Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression Sara Berry Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression By Moses E. Ochonu. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Colonial Meltdown investigates the impact of the global economic depression of the 1930s on the people of Northern Nigeria. Unlike much of the historical literature on colonial Northern Nigeria, Ochonu’s study is not centered on the area formerly controlled by the Sokoto Caliphate, a Muslim state that ruled over the northwestern quadrant of Nigeria for most of the nineteenth century. When Britain took control of the region at the beginning of the twentieth century, officials assumed that the Caliphate’s jurisdiction extended farther south and east than it did, and proceeded to incorporate a large area, later known as the Middle Belt, into the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. Ochonu’s study deals with this region, focusing particularly on Idoma Division, an area reaching south from the Benue River to the borders of Onitsha, Abakaliki, and other predominantly Igbo societies. Unlike the Sokoto Caliphate, a centralized Muslim state dominated by speakers of Hausa and/or Fulfulde, much of the Middle Belt was occupied by small, non-hierarchical, multilingual polities whose inhabitants followed a variety of religious beliefs and practices. Partly because of its extreme cultural and linguistic diversity, the Middle Belt has attracted less scholarly attention than areas occupied by Nigeria’s three largest and best known ethnic groups. Ochonu’s study makes a welcome contribution to filling this historiographical gap. Taking issue with scholars who argue that British policy during the depression involved a straightforward effort to cut spending on the colonies while extracting more revenue and resources from “subject” populations, Ochonu argues that colonial officials often found themselves working at cross purposes as they attempted to ride out the depression and work toward economic recovery. Forced by plummeting revenues to practice strict fiscal austerity, administrators adopted measures that disrupted local economic life and undermined their own efforts to collect more taxes. Increased tax rates on cash-earning export commodities discouraged the production of crops whose prices were already low because of the depression, leading to an overall decline in the amount of tax revenue collected. Layoffs of government clerks, tin miners, railway workers and others undermined demand for domestically grown foodstuffs, leading farmers in Idoma—who had formerly carried yams to sell to miners in Jos, or traders in Igbo towns to the south—to retain their crops at home, and leaving them without cash to pay taxes. In Idoma, the problem was compounded by the government’s decision to save money by delaying, or cancelling, plans to build feeder roads into the rural areas, as well as their efforts to withdraw silver coins from circulation in Nigeria in order to augment the gold and silver reserves of the British Treasury. One group that enjoyed some benefit from the slump were women weavers, whose cloth was in increasing demand as supplies of imported textiles declined, and Northern Nigerians gained some relief from discoveries of gold deposits in the early 1930s. The gold mining boom did not last, however. The economy remained predominantly agricultural, and falling real and monetary incomes caused hardships for ordinary Nigerians that were exacerbated by officials’ redoubled efforts to maintain their revenue by squeezing more out of their “subjects.” The results, Ochonu argues, were not only onerous, but also disruptive, provoking resistance and evasion from hard-pressed farmers and workers, and helping lay the social foundations for anti-colonial mobilization after the Second World War. While many officials recognized that tax collections were falling because people simply did not have cash to pay them, career-threatening pressures from their superiors in Britain led them to intensify their efforts to extract more from ordinary Nigerians. In Ochonu’s succinct summation, “indirect rule became more direct.” (46) Officials resorted to increasingly harsh measures to force people to pay, keeping up pressure even in years of poor harvests, and driving some districts into famine during heavy locust infestations in the early 1930s. Intensified sanctions on chiefs who failed to deliver their tax quotas led chiefs to resort to harsh measures that alienated their “subjects” and undermined the central premise...