Nigeria

by E. D. Morel

In connection with the internal government of the Protectorate it may be advisable to refer briefly to the House Rule Ordinance of 1901 which has recently given rise to some controversy. The House Rule Ordinance is a measure designed by the late Sir Ralph Moor to prevent social anarchy from ensuing when slavery was abolished by the British Government. It gives force of Law to House Rule. House Rule is, in reality, the native form of government, which has existed in Southern Nigeria for many centuries. In recognizing the former the Administration acknowledges the existence of the latter for which it can provide no substitute. Native society, as already stated, is in the patriarchal state. The foundation of it is the “Father,” whether of the family, of the community, or of the tribe. The members of the House are, in a measure, apprentices. Under native law there are obligations on both sides. It is a transitional stage, and should be regarded as such, and allowed to reform itself from within. The one difficulty, in this respect, is lest the Ordinance should tend to prevent a gradual internal evolution towards a higher state by sterilizing any healthy influences making for modification. A much greater danger would be any sudden change which would throw the whole country into absolute confusion. In the Western Province and in the Bini district, where native rule has developed more rapidly than in the Eastern and Central, the Father of the House is subject to the Father of the district, and he in turn is subject to the Paramount Chief of the whole tribe—the Supreme Father. There is, therefore, a check upon despotic abuses by the head of the House. In the bulk of the Central Province and in the whole of the Eastern Province, the head of the House is virtually the head of the community, the higher forms of internal control not having evolved. Any hasty and violent interference which domestic “slavery,” as it is termed, in a country like the Central and Eastern Provinces should be strenuously opposed. It would be an act of monstrous injustice, in the first place, if unaccompanied by monetary compensation, and it would produce social chaos. But there seems to be no reason why the House Rule Ordinance should not be amended in the sense of substituting for Paramount Chieftainship therein—which is virtually non-existent—the District Commissioners, aided by the Native Councils, as a check upon the now unfettered action of the heads of Houses. To destroy the authority of the heads would be to create an army of wastrels and ne’er-do-weels. Native society would fall to pieces, and endless “punitive expeditions” would be the result.[5]

For purposes of administration Southern Nigeria is divided into three Provinces, the Eastern (29,056 square miles), with headquarters at Old Calabar; the Central (20,564 square miles) with headquarters at Warri; and the Western (27,644 square miles), with headquarters at Lagos, the seat of Government of the Protectorate. To the Western Province is attached, as distinct from the Protectorate, what is termed the “Colony of Lagos,” comprising the capital and a small area on the mainland—Lagos itself is an island—amounting altogether to 3,420 square miles. The supreme government of the three Provinces is carried on from Lagos by the Governor, assisted by an Executive Council and by a Legislative Council composed of nine officials and six unofficial members selected by the Governor and approved by the Secretary of State. Each Province is in charge of a Provincial Commissioner, although in the Western Province his duties are more nominal than real. In none of the Provinces is there a Provincial Council. The Central and Eastern Provinces are sub-divided into districts in charge of a District Commissioner and Assistant Commissioner, who govern the country through the recognized Chiefs and their councillors by the medium of Native Councils which meet periodically and over which the District Commissioner or his assistant presides. These Native Councils or Courts constitute the real administrative machinery of the country. They administer native law in civil and criminal cases between natives. They may not, however, except by special provision, deal with civil cases in which more than £200 is involved, or with criminal cases of a nature which, under native law, would involve a fine exceeding £100 or a sentence of imprisonment exceeding ten years with or without hard labour, or a flogging exceeding fifteen strokes. Appeal from the Native Courts to the Supreme Court can be made through the District Commissioners, who have the powers of a Judge of the Supreme Court with powers of jurisdiction limited by law. The District Commissioner’s Court is virtually a branch of the Supreme Court, and deals almost entirely with cases in which non-natives are concerned.

The Central and Eastern Provinces, which include the deltaic and the larger part of the forest region, are inhabited by Pagan tribes, among whom Mohammedanism is at present making but relatively slow progress (none at all in many districts) and Christianity, which by fits and starts and with long intervals has been at them since the fifteenth century, still less. These tribes are of an independent, sturdy temperament, and in the remoter parts of both Provinces still uncontrolled, or virtually so. They are, almost without exception, great traders, and the British merchants who know them best speak highly of their honesty in commercial transactions.

The problem of governing these peoples offers no complications, which may be called political, of a serious character. It is rendered easier in the Central Province, where the authority of the Benin Kingdom, exercised for so many centuries, has led to the centralization of a strong native authority; and proportionately less so in the Eastern Province, where no considerable native power was ever evolved. The Administration levies no direct tax, and its chief concern is to keep the peace, to open up the country, and to check barbarous customs. Astonishing progress has been effected in these respects during the past decade, nor must it be supposed that because there is an absence of complex political questions, progress has not been attended with complexities of a different order. Indeed, people at home can have no conception of the natural difficulties under which the administrator, the merchant, and, for that matter, the native also, labour in carrying out their respective tasks and avocations in the deltaic and forest regions of Nigeria. For six months in the year a very large portion of the Central and Eastern Provinces is partially submerged. The Niger overflows its banks, every forest rivulet becomes a river, the creeks and channels spread their waters upon the land, the forest is flooded over an enormous area, and the pathways intersecting it are impassable.

It is in circumstances such as these that District Commissioners have to keep in touch with their districts, not infrequently spending days and even nights in dug-outs under conditions which may be better imagined than described; marching in the rear of weary carriers through reeking, soaking, steaming forest; negotiating streams swollen into torrents; camping where and when they can, the boots they remove getting mouldy in a night, the clothes they hang up wringing wet when they come to put them on again; add to this a body often plagued with malaria and rheumatism, poorly nourished with sometimes insufficient and usually untempting diet, tormented by stinging insects, and a faint idea can be formed of conditions, during the rainy season, of a life which even in the dry season calls upon the utmost reserves of a man’s moral fibre, to say nothing of his physical powers. That the latter give way does not, alas! need demonstration, for while a favoured few resist, the roll of deaths and invaliding tells its own tale; and it would not be surprising if the former proved itself frequently unequal to the strain. Such cases are, however, extremely rare, and it is but natural if men labouring for their country under the conditions of hardship I have inadequately sketched should bitterly resent being portrayed on public platforms at home in the light of rivets in an administrative machine cynically demoralizing the natives of the country with drink in order to raise revenue.[6] Assuredly it is necessary, as a prominent statesman addressing the House of Commons declared some years ago, that “the more you extend your Empire the more imperative it is that this House should extract from its agents abroad the same standard of conduct which we exact at home.” But it is also necessary that public opinion in Britain should take more trouble than it does to realize something of the conditions under which its agents in the most unhealthy tropical regions of the Empire have to spend their lives, and should extend to them more sympathy than, at present, it seems often inclined to do.

ONE OF THE COMMUNAL RUBBER PLANTATIONS (FUNTUMIA ELASTICA), BENIN CITY.

A SCENE IN YORUBALAND.

It is in this part of Nigeria, where natural man is perpetually in conflict with his environment, that you would expect to find those darker customs and practices connected with the spiritual side of life, whereby humanity has in all ages sought to propitiate the forces of Nature; customs which under the modern form of sword-dances, Morris dances, and the like attest to their former existence in Europe. If we are honest with ourselves we must admit that the inspiration which has evolved a sort of misty horror around the peoples of the West Coast of Africa, has been largely drawn from the setting of swamp and forest where the sacrificial rites associated with them, more prominently, perhaps, than they deserve, have been performed. In themselves these rites differ in no way from those we are familiar with in the records of white peoples when they had reached a stage of intellectual advancement which the Nigerian negro has certainly never attained, and which it is doubtful if any human stock could, or can ever, attain, in such an environment. Owing to the unconquered and, I think, unconquerable natural forces surrounding him, the Nigerian of the delta is still in the stage “to listen to the will of Jove which comes forth from the lofty and verdant oak”; to seek as the load-star of his spiritual necessities and in his ceaseless struggle against implacable odds, the conciliation of the fertilizing spirit through whose assistance alone he can hope to subject them; to incorporate the personality of protecting deities into man by oblation and by human or animal sacrifice, the shedding of blood being the mystic symbol of established contact with the protecting spiritual elements (the same prompting animates the most sacred of Christian rites) as it remains the tangible and most potent symbol of human brotherhood. The sacrificial knife of the Nigerian negro may seem more repulsive to the modern eye from the setting of black forms framed in the deep shadows of primeval forest and fœtid swamp, and a double dose of original sin may with complacency be assigned to him by the superficial. But in itself and in the motive which raises it quivering over the bound and helpless victim, it differentiates not at all from the story of Abraham and Isaac handed down to us in the sacred writings and not, certainly, in a light other than commendable, given the setting. If some of those who are so ready to pass shallow judgment upon the social and spiritual habits of the West African chez lui and who are responsible for so much misapprehension in the public mind as to his true character, would study the book of Genesis, they might approach the subject with an exacter sense of proportion. For a cessation of these practices in their most repellant forms—already much curtailed, openly at least—time must be relied upon and the most powerful element in hastening the process is not the punitive expedition, but increased facility for inter-communication which trade expansion generates and entails upon Government to provide. It may be safely predicted that the process will be far more rapid than it was in Europe.