$Unique_ID{COW02621} $Pretitle{357} $Title{Nigeria Chapter 1B. European Presence in West Africa} $Subtitle{} $Author{Robert Rinehart} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{trade british slave niger slaves century african states fulani region} $Date{1981} $Log{Figure 5.*0262101.scf } Country: Nigeria Book: Nigeria, A Country Study Author: Robert Rinehart Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1981 Chapter 1B. European Presence in West Africa A desire for glory and profit from trade, missionary zeal, and considerations of global strategy brought Portuguese navigators to the West African coast in the early fifteenth century. Locked in an interminable crusading war with Muslim Morocco, the Portuguese conceived of a plan whereby maritime expansion could be used as a weapon in their arsenal as well as a means of commercial gain. By sea the Portuguese planned to cut off the flow of gold over the caravan routes to North Africa by channeling the trade to the Guinea coast, from which the gold could be conveyed to Europe. By opening a sea route around Africa, they could also tap the wealth of the Indies and, it was believed, link up with the fabled Christian kingdom of Prester John-supposedly on the far side of the continent-to attack the Moors from the rear. By 1471 Portuguese ships had reconnoitered the West African coast as far as the Niger delta, and in 1481 emissaries from the king of Portugal visited the court of the oba of Benin. Close relations were eventually established between the European and African kingdoms. Portuguese soldiers aided Benin in its wars, and the impact of the European presence at oba's court was reflected in the use of the Portuguese language there and in a subtle influence on Benin's art. A depot was set up at Gwatto, the port of Benin, to handle the peppers, ivory, and increasing numbers of slaves offered by the oba in exchange for coral beads, European-manufactured articles, including tools and weapons, and for great quantities of processed metal in the form of mantillas (brass and bronze bracelets that were used as currency and also were melted down for reworking in objects d'art). Secure for a century, the Portuguese monopoly on West African trade was broken by the end of the sixteenth century, and Portugal's influence was supplanted by the rising naval power of the Netherlands. The Dutch took over Portuguese trading stations on the coast that were the source of slaves for the Spanish and subsequently the English plantations in the Americas. French and English competition undermined the Dutch position after about 1650. Although slave ports from Lagos to Old Calabar would see the flags of many other European maritime countries (including Denmark, Sweden, and Brandenburg), it was Britain that in the eighteenth century became the dominant power engaged in the slave trade on the Guinea coast, its ships handling fully two-thirds of the trans-Atlantic traffic. The first British colony in West Africa, however, was established as a refuge for liberated slaves at Sierra Leone in 1787. The Slave Trade The slave trade was not a European innovation in West Africa. Domestic slavery was prevalent throughout the region, and many indigenous economies relied on some aspect of the slave trade, whether it was collecting, marketing, or conveying the human cargo. From time immemorial the traffic in slaves along the trans-Saharan trade routes had linked the Niger basin to North Africa. In the sixteenth century, however, the demand for slaves for the New World plantations had redirected this trade to the coastal ports. Whereas domestic slavery had not always been an intolerable or even necessarily a permanent condition, captives caught up in the export trade and destined for the Americas were treated as commodities at all stages of the transaction. African rulers and communities competed for shares in the proceeds. Wars had always been fought with the object of taking enemy prisoners and selling them as slaves, but the opening of new markets sharpened the competition and contributed to the rise and to the downfall of warring states in the forest region. The volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade peaked in the eighteenth century when, according to some estimates, more than 8 million slaves were shipped from West Africa, about one-fourth of the total from Lagos and the Niger delta ports. Depopulation of some regions was a major result of the slave trade, but this does not appear to have occurred in the Niger region. Among the Ibo and others on the east bank whose communities were regularly "harvested" by Aro slave traders, slavery even recommended itself as a relief from overpopulation and insufficient land. In 1807 the British Parliament enacted legislation prohibiting the slave trade. Several decades of antislavery campaigning in Britain had culminated in adoption of the measure that was spearheaded by the Evangelical movement and financed by philanthropists like Granville Sharp. A suit brought before the courts by Sharp had led to a judgment in 1772 that slavery could not exist in England and that slaves disembarked there were automatically emancipated. The decision added the weight of legal precedent to arguments made in Parliament by political figures such as William Wilberforce for the abolition of the trade in ships under the British flag. Opposition to the slave trade was based not only on the moral objections raised by religious groups but also on the sound economic arguments put forward by British manufacturers and financial institutions. Britain's developing industrial complex demanded access to raw materials and required new and expanding markets for its exports. The huge investment in shipping and capital tied up in the African slave trade, it was pointed out, could be diverted to legitimate commodity trade. The legislation forbade ships under British registry to engage in the slave trade, but it was applied generally to all flags and was intended to shut down all traffic in slaves coming out of West African ports. The British act was followed the next year by legislation in the United States, and similar prohibitions were enacted in Denmark (which i 1792 had become the first European power to abolish the slave trade in its ships), Sweden, the Netherlands, and France. Attitudes changed slowly, however, and not all countries cooperated to the same degree in controlling the activity of their merchant ships. American ships, for instance, were notorious for evading the prohibition and going unpunished under United States law. To enforce a blockade the Royal Navy detailed the so-called Prevention Squadron to a permanent station off the Niger delta with responsibility for patrolling the West African coast. Despite the demands made by the Napoleonic war, about one-sixth of all British warships were assigned to this mission, and a squadron was maintained on station for more than half a century. Slaves rescued at sea were usually taken to Sierra Leone and released there. British naval crews were permitted to divide prize money from the sale of captured slave ships. Apprehended slave runners were tried on the West African station by naval courts and were liable to capital punishment when found guilty. Still, a lively slave trade continued until the 1860s, and the outflow of slaves actually increased in volume in the years after its abolition. The demands of the American market were met by the flood of captives taken in the Yoruba wars and shipped from Lagos. The risk involved in running the British blockade made profits all the greater on delivery. The British campaign to eradicate the slave trade involved African rulers on whose support its success ultimately depended. British agents attempted repeatedly by means of diplomacy, subsidies, and bribery to exert pressure on the kings and chieftains to relinquish the slave trade in favor of legitimate commodity transactions. These efforts, reinforced by the activities of British missionaries to halt the slave trade, involved Britain increasingly in the internal affairs of the Niger region during the course of the nineteenth century and were instrumental in the British decision to assume jurisdiction over the coastal area. Suppression of the slave trade and subsequently of slavery-issues that remained at the forefront of British dealings with local rulers even after the establishment of colonial rule in Nigeria-frequently required armed intervention by British forces against those who refused to collaborate. Commodity Trade The gradual elimination of the slave trade caused British investment capital to be directed by the mid-nineteenth century to the development of trade in legitimate commodities-particularly palm oil and timber-much of which had existed alongside the slave trade from the time that the Portuguese had opened the area to European commerce. Although this trade grew to significant proportions-palm oil alone was worth 1 million Pound a year by 1840-it was concentrated along the coast and failed to fill the major gap left in economies like those of the Yoruba kingdoms that had been based almost entirely on slavery. The kind of long-term commercial commitment that prompted British investors to encourage genuine economic development represented a sharp turnaround from an era of quick profit from slaving operations. Some kings, who had prospered from slave raiding, did not find British arguments for developing a new economic base convincing, and their adjustment to changed conditions was very slow. Only gradually was the transition made (with the help of British investment) from subsistence agriculture to a more intense cultivation of commercial crops. For British trading interests this implied the establishment of permanent purchasing agencies that were in constant contact with indigenous producers, and eventually it meant the purchase of choice farmland and direct involvement in planting and harvesting. The political stability of the region as well as its economic development thereby became a concern for them. Because of the hazards of climate and disease for the Europeans and the absence of any authority responsive to their interests on the mainland, traders had ordinarily moored their ships outside harbors or in the mouth of the rivers in the delta and used them as trading stations to which cargo was ferried. In time, however, they built depots onshore and eventually moved up the Niger to stations established in the interior, like that at Onitsha, where they could bargain with local suppliers and purchase products likely to turn a profit. Some traders switched to legitimate business only when the commerce in slaves had grown too hazardous. Disreputable as many of them had been, they often suffered from the precariousness of their position at the mercy of unpredictable coastal rulers. Accordingly, as the volume of trade increased, the British government responded to repeated requests from merchants to appoint a consul to cover the region. John Beecroft, the British representative to the Spanish colony of Fernando Po, was also accredited in 1849 as consul for the bights of Benin and Biafra, a jurisdiction stretching from Dahomey to the Cameroons. Backed by the British naval presence off the coast, he won the respect of local rulers whose support he could usually count on when he proceeded against a violator of accepted trading practices. Exploration of the Niger Basin The development of trade in legitimate commodities was the final phase of both private and official British efforts to find a positive alternative to the traffic in slaves. Earlier aspects of such constructive interest had included the founding of the colony at Sierra Leone as a refuge for liberated slaves, the missionary movement designed to bring Christianity to the peoples of the region, and programs of exploration sponsored by learned societies and scientific groups such as the London-based African Association. Exploration of the Niger basin had a commercial as well as scientific motivation, but the chief stimulus for it was the curiosity aroused by the Niger River, the course and destination of which were masked from travelers along the coast by the delta that divided the mouth of the great river into many lesser outlets to the sea. In 1794 the African Association commissioned Mungo Park, an intrepid Scottish physician and naturalist, to search for the headwaters of the Niger and follow the river downstream. Park reached the upper Niger the next year by traveling inland up the Gambia River and recorded that it flowed eastward, but he was forced to turn back when his equipment was lost to Arab slave traders. In 1805 he set out with a party of forty Europeans on a second expedition sponsored by the British government to follow the river all the way to the sea. His mission failed, but Park and his party covered more than 1,500 kilometers before they were drowned in rapids. Park's journals of his expeditions survived, however, and significantly advanced the knowledge of the West African interior. On subsequent expeditions to the western Sudan, Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton collected information about the Fulani empire and Bornu, but charting the course of the Niger River to the sea was reserved for Richard and John Lander, who with Clapperton finally reached the delta from upstream in 1830. Initial attempts to open trade with the interior by way of the Niger were defeated by climate and disease, which took the lives of a third of a British riverine expedition in 1842. Use of quinine to combat malaria on similar expeditions in the 1850s enabled a Liverpool merchant, Macgregor Laird, to open trade along the Niger and Benue rivers. Laird's efforts were stimulated by the detailed reports of a pioneer German explorer, Heinrich Barth, who traveled through much of northern Nigeria and recorded information about the region's geography and inhabitants. The success of the Royal Niger Company in the 1880s was built on the foundations laid by the explorers. The company proceeded along established routes of trade that they had charted, systematically setting up permanent depots along the way. Its trading station at Lokoja, at the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers, became a link between the north and the south, and the northward advance of its jurisdiction formed the basis for the territorial consolidation of Nigeria under British colonial rule. Influence of the Christian Missions Christianity was introduced at Benin in the fifteenth century by Portuguese priests who accompanied traders and officials to the West African coast. Several churches were built to serve the Portuguese community and a small number of Yoruba converts. When direct Portuguese contacts in the region were withdrawn, however, the influence of the Catholic missionaries waned and by the eighteenth century had largely disappeared. Although churchmen in Britain had been influential in the drive to abolish the slave trade, significant missionary activity was renewed only in the 1840s and was confined for some time to the area between Lagos and Ibadan. The first missions there were opened by the Church of England's Church Missionary Society (CMS), which had worldwide operations, to be followed by other Protestant denominations from both Britain and the United States and in the 1860s by Roman Catholic religious orders. Protestant missionaries tended to divide the country into spheres of activity to avoid competition with each other, and Roman Catholic missions similarly avoided duplication of effort among the several religious orders working there. Catholic missionaries were particularly active among the Ibo; the CMS among the Yoruba. Christianity's impact was enhanced by the auxiliary functions of its missions. Education was the preserve of mission schools, which were of vital importance in the emergence of a class of literate Nigerians who eventually staffed government offices and were leaders in their country's drive for self-determination. The missions also built hospitals and provided medical services as part of their apostolate. Protestant groups soon promoted Africans to responsible positions in the mission field. An outstanding example of this was the appointment of Samuel Adjai Crowther as the first Anglican bishop of the Niger. Crowther, a liberated Yoruba slave, had been educated in Sierra Leone and in England, where he was ordained before returning to his homeland in the first group of missionaries sent there by the CMS. This was part of a conscious "native church" policy pursued by the Anglicans and others to create indigenous ecclesiastical institutions that would eventually be independent of European tutelage. The effort failed in part, however, when church authorities came to feel that religious discipline had grown too lax during Crowther's episcopate, and he was succeeded as bishop by a British cleric. Nevertheless the acceptance of Christianity by large numbers of Nigerians depended finally on the various denominations coming to terms with local conditions and involved participation of an increasingly high proportion of African clergy in the missions. In large measure European missionaries were convinced of the value of colonial rule, thereby reinforcing colonial policy. In reaction some African Christian communities were persuaded to form indigenous churches independent of their parent bodies. Colonial authorities were careful to avoid offending Muslim sensitivities in the north, however, and there were frequent disagreements between them and churchmen over official discouragement of attempts to extend Christian missionary efforts to that part of the country. Prelude to Colonial Rule The early nineteenth century brought fundamental political and economic change throughout the Niger region. In the north the Hausa states, already in disarray, fell one after another to the Fulani in a holy war and were organized under the rule of rigidly orthodox emirs. To the south the economy of the delta states underwent a profound reorientation as a result of British efforts to suppress the slave trade on which they had prospered in the eighteenth century. Meanwhile the sudden decline of ancient Yoruba kingdoms created a political vacuum that invited eighty years of warfare as new centers of power asserted their dominance. The British campaign against the slave trade and the desire to protect legitimate commerce in an unstable political environment brought growing involvement in the internal affairs of the region that set the stage for the introduction of colonial rule. By the end of the century the commercial activities of the Royal Niger Company had extended the British sphere of influence up the Niger River to include the Muslim north. Usman dan Fodio and the Fulani Emirates The Hausa states were engulfed in war during most of the eighteenth century. Katsina contested control of trade routes with Kano and was in turn challenged by Zamfara. Gobir, on the desert fringe of Hausaland, took advantage of the situation to seize fertile grazing land on the savanna from Zamfara, and all of the Hausa states were weakened as a result of the ensuing wars. The chaos in Hausaland was symptomatic of the decline that had set in among traditional states across the western Sudan. Since coming into Hausaland in the sixteenth century, the towndwelling Fulani had been the watchdogs of Islamic orthodoxy in the Hausa cities. In the late eighteenth century they had precipitated religious revolts against lax rulers who were accused of offending public morality. One such revolt-which had broad consequences-was launched in 1804 by Usman dan Fodio, a widely traveled Fulani mallam (teacher), against the Hausa sarkin (king) of Gobir. The sarkin had seen in the influence of the Fulani bureaucracy and religious leaders a threat to royal authority and had discouraged further conversion of his subjects to Islam. According to the practiced formula for a "return to the pure and primitive faith," Usman proclaimed a jihad against Gobir. By 1810 he and his followers had made the most of Hausa disunity to sweep away their "pagan" kings and impose Fulani hegemony throughout Hausaland. The Fulani light cavalry also took Ilorin in Yorubaland and attacked Bornu but failed to conquer it. Initially political and ethnic factors were as important as religion in Usman's swift victories. The Muslim religious leader received the support of the non-Muslim "cattle" Fulani, who rose not so much against the Hausa kings as against the Hausa who had repressed the nomads for generations. The nomads settled many old grudges against Hausa townspeople and farmers. It was Islam, however, that tied the Fulani movement together and sanctioned the seizing of power from the Hausa rulers. Usman was recognized as caliph (religious leader) and sultan (political overlord) in Fulani-held Hausaland and took the title emir al muaminin (commander of the faithful), which combined his religious and political functions with his supreme military command. He granted Hausa cities as emirates to loyal followers among the Fulani aristocracy, reserving for himself the sultanate of Sokoto as the first in rank among them. Although the other emirs owed Usman and his successors at Sokoto personal allegiance and, as caliph, religious obedience, the emirates were otherwise regarded as independent states, of which Kano was recognized as being the second in importance (see fig. 5). Candidates for vacant emirates were customarily subject to evaluation by electoral councils composed of Islamic jurists whose recommendations were submitted to the sultan for approval or rejection. The new Fulani rulers continued Hausa political and social traditions, distributing jurisdiction over territory in return for service and loyalty to titled fiefholders whose rank depended on their lineage. Each rank constituted a unique legal corporation with definite prerogatives and responsibilities. Each lineage group, in turn, possessed a number of different descent lines that competed for positions reserved for it. Delta States The changes caused by the redirection of the slave trade to the coast completely altered the political organization and social structure of the Ijaw (Ijo) and Efik-Ibibio peoples of the Niger delta. The Ijaw occupied the tidal area in proximity to the Ibo, wresting a frugal living from subsistence farming and the sale of dried fish and sea salt to the inland communities. Traditionally, they lived in federated groups of villages with the head of the ranking village presiding over general assemblies attended by all the males. During the heyday of the slave trade in the eighteenth century, some of these Ijaw villages became depots for human cargo and grew into cities of 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants ruled by local strongmen or governed as dependencies of Benin, their economies based entirely on the facilities they offered to slave traders. They were entrepreneurial communities, receiving slaves from the Ibo for resale to European factors, and personal wealth rather than status within a lineage group was the basis for political power and social status. The most important of the delta states were Bonny, Owumu (New Calabar), Okrika, Brass, the Efik-Ibibio city of Old Calabar at the mouth of the Cross River, and Warri, a colony of Benin at the western end of the delta (see fig. 6). Government was typically conducted by councils composed of leading merchants and headed by an amanyanabo (chief executive), an office that in time became hereditary in some dynastic families. The basic economic units in each town were "houses," family-operated slave markets that were also the focus of loyalty for those employed in them. A "house" included the extended family of the master trader, retainers, and slaves. As its head, the master trader taxed other traders who were members of his "house" and was obliged to maintain a war canoe for the defense of the harbor. Whenever a trader could afford to keep a war canoe, he was expected to form his own "house." When the slave trade was abolished Britain strove to conclude treaties with the delta states that would encourage them to reorient their economies to legitimate commodity trade. [See Figure 5.: The Sokoto Caliphate, Mid-Nineteenth Century] The Yoruba Wars The collapse of the alafin's authority over Oyo's subject states at the end of the eighteenth century sparked revolts throughout Yorubaland. Oyo's decline inaugurated a period of eighty years of intermittent warfare as new centers of power-Ibadan, Abeokuta, Owo, and Warri-contested control of the trade routes and sought access to fresh supplies of slaves. The tightening of the British blockade on the delta shifted the focus of the illicit trade in slaves to Lagos and also stimulated the domestic market to provide slaves for use as farm laborers and as bearers to carry legitimate trade commodities to market. War and slave raiding were complementary exercises among the Yoruba, who fought wars to obtain slaves who were exchanged for the firearms with which they fought new wars for the same end. It is doubtful, however, that firearms made warfare any more bloody than it had been in the past. The weapons were intended for their psychological rather than their killing effect for, as the British governor of Lagos reported, "few are killed [because] man-hunting is the real business of these fights." Some of the emerging Yoruba states started as war camps during the period of chaos in which Oyo broke up and the Fulani threatened Yorubaland. Ibadan, which became the largest city in black Africa during the nineteenth century, owed its growth to the role it played in the Oyo civil wars. Ibadan's omuogun (war boys) raided far afield for slaves and held off the advance of the Fulani after the fall of Ilorin and the destruction of Oyo in 1834. They also took advantage of distracted older states like Benin to seize the roads leading to the flourishing slave port at Lagos. The threat that Ibadan would dominate Yorubaland alarmed its rivals and inspired a military alliance led by the Egba city of Abeokuta. Lagos had been founded as a colony of Benin in about 1700. After a long dynastic struggle its reigning oba was overthrown, and the treaty agreements that he had concluded with Britain for curtailing the slave trade were systematically disregarded by his successor. Determined to halt the traffic in slaves fed by the Yoruba wars but frustrated in its efforts to reach a settlement with the usurper, Britain annexed the port of Lagos as a colony in 1861 and extended its control along the coast. British intervention in the internal affairs of Yorubaland became more insistent in the 1870s and 1880s as a result of pressure from the missionaries and in order to protect legitimate commerce disrupted by the fighting, resulting in peace treaties dictated by Britain and in further annexations. Royal Niger Company The legitimate trade in commodities attracted a number of roughhewn British merchants to the Niger region, as well as some formerly engaged in the slave trade who had changed their line of wares. The large companies that subsequently opened depots in the delta cities and in Lagos could be ruthlessly competitive and frequently used force to compel potential suppliers to agree to contracts and to meet their demands. The most important of these trading companies, whose activities would have far-reaching consequences for Nigeria, was founded by George Goldie in 1879 as the United Africa Company. In 1886 Goldie's consortium was chartered by the British government as the Royal Niger Company and granted broad concessionary powers in "all the territory of the basin of the Niger." The terms of the charter specified the maintenance of free trade in the region-a principle that was systematically violated as the company strengthened its monopoly to forestall French and German trade expansion. It also enjoined the company to avoid trespassing on local customs "except so far as may be necessary in the interests of humanity." The qualifying clause was aimed at slavery and other activities categorized as "barbarous practices" by British authorities, and it foreshadowed the qualifications applied to noninterference as a guide to official policy when Britain assumed formal colonial responsibility in Nigeria. Meanwhile the Royal Niger Company had established its headquarters far inland at Lokoja and assumed responsibility under the charter for the administration of areas along the Niger and Benue rivers where it operated depots. Year by year the company extended its direct jurisdiction to territory it had acquired by treaty and which was policed by a British-led native constabulary that also protected trade routes. Treaties were entered into with Sokoto, Kano, Bornu, and Nupe guaranteeing the company exclusive access to trade in those areas in return for the payment of an annual tribute. Goldie, whom posterity accorded and title "maker of Nigeria," and his aide, Frederick (later Lord) Lugard, were single-minded in their efforts to suppress the slave trade, although this brought the company's forces into armed confrontation with the Fulani emirs. Under Goldie's direction the Royal Niger Company had been instrumental in depriving France and Germany access to the region and had laid the basis for British claims there. But in 1900 the British government terminated the company's charter by mutual agreement coinciding with the imposition of a British protectorate over northern Nigeria. In compensation the company obtained mineral rights in a large area north of the Niger-Benue, where it began extensive mining operations in 1906. Colonial Nigeria Prodded by the instability created by the Yoruba wars and by the activities of other European powers, Britain moved cautiously but inexorably toward colonial domination of the lower Niger basin. In the decades that followed official abolition of the slave trade, British diplomacy wove a fabric of treaties with kings and chieftains whose cooperation was sought in suppressing the traffic through their territory. British interests also dictated occasional armed intervention by the Royal Navy and by the Royal Niger Company's constabulary to stanch the illegal flow of slaves to the coast as well as to protect legitimate commerce and to serve in a peacekeeping role during the Yoruba wars. Moreover the missionary effort entailed the need to safeguard British subjects engaged in it, while the missionaries themselves appealed for assistance in stamping out the practice of slavery and "barbarous practices" associated with indigenous religions. Finally the marked increase in British trade in the region required the posting of consular officials by the Foreign Office to coastal ports on the bights of Benin and Biafra, where their presence facilitated the projection of British political influence to the interior. For many years these factors were outweighed by official hesitation when it came to adding further tropical dependencies to the British Empire. The prevailing sentiment, even after Lagos became a colony, was expressed in a parliamentary report in 1865 urging withdrawal from commitments in West Africa. Colonies were regarded as expensive liabilities, especially where trading concessions could be exercised without resorting to annexation. Attitudes changed, however, as rival industrial powers scurried to find and develop overseas markets and as French and German ambitions in West Africa became more obvious. Inevitably the colonial powers came into conflict when their respective intentions in the region overlapped. In 1885 the Berlin Conference was convened to resolve conflicts of interest in Africa by alloting areas of exploitation. The conferees also enunciated the principle, known as the dual mandate, that the best interests of Europe and Africa would be served by maintaining free access to the continent for trade and by providing Africa with the benefits of Europe's civilizing mission. Britain's claims to a sphere of influence in the Niger basin were acknowledged formally, but it was stipulated that only effective occupation would suffice for continued recognition under international law. This ruling and increasing pressure in the region from France and Germany hastened the establishment of effective British colonial administration in the Niger area (see fig. 7).