A historical narrative of an empire reeling from the carnage and destruction of the British invasion of 1897

By George Omogun - Benin-city

A historical narrative of an empire reeling from the carnage and destruction of the British invasion of 1897. 

An attack that forever changed the fate of a once-proud and unconquered people whose nation became incorporated into modern Nigeria. 

The founder of modern Nigeria was a swashbuckling English adventurer named George Dashwood Goldie Taubman. He dreamed of establishing a British-controlled commercial empire stretching from the Niger River delta to the Nile. After traveling around North Africa, Goldie journeyed to the Guinea Coast to resuscitate a company owned by his sister-in-law's family that bought palm oil in the Niger delta. 

By the mid-nineteenth century, palm oil, needed to make soap and candles and to grease the machines of the industrial revolution, had replaced slaves as the main commodity of exchange between Africa and the West. In return, Britain imported into Nigeria millions of gallons of cheap gin. Goldie banded together the various English companies operating in the Niger delta, used gunboat diplomacy to subdue the African chiefs in the area and keep out the French and Germans, and obtained a royal charter from London. At the 1884—1885 Berlin Conference at which the Europeans drew their arbitrary lines across the map of Africa, the British assumed control of the Niger River basin.

But Goldie had grander ambitions. He enlisted Lord Frederick Lugard, a man of unflagging energy, with an imposing walrus mustache, whom the historian Thomas Pakenham has described as the most successful "of all the freelance imperialists." Lugard, fresh from routing the French in Uganda with the Maxim gun, arrived in the Niger delta at Goldie's headquarters at Akassa. With a small army of African soldiers known as the West African Frontier Force, Lord Lugard moved up the Niger to conquer the interior. 

In 1914 he amalgamated the northern and southern territories in the name of the British Crown, setting the borders of what became Nigeria. The joining was not for the purposes of nation building. The simple reason was that the north's colonial budget was running at a deficit and only a link with the profitable south could eliminate the needed British subsidy. Goldie's influence on the course of events was so powerful that when it. came time to name the new colony, Goldesia, reminiscent of Cecil Rhodes's Rhodesia, was considered along with Niger Sudan and "Negretia."