Nigeria is a country Britain invented. It began with one island taken under the guns of a warship in 1861, grew through a trading company's private empire and a war against the Sokoto Caliphate, and was glued together from two separate colonies in 1914. Forty-six years later it became Africa's most populous independent state.
Lagos was a slave-trading port in the 19th century, and Britain used the fight against the slave trade as its way in. At the end of 1851 a Royal Navy force bombarded the town, drove out Oba Kosoko and put his rival Akitoye on the throne. Akitoye signed a treaty on 1 January 1852 banning the slave trade. A British consul now sat in Lagos and steadily took over its affairs.
In 1861 London decided to make the island British. On 30 July the acting consul, William McCoskry, and Commander Bedingfield of HMS Prometheus called Oba Dosunmu, Akitoye's son, aboard the warship and told him the terms. Dosunmu resisted, but under the threat of bombardment he signed the Treaty of Cession on 6 August 1861. In exchange for Lagos he was given a pension of about £1,000 a year. The British record called it a cession. It was a takeover at gunpoint with a signature attached.
Up the Niger, Britain let a private company do the work. In 1879 George Taubman Goldie merged the British trading firms on the river, and in 1886 his firm received a royal charter as the Royal Niger Company. It signed hundreds of "treaties" with local rulers, many of whom had no idea what they were giving away, kept out rival traders and fought its own wars.
Rival firms complained that the company broke its own charter with its monopoly, and in 1895 King Koko of Nembe attacked its depot at Akassa. On the coast to the east, the Niger Coast Protectorate grew out of the palm-oil trade. In 1897 its forces sacked Benin City and carried off the Benin Bronzes.
On 1 January 1900 the government revoked the company's charter and took over its territory, paying £865,000 in compensation. Britain then divided the land into the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria and the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. One Nigerian writer later put it bluntly: it was as if the country had been sold at a bazaar.
The north was ruled by the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest state in West Africa, made up of emirates such as Kano, Zaria and Katsina. Frederick Lugard, the High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria from 1900, set out to conquer it. On 3 February 1903 the West African Frontier Force, African soldiers under British officers, stormed the walled city of Kano with artillery and machine guns. In March they defeated the Sokoto army outside its walls, and on 21 March Lugard proclaimed that independent Fulani rule had ended.
Sultan Muhammadu Attahiru I escaped east with thousands of followers. Mid-1903 the British caught up with him at Burmi and he was killed. Britain kept the title of Sultan and installed a new one, and by 1906 organised resistance in the north was over. In the south, British forces broke the Aro Confederacy in 1901–02 and the Ijebu kingdom had already been crushed in 1892.
Britain then ruled the north through the emirs: "indirect rule", which Lugard made famous and exported across the empire. It was cheap, kept the north conservative, and kept out the mission schools that were spreading in the south. That gap in education would haunt Nigeria after independence.
In 1906 the old Lagos colony was merged into Southern Nigeria. Southern Nigeria paid its way through customs revenue; the north did not and depended on subsidies from the British Treasury. Lugard's solution was to join them. On 1 January 1914 he read the amalgamation proclamation in Lagos and became the first Governor-General of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria.
Nobody in Nigeria was asked. The two halves kept different laws, land systems, schools and officials for years. A northern leader, usually quoted as Ahmadu Bello, later called it "the mistake of 1914". Some Nigerian historians argue the 1906 merger of Lagos and the south mattered more. Either way, the country's borders were drawn for Britain's convenience, not its peoples'.
Report by Sir F. D. Lugard on the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria, and Administration, 1912–1919.Lugard's own report, reprinted in 1968 and held by the National Library of Nigeria
In the south-east, Britain appointed "warrant chiefs" where no such chiefs had existed, and they were widely hated. In November 1929 a rumour spread that women were to be counted for tax. It started at Oloko, when a woman named Nwanyeruwa refused to be counted, and from 23 November thousands of Igbo and Ibibio women rose across Owerri and Calabar provinces. They called it Ogu Umunwanyi in Igbo and Ekong Iban in Ibibio, the Women's War. The British called it the "Aba Riots". Troops and police opened fire, and dozens of women were killed. The Aba Commission of Inquiry report is held today at The National Archives in Kew.
"How are we going to pay tax? We depend upon our husbands, we cannot buy food or cloth ourselves: how shall we get money to pay tax?"Testimony quoted by The National Archives, UK
In June 1945 Nigerian workers launched a general strike over wages and the cost of living, with the railway unionist Michael Imoudu at its centre. Lagos, the colonial capital, was its heart. A year earlier Nnamdi Azikiwe and Herbert Macaulay had founded the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons.
On 18 November 1949 police under a British superintendent, F. S. Philip, opened fire on striking coal miners at the government-owned Iva Valley mine in Enugu. Twenty-one miners were killed and 51 injured, many shot in the back. Protests spread to Aba, Port Harcourt, Onitsha and even Trafalgar Square in London. The shooting fed the drive for independence.
After 1945 Britain moved Nigeria towards self-rule through a series of constitutions. The Richards Constitution of 1946 created three regions, North, West and East. They came to be dominated by three parties and three leaders: Ahmadu Bello's Northern People's Congress, Obafemi Awolowo's Action Group and Azikiwe's NCNC. A federation was set up in 1954, and the Eastern and Western regions became self-governing in 1957.
The UK Parliament passed the Nigeria Independence Act 1960. On 1 October 1960 at the Lagos Racecourse, Princess Alexandra, representing the Queen, handed the constitutional instruments to the Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. On 16 November Azikiwe became the first Nigerian Governor-General. In June 1961 the Northern Cameroons voted to join Nigeria. On 1 October 1963 Nigeria became a republic, with Azikiwe as President.
Nigeria's own story is far older than Britain's: Ife and Benin, Oyo, the Hausa city-states, Kanem-Borno and the Sokoto Caliphate. Our sister sites cover the country today:
The Colonial Office files on Nigeria, including the Aba Commission report, are at The National Archives in Kew, free with a reader's ticket. The Benin Bronzes taken in 1897 are in the British Museum. Nigerian London is strongest in Peckham, south-east London.
In Lagos, the National Museum at Onikan holds the car in which Murtala Mohammed was shot, as well as older treasures. The old colonial quarter is on Lagos Island around Tinubu Square and the Marina. Badagry, west of Lagos, has a slave-trade museum and the first storey building in Nigeria. Kano's old city walls and the Emir's palace survive. Check travel advice before going north.
Entrance fees are included in the tour price; tips are not included but are always welcome.
In London:
All of Britain's African territories, country by country.
The neighbour that went first, in 1957.
What was taken in 1897, and where it is now.
The shipping line between Liverpool and Lagos.
Where Nigerian students in London planned independence.
The story after 1960.
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