IS THE AMALGATION REALLY THE PROBLEM OF NIGERIA: A CRITICAL EXPOSE OF THE EFFECTS OF 1914 AMALGAMATION ON NIGERIA
IS THE AMALGAMATION REALLY THE PROBLEM OF NIGERIA: A CRITICAL EXPOSE OF THE EFFECTS OF 1914 AMALGAMATION ON NIGERIA.
INTRODUCTION
Chinua Achebe citing an Igbo proverb in his “There was a country” tells us that a man who does not know where the rain started to beat him cannot say where he dried his body. The rain that beat Nigeria began more than a decade ago, from the resolutions of the Berlin conference of 1884/1885 to the economic–driven amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria in 1914 by Lord Lugard.
When the British set foot on the area presently known as Nigeria, it was a cacophony of many nations; nations which the British preferred to call “tribes”. Encouraged by the western anthropological binary of the “self” and the “other”, the British colonialists saw themselves as destined and equipped to rescue these African peoples from deep-scaled savagery, superstition and statelessness. They could not acknowledge that these peoples had any form of civilization or system of governance. Even if they did, they did not see the need to encourage the maturity and crystallization of such institutions. Theirs, they thought was a superior and more authentic civilization, and history especially that of slavery, had perhaps taught them that the need for European to conquer and “pacify” the “other”, the rest of the world, especially Africa was a divinely ordained enterprise (Davison 1991:21-51).
Little wonder that when the British came to Nigeria in the 19th century, first as traders and merchants, they did not hesitate to bring along their religion and later, government. With a conjunction of force, tact and artifice, they set up administrative machinery which was later to become a metaphor for the suppression and annihilation of indigenous political and socio-religious structures; machinery which was designed to proclaim and establish the superiority of the European “self” over and above the African “other”. For easy administration more than
INTRODUCTION
Chinua Achebe citing an Igbo proverb in his “There was a country” tells us that a man who does not know where the rain started to beat him cannot say where he dried his body. The rain that beat Nigeria began more than a decade ago, from the resolutions of the Berlin conference of 1884/1885 to the economic–driven amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria in 1914 by Lord Lugard.
When the British set foot on the area presently known as Nigeria, it was a cacophony of many nations; nations which the British preferred to call “tribes”. Encouraged by the western anthropological binary of the “self” and the “other”, the British colonialists saw themselves as destined and equipped to rescue these African peoples from deep-scaled savagery, superstition and statelessness. They could not acknowledge that these peoples had any form of civilization or system of governance. Even if they did, they did not see the need to encourage the maturity and crystallization of such institutions. Theirs, they thought was a superior and more authentic civilization, and history especially that of slavery, had perhaps taught them that the need for European to conquer and “pacify” the “other”, the rest of the world, especially Africa was a divinely ordained enterprise (Davison 1991:21-51).
Little wonder that when the British came to Nigeria in the 19th century, first as traders and merchants, they did not hesitate to bring along their religion and later, government. With a conjunction of force, tact and artifice, they set up administrative machinery which was later to become a metaphor for the suppression and annihilation of indigenous political and socio-religious structures; machinery which was designed to proclaim and establish the superiority of the European “self” over and above the African “other”. For easy administration more than