Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria

The Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria was formed in 1914 by amalgamating two separate British administrations, and the join has never fully set. Lagos had been a colony since 1861; the Royal Niger Company had held a charter over the interior until 1900. Frederick Lugard united the northern and southern protectorates for administrative economy, since the south's revenues could subsidise the north's deficit. The two halves were then governed differently. The north was ruled indirectly through the Sokoto emirates, whose authority Britain preserved, and Christian missions and Western schooling were largely excluded to avoid provoking the Muslim establishment. The south had missions, schools and an educated class from the start. By independence the regions had unequal literacy, unequal access to the civil service, and different ideas of what the country was for. Oil was found at Oloibiri in 1956, in the east. Independence came on 1 October 1960 under a federal constitution with three regions, each large enough to be dominated by one ethnic group. Coups in January and July 1966 and pogroms against Igbos in the north followed. The east seceded as Biafra in 1967 and the war that followed killed perhaps a million people, mostly by starvation. The structural problem that produced it was designed in 1914 for accounting reasons. Lugard's wife Flora Shaw coined the name Nigeria in a newspaper column in 1897. The country contains something over two hundred and fifty ethnic groups. Indirect rule as practised there became the model Britain exported across its African colonies. Nigeria is now the most populous country in Africa.

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