First Published in 1965. This book recounts Nigeria under British rule and is dedicated by the author to Mr Joseph Chamberlain who was Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1895 to 1903. It includes the areas of Lagos and the Niger coast as revenue generators, the Niger Delta Protectorate, the Royal Niger Company, and Amalgamated Nigeria from 1914.
In this insightful book, development historian Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina addresses the crisis of development in Africa by locating it in its colonial historical past. Using Nigeria as a case study, he argues that the nature and practice of British colonialism in this colony created social and economic deficiencies that have left a legacy of underdevelopment. Ukelina outlines the processes that led to the 1945 Nigerian Development Plan and the evolution of colonial agricultural policy and practices in Nigeria. He argues that a few key factors led to the failure of development in the late colonial period: the imperial and neocolonial imperative to exploit African resources and people, poor planning as a result of this imperative, and the racial ideologies of the colonial state that resulted in a total rejection of local African experience and knowledge in favor of Western ‘experts.’ The Second Colonial Occupation uncovers and analyzes the short and long term impact of colonialism. It reveals that though colonial rule was promoted as a benevolent mission, at heart, it was a system that guaranteed that Africans continuously paid for their own exploitation. Ukelina argues that ‘postcolonial’ Africa will continue to face development challenges unless it breaks free from the intellectual relics of colonial rule and the economic shackles of neocolonialism.
Over recent decades, the responsibility for the past actions of the European colonial powers in relation to their former colonies has been subject to a lively debate. In this book, the question of the responsibility under international law of former colonial States is addressed. Such a legal responsibility would presuppose the violation of the international law that was applicable at the time of colonization. In the ‘Scramble for Africa’ during the Age of New Imperialism (1870-1914), European States and non-State actors mainly used cession and protectorate treaties to acquire territorial sovereignty (imperium) and property rights over land (dominium). The question is raised whether Europeans did or did not on a systematic scale breach these treaties in the context of the acquisition of territory and the expansion of empire, mainly through extending sovereignty rights and, subsequently, intervening in the internal affairs of African political entities.
“In this densely detailed and interpretatively nuanced study, Mahmud Modibbo Tukur lays bare the very foundations of the colonial state in what is now northern Nigeria. This is a must read for anyone wanting to understand the foundations of contemporary Nigeria and how we came to be what we are.” – Prof. Abdul Raufu Mustapha, University of Oxford, UK. Mahmud Modibbo Tukur’s work challenges fundamental assumptions and conclusions about European colonialism in Africa, especially British colonialism in northern Nigeria. Whereas others have presented the thesis of a welcome reception of the imposition of British colonialism by the people, the study has found physical resistance and tremendous hostility towards that imposition; and, contrary to the “pacification” and minimal violence argued by some scholars, the study has exposed the violent and bloody nature of that occupation. Rather than the single story of “Indirect rule”, or “abolishing slavery” and lifting the burden of precolonial taxation which others have argued, this book has shown that British officials were very much in evidence, imposed numerous and heavier taxes collected with great efficiency and ruthlessness, and ignored the health and welfare of the people in famines and health epidemics which ravaged parts of northern Nigeria during the period. British economic and social policies, such as blocking access to western education for the masses in most parts of northern Nigeria, did not bring about development but its antithesis of retrogression and stagnation during the period under study. Tukur’s analysis of official colonial records and sources constitutes a significant contribution to the literature on colonialism in Africa and to understanding the complexity of the Nigerian situation today.
As the last recruit into the British Colonial Administration in Northern Nigeria when the country was on the brink of independence, John Hare was dispatched to serve in some of the remotest areas in the North. He was posted to an area in Adamawa Province, which had been part of the original German Cameroons, until it was divided between France and Great Britain after the Great War and administered as part of the French Cameroons and Nigeria. Unexpectedly, this territory, which was administered under a United Nations mandate, voted in a plebiscite to remain a colony under the British. John Hare explains the tribal politics behind this vote and how, for 18 months, the territory acquired the status of a separate colony with its own Colonial Governor, until a second plebiscite's outcome determined the territory should revert to Nigerian rule.
