By Richard Bourne
Noticeable from a few angles, Nigeria is a notable good fortune tale: regardless of its poorly conceived colonial origins, the lingering harm of its colonial subjugation, tenacious civil conflict, wildly unequal economic climate, and the hot insurgency by way of Boko Haram, it has still remained one country, growing to be in inhabitants and tool, for greater than a century now.
This new examine Nigeria strains the country’s heritage from its pre-colonial days because the domestic sector to a few designated tribal powers via its definition through Britain as a unmarried state in 1914, to the hopeful early days of independence after global struggle II and the continued, frequently tragic disappointments of its governance and financial functionality within the a long time on account that. Richard Bourne can pay specific cognizance to the failure to make sure that the wealth from Nigeria’s ample oil, mineral, and agricultural assets is extensively shared, and he deals an incisive research of the harmful results that such gross inequality has at the nation’s balance and democratic prospects.
the main updated and entire research of Africa’s most crucial and populous kingdom in a long time, this history—rooted in additional than 3 a long time of vacationing and dealing within the country—will immediately be the traditional account of Nigeria.
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Significantly, Clifford did not entirely believe in ‘Nigeria’. Speaking to the Nigeria Council on 29 December 1920, he said that there could be neither a west African nor a Nigerian nation. 4 Nonetheless the pressures to make a reality of ‘Nigeria’ grew in the 1920s. ’5 European education still met a measure of suspicion in the north, where craft schools were merged with primary schools and some chiefs withheld their children. The object in the north was to educate artisans and junior officials and prevent these occupations being colonised by better-educated southerners.
There were, however, wider political and ideological issues at stake. British control over both south and north could be regarded as still insecure, at a time when the balance of power within Europe was changing. Thanks in part to Lugard himself the French threat to British claims in west Africa had been thwarted, even if the Entente Cordiale was not always replicated in that sub-region. But, as the dreadnought naval race between the British and German empires expensively demonstrated, there was a growing German threat.
In April 1915 a German raiding party broke through the Nigerian lines and burnt government buildings in Mutum Biyu on the Benue river, inside Nigeria. The Emir of Yola and the British district officer fled. When the AngloFrench force captured the Benue port of Garua, the Emir of Yola, who was hoping to gain traditional Adamawa lands that were on the German side of the border, celebrated effusively. He presented a thousand head of cattle to the victors. General Frederick Cunliffe (1861–1955), who was supposed to be in command of the Anglo-French force in the north, had difficulty in getting French acceptance.