Early Nigerian Colonial History

It was before 1900 that European nations decided to carve up Africa to expand their respective Empires and establish colonies to help enrich the homeland. Along the left or western edge of modern Nigeria, the French and British created a boundary line inland from the sea that unwittingly cut right through the Yoruba nation. A large portion of Yoruba found themselves in French Dahomey and even west of that in German Togo.

This line was extended far to the north into the savanna, nearly to the edge of the Sahara Desert, into the realm of the Hausa-Fulani, a Muslim empire in the north. On the east side, the colonial boundary line running inland was created with the British on the Nigerian side of the line and the Germans on the east, creating the German colony of Cameroun.

Compared to what happened to the Yoruba in the West, this line did not cut off any of Igboland because the Ibibio and Efik peoples were between them and the new border. When Germany lost WWI, part of the reparations involved giving up the Cameroun, the majority of which became a French colony, but a portion in the south, adjacent to Nigeria, became administered by Britain. German Togo was split between the French, adding it to Dahomey, and the British, administering half next to Ghana/The Gold Coast.

What the British did, regarding Nigeria, without realizing it at the time, was to encircle the three largest tribes in Africa, all within one “colony nation”! These tribes, at that stage of development, had very little knowledge of one another and very little interaction. They were very much used to being in charge of their own show. The exception was previously when the Hausa-Fulani jihad cavalry swept into northern Yoruba savanna land, conquering and converting about one-third of Yoruba to Islam. The Hausa-Fulani cavalry was defeated in its attempt to enter Igboland or even its neighbors to the near north since it was still heavily forested at that time. The jihad attempt was not foiled by local defending warriors on foot but by the tsetse fly. This insect bit, infected, and put to sleep the military advantage of the Hausa cavalry.

In comparison, the balance of West Africa developed colonies along the seacoast rain forests. Examples include Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, and Benin (the former Dahomey). In these cases, the lands to the interior became their own separate colonies, without having any seacoast, such as Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Nigeria was the exception, containing cultures from the coastal rainforest, the interior savanna, and the Sahel, right up to the desert. There are substantial differences between these cultures; in Nigeria's case, there were about 300 different languages! Talk about a challenge.

The three largest ethnic groups, from the largest to the smallest, were the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Igbo. It took quite a while for each to become familiar with one another, and it did not always go smoothly (and some would say it does not go so smoothly today). I have not found any population statistics on the Nigeria Colony in 1900, and I doubt the British could determine general estimations for decades.