Zélia Moreira, A Princely Republic: Ilorin During the British Period (Ilorin: Popular Press, 2007)
… Muhammadu Abacar’s dictatorship outlasted the Imperial Government by less than eighteen months.
His rule had been embattled nearly from the beginning: the imamate had declared his presidency illegal, and after three generations of civil liberties, the people disliked his censorship and repression. Few respected the rulings of the imams he had handpicked to fill the qadis’ courts, and as others in West Africa and the Ottoman world had done before them, trade unions and religious brotherhoods withdrew participation from society and formed parallel institutions. Radicals from Sokoto and the Adamawa industrial belt, raised in a harder school than their Ilorin brethren, streamed in to provide support and organization. But as long as the Imperial Party held power in London, fear of it prevented the people from rebelling openly.
The Imperial Government’s fall brought the underground opposition into the open. Although Muhammadu had railed against the Imperials, it was clear to all that he ruled with their tacit support, and that a threat to him might bring British troops from Lagos and Igbo country. The fear of invasion was now gone, replaced by something akin to the revolutionary spirit of the 1840s. Crowds of people resurrected the tradition of the assembly-field by surrounding unpopular officials and shouting them down; Umaru Abacar and the other dissident imams called for strikes and protests. Muhammadu responded with violent repression, but the local assemblies and labor brotherhoods fought back with arms secured from the north, and the army’s own loyalty was increasingly in question.
The act that finally tipped the balance, however, came not from the radical north but from the conservative south: the Yoruba city-states of the New Oyo Confederation. Ever since the confederacy was formed in response to the Royal Niger Company threat [1], the Yoruba had been content to follow Ilorin’s lead; it had, after all, brought them victory and prosperity. But there had always been an undercurrent of resentment over the city-states being economic and political adjuncts of Ilorin, and with Muhammadu’s rise, that resentment was transformed into fear of what their neighbor might do. And fear would eventually turn to resolution.
The July 1922 meeting at which the Confederation censured Ilorin appeared to many contemporaries like a bolt from the blue, but it was in fact the result of careful organization. The groundwork was laid by Funmilayo Abacar, who had conceived of the idea and spent months securing the support of British officials and Yoruba monarchs. By the time the city-states met at Ife, their agenda was already set, and they knew that Britain would defend them if Muhammadu responded to it with aggression.
Ilorin did not attend the conference, and the vote to suspend its privileges was nearly unanimous, well over the two thirds needed for a carrying majority. And its suspension carried with it the loss of free movement and transit through the Yoruba states. Industrialists all at once needed visas to visit their warehouses in Lagos – visas that, somehow, always encountered bureaucratic delays – and, worse yet, had to pay heavy fees to transport goods to port by rail.
Nor was this a problem that could be solved by leaving the confederacy. The 1880 treaty with Britain recognized Oyo collectively, and not Ilorin in its own right, as an Imperial Domain; if it seceded, Ilorin would be just another princely state, without the advantages that the pact conferred. And the Empire Office in London made clear that it would take a dim view of any attempt to renegotiate the treaty while Muhammadu remained in power.
So the sanctions bit hard, and they cost Muhammadu the support of the industrial class, which had reluctantly supported him as a bastion against the radicals. The factory owners suddenly began to obey the imamate’s injunction against paying taxes to an unlawful government, and unilaterally canceled their military contracts. Without money to pay his soldiers, and without the support of any sector of society, the game was up: in January 1923, Muhammadu shot himself as crowds surrounded the old Abacar home on Oyo Square that he had made into a presidential palace.
After that, events followed quickly: a provisional government of True Abacarist trade unionists, liberal imams and industrialists took power, and the Empire Office suddenly lost its reluctance to negotiate a new order in the lower Niger. Matters could not go back to the way they had been before Muhammadu seized power – the Yoruba city-states had come into their own, and now wished a destiny separate from Ilorin – but Muhammadu’s fall created more of a sense of shared victory than bitterness, and it proved easy for London to broker an amicable divorce. On August 1, 1923, the Republic of Ilorin and the Oyo Confederation (the “New” had got lost along the way) became separate Domains of the British Empire…
… It has been said that Muhammadu’s downfall kept the Malê states British a decade longer than they would otherwise have been, and that is likely true. Everyone realized that, without Britain to act as guarantor, the attempt to discipline Ilorin would probably have led to war, and that only British power had given the Yoruba city-states the leverage to shake off Ilorin’s dominance. But at the same time, the affair reinforced the Niger Valley states’ wariness of Britain: after all, if it had cooperated in taking down one government, what was to prevent it from toppling another that was not to its liking? And while an Imperial Domain had originally been the rough equivalent of a dominion, the dominions’ independence had advanced while the domains’ had not.
The search for a middle ground between full independence and the status quo would lead to a revival of Usman Abacar’s vision of a Niger Valley federation: a federal dominion, like Australasia or South Africa, that would have more leverage vis-à-vis Britain and would be able to police its member states without British help. The first stirrings of renewed federalism came from the left: the All-Niger Workers’ Congress, a loose coalition of federalist trade unions and labor parties throughout the region, was founded in 1923, and attracted the support of such figures as the insubordinate
jaji turned novelist Honório Yaji. [2] But before long, federalism – and opposition to it – would transcend left and right…
Aminatou Salazar, Africa’s Twentieth Century (Univ. of Sokoto Press )
… To the Niger Valley federalists, South Africa was an example of how entities with different levels of sovereignty and even different imperial patrons could form an effective union. Their opponents also saw South Africa as an example, but a cautionary one, pointing to the conflicts in Matabeleland and Basotholand and to the way in which the Imperial Party had been able to bring the government to a virtual standstill. To them, any attempt to combine colonies, protectorates and independent states was doomed from the start.
In the 1920s, three parts of British West Africa were still crown colonies. The Gold Coast was relatively content with that status, which was all that stood between them and annexation by the Dahomey and Asante kingdoms to the north. The other two were not. The Lower Niger colony – Igboland – was still in a ferment after the Women’s War [3]; although London had retreated from the worst policies even before the Imperial Government fell, the Igbo now wanted self-rule rather than a return to the old status quo. And Lagos had become the Hong Kong of West Africa, the port where Malê, Coaster, British and Brazilian trade routes met: it had a polyglot population of Yoruba, Igbo, Krio, Afro-Brazilians, Indians and Europeans, and the colonial authorities were torn between the restive middle class’ demands for self-determination and their own desire to keep a firm grip on such an important entrepôt.
The princely states also ran the gamut from contented to otherwise. Bonny, Calabar and the Gobir Agency were peaceful, the former two because of their wealth and the latter because it was remote, traditionally-minded and generally left alone by London. Dahomey and Asante were quite the opposite: during the Imperial era, their kings had correctly guessed that they had hunting licenses against the domestic opposition and had used those licenses ruthlessly. Thousands of dissidents had been imprisoned or exiled, and with the fall of the Imperial Government, they now redoubled their efforts for change. In Wukari, Borgu and the Nupe kingdom, where Igbo and Malê merchants brought new ideas and the rulers had met the twentieth century somewhat less than halfway, the population simmered rather than boiled, but the desire for more was just under the surface.
And the domains, as well, had their discontents. Sokoto and Adamawa had democratized, but not enough to suit the domestic opposition; the struggle between the industrialists and the labor brotherhoods had only been inflamed by the Imperial era; and through long habit, the British commissioners supported the rulers against their peoples’ aspirations. Both were governed by elites who had been educated in British-sponsored civil service schools and who had ties to the throne and the industrialists, and pressure from below had made these elites all the more determined to hang onto power.
The differences between these states presented a formidable obstacle to federation. By 1923, the crown colonies had been granted elected legislatures and expanded civil rights but not responsible government, and the domains were wary of combining with entities over which London retained so much control. The more autocratic of the princely states balked at the democratic reforms they would need to institute in order to join a union. The smaller states feared domination by the larger ones, and Oyo worried that a union would put it back under the Malê dominance it had but recently shaken off. The Igbo, Fon, Asante and Niger Delta peoples, who were Christian, were unsure that they wanted to be part of a mostly-Muslim dominion. So negotiations dragged on, sometimes encouraged by Britain and sometimes not, but to little avail.
The general strike of 1928, called by the All-Niger Workers’ Congress to support democracy and federation, would be a catalyzing event for all sides. The strike began in Zaria but spread quickly to other major cities in the Niger Valley, and in many, local grievances overwhelmed the common agenda. In Kumasi and Abomey, the protests spilled over into open revolt against the monarchies; in Sokoto, strikers demanded a third republic; in Lagos and Owerri, they called for immediate dominion status.
The governor of Lagos, who was the highest-ranking British official on hand, was well-intentioned but alarmed at disorder spreading throughout the lower Niger. He negotiated with the Igbo strikers but declared martial law in Lagos port, and when the princely rulers asked for British troops to suppress the revolts in their kingdoms, he acceded. By the time the dust had cleared, hundreds were dead in the Dahomey and Asante capitals, and the Emir of Adamawa had imposed emergency rule on the industrial cities.
By February 1929, the strike was over. In some places, the strikers had made gains: Sokoto instituted fully responsible government beginning that year, and more powers were transferred to the Lower Niger and Lagos legislatures. But in other states, the suppression of the protests, and Britain’s role in that suppression, would leave bitter memories, and it also killed the idea of federation for the time being. The three Malê successor states and the Oyo Confederation would attain dominion status separately in 1930, but a unified Dominion of West Africa seemed farther away than ever…
Zélia Moreira, A Princely Republic: Ilorin During the British Period (Ilorin: Popular Press, 2007)
… The parliament elected in 1923 had a dual mandate as legislature and constitutional assembly, and a year into its term, it voted out Ilorin’s first written charter. This constitution, approved by referendum in early 1925, created the modern Ilorin Republic: with minor changes, the institutions and forms of government set by the 1925 document remain in effect today.
The constitution combined aspects of Westminster democracy with the institutions that had grown up during three generations of Abacarist rule, and sought to prevent a recurrence of the excesses that had marked the Muhammadu Abacar interregnum. The office of president, which Muhammadu had created and abused, was abolished. Instead, the prime minister would once again be the highest state officer and would be first among equals in a collective cabinet government. Civil liberties were made untouchable even in emergencies, the right to petition and sue the government was made virtually absolute, and a modern version of the assembly-field was institutionalized by requiring all legislative sessions to be open and forbidding votes from being taken until the citizens had a chance to speak.
Other provisions entrenched Abacarist labor legislation: the right to work and sustenance were added to the bill of rights, as were the right to safe working conditions and to a just wage as defined by Abacarist jurisprudence. The distinction between civil and sharia courts was formalized for the first time, but the two systems merged at the highest level: the supreme court of the republic would have an equal number of civil judges and qadis, and a majority of both was required to sustain a ruling…
… The early years under the new constitution were peaceful ones: the return to democracy, and the general prosperity of the 1920s made Ilorin’s politics less volatile than those of the other two successor states. The decade after Muhammadu’s downfall was more a chance for politics to catch up to the society Ilorin had become: one that was on the margins of being a developed country by the standards of its time, and one in which several of the founding institutions had become unnecessary.
With schools in every village, for instance, there was no longer a need for
jajis; itinerant professionals were now more likely to be doctors who circulated in districts where clinics had not yet been built. Modern roads, motor wagons, cinema and radio had replaced itinerant peddler-storytellers. The descendants of the Malê smallholder-soldiers settled in the countryside during the First Sokoto Republic were now, for the most part, members of district cooperatives along with their Yoruba and Hausa neighbors. Indeed, there was no longer a distinct Malê population: for more than forty years, “Malê” meant anyone who spoke Sudanic and adopted Abacarist culture. Ilorin was still a country steeped in the legends of Usman dan Fodio and Paulo Abacar the Elder, and those legends suffused its political discourse, but it had moved on to other challenges and conflicts that were far from those stories.
Ilorin had modernized in other ways as well. In 1880, a typical family had slightly more than six children; by 1930, that number had declined to just under four. Life expectancy at birth stood at 52 years, and children who survived until age five could expect to reach their sixties. Before the Great War, a substantial majority of the population had been rural, but now almost 40 percent lived in the large towns, and the 1928 census found that Ilorin City had more than 600,000 people.
But decades of coal-based industrial growth and urbanization, especially the rapid expansion of the Great War and the 1900s, had brought their own problems, pollution and sanitation chief among them. The air in Ilorin City and other industrial towns was often smoggy and thick with factory smoke, causing a rise in asthma and other respiratory ailments. The water of the Asa and Niger rivers was no longer safe to drink, and fish stocks, which had been a traditional dietary supplement for those who lived along the rivers’ banks, had declined noticeably. Rising levels of pollution had been noted for some time, but after the “Ruhr fog” of 1926 – an acute air pollution episode in Germany that left more than 70 people dead [4] – doctors worried that it might become more than a nuisance.
It was under these circumstances that a new current entered Ilorin’s politics: that of concern for the environment. This had its precursors in other places: conservationist movements had existed in the United States and western Europe for decades, and anti-dumping laws had been enacted in Britain even in the nineteenth century. [5] But conservationism was still largely an elite movement and, in many cases, one that remained uneasy with industrial modernity. In Ilorin, where modernity was a foundation of the state and where people were keenly aware that industry was its lifeblood, such notions were a bad fit; instead, the founders of West African environmentalism proceeded from an Islamic humanist ethos and sought to treat both industry and nature as interdependent parts of the human world.
This would find its first expression in a 1927 ruling signed by a dozen Abacarist and Labor Belloist imams, several of whom, including Umaru Abacar, had been on the court that declared the Muhammadu government illegal. Citing the thirty-third sura [6] as well as various injunctions concerning the purity of water and the preservation of earth, they argued that humans held the earth in trust, not only for this generation of the
ummah but for all past and future generations. There was thus an obligation to preserve places of historic significance and traditional livelihood, to provide clean air and water to those who lived now, and to ensure that leave the next generation a world in which it could survive.
The ruling also drew from Belloist ideas of faith community, writ large to encompass the entire world. Industry was good, for it reduced poverty and helped humanity achieve the dominion it had been granted over the world, but industrialists were part of a community that included humans, plants, animals and God. [7] As such, they were obligated not to foul the places where others lived, and the community as a whole had a duty to plan and regulate industrial development.
This was a remarkably political document for a faith tradition that professed withdrawal from politics, and in this it was similar to the Christian Stewardship movement of the following decades, which also claimed to be apolitical. Some of its fruits would be political, such as the clean-water legislation that passed the Ilorin parliament in 1929, and the opposition to it certainly would be. But it would also have a long-term effect on the ethical thinking of West African Islam, and some of that effect’s implications would be decades in appearing…
Amara Konneh, “Liberia and the Beginning of Afro-Atlantism,” Journal of African Development 32: 285-92 (Fall 2001)
… By the end of the Imperial period, several thousand Sierra Leonean political dissidents had fled to Liberia. Many spent years there, establishing professional practices or working for Liberian businesses, and most of these found Liberian sponsors to connect them to the clientage networks that were still a critical part of the country’s political and economic life. With their return to Freetown after the Imperial Government’s fall, the Liberian patronage system – which had already established itself in Sierra Leone through marriages between elite Krio and Americo-Liberian families – now extended throughout both countries.
This, along with the return of other political exiles who had spent the Imperial years in South Carolina, marked a significant point in the development of what is now called the Afro-Atlantic Creole culture. The peoples of Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Carolina and Georgia lowlands had always thought of themselves as cousins, but now, more and more of them came to consider each other siblings instead, part of a single nation rather than a complex of related ones. It was a hybrid nation, one heavily influenced by the Kru and Mande of Liberia, the Temne of Sierra Leone and the folkways of the American South, but its people were at home nearly anywhere along the Atlantic rim.
Liberia’s newfound prosperity as an iron exporter [8], and its central position between Leonean and African-American cultures, would be a dominant influence in this hybrid people, and the Americo-Liberians – who still had enormous cultural influence even though the Kru and Mande had held political power for two generations – would be its chief architects. By 1930, the Krio and Gullah languages had largely merged into the Kru-inflected Liberian creole, and in the wake of the 1925 Jamaican Settlement, the patois of Jamaica had begun to do likewise. The Atlantic-rim cultures also shared a common core of foods, holidays, styles of clothing and family patterns that combined Britain, the southern United States and the Rice Coast, and by this time, even the inland peoples had assimilated to this culture through education and the clientage system.
For a generation, it had been common for middle-class families to have branches in all three countries. In the 1920s, intermarriage became increasingly common even for the working class and peasants; by 1940 it was the exception for a Leonean family
not to have cousins in Monrovia and Charleston, and increasingly in the Caribbean as well. The rise of Liberian-style adoption bonds, and declared brotherhood between the children of close friends or business associates, made multinational families even more prevalent.
This inevitably led to calls for closer economic and political union, echoing the Afro-Atlantic ethos first professed by Edward Wilmot Blyden. [9] In 1925, Sierra Leone attained a greater measure of self-government, with an elected legislature similar to those in Lower Niger and Lagos, and one of that parliament’s first acts was to support a customs union with Liberia; the governor initially vetoed this union, but after further negotiations between Freetown, Monrovia and London, it was approved in 1928. Given Liberia’s history of friendship with France, this gave Leoneans easier access to markets in French West Africa and metropolitan France itself. And by 1930, both Liberia and Sierra Leone had begun to explore the possibility of upgrading the most-favored-nation status they already had with the United States…
_______
[1] See post 647.
[2]
Remember him?
[3] See posts 3872 and 3893.
[4] Compare OTL’s
Meuse fog of 1930.
[5] As in OTL.
[6] Verse 33:72 to be exact; this verse is sometimes cited as a source of Islamic environmental ethics in OTL.
[7] Sura 6:38: “There is not an animal in the earth, nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are peoples like unto you.” This is also a common citation in discussions of Islamic environmental ethics.
[8] See post 3196.
[9] See post 3196.
