HOW NIGERIA WAS SOLD TO THE BRITISH FOR £865,000 IN 1899.

SNIPETS ABOUT THE PRINCIPAL ACTORS

KING JAJA OF OPOBO (1821-1891)

Born in Igboland and sold as a slave to a bonny trader at the age of twelve, he was named Jubo Jubogha by his first master. He was later sold to Chief Alali, the head of the Opubo Annie Pepple Royal House. Called Jaja by the British, this gifted and enterprising individual eventually became one of the most powerful men in the eastern Niger Delta.The Niger Delta, where the Niger empties itself into the Gulf of Guinea in a system of intricate waterways, was the site of unique settlements called city-states.

From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, Bonny, like the other city-states, gained its wealth from the profits of the slave trade. Here, an individual could attain prestige and power through success in business and, as in the case of Jaja, a slave could work his way up to head of state. The House was a socio-political institution and was the basic unit of the city-state. In the nineteenth century—after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807—the trade in slaves was supplanted by the trade in palm oil, which was so vibrant that the region was named the Oil Rivers area.

In a few years, he had become so wealthy that he was shipping palm oil directly to Liverpool. The British consul could not tolerate this situation. Jaja was offered a treaty of "protection", in return for which the chiefs usually surrendered their sovereignty. After Jaja's initial opposition, he was reassured, in vague terms, that neither his authority nor the sovereignty of Opobo would be threatened.

Jaja continued to regulate trade and levy duties on British traders, to the point where he ordered a cessation of trade on the river until one British firm agreed to pay duties. Jaja refused to comply with the consul's order to terminate these activities. When Jaja refused to cease taxing British traders,Henry Hamilton Johnston, a British vice consul, invited Jaja to negotiations in 1887. When Jaja arrived, the British arrested him and tried him in Accra in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) then took him to London for some time, where he met Queen Victoria and was her guest in Buckingham Palace. After some other turbulent history, he was exiled to Saint Vincent in the West Indies. Plans were also made for him to be relocated to Barbados.

In 1891, Jaja was granted permission to return to Opobo, but died en route, allegedly poisoned with a cup of tea. Following his exile and death, the power of the Opobo state rapidly declined.

King Frederick William Koko, Mingi VIII of Nembe (1853–1898)

An Ijaw, Koko was a convert to Christianity who later returned to the local traditional religion. When chosen as king of Nembe in 1889, Koko's attack on a Royal Niger Company trading post in January 1895 led to reprisals by the British in which his capital was sacked. Following a report on the Nembe uprising by Sir John Kirk which was published in March 1896, Koko was offered a settlement of his grievances but found the terms unacceptable, so was deposed by the British. He died in exile in 1898.

THE FIRST OIL WAR IN BRASS

We will be discussing the first oil war, which was fought in the 19th century, in the area that became Nigeria.

All through the 19th century, palm oil was highly sought-after by the British, for use as an industrial lubricant for machinery. Remember that Britain was the world’s first industrialised nation, so they needed resources such as palm oil to maintain that.
Palm oil of course, is a tropical plant, which is native to the Niger Delta. Malaysia’s dominance came a century later.

By 1870, palm oil had replaced slaves as the main export of the Niger Delta, the area which was once known as the Slave Coast. At first, most of the trade in the oil palm was uncoordinated, with natives selling to those who gave them the best deals. Native chiefs such as former slave, Jaja of Opobo became immensely wealthy because of oil palm. With wealth comes influence.

However, among the Europeans, there was competition for that would get preferential access to the lucrative oil palm trade. In 1879, George Goldie (1846 – 1925, pictured above) formed the United African Company, which was modelled on the former East India Company. Goldie effectively took control of the Lower Niger River. By 1884, his company had 30 trading posts along the Lower Niger. This monopoly gave the British a strong hand against the French and Germans in the 1884 Berlin Conference. The British got the area that the UAC operated in, included in their sphere of influence after the Berlin Conference.

When the Brits got the terms they wanted from other Europeans, they began to deal with the African chiefs. Within two years of 1886, Goldie had signed treaties with tribal chiefs along the Benue and Niger Rivers whilst also penetrating inland. This move inland was against the spirit of verbal agreements that had been made to restrict the organisation’s activities to coastal regions.

By 1886, the company name changed to “The National Africa Company” and was granted a royal charter (incorporated). The charter authorized the company to administer the Niger Delta and all lands around the banks of the Benue and Niger Rivers. Soon after, the company was again renamed. The new name was “Royal Niger Company”, which survives, as Unilever, till this day.

To local chiefs, the Royal Niger Company negotiators had pledged free trade in the region. Behind, they entered private contracts on their terms. Because the (deceitful) private contracts were often written in English and signed by the local chiefs, the British government enforced them. So for example, Jaja of Opobo, when he tried to export palm oil on his own, was forced into exile for “obstructing commerce”. As an aside, Jaja was “forgiven” in 1891 and allowed to return home, but he died on the way back, poisoned with a cup of tea.

Seeing what happened to Jaja, some other native rulers began to look more closely at the deals they were getting from the Royal Nigeria Company. One of such kingdoms was Nembe, whose king, Koko Mingi VIII, ascended the throne in 1889 after being a Christian schoolteacher. Koko Mingi VIII, King Koko for short, and like most rulers in the yard, was faced with the Royal Nigeria Company encroachment. He also resented the monopoly enjoyed by the Royal Nigeria Company, and tried to seek out favourable trading terms, with particularly the Germans in Kamerun.

By 1894 the Royal Nigeria Company increasingly dictated whom the natives could trade with, and denied them direct access to their former markets.

In late 1894, King Koko renounced Christianity, and tried to form an alliance with Bonny and Okpoma against the Royal Nigeria Company to take back the trade. This is significant because while Okpoma joined up, Bonny refused. A harbinger of the successful “divide and rule” tactic.

On 29 January 1895, King Koko led an attack on the Royal Niger Company’s headquarters, which was in Akassa in today’s Bayelsa state. The pre-dawn raid had more than a thousand men involved. King Koko’s attack succeeded in capturing the base. Losing 40 of his men, King Koko captured 60 white men as hostages, as well as a lot of goods, ammunition and a Maxim gun. Koko then attempted to negotiate a release of the hostages in exchange for being allowed to choose his trading partners. The British refused to negotiate with Koko, and he had forty of the hostages killed. A British report claimed that the Nembe people ate them. On 20 February 1895, Britain’s Royal Navy, under Admiral Beford attacked Brass, and burned it to the ground. Many Nembe people died and smallpox finished off a lot of others.

By April 1895, business had returned to “normal”, normal being the conditions that the British wanted, and King Koko was on the run. Brass was fined £500 by the British, £26,825 in today’s money, and the looted weapons were returned as well as the surviving prisoners. After a British Parliamentary Commission sat, King Koko was offered terms of settlement by the British, which he rejected and disappeared. The British promptly declared him an outlaw and offered a reward of £200 (£10,730 today) for him. He committed suicide in exile in 1898.

About that time, another “recalcitrant King”, the Oba of Benin, was run out of town. The pacification of the Lower Niger was well and truly under way.

The immediate effect of the Brass Oil War was that public opinion in Britain turned against the Royal Nigeria Company, so its charter was revoked in 1899. Following the revoking of its charter, the Royal Niger Company sold its holdings to the British government for £865,000 (£46,407,250 today). That amount, £46,407,250 (NGN 23, 203,625,000.00 at today’s exchange rate) was effectively the price Britain paid, to buy the territory which was to become known as Nigeria.