Dan Snow's History Hit - What Britain Did to Nigeria

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

When we think of the British Empire we often think of India, Pakistan, Singapore, Burma or perhaps South Africa but an often underrepresented part of the colonial picture is that of west Africa and specifically Nigeria. Now the most populous country in Africa Nigeria was created out of a diverse set of peoples and territories to suit the needs of the colonial administration. Max Siollun, author of What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule, joins Dan to discuss the history of the British colonial project in Nigeria. Many of the themes will be familiar with the exploitation of resources, colonial violence and racism. They also explore how the ripples of the colonial rule continue to be felt in Nigeria shaping its society and politics to this day.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We talk a lot on this podcast about the British Empire in Asia, thinking about Singapore, Malaya, Burma, through India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and into the Indian Ocean. And because I love the 18th century, I talk a lot about the British Empire in North America and its partial collapse in the 18th century. And also I think I've had a few people on talking about the late 19th century expansion in South and East Africa, but a part of the British Empire we don't talk much about is West Africa. A vast tract of that continent, tens of millions of people under British rule from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. A part of the world that had seen earlier generations arrive at to trade in enslaved Africans, take them over to plantations in the New World, but attempts to

formally annex, to colonise parts of West Africa, always founded on the very tricky geography and the prevalence of disease, which Europeans were particularly vulnerable to. On this episode then, I'm talking to Max Sjölen. He's written a really interesting expose of the British Empire's impact on what is now Africa's most popular state, Nigeria. Many of the themes in this will be familiar from colonial violence, racism, but also the bizarre way in which the British Empire and other European empires cobbled together these states, which are now some of the world's most important states, to suit the whims of colonial administrators.

And many of the challenges faced by places as diverse as Nigeria and Syria are partly down to the intervention, the fiddling with the political geography of generations of imperial administrators. So this was such an interesting conversation, long overdue, talking about the British Empire in West Africa and what it continues to mean to this day. If you want to hear other episodes of this podcast about Britain's empire, anyone else's empire, you can do so at historyhit.tv, all the episodes there without any ads, you'll be glad to know. No ads at all on there, so you have to listen to me doing the capitalism head over to historyhit.tv it's netflix for history you're gonna love it over there got some big projects landing this week including a new series on

medieval history by elena yanaga who's a complete star so please go and check that out in the meantime though enjoy max siolen talking about the British in Nigeria. Max, great to have you on the podcast. No problem at all. Thank you for inviting me. Pleasure to be here. It's so fascinating talking about the West African Empire. A lot of students of British imperial history talk about the South Asian Empire,

what is now Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, the Raj, the settler dominions. But West Africa was such a populous and important part of the empire. And Nigeria was, you know, the most significant part of that. It feels too often like it gets overlooked. Absolutely. I agree very much. India does tend to be looked upon as the proverbial jewel in the crown. And the story of Nigeria and the other former British West African colonies kind of tend to fly under the radar. And the reason why they fly under the radar is due to a theme that I explored in the book, which is that a lot of the accounts of colonial history in those areas were written by the colonial officers themselves. And unfortunately, in the post-colonial era,

there haven't been many popular histories challenging those narratives written by the indigenous people from those areas. The histories of those areas tend to kind of exist in academic textbooks, which are not accessible to a lay audience. Whereas in Southeast Asia, there's been a lot more popular literature, for example, What Britain did to India by Sashita Raw, which came out a few years ago. So I think that's why you've had that difference between the Britain's South Asian colonies and its former colonies, rather, in West Africa. How important was Nigeria within Britain's empire, and particularly within Britain's African empire? You mentioned in the book that when Nigeria became independent, it doubled the liberated population of the African continent. Absolutely. Nigeria, or what was then West Africa, was very important for two reasons. One,

sheer size. So at the time Nigeria became independent in 1960, half of the people, 50% of the people in the British empire were in Nigeria. And as you pointed out, it also doubled Africa's independent population when Britain left the colony. Then the second area of importance was economically. Britain's colonization of Nigeria was really prompted by the industrial revolution in Europe. At that time, Britain was becoming less dependent on human labor and more dependent on machine labor and technology. So as a result, the raw material that Britain and other European countries needed to superpower, if you like, their industrial revolution were in West Africa. For example, they needed palm oil from West Africa to lubricate the machines in European factories.

palm oil from West Africa to lubricate the machines in European factories. Back then, infant mortality and hygiene were really appalling in Europe. And again, the materials for manufacturing soap, which became essential for survival, were in West Africa, again, in palm oil. And the pneumatic rubber tire was also invented in Europe. So there was a great demand for rubber from what was then West Africa, which is now Nigeria, to manufacture Europe. So there was a great demand for rubber from what was then West Africa, which is now Nigeria, to manufacture tyre. So I think Nigeria had great significance economically and just in terms of the sheer magnitude of the landmass and the population in that area. The formal British empire of what we now think of as Nigeria didn't really last very long in the great sweep of history. But as you point out in the book, it defines modern Nigeria to this day.

Absolutely. Britain's colonisation of Nigeria was kind of mission creep. It wasn't accomplished in a single blow. So what you had originally was mercantile companies, such as the Royal Niger Company, which really came prospecting for economic resources, raw materials, etc. And the British government really subcontracted out the job of colonizing because it was expensive and it was dangerous to mercantile companies. And it gave them the dirty work of fighting wars, imposing taxes, and so on. So colonization by the British government really didn't start until kind of the turn of the 20th century, in the early 1900s or so, and it lasted until 1960.

But in that short space of time, the effects of it were absolutely tectonic, economically, culturally, religiously, etc. interest along that West African coast had been going on since the 15th, 16th centuries, the gigantic Atlantic trade and enslaved Africans. But the European powers didn't push inland very much, did they? Because of the profound geographical and microbial, or however you want to call it, Europeans just died when they went inland. And African kingdoms were quite resilient, weren't they, in opposing them as they tried to push in? For a period of about 300 years, from the 1500s to the 1800s, there was real economic competition between the European countries and the indigenous West African kingdoms. As I mentioned, really, the European entrance there was prompted by the need to extract economic resources. So the Europeans wanted to go inland to extract the resources themselves, candidly, without having to pay anyone for them.

But they were confronted by two big challenges. One was the Africans themselves, who didn't want them to go inland to extract the resources without paying for them. And secondly, was just ecology. At that time, there was a mysterious disease that no one knew what caused it that was just killing Europeans every time they tried to penetrate inland. And they called it back then egg, but we now know that disease, of course, is malaria, which is caused by mosquitoes, but Europeans didn't know that. And they thought that what was killing them was the heat and just the fact that they were unused to this climate. So really a turning point was in the 19th century when quinine was invented because then it allowed Europeans to enter inland,

it increased their survival rate and also the invention of the steamship also allowed them to travel vast distances by sea in a very very short space of time and carry massive amounts of cargo and extract the resources and make fewer trips to and fro from West Africa. I've been reading about the Anglo-Ashanti wars recently, the early campaigns where the British army tried to march in from the coast. It's like just appalling losses and catastrophe. So in that case, when you mentioned the advance, the Quinine steamships, other things like that, that allows finally direct imperial reach into the interior of the continent, what did Britain find in the area that is now Nigeria? What power structures were there? So there's this kind of misconception that Africans just kind of lived in these loosely

disorganized societies, but that wasn't the case at all. In the area that is now Nigeria, there was several indigenous societies, probably 500 indigenous languages being spoken between them. But for the sake of being concise, I can't always talk about all of them. I'll focus on two areas. So if we use the River Niger, after which Nigeria is named, as kind of our guiding point. So we use the River Niger, after which Nigeria is named as kind of our guiding point. So north of the River Niger, you had two great kingdoms, Islamic empires. One of them was called the Sokoto Caliphate, which at its greatest extent, extended at its eastern point from what is now Cameroon, traversed Nigeria, traversed Burkina Faso, and at its western end, ended in Mali. So it was the largest West African state in its heyday. And I think in its pomp, it had 30 to 40 million people

living in there. To its east was the Khan Mbono Empire, another Islamic empire, which extended from what is now modern day northeastern Nigeria, traversed Niger, traversed Chad, and at its northern end was almost tipping into Libya. These two empires were incredibly sophisticated. There were Islamic theocracies, they had systems of education, incredibly advanced systems of government. They were conversing with and established diplomatic contacts with other Islamic empires as far away as Turkey. So these were very, very advanced societies. To the south of the River Niger, the situation was very different. You had societies which were, and maybe I'm slightly contradicting myself now, where they didn't really recognize paramount kings. In fact,

one of the largest communities south of the River Niger was peopled by the Igbo people who had the saying, which is, the Igbo knows no king. So there were incredibly democratic societies in that every freeborn person had a right to have a say in the running of the society. So you had these north of the river Niger, south of the river Niger, completely different societies with different social ethos, different cultural ethos, different religious ethos. And when Britain amalgamated these different societies into what is now Nigeria, it created what one American professor called Professor John Padden, he said, quote, Nigeria must be the most complicated country in the world. Because now, the demographics are just astonishing. 520 languages, hundreds of different ethnic groups,

and Nigeria is the only country in the world whose population is split equally between Muslims and Christians. But obviously, there's other multi-religious countries, but usually one of those religions is in a clear majority. But Nigeria is the only one where it's 50-50 between those two. So a lot of those fault lines from the colonial days that Britain kind of amalgamated are still causing problems in Nigeria till today. Okay, well then let's come to the title of your brilliant book.

What did Britain do to Nigeria? This is interesting. It's later in the imperial story. There is a school of thought that says, yes, the early British empire was full of slave traders and people extracting value out of India, but then it all becomes far more enlightened and it becomes about building roads and economic development and this expression philanthropy that's always bandied around by these slightly later imperialists. In your studies, how did Britain go about governing this vast new territory and how enlightened was it? I think in terms of Britain's legacies to Nigeria, the two biggest ones are language and religion. So the early colonial officers, they presented their mission as a

civilizing mission. Candidly, they saw West Africans as really just heathens, barbarous people who had no faith. And they obviously had no interest in learning 500 languages either. So to facilitate ease of colonial governance, they just projected the English language onto these people and basically gave Nigeria a new national language, which was English. And also they Christianized half of the country. So I mentioned the North-South divide, north and south of the River Niger. They quite wisely didn't want to antagonize the Muslim empires north of the River Niger. So they Christianized the communities south of the River Niger. And it's actually remarkable because right now you had British colonial officers going out on a mission to teach English

to these people and to Christianize them. And obviously in the 21st century, Britain has become more and more secular. And there's this incredible irony of the colonial enterprise in Nigeria, where now Nigeria has more English speaking people than Britain, the country that brought the English language to Nigeria. So in fact, Nigeria has twice as many English speakers as Britain does, because now Nigeria's population is 200 million and most of them can speak English. And also Nigeria, ironically, now has more Christians than Britain, the country that taught it Christianity, so to speak. And as I mentioned, as Christianity has kind of receded in Britain and as Britain's

identity as a Christian country has become less and less significant to national identity, it's become more and more important to Nigerians. And there's this incredible reverse proselytization now where the propagators of the faith now are really West Africans. So in Europe, there's this wonderful irony where the largest church in Europe is a Pentecostal church run and owned by a Nigerian pastor, which in the pre-COVID times used to have 12,000 people attending his service every single weekend. So I would say language and religion were the two biggest legacies of British rule in Nigeria. You listen to Dan's News History. We're talking to Max Sjöland about Nigeria and Britain's West African Empire. More after this. Romans, gods, Spartans, the wars of Alexander the Great's successors in incredible, entirely necessary detail. The Ancients podcast, it's kind of like Dan's show, except it's just

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or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. What about violence? How violence was turning this into a colony of Nigeria across all these different boundaries of religion, ethnic group, and language? I mean, was that a violent process? Incredibly so. And I mentioned a lot of elements of colonialism in Nigeria flying under the radar. I think one of the biggest elements that's flown under the radar is the intensity of, A, the violence deployed by the colonial invaders, and B, the intensity of the resistance.

The colonial officers tended to present it as, look, the natives welcomed us with open arms. It's a bit like reading a dossier on the Iraq war, kind of, you know, liberation, you know, 200 years before the Iraq war. If you read some of their accounts, it's a bit like reading that. Let me give you an example. I asked a woman from northwestern Nigeria, look, have you heard of a town called Satiru before? She said, oh no, even though she's from the area where Satiru once stood. The reason why she's never heard of it, even though it's literally on her doorstep, is because Satiru doesn't exist anymore. In the early 1900s, when Britain invaded that town, they expended a biblical level of violence. They admitted,

quote, we burned every structure, no tree was left standing, and they killed about 3,000 people in one afternoon and fired about 32,000 rounds that's just one example I mean we could do an entire podcast just about colonial violence and another aspect that was overlooked was the intensity of the resistance the colonial accounts tend to kind of portray colonialism as seamless and don't mention that it was secondary resistance. So even after the initial wars of conquest, the indigenous people kept on fighting guerrilla wars to make the British go away. And the most impactful of those was in the Southeast and Southeast of Nigeria. I mentioned that these were people that were not accustomed to centralized political control by

their own people. They didn't even want their own people ruling over them. So imagine their reaction when they had foreigners coming to rule them. It was not a very popular measure. And you had in southeastern Nigeria, a secret warrior cult called Ekumeku, which loosely translates as the Silent Ones. So they basically went around at night, burning British mission stations, attacking British facilities, killing British soldiers. And that resistance went on from the late 1800s to around 1915 or so. And again, these are stories which are not really told much in the colonial accounts written by Britain or by indigenous Nigerians either. What was Britain's primary aims in Nigeria? Was it about extracting these natural resources? Initially, that's definitely what prompted it. So I think there's probably three phases of British colonialism in Nigeria. There's the early phase where it was about trading

people, the slave trade. Then when Britain abolished slavery in 1808, it turned from trade in people to trade in goods. And from the early 1800s, kind of to the 1920s, 30s or so, it was really about extracting economic resources via mercantile companies such as the Royal Niger Company, now known as Unilever. And then the last 15 to 20 years of colonial rule, it was more about now there was a realisation that, look, you've created a new country and this has got to end, this won't go on forever. So it was about trying to create national institutions for the post colonial government of the former colony when it became independent.

How about that nationalising effect? I've talked about this on this podcast many times, in the subcontinent, in India. Did resistance to British rule and did British attempts to impose unity, did that help to create a Nigerian identity? No, I don't think it did at all. In fact, it did the opposite. It actually hardened premordial identities because the way Britain governed the different ethnic constituencies was different. So in the North, you had kings, pre-existing kings. So Britain used a system of indirect rule, which is very popular in all its colonies. They use it in Uganda, use it in India as well. And indirect rule really meant using

the pre-existing indigenous rulers and kings as proxy rulers to do the unsavory aspects of colonialism, like tax collection, conscripting forced labor, using them as a proxy colonial workforce. But in the Southeast, there were no pre-indigenous rulers so indirect rule didn't work as well in the southeast it wasn't as effective so really i think it created a haphazard effect around the country because in some areas it preserved the pre-colonial institutions in some other areas it elevated people who were not part of the pre-colonial governing structure it propelled them to power but it did so in a way that made them lose face to their own people it made them look like collaborators of the colonial regime so when britain left i think it actually in a way

didn't create a nigerian national identity actually fractured the local identities and preserved them more and And of course, as soon as Britain left, they all went for each other and came for each other's throats. And the Nigerian Civil War started about six years after Britain left. So you mentioned client kings or puppet states and things. Would you have seen, would you have known the British imperial institutions, organs of government, if you'd been living in Nigeria, perhaps away from the big cities in the early part of the 20th century? It depends on which part of Nigeria you were in. So to a northern Nigerian,

visibly, if you were living in a remote village, nothing much changed because ostensibly, your emir, who was the local king, was still the king, albeit he wasn't the king you had before. He was now one that was appointed and sanctioned by Britain. But ostensibly life just went on as normal. In the southeast though, where in the pre-colonial era there were no kings, how Britain got around this problem was that it appointed what Britain called warrant chiefs. So basically it went around and found people who Britain felt were men of influence and gave them a certificate, gave them a letter of appointment, called a warrant and said, you are now a chief in this locale. In the Southeast, definitely people felt the impact of British administration in two ways. One, the warren chiefs were deeply,

deeply unpopular and bitterly resented because, as I mentioned, they were just really viewed as creations and collaborators of the colonizer. Secondly, what Britain did is to staff the colonial army, they found indigenous ethnic groups that they regarded as warrior tribes or martial races and recruited them into the colonial army. So the institution that is now the Nigerian army was descended from a British colonial paramilitary force called Glovers Housers and the Housers were the most numerous ethnic group in the north. So Britain for whatever reason regarded these people a bit like the Sikhs and the Gurkhas as a martial race, recruited them into the colonial army and used them to conquer the southern ethnic groups.

So obviously that created and contributed to inter-ethnic tensions within Nigeria because now northerners were viewed as the soldiers of the British colonial establishment who were killing on demand and burning towns in the south on behalf of Britain. So I would say a southeastern Nigerian definitely felt the impact of colonial rule more than a northern Nigerian. Nigeria is such an important player in the world, demographics among other reasons. There's going to be three quarters of a billion Nigerians probably within this century. Obviously, like every state, it's a complete product of its history. What are the things that you pick out about this historical story

that you think is essential for us to understand the modern state and the trajectory that it's on? I think one of the ironies is that despite all these problems, all these complications caused by colonial rule, an unwritten consensus in Nigeria is that, look, we didn't create this country, but the borders are sacrosanct. The unity of the country is sacrosanct. I mean, the country went to war to preserve its unity in a way. And this understanding among the political elite, at least, to say, look, maybe we were dealt a bad hand,

but we've been given an opportunity to create an African success story. So far, it hasn't always gone very well. So Nigeria in the post-colonial era, really, the Nigerian project has been all about, look, let us take these raw ingredients that were given to us by the colonizer, and let's make a country out of it, despite the 500 languages, despite the north-south differences, despite the different religions. And most of Nigeria's crises are really about forging a nation state out of these very, very disparate ethnic groups. And let me give you some examples of innovations that Nigeria has developed in the post-colonial era to kind of cope with the problems and the legacy of colonial rule.

One is this concept, the constitutional concept called federal character, which is there is a quota system, an affirmative action program where to ensure that no ethnic group is favored above the others, there is a quota for admission into all state institutions, into schools, universities, the army, the police, the government. There is an alternation on a North-South and sometimes Muslim-Christian basis of the presidency. And these are all aimed at kind of dealing with these world problems that I mentioned to you, and also bequeathing a national unity legacy to the next generation. Because one opportunity that Nigeria has is that its population is incredibly young. Two-thirds of the population are under 30 years old. So you find in the younger generation in Nigeria, they don't have some of the

ethnic hang-ups that the first generation of Nigerians have. And so really the country is placing its faith in that. Let me just call them the born free generation to kind of be the generation that creates a Nigerian national identity that's not just about religion, that's not just about what ethnic group you're from. And I would say it's a qualified success story because when South Africa emerged out of apartheid, not many people know this, but they actually modelled their first post-apartheid constitution on Nigeria because they wanted to study other multi-ethnic societies and see how they've dealt with some of the problems that South Africa is now dealing with. But I say it's a very, very qualified success story because

obviously there's some severe, severe challenges that Nigeria is still dealing with. Well, thank you so much for coming on coming on the podcast just scratched the surface and i'd love to talk to you other times about your work on other great moments from nigerian history the book is called what britain did to nigeria a short history of conquest and rule don't get it everyone fascinating stuff thank you very much indeed no thank you dan have a fantastic rest of the day i feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all work on and finish hi everyone thanks for reaching the end of this podcast most of you are probably asleep so i'm talking to your snoring forms,

but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason

to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much now sleep well