BASIC STRATEGIES OF COLONIAL DOMINATION.docx

**BASIC STRATEGIES OF COLONIAL DOMINATION of NIGERIAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES (NPC COURSE NOTES BY DR. TETE)** The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive Nigeria through Bini Kingdom. According to Hodgkin: "the second half of the century (fifteenth) saw the arrival of the first Europeans in Benin...

**BASIC STRATEGIES OF COLONIAL DOMINATION of NIGERIAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES (NPC COURSE NOTES BY DR. TETE)** The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive Nigeria through Bini Kingdom. According to Hodgkin: "the second half of the century (fifteenth) saw the arrival of the first Europeans in Benin, the Portuguese Ruy de Sequeira in 1472 in Ewuare's reign and Alfonzo de Aviero in 1484 in Ozolua's reign". But it was the British assault on the indigenous Nigerian peoples for the purpose of effecting British legitimate commerce in the 19^th^ century that progressively led to the birth of the Nigerian nation. Nigerian peoples were independent indigenous peoples; including the Hausa, Kanem-Borno, and Nupe to the North; the Igala, Jukun, and the Tiv around the Benue basin popularly called the Middle Belt; the Yoruba, Bini, and Urhobo/Edo to the West; the Igbo and Ogoja to the East; and the Ijaw, Kalabari, Ogoni, and Efik/Ibibio among others at the South base, and a host of nearly 300 relegated and often subjugated peoples called "minorities". The colonial project was effected by a combination of strategies. Basic strategies of the colonial project were trade, education, social welfare, religion, and military might. Lets see them in some details. **Military Assault:** As shall be seen below, military campaign was a major strategy of launching the era of legitimate commerce. The natives were not colonized by agreement. They were assaulted and conquered. The assault was global: in the Opium War (1839-1842) Britain waged war on China in order to force her to buy and consume opium that the British grew in India. The US would assault Japan in 1853 to compel her to open up to western trade. Modern African nations like Nigeria were the product of European military and cultural assault on African indigenous peoples: the Mali, the Ashanti, the Benin, the Yoruba, the Igbo, the Swahili, the Ijaw, the Nupe, the Hausa, the Ogoni. Through what has been called the diplomacy of the gunboats the British overran, conquered and devastated the city-states of the Delta, the kingdoms of Benin and Nupe, the empires of Karnem-Borno and Kanuri, and the towns and villages of Igboland: In 1851, after detailed meddling with the affairs of the town, the British put Lagos under threat of naval bombardment, dethroned and banished King Kosoko, and installed another in his place. In 1861 they dispensed with the puppet rule, annexed the town, and proclaimed Lagos a British colony. By 1885 the Niger Delta states will have been subdued and proclaimed Oil Rivers Protectorate. In 1894 Nana of Warri, for refusing British takeover of his control of trade at Sapele, had his capital Ebrohimi besieged and shelled by ten war ships for a full month until it fell; Nana escaped and later surrendered at Lagos and was tried at Calabar and exiled to Accra. In 1837, for refusing British infringement on the sovereignty of the city-state and for rejecting British domination of its trade, Bonny was besieged by British naval power, King William Dappa Pepple was deposed and banished, first to the offshore island of Fernando Po, and later to the mid-Atlantic island prison of Ascension, and finally to London. In 1897 the British marched on Benin and subdued it. The Oba had refused to give the representatives of the British consul audience on the grounds that he was busy with pressing priestly duties required of him by office. The British emissaries rudely forced their presence upon the Oba. The Oba's lieutenants gunned them down for their effrontery. In response a British column marched on Benin, sacked the city and looted its treasures, dragged Oba Overamwhen off the throne of his ancestors, exiled him and broke the ancient power of that kingdom. At Opopo, for refusing the British to invade his territory hinterlands and for insisting on his right to control all trading activities at the Opobo port, King Jaja was in 1885 tricked unto a ship for discussion on the Queen's position over the issue, thereupon he was arrested and detained and kidnapped to Accra enroute exile at St Vincent in the West Indies. In 1901 they invaded and subdued the Igbo hinterland where they set the Ibinukpabi Oracle of Arochukwu on fire and executed its priests to breakdown the backbone of Igbo resistance. The same is true of New Calabar and Old Calabar (1855), the Nupe Kingdom (1898), the thousand-year-old trans-Sahara trade city-state of Kano (1903), the Karnem-Borno Empire, the Sultanate of Sokoto where the empire of Othman dan Fodio was terminated with the overthrow of Sultan Attahiru Ahmadu in 1903. The conquered territories were annexed into colonies and protectorates to advance the "legitimate" gunboat business of the British under the title of the Royal Niger Company. **Colonial Trade:** Trade was the general pretext under which European colonization of Africa and other parts of the world operated. After effectively overrunning the centuries old empires and kingdoms and emirates of the indigenous peoples of the Niger area, the geographical landmass later to be called Nigeria, the British settled for the "legitimate commerce" of colonialism. This was sealed at the Berlin conference in 1885 (the conference started in 1884 and continued into 1885) were European scramble for African colonies were brought to a round table and the continent was partitioned peaceably like a big Christmas goat by the colonizers. Under the business name of the Royal Niger Company, colonial trade (the so-called legitimate commerce) in "Nigeria" was conducted through usurpation of lands (privatization through unilaterally decided treaties), commercial agriculture, enforcement of forced labour, policies of taxation, all of which were enforced by colonial rule. Natives were used like slaves to provide labour for the commercial farms that produced raw materials to be shipped home (Europe) for factory production so that finished goods can be sold to the rest of the world. **COLONIAL RULE (administration and social welfare)** Colonial rule was a semi-feudal civil administration through the use of warrant chiefs (indirect rule) used to enforce British economic interest represented by the Royal Niger Company. Colonialism was slavery at home. Instead of buying the natives and taking them to plantations oversees, the farms were established on the land of the natives and they were consigned to the same servitude that their forebears had faced in the Americas in previous centuries. The only difference was that the natives were now at home and were paid pittances hardly enough for their sustenance. Natives were encouraged to cultivate cash crops and pay taxes on proceeds. Meanwhile the British had control of the cash crop market, they singularly determined the value of your product and buy it from you at any value so determined by them. Those who couldn't afford the foreign currencies to pay taxes had to learn such anticultural behaviours as tax evasion or resort to stealing or robbery to meet the need. Colonial rule was mainly accomplished through the strategy of indirect rule, with its internal policy of divide and rule. While the British sought their avowed economic interests by any means possible, trade and administrative policies were enforced through the warrant chiefs: the emirs and chieftains who were appointed to enforce the will of the white man on the natives. Each protectorate or colony was administered as a network of provinces, divisions and districts. The governor-general of the protectorates, the provincial commissioners, the divisional and district officers were all British colonial personnel. Subservient to these was the native authority of emirs and chiefs whose office it was to cooperate with colonial authorities to deploy every necessary measure, including the use of coercion, to ensure that the subjects, that is, the native populations, produced the resources required by the colonial economy. With the exploitative designs of the colonial system thus structured, colonial rule achieved a new framework of production, distribution and exchange, a colonial political economy. Social welfare (civilizational structures): Various structures of social welfare, including modern transportation and healthcare, banks, hospitals and postal services were palliatives at the service of the colonial project. **Colonial Education:** To facilitate the concept of colonial education lets step back to look at the very idea of colonization. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy defines colonization (or colonialism) as a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another. Colonialism was adopted by European powers as an alternative to slave trade when the latter became widely unpopular in the 19^th^ century, after serving European purposes for 300 years. A related concept to colonialism is imperialism. Like imperialism, colonialism involves political and economic control over a dependent territory. The basic difference however is that while colonialism (from the Latin *colonus*, meaning farmer) involved physical occupation or settlement and cultivation of the territory in question, imperialism (from Latin *imperium*, meaning to command) more generally refers to one country exercising power over another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control. It has been said that politics is the fate of man and "education's political character is inextricable from the political nature of man's social existence" (McLaughlin, 1974). The subject of colonial education exposes the political character of education in the light of colonialism. As an instrument of colonization, the colonizing nation implements its own form of schooling within their colonies. Two scholars on colonial education, Gail P. Kelly and Philip G. Altbach (1984) define the process as an attempt "to assist in the consolidation of foreign rule". The idea of assimilation is important to colonial education. Assimilation involves the colonized being forced to conform to the cultures and traditions of the colonizers. Gauri Viswanathan (1988) points out that "cultural assimilation \[is\]... the most effective form of political action" because  "cultural domination works by consent and often precedes conquest by force". Colonizing governments realize that they gain strength not necessarily through physical control, but through mental control. This mental control is implemented through a central intellectual location, the school system, or what Louis Althusser would call an "ideological state apparatus." Kelly and Altbach argue that "colonial schools...sought to extend foreign domination and economic exploitation of the colony" because colonial education is "directed at absorption into the metropole and not separate and independent development of the colonized in their own society and culture". Colonial education strips the colonized people away from their indigenous learning structures and draws them toward the structures of the colonizers. The ultimate goal of colonial education is to control the mindset of the colonized, to reduce them at best to a state of cultural hybridity, to make them willing servants and unwitting workforce of the colonial economy. All colonizers share the idea that education is important in facilitating the assimilation process and effecting the intended purpose of economic domination. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1981), writing from the context of colonized Kenya, sums up the damage that colonial education wreaks on colonized peoples in asserting that the process "annihilate\[s\] a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves". Chinweizu (1975), writing from a Nigerian background likewise insists that colonial education was miseducatioin, a distracting miseducation: Colonial education was the education of the natives undertaken by the colonizers as part of the strategies of effective colonization. turned out a program of mental slavery, at the service of colonization, in as much as such education was deliberately uncreative and Europeanizing. A cultural oppression had been staged. The consequence would be a persistence of mental, cultural and especially economic colonization (Neocolonialism) long after political independence. **Partnership with the Missions** (Religion): A quotation attributed to Desmond Tutu has it that WHEN THE MISSIONARIES CAME TO AFRICA THEY HAD THE BIBLE AND WE HAD THE LAND. THEY SAID 'LET US PRAY'. WE CLOSED OUR EYES, WHEN WE OPENED THEM WE HAD THE BIBLES AND THEY HAD THE LAND. This however does not seem to represent the role of the missions in the colonial project fairly. Perhaps unwittingly, the Christian missionaries (Protestant \[CMS, Methodist, Baptist, etc\] and Catholic \[RCM\]: German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Irish, British, American, etc), in the name of evangelism or mission, lent their support to the colonial project through their Gospel denigration of African culture, and the prescription of a Europe-modeled Christianity as the only way to salvation. This impacted negatively through generations of lost culture and tradition of native peoples across Africa. The Missionaries came to propagate the Gospel. They established schools as part of their mission agenda. In fact they established the first schools. The CMS established the first primary school in Nigeria in the year 1843 at Badagry, with the name Nursery of the Infant Church, which was later renamed St Thomas Anglican Nursery and Primary School. But the racist mindset of the missionaries became useful for colonial purposes. Hence the colonial government saw them as partners, supported their mission schools with funding, with the political motive of advancing colonial education as a strategy for colonial domination.