Zélia Moreira, A Princely Republic: Ilorin During the British Period (Ilorin: Popular Press, 2007)
… Usman Abacar may have handled the British politics of the Oyo-Company War almost perfectly, but he bungled the domestic politics. The man in the street in Ilorin couldn’t understand why Oyo had won the war but was now acknowledging the sovereignty of a British queen, and many of Usman’s core Abacarist supporters balked at bending the knee to any monarch at all. The reason for the peace terms – that the sheer scale of Oyo’s victory made it necessary to come to terms with Britain lest the London mob bay for revenge, and that the terms of accession preserved Ilorin’s republic in all but name – were somewhat too nuanced to be easily explained, and Usman’s political enemies weren’t interested in trying. By the time the peace was actually signed, and approved first by a visibly reluctant Ilorin legislature and then by the leaders of the confederated Oyo states, many people saw Usman not as the winner of the war but as the loser of the peace.
Usman’s political coalition held together through the ratification, but the defections had already begun, and they accelerated afterward. Less than a month later, the government lost a vote of no confidence and for the first time in Ilorin’s history, early elections were called. The industrialists and large merchants who had lost power to the Abacarists in 1872 pulled out all the stops, charging that Usman had mismanaged and sold out the country, and even seizing on his son’s middle name of Malik (after the founder of the Maliki madhab) as evidence that he was a would-be dictator.
In the uncertainty and charged atmosphere of the postwar period, these attacks worked. When the dust had settled on the 1880 election, Usman had retained his seat handily and the Abacarists were still the largest single party – in fact, they remained the only political party worthy of the name – but they had lost their majority, and the industrialists’ faction seized the premiership. Usman would remain as the largely ceremonial chancellor of the New Oyo Confederation, but in his own constituent state, he was once again leader of the opposition.
Curiously, the outcome of the election did much to calm the political tensions. Possibly the people were reassured by the fact that they could still vote out their government, and that even with Oyo as a British imperial domain, their voice still mattered. And in the event, the merchant-industrialist faction's policies were at least as pro-British as Usman’s. Britain was where the money was, many of them already had British partners or investors, and the elimination of barriers between Oyo and Britain meant that they could now invest their profits throughout the empire. Some went into finance, becoming bankers and merchants to the West African parts of the empire as the Indians were in East Africa. Others, who had developed relationships with particular naval officers or British suppliers in their role as refitters to the Royal Navy, removed to Britain itself, joining the naval manufacturing facilities around the Chatham Dockyard and founding the African community of the Medway Towns. These ventures were still in their infancy in the 1880s, but in time, millions of pounds in profits would be reinvested in Ilorin.
The "interval of the merchants," as it is locally known, was in some ways a period of rapid development. The railroad from Lagos to Ilorin was completed in 1883, and by the end of the decade, it would extend to Jebba. The navigation canals that had been built during the First Sokoto Republic were enlarged and extended, making the Niger navigable year-round for larger packet steamers, and the port facilities at Jebba were improved.
But these very improvements would lead to hardship in many parts of the country. A decade of Abacarist industrial policy, combined with Usman's strategic partnership with the Royal Navy, had enabled the ironworking and textile industries to stay locally competitive, becoming efficient enough to sell their products more cheaply than imported goods despite diminishing shipment costs. The latecomer industries such as furniture and glass, however, hadn't been able to scale up to this degree, and the coming of the railroad reduced shipping costs to the point where they were no longer viable.
In time, these industries would restructure. The glass-works would find a niche in naval and medical production, while the furniture workshops would shift away from mass-market production to high-quality, artistically carved wares for the export market. The reformed furniture industry, in fact, would take in not only Ilorin but all the Oyo city-states, taking advantage of traditional wood-carving forms. But for both industries, this represented a shift from factories to semi-artisanal production, and many jobs and fortunes were lost during the process.
The losses in the secondary industries would prove to be the first crack in the industrialists' political coalition. While the government was undoubtedly pro-business, it lacked a coherent industrial
policy, and it had no solutions for the weaker sectors, which in turn began to rethink their allegiance. The coalition's final downfall, though, would come from the other direction. In 1884, the industrialists attempted to take advantage of the weak labor market by repealing the Abacarist labor code that Usman had instituted. In doing so, they overestimated their strength; several of the independent legislators upon whose support they relied belonged to the traditional imamate, whose communitarian sensibilities were offended by the industrialists' adversarial attitude toward their workers. Usman rallied the imams, the independent Abacarists and some of the disgruntled furniture- and glass-makers against the bill, succeeded in declaring it a vote of confidence, and brought down the government with its failure.
The ensuing election marked a return to old patterns: Usman was once again seen as his father's heir and the champion of the working class, and he argued for an industrial bank to ease the secondary industries' transition and increased
zakat distribution in the form of business loans to displaced workers who qualified. In October 1884, the Abacarist party was returned to office with an absolute majority, and Usman was once again prime minister...
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Samuel de Souza, Political Science: Medicine and Agriculture in Colonial Africa (Lagos: United, 1995)
… Ilorin’s agricultural institute and medical school were created as technical training institutions, and for the first few years, they were exactly that. The medical school trained local doctors and assisted cities and towns in improving public health; the agricultural college introduced clay-pipe drip irrigation to West Africa and dispatched instructors to teach farmers about crop rotation and soil conservation. During the 1870s, as these measures spread across the Oyo confederation and north to the Sahel, the region experienced a modest increase in crop yields, creating a surplus to feed the growing cities and reducing dependency on imported foods.
But neither institute would remain exclusively a technical school for long. The medical school’s public health work led naturally to experimentation and research: doctors sent to control epidemics sought to determine their sources, and in doing so, discovered the vectors for several locally endemic diseases. In 1883, David Bruce, who was investigating an outbreak of sleeping sickness in Lagos, discovered the tsetse-fly vector, and the mosquito vector for yellow fever was found three years later. [1] This would lead to pest-control campaigns and draining of stagnant water throughout Oyo, and the success of these efforts would encourage the medical faculty to more experimental efforts.
Medicine in the lower Niger also benefited from the “Company’s gift:” the introduction of cinchona trees in the delta region. Britain begun cultivating smuggled cinchona in Ceylon as early as 1861, and when the Company took over Bonny in 1872, it purchased several trees from the Hakgala Gardens for use by its personnel, as well as land in the Udi Hills where they could be cultivated. Unlike the palm-oil trade, the Company made no attempt to monopolize cinchona cultivation, trading seeds and young plants freely in order to build trust. By 1880, there were also cinchona plantations in the hills of central Oyo and on the Jos plateau, and the bark was being traded north as far as Gobir and Bornu. Deaths from malaria in the lower and middle Niger dropped precipitously during the 1880s, and it is estimated that life expectancy in the region increased by five to seven years…
David Bruce
… The agricultural school had likewise established experimental gardens by the end of the 1870s. Many of the early experiments involved attempts to breed tropical varieties of European cereal crops, and most of these proved unsuccessful. At the same time, however, the faculty had begun to experiment with local crops, breeding higher-yield varieties of pearl millet and cowpea, and studying the cultivation of wild
udala or star-apple as well as underused bean and nut crops. [2] Although some of these efforts met with resistance from local farmers, something of a breakthrough was achieved in 1886, when the institute’s director persuaded the Ilorin government to grant loans to displaced workers who agreed to grow the experimental crops…
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Laura Douglas, “British Administration in West Africa During the Transitional Period,” African History Quarterly 37:318-30 (Autumn 1983)
... The Oyo war wasn't the end of the Royal Niger Company: in fact, during the early 1880s, it continued to consolidate its control of the Igbo country and the Benue basin. But as the new decade dawned, the Company found itself with its freedom of action curtailed. Whitehall had no interest in bailing the Company out of any other disastrous ventures, and with its reputation damaged by Usman Abacar’s propaganda assault, its political patrons were unable to protect it. Even before the conclusion of the peace treaty, the British government imposed a new oversight board, put the Company’s military under the direct command of Horse Guards, and required its directors to submit all treaties with indigenous rulers for review.
Soon, another attack would come from an unexpected quarter. Jaja of Opobo, the former king of Bonny whose overthrow the Company had arranged, had banked much of his fortune in Britain before being exiled, and invested much of it in breaking the Company’s palm-oil monopoly. Using his connection with the Coaster peoples, who carried on a nominally-illegal but broadly tolerated trade that linked the colonial empires, Jaja bought large consignments of palm oil in Côte d’Ivoire and transshipped them at Freetown or Lagos, selling them in the British industrial cities at below the Company’s price. In order to stay competitive, the Company was forced to slash its profit margins and cut wages to the point where many plantation workers returned to subsistence farming.
In 1881, Jaja took the battle to London itself, filing suit against the Company for the restoration of his throne on the ground that it had unlawfully arranged for him to be deposed. The case, with its flavor of the exotic, was a media sensation when it was tried before the High Court, and again when Jaja’s appeal reached the House of Lords. Although the trial was a somewhat quixotic enterprise, Jaja’s lawyers delighted in revealing embarrassing details about how the Company did business, and public sympathies, which were always ready to turn against rapacious trade barons, swung heavily in favor of the exiled king.
Ultimately, the Law Lords declined to restore Jaja to his throne or to award damages; to do so would risk undoing far too many political arrangements made by other chartered companies. The lords did find, though, that since Jaja had been convicted of no crime in any British court, the Company had no right to bar him from returning to Opobo as a private citizen and must give him the same regard as any other British subject. Early in 1883, Jaja arrived in Bonny to great fanfare, taking a villa across the street from his old palace and buying vast tracts of land in the interior to plant palm oil and cocoa.
With its profits further cut by scandal and competition, the Company threw up its hands. In April 1884, its parliamentary backers arranged for the British government to buy out the directors – at substantially more than their shares were worth – and to take over direct responsibility for its territories. The kingdoms of Bonny and Calabar became British protectorates, and the remaining holdings were incorporated as the Crown Colony of Lower Niger.
The assumption of this large new colony completed a three-tiered system of administration in West Africa, modeled on that of India. The coastal areas that had long been held by Britain, and the new territories where no pre-colonial state existed, came under direct rule by British governors, district officers and courts. The inland and delta kingdoms which had been conquered by Britain or the Company – or which voluntarily sought British protection from Adamawa, as the Nupe and the Wukari did in 1884 – were treated as princely states, with external relations and defense in British hands but broad internal self-government. Most of the smaller states, such as the two Yoruba city-states that hadn’t joined the Oyo Confederacy or the petty kingdoms of the Wukari (and later of the Borgu), contracted away many of their governmental functions to Britain, to the point where their rulers held title largely in name. The larger ones continued to manage their own affairs, with some even having military units under integrated British command, but were responsible to a British resident who could overrule or even depose their rulers.
The third category, unique to Oyo until the later 1880s, was that of “imperial domain.” In some ways, Oyo’s relationship with Britain was like that of a princely state: it was a subsidiary alliance in which Oyo recognized British sovereignty, ceded its war-making power to Whitehall, and bound itself to imperial foreign and trade policy. At the same time, it kept a fully equipped army, under British command only at the operational level, and had responsible government with the resident having solely diplomatic authority. It also continued to maintain diplomatic relations with African nations outside the British Empire, which would prove to be a useful back-channel for British diplomacy. Indeed, until the establishment of the Empire Office, relations between London and Ile-Ife would be handled out of the Foreign Office rather than the Colonial Office…
… To rule its growing empire, Britain established the African Civil Service, modeled on the elite civil service of India. Like its Indian counterpart, the ACS, which was established in 1885, would number about 1000 at any given time, and would form the senior judicial and executive branch of the colonial government (lower-level administrators and clerks would be recruited locally or else posted from the British civil service). Candidates were chosen by competitive examination and, after two years of training in administration, law and the language of the area in which they were to serve, were liable to service anywhere in British Africa except the Cape Colony and Natal.
In theory, the ACS examinations were open to any British subject regardless of race, and since Africa was considered a hardship posting, there was more non-European representation than in the Indian senior bureaucracy. But many of these non-Europeans were from India, where there were more candidates who met the educational qualifications; ironically, during the 1880s and early 1890s, there were ironically more Indians in the ACS than in the ICS. And, with advances in tropical medicine making Africa safer for Europeans, Indians and Africans together were far outnumbered by Englishmen. There were always a few African judges and district officers - typically recruited from the Krio of Sierra Leone, the Yoruba or the Malê, who were most likely to have a post-secondary education – but for the first generation of its existence, the African Civil Service was primarily a European affair. This would have some benign effects, such as introducing cricket, rugby and football to Africa, but many others would not be so benign…
… By the mid-1880s, as the European powers expanded their African empires, the borders of British West Africa were increasingly troubled. In the west, the French colonial governors of Côte d’Ivoire disputed the borders of the Asante kingdom, which was now firmly incorporated into the British empire as a princely state. To the north, Britain and France quarreled over the right to trade with the Mossi kingdom and bring it into their sphere of influence; French authorities were particularly disturbed by British merchants selling weapons to the Mossi, many of which were sold on to the Toucouleur.
In the east, relations between the Lower Niger Colony and the North German Confederation’s ivory-and-rubber trading post at Douala were more cooperative, but this too had its hazards. The boundary between the German zone and French Gabon was uncertain, and a number of incidents between French and Prussian colonial troops during 1884 and 1885 threatened to bring Britain, as a North German ally, into the dispute.
And then there was the growing scramble for the Congo…
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Ahmadu Odubogun, Faith and Ferment: The Sahel and Sudan in the Nineteenth Century (Ibadan Univ. Press 2005)
… The Nana Asma’u’s death in March 1882, at the age of eighty-eight, marked the end of an era in the Islamic Sahel. For more than half a century, her name had been synonymous with education; kingdoms and republics might rise and fall, but her
jaji corps of itinerant teachers had brought primary education to village women and children throughout the lower Niger and Benue basins. The
jajis had helped bring Islam to the southern Yoruba, raised the basic literacy rate from less than five percent to more than fifty, and spread the Roman alphabet from Ibadan to Yola.
The
jajis were far too useful to let lapse, but there was no one of the Nana’s stature to continue them. Instead of a single, international corps of teachers, there would now be several, each operating within a single country and under the control of its government. The
jajis, like the teachers at brick-and-thatching schools, became civil servants.
It seems amazing to a modern reader that the Sahelian governments waited so long to take over the itinerant teachers, but few of them thought of education as political. To them, the
jajis were performing a religious duty, and if the Nana Asma’u wanted to educate their subjects at no cost to them, they weren’t inclined to ask questions. The idea of primary education as a tool to inculcate loyalty and spread political propaganda is a modern one, and the Sahelian rulers’ modernization didn’t extend quite so far.
Thus, the emirs of Adamawa didn’t notice that an entire generation of children, both in rural districts and in the industrial cities, had been exposed to Abacarist ideals, and by the time events brought that fact to their attention, it was far too late to change.
The trigger was economic. During the 1870s, the industries of Ilorin were forced to contend with European competition, but shipping costs to Sokoto and the former Atikuwa sultanate remained high enough that their factories were still insulated. By the 1880s, that was no longer the case: the accession of Oyo to the British empire, the beginning of the West African railroad system and the navigational improvements on the middle Niger enabled British goods to undercut local products. And unlike Ilorin, the governments of the northern states had no policy in place to confront this challenge.
The industrialists of Sokoto – and, even more, those of Zaria, Kano and Kaduna – responded by cutting the cost over which they had the most control: labor. Between 1883 and 1885, wages fell by more than a third, to the point where many industrial workers became eligible for
zakat, even while working hours increased and conditions became less safe. In Sokoto, which still paid lip service to Abacarist ethics, the government made a half-hearted attempt to enforce the minimum wage and control working conditions, but with an inexperienced emir and a parliament dominated by the industrialists, these efforts amounted to little. In Adamawa, where the factory barons owned the municipal governments outright, not even that much was done.
The labor movement, blooded by a generation of bitter struggle, treated the wage cuts as a declaration of war, and the radicalism which had been repressed since the late 1850s once more made an appearance. This was not, however, the radicalism of Gusau, which had sought to overturn both politics and religion and to transform Islam into a cult of reason. Instead, the Sahelian labor movement was deeply rooted in traditional religious brotherhoods, and shaped by Abacarist militancy and the communal ethic of Labor Belloism.
Although the unions disagreed on points of doctrine, they were unanimous in arguing that the industries were cutting the wrong cost. To them, a factory was a community, and profit should be invested for the community’s good, which necessarily meant that the first cuts should come at the top rather than being visited on those least able to bear them. And since the industrialists were unlikely to make these cuts voluntarily, then it was necessary for the workers to take ownership of the mills and manage them according to principles of
ijma, or consensus.
Up to the 1880s, this had been a matter of philosophical debate, with the actual strikes relating to more immediate matters of wages and hours. But the 1883-85 wage cuts brought the question to the forefront. So severe and widespread were the cutbacks that strikes alone seemed ineffective to deal with them, and when the Third Labor
Shura met in Ilorin in 1884, it seemed less like a trade union congress than a planning ground for revolution. And so it proved to be.
The labor uprisings of 1885 broke out almost simultaneously in Sokoto and Zaria. In Sokoto, union militias aligned to the Malê religious brotherhoods took control of much of the capital, forcing the king to flee and declaring a republic. In Zaria, the unions engaged in three days of pitched battles against the industrialist-controlled city militia, driving them out of the city and establishing a municipal government controlled by a council of factory cooperatives. Kano and Kaduna followed suit within the week, and there was even unrest in Yola itself.
The Second Sokoto Republic would last less than six months. The upheaval of the 1850s was still fresh enough in mind for people in the rural districts, and even many in the cities, not to want to repeat it, and they preferred the stability of the emirate to the uncertainty of another republic. The revolution was thus unable to expand its control beyond the capital, and while its control of the city armories made it difficult to dislodge, its fate was sealed when the emir requested British aid.
This was not a decision the emir made lightly; he had studied the British empire, and was well aware of the limitations placed on princely states. But what he also saw was that princely-state status was a powerful guarantee of stasis, protecting the ruler against both external enemies and popular unrest from within. So in 1886, Sokoto became the second of West Africa’s Imperial Domains, and the capital was retaken with the help of a regiment from the Lagos garrison. At the urging of the new British commissioner, the emir extended the qualifications for suffrage and increased the
zakat allowance for the needy, but the unions’ attempt to seize control of the factories had, for the time being, failed.
In Adamawa, the emir had no desire to call upon the British Empire, but his other options were limited. The bulk of the military was tied up along the northern frontier; the emir had invaded Bornu two years earlier with the intent of adding it to his kingdom, but his plans had gone disastrously wrong due to the fanatic defense put up by the Bornu armies. Many of the troops not committed to the war were stationed in other recently-conquered provinces, and pulling them out might put those districts at risk of revolt.
It was early 1886 before the emir could scrape together enough force to confront the industrial rebellion, and in March, his forces invested Zaria. There, however, the unions played their trump card: they held the factories hostage, and any attempt to retake the city would result in the destruction of its industries. By this time, both the army and the government of Adamawa depended on industrial production, the few factories in Yola were insufficient to meet their needs, and with the nation at war, a victory which came at the cost of the Atikuwan factories would be suicidal.
The emir had no choice but to come to terms. On May 11, 1886, the Zaria Commune – which had negotiated for Kaduna and Kano as well as for itself – surrendered to the emir’s forces. The terms of surrender required it to compensate the industrialists, but the unions were legalized and the labor brotherhoods were allowed to keep control of the factories they had seized.
The unions’ victory would prove bittersweet. Some of the cooperatives were still unable to withstand competition from imported goods. Hard times would force many workers to sell their shares, and within a few years, many of the cooperatives would have to sell majority ownership back to the industrialists in order to raise capital. Over time, both the local governments and the emirate would systematically undermine and suborn those that remained. But the Sahelian labor movement was now, beyond doubt, a power in itself…
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[1] In OTL, the sleeping-sickness vector was found in 1903, so an 1883 discovery isn’t that great an advance. Germ theory was advanced enough by 1883 that the vector could be found if someone were actually looking for it. The pioneering doctor, David Bruce, is an ATL sibling of the man who isolated the cause of sleeping sickness in OTL; rather than going into private practice and then joining the British army and being posted to Malta, this Bruce accepted a faculty position in Ilorin. Because he went directly to Africa after medical school, he never met Mary Steele, who became his wife and his partner in microbiology; on the other hand, he’ll have the opportunity to marry locally, and we’ll see which family he marries into, and what his wife (and children) end up doing.
[2] I am indebted to The Sandman for pointing me to the National Academies Press'
Lost Crops of Africa series (all of which can be read online for free if you click on the individual books in the series).