Frederick Lugard

Frederick Lugard conquered northern Nigeria, amalgamated it with the south into the country that exists today, and wrote the book that made indirect rule the standard method of British colonial government in Africa. He was an army officer who fought in Burma and the Sudan, worked for the Imperial British East Africa Company in Uganda, and raised the West African Frontier Force. Between 1900 and 1903 he took the Sokoto Caliphate, a Muslim state of perhaps ten million people, with a few thousand African soldiers and Maxim guns. What he did next is what he is known for: rather than replace the emirs he left them in place, ruling through them under British residents, with their courts and taxation intact and their authority now guaranteed by an outside power. It was cheap, it required very few Europeans, and it froze in place the authority of whoever happened to be in charge when the British arrived. He amalgamated northern and southern Nigeria in 1914 - his wife Flora Shaw had coined the name - joining a Muslim north governed indirectly to a Christian and animist south governed directly, which is the structural fault line Nigerian politics has run along ever since. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa appeared in 1922. Indirect rule was adopted across British Africa and in parts of Asia because it was inexpensive, and its consequences outlasted it everywhere: chieftaincies invented or hardened by colonial recognition, and a north-south division in Nigeria that every constitution since has tried to manage. He later chaired the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission. His reputation among historians has moved a long way since the 1950s and the book is still in print.

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