.
Lagos Colony was a British colonial possession centred on the port of Lagos in what is now southern Nigeria. Lagos was annexed on 6 August 1861 under the threat of force by Commander Beddingfield of HMS Prometheus who was accompanied by the Acting British Consul, William McCoskry. Oba Dosunmu of Lagos resisted the cession for 11 days while facing the threat of violence on Lagos and its people, but capitulated and signed the Lagos Treaty of Cession. Lagos was declared a colony on 5 March 1862. By 1872, Lagos was a cosmopolitan trading centre with a population over 60,000. In the aftermath of prolonged wars between the mainland Yoruba states, the colony established a protectorate over most of Yorubaland between 1890 and 1897. The protectorate was incorporated into the new Southern Nigeria Protectorate in February 1906, and Lagos became the capital of the Protectorate of Nigeria in January 1914. Since then, Lagos has grown to become the largest city in West Africa, with an estimated metropolitan population of over 9,000,000 as of 2011.
Sir Walter Egerton, had a long career in the administration of the British Empire, holding senior positions which included the Governorships of Lagos Colony (1904–1906), Southern Nigeria (1906–1912), and British Guiana (1912–1917).
Nigerian nationality law is regulated by the Constitution of Nigeria, as amended, and various international agreements to which the country is a signatory. These laws determine who is, or is eligible to be, a national of Nigeria. The legal means to acquire nationality, formal legal membership in a nation, differ from the domestic relationship of rights and obligations between a national and the nation, known as citizenship. Nationality describes the relationship of an individual to the state under international law, whereas citizenship is the domestic relationship of an individual within the nation. Commonwealth countries often use the terms nationality and citizenship as synonyms, despite their legal distinction and the fact that they are regulated by different governmental administrative bodies. Nigerian nationality is typically obtained under the principal of jus sanguinis, i.e. by birth to parents with Nigerian nationality. It can be granted to persons with an affiliation to the country, or to a permanent resident who has lived in the country for a given period of time through naturalisation.
The Colonial history of Northern Nigeria extends from the British pacification campaigns to the independence of Northern Nigeria in 1953.
The history of Northern Nigeria covers the history of the region form pre-historic times to the modern period of Northern Nigerian state.
The Flag of Nigeria between 1914 and 1960 was a British blue ensign with a green six-pointed star described as the Seal of Solomon, surrounding a Tudor Crown with the white word "Nigeria" under it on a red disc. It was adopted by the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria following the amalgamation of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate and Northern Nigeria Protectorate.
Sir Edwin Arney Speed was the Chief Justice of Nigeria from 1914 to 1918. He was highly thought of by Lord Lugard who secured his appointment as the Chief Justice of the amalgamated Southern and Northern protectorates. He was tasked by Lugard to unify the laws of the two colonies and to establish a single Supreme, Provincial and Native court system.
The Mount Patti Hill is a 1503 foot-tall mountain and tourist attraction in Lokoja, Nigeria. It is famous for being the place where British journalist and writer Flora Louise Shaw gave Nigeria its name.
Baro-Kano railway built between 1908 and 1911 by government of the Northern Nigeria Protectorate was opened to traffic in 1912, to serve as the main rail transport facility from Baro in present Niger state to the emporium of Hausa land Kano. The first railway built in Nigeria was the Lagos–Kano Railway built by the Lagos Colony. The Baro-Kano Railway and the Lagos Government Railway was later amalgamated by the British colonial government represented by Frederick Lugard in 1914 to form a national system known as Nigerian Railway Department.
Adiele Afigbo, "Sir Ralph Moor and the Economic Development of Southern Nigeria, 1896–1903", Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 5/3 (1970), 371–97
Adiele Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891–1929 (1972)
Robert Home, City of Blood Revisited: A New Look at the Benin Expedition of 1897 (1982)
Tekena Tamuno, The Evolution of the Nigerian State: The Southern Phase, 1898–1914 (1972)
J. C. Anene, Southern Nigeria in Transition, 1885–1906: Theory and Practice in a Colonial Protectorate (1966)
Obaro Ikime, Merchant Prince of the Niger Delta: The Rise and Fall of Nana Olomu, Last Governor of the Benin River (1968)
24. Claimed in 1908; territory formed 1962; overlaps portions of Argentine and Chilean claims, borders not enforced but claim not renounced under the Antarctic Treaty.
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