patterns with local communities as the origin of the Ogoni people. However, their incorporation into the broader Nigerian colonial state forced the Ogoni to organize into a political unity, despite the fact that some Ogoni groups had long rejected the idea of a pan-Ogoni identity.3
For Saro-Wiwa, British rule in southern Nigeria, which formally began in 1900 and ended in 1960, ushered in a new phase in interethnic relations. British rule concentrated power over the country and its resources along ethnic lines; it created a system that encouraged resource exploitation, and ethnicity became the de facto mode for political organization. This system, which the British called “indirect rule,” gave rise to a struggle for access to the mechanisms determining political culture after independence. Saro-Wiwa decried this system, not only because it shaped the ethnically fractured structure of postcolonial Nigeria, but more importantly, because it gave rise to a system of exploitation that he called “indigenous imperialism.”
Although the British did not invent ethnic and political conflict in Nigeria, they created a system in which the only legitimate access to resources and the mechanisms of distribution was organized along ethnic lines. In his civil war memoir Saro-Wiwa lambasted the Igbo for denouncing this system for marginalizing them at the national level but failing to acknowledge that the same system allowed them to dominate political institutions in the southeast of the country at the expense of the smaller groups whom they shut out of government appointments and contracts.
From the establishment of colonial rule in Nigeria at the end of the nineteenth century until 1914, the British created several protectorates, which eventually coalesced into the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria and the Colony and the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. As with most colonial possessions, the British administered the protectorates through a system of local rulers, known collectively as “indirect rule,” as mentioned earlier. In the Northern Nigeria Protectorate, the British relied heavily on established local rulers, usually emirs remaining from precolonial times, to administer the protectorate and collect taxes. In the much more politically diverse Southern Protectorate, many differing local administrations emerged, owing to British recognition of the multiplicity of precolonial political systems. The British colonial administration co-opted those systems as important mechanisms in colonial administration. However, some aspects of precolonial rule, especially revenue collection systems, were incompatible with the new system of government.
A major change that the British enacted in both Northern and Southern Nigeria was to shift the tax collection system to one that required payment in coin and paper, namely, the British pound. This change required a retooling of local economies that had for centuries accepted payment either in specie or in commodities. The Protectorate of Southern Nigeria was better suited to this new system because many parts of the region had well-established import/export economies that replaced the slave trade in the early nineteenth century. Further, alcohol sale in the south provided a ready tax base and served as one of the major revenue generators for the colonial administration in Southern Nigeria, whereas strict religious laws in the predominantly Muslim north forbade the sale and consumption of alcohol. As a result, Northern Nigeria hemorrhaged money because the tax collection system did not generate the necessary revenues to finance the colonial government. By 1912, Northern Nigeria was heavily dependent on subsidies, both from the southern protectorate and an annual allocation of GBP 300,000 from the Colonial Office.
Sir Frederick Lugard (later Lord), who previously served as high commissioner of Northern Nigeria, was recalled to the country from his post as the governor of Hong Kong in 1912 to facilitate the unification of Northern and Southern Nigeria into one administrative unit. The main goals of Nigerian unification were economic in nature. First and foremost, Lugard needed to stabilize the finances of the Northern Protectorate and allow for easier transfer of funds between the different regions of the country. Second, Lugard was to create a unified bureaucracy to make administering Nigeria more cost-effective and efficient.
Lugard articulated British policy toward Nigeria in a book called The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. In it, he outlined the idea of indirect rule and the creation of native institutions. Lugard envisioned a system whereby the colonial administration would serve British interests while working in the best interests of the colonized people. In particular, Lugard encouraged local control over taxation and expenditures and discouraged British officials from interfering in local affairs. In Northern Nigeria, where Lugard had previously served as high commissioner, he maintained most of the tax collection system prevalent before British rule. The emir collected the taxes, paid his officials, and financed other projects from a “native treasury” created for this purpose. This system worked because of a long history of centralized rule and taxation in the precolonial states, especially the powerful Sokoto Caliphate. In the south, there was little history of direct taxation. State revenue extraction took the form of customs duties, court fees and fines, and other administrative fees and duties, such as the aforementioned tax on alcohol sales. These policies made revenue allocation in the south a colonial creation, whereas in the north, the colonial administration superimposed itself on an existing taxation system. Finally, Lugard separated colonial administration from the “native treasuries” and required that all local administrative salaries come exclusively from local revenue collection; they could not be supplemented by outside funds.
Despite pretensions of allowing native rulers to administer their own populations, local rulers were little more than unofficial colonial agents, lacking autonomy and political clout. Further, Lugard homogenized the multiple administrative systems in the south, which he dismissed as chaotic and wasteful, but the reorganizaton resulted in increased marginalization of smaller ethnic groups. Most damaging, Lugard created a new type of indigenous ruler in the southern region modeled on the northern emir. This departure from the existing heterogeneity in southern Nigeria created a new class of rulers and bestowed on them powers that few rulers in the south had traditionally possessed. In effect, Lugard created a new class of native colonial administrators who owed their allegiance to their respective ethnic groups but derived their power, not from traditional roles, but from new roles acquired from the British administration. The three major ethnic groups, namely, the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest, and the Igbo in the southeast, used the new colonial administration to consolidate their power and create a new colonial patronage system that benefited their own groups at the expense of the many minority ethnic groups in the country, including Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoni.
Despite the lack of shared identity as Ogoni before British colonial occupation, British administrators recognized the various Ogoni groups as a distinct “tribe.” In 1932, most Ogoni-speaking areas were amalgamated into what the British determined as the Ogoni “tribe,” with various subgroups referred to as “clans.” In reality, no stable affiliations of this kind existed; for example, one group related to the Ogoni, the Eleme, petitioned the British to be included as part of the Ogoni, but in later years dissociated themselves from the Ogoni. This ethnic and linguistic grouping of peoples into political units was not unique to the Ogoni, however, and in the aftermath of unification, many smaller ethnic groups realized that strength in numbers was the only way to secure their collective rights. Other new ethnopolitical groups coalesced, especially in the diverse Niger Delta region, with the Ijo and the Andoni securing similar recognition from the British authorities. Larger groups in Nigeria were not immune to this consolidation of political power along similar lines. Under British rule, the Yoruba in the southwest of Nigeria transformed from a patchwork of opposing kingdoms and city-states into a major unified force in Nigerian politics, both during colonial rule and after. Similarly, the Igbo, largely recognized as a stateless society, merged into a political force that attempted to secede from Nigeria and form the Republic of Biafra in 1967, sparking a three-year civil war.
For the Ogoni, the need for political influence became increasingly important. In 1945, as various ethnic groups merged and new ethnic identifications surfaced, the Ogoni created the Ogoni Central Union (OCU). Led by Paul Birabi, the first Ogoni university graduate, the OCU agitated for an official Ogoni administrative division. After attaining this in 1947 with the creation of an Ogoni division within what was at the time the Rivers Province, Birabi and the OCU fought for increased
