Discuss The Role Of Colonialism In Nigeria

Chapter One

British Cultural Promotion in Nigeria Before 1954

Introduction The first contact between Britain and Nigeria began in the sixteenth century along the Nigerian coastlines. During this period, British slave trading companies were preoccupied with establishing their trading posts to control the profitable “Transatlantic Slave Trade” without trying to control the local tribes. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, and due to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire, the trading interests of the British in Nigeria gradually shifted to “Legitimate Commerce” in such goods as ivory and palm oil with the inland populations. These new commercial interests led to the acquisition of Lagos in 1861, Southern and Northern Nigeria in 1900 and finally the amalgamation and the placement of the Northern and Southern regions under British colonial rule in 1914. British colonization of these regions brought a new culture whose propagation remained essentially the preoccupation of the Christian missionary societies until the twentieth century.

Since the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the British had secured a virtual monopoly over the transatlantic slave trade, commenced by the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century, on Nigeria’s western coast. In the nineteenth century, at the time when the movement for the abolition of slavery was prevailing in Britain, the British share in the slave trade had been much greater than any other European nation in the Nigerian region. This long-standing commercial prosperity in human slaving, however, came to an end in 1807 when Parliament in Britain made it illegal for British subjects to be involved in the African slave trade and ultimately in 1833 when another Parliamentary Act was passed and fully abolished the institution of slavery throughout the British