Why Did Nigerians Stop Tolerating British Rule? (1900-1946)
Depression, War, and Strike: The Forces That United Nigerians Against Britain
This is Part X of my Nigeria series. Previous parts covered pre-colonial kingdoms, the slave trades, and early colonial rule.
In this article, I’ll discuss:
The Economics: Nigeria’s Colonial Budget & The Great Depression
The Geopolitics: World War II
The Domestic Politics: Nationalism, the 1945 Strike, and Federalism
Note: The end of this article might be cut off in some email clients. Read the full article, unbroken here.
Previously: Multiple Worlds, One Colony
Last time, we saw how Fredrick Lugard merged two distinct worlds into one colony. In both areas, Britain ruled indirectly, but indirect rule was applied in two starkly different ways, creating a profound and lasting divergence.
The North: Preservation
Northern Nigeria was dominated by the Kanuri-ethnic Bornu Kingdom and the Hausa-Fulani-ethnic Sokoto Caliphate. By the early 1900s, the Sokoto Caliphate was the largest slave plantation state on earth with 1-2.5 million slaves. Britain’s indirect rule here meant “preservation”.
The traditional Emirs ruled with minimal British supervision, Sharia remained the law of the land, literacy remained an elite male activity, and slavery (Bayi & Cucanawa) persisted (though the British frowned upon it). The Fulani aristocracy continued to rule over the Hausa majority, intermixing over time like the Manchu elites ruling Han China in the Qing Dynasty or the Normans ruling Saxon England.
Crucially, Islam continued to spread under colonial rule. Parts of the North, and especially the Middlebelt, were pagans or practiced syncretic Islam mixed with local African traditions. Because British colonial pacification reduced warfare and banditry, Muslim clerics could travel into previously inaccessible North & Middlebelt pagan areas, proselytize, and establish Quranic schools and Sufi brotherhood networks. Islam was even spreading southwest into Yorubaland and the “Middlebelt”, the region between the North and South. The Middlebelt societies (Tiv, Idoma, Birom) avoided Muslim rule for centuries, but became increasingly Christianized under colonial rule. They felt like (and still feel like!) persecuted minorities in a mostly Muslim region.
The South: Transformation
Southern Nigeria was a patchwork of kingdoms, chieftaincies, village clans, and city-states. Some of these ethnic groups (like Efik, Ijaw, Warri, and Edo) had existed for centuries. But others (like Yoruba and Igbo) were essentially colonial stitches consolidated by missionaries and colonial officials who grouped related dialect clusters into macro-identities. Over time, these labels hardened into ethnic categories people now live and die for.
In the South, Britain destroyed the old order. Christian missionaries replaced pagan shrines with Christian schools, chiefs were invented in places that did not have chiefs before, and “backwards customs” (like ritual sacrifice, twin killing, widow killing, and slavery) were outlawed. In a single generation, much of the pagan South was remade into a literate, Christianized society.
The Result:
The South developed higher human capital: producing a small, but influential class of journalists, lawyers, engineers, and doctors
The North kept its older structures, but lagged behind in Western education.
Out of this Southern middle class emerged the first pan-Nigerian nationalists, who blended racial solidarity with anti-colonial critique.
Below you will see a rough estimate of the ethnic breakdown of Nigeria:
Note: Very few Europeans settled in Nigeria (~4K by the 1930s), mainly because Europeans hated the terrain, climate, and malaria. As a result, Nigeria never had the entrenched racial land issues like South Africa or Rhodesia(Zimbabwe).
#1 The Colonial Budget
In a nutshell, colonial Nigeria ran two budgets: the recurrent budget (taxes & tariffs) for salaries, and the capital budget (bonds, grants and loans) for infrastructure (similar to municipal finance today).
The Recurrent Budget:
Britain wanted Nigeria self-sufficient, so the colony relied on import/export tariffs. When Nigerians imported clothes or alcohol, or exported palm oil, cocoa, and peanuts, everything was taxed at coastal ports. From 1900 to WWI, over half of government revenue came from tariffs. The recurrent budget boomed when exports rose and collapsed during global downturns.
Capital Budget:
If you thought the recurrent budget was volatile, wait until you see the capital budget. The capital budget financed infrastructure, but British Nigeria struggled to attract investors.
For example, in 1923, British Nigeria attempted to raise £5.7 million through a bond offering on the London market. Investors purchased only £460,000, just 8% of the issuance. The New York Times called it a “FIASCO.”
British Nigeria tried to price its bonds like British government securities. But investors weren’t braindead, you can’t compare industrialized Britain to a colony that depended on the volatile global price of palm oil and cocoa. As a result, investors demanded higher returns from British Nigeria to compensate for that risk.
South Africa, by contrast, successfully raised £9 million at 5% interest around the same time. The message from global markets was clear: British Nigeria was not a trustworthy investment and was deemed high risk (This is still true today. Nigeria has a junk credit rating at B-).
#2 Great Depression: Where Colonial Rule Failed
Economic growth and living standards rose until 1929. The population grew too. By 1929 the North had 10.4M people and the South had 8.4M.
But, when the Global Great Depression struck in 1929, Nigeria’s commodity-dependent economy collapsed. Export values nearly halved from £17 million in 1929 to £9.7 million by 1938 as global prices for cotton, palm oil, and peanuts cratered. The colonial government was powerless to end the crisis.
This catastrophe coincided with Britain’s violent suppression of the Women’s War of 1929, when colonial authorities killed protesting women.
In addition, too many Nigerian farmers shifted into cash crops over staple crops. This created food shortages and forced the colony to import of staples like rice, biscuits, bread, corn meal, fish and others. In the North, farmers focused so heavily on peanuts that they weren’t producing enough food to feed themselves. Then came the 1935-1936 drought. Poor rainfall caused nationwide shortages and sent the price of corn, rice, and yams soaring by 50% to 100%. The British tried to raise domestic rice output, but the crisis still lingered with other staples.
Together, these failures (economic collapse, food inflation, food shortages, and brutal repression) catalyzed nationalist movements across Nigeria.
Colonial rule rested on the idea that Britain would provide progress & security. When that promise collapsed, many Nigerians began thinking “Why do we let these idiots rule us?”
#3 Nigerian Nationalism Emergences
Pre-1930: West African, Not Nigerian
Before 1930, few Nigerian elites identified as “Nigerian.” Even nationalists like Herbert Macaulay saw Britain’s boundaries as arbitrary constructs, confining Black Africans to menial positions in the colonial bureaucracy and European firms.
The Nigerians who studied at British universities, alongside subjects from Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast (now Ghana), began developing a broader West African identity. This led to the formation of the West African Students’ Union in London in 1925.
At this stage, these Africans were focused on ending racial barriers across the empire. A good example is the colour bar, which limited African advancement throughout the empire and entrenched racial discrimination in elite civil service jobs.
Post-1930: A New Generation
By the 1930s onward, a different breed of Nigerians emerged. Born under British rule, they were the first in their families to gain Western education, travel abroad, and speak/write English. They attended not just British universities but also American Historically Black Colleges. In sheer numbers, this generation dwarfed its predecessors.
This new educated class formed the backbone of Nigerian nationalism, not because they rejected modernity, but because they embraced it and demanded full participation in it. They hated racial hierarchy and the stark differences between Nigerian and Western livelihoods.
Organizing for Change from the Bottom Up
This new professional managerial class built political power through:
Ethnic Unions:
Western-educated Nigerians were not satisfied becoming just teachers, clergymen, or low-level civil servants. They voiced discontent with colonialism, embarked on self-help campaigns, and formed tribal kinship unions in urban centers (The Ibo (Igbo) Federal Union, the Yoruba Egbe Omo Oduduwa, the Ibibio Welfare Union, the Ijaw Rivers People’s League, and more). These ethnic unions helped their members find jobs, navigate city life, and maintain links with their villages. They funded primary and secondary schools in rural areas and sponsored scholarships for higher education abroad.
Ironically, these Nigerian-made ethnic unions reinforced tribalism even as they pursued nationalist goals.
Professional & Labor Unions:
Non-ethnic unions also proliferated: the Nigerian Civil Servants Union, the Nigerian Union of Teachers, and the Mechanics’ Union of railway workers. They pressured the colonial government to arbitrate disputes between labor and management and went on strikes to improve their conditions. In addition, cocoa farmers formed cooperatives.
Women’s Organizations:
Southern women created organizations like the Lagos Women’s League (1936) and the Abeokuta Ladies’ Club (1944) to push for women’s advancement in civil service jobs.
The Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM)
Lagos became a hotbed of Nigerian nationalism, especially under an organization called the Lagos Youth Movement. By 1936, they changed their name to the Nigerian Youth Movement to illustrate their nationalist goals.
They fought for Africanization of the elite civil service jobs, better wages & working conditions for Nigerians, and more elected representation in government. By 1938, the Nigerian Youth Movement had expanded to other cities: Ibadan, Ijebu-Ode, Warri, and Benin City (Southwest and South-central); Port Harcourt and Calabar (Southeast); Jos (Central); and Kano, Zaria, and Kaduna (North). They had a membership over 10K and ran their own newspaper called The Daily Service, which criticized the British government.
The Catalyst for NYM’s popularity, The Cocoa Pool Incident:
By the late 1930s, seven European firms controlled 67% of all Nigerian export trade. The largest was the United Africa Company (a branch of the larger Anglo-Dutch firm Unilever), which handled 40% alone in 1939. Unilever controlled 80% of Nigeria’s export trade overall.
During the Depression, these European trading firms colluded and lowered the prices they paid for cocoa in what became known as the “Cocoa Pool incident of 1937.” This devastated cocoa farmers’ incomes in Gold Coast (Ghana) and Nigeria. The NYM responded by supporting farmer boycotts and demanding a commission to prevent collusion. These actions made the NYM popular among Nigeria’s rural majority.
#4 Britain’s Top Down Change
Abolition of Domestic Slavery
Beyond the educated elite, criticism of colonial rule increased when Britain joined the League of Nations. British NGOs like the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society in London travelled to Nigeria and submitted scathing reports to the British Colonial Office and League of Nations. While domestic Nigerian slavery was more-or-less abolished in the South between 1880 to 1915, domestic slavery was very much alive in the North. In the 1900s, Northern elites retained female concubines, Emirs had palace slaves, and hereditary domestic slaves remained attached to aristocrats. As a result, these NGOs pushed Britain to end Northern Nigeria’s culture of domestic slavery with the ordinance of 1936.
Imperial Preference & Wartime Controls
Before WWII, Britain established the Imperial preference system (Ottawa, Canada, 1932), lowering tariffs within the Empire and raising outside it.
But when war began in 1939, Britain imposed emergency mechanisms that:
Forced colonies to buy only from suppliers inside the British Empire
Fixed colonial export prices far below world-market levels
Imposed price controls on local food (meat, gari, dried fish, rice & beans)
Created government monopolies to buy African cash Crops.
Price controls (#3) infuriated market women. Prices aren’t the problem, scarcity was. Prices are signals: when a good is scarce, prices rise; when it is plentiful, they fall. By capping prices in Lagos in 1942, the colonial government broke the price signal. Women still had to pay farmers more during wartime, cover transport costs, bribe checkpoint guards, and manage risk of food spoilage. When forced to sell below cost, they simply stopped selling, sold it in black markets, or diverted food to towns without controls.
Women caught selling above government fiat prices were criminalized by price inspectors. Ultimately, price controls resulted in empty shelves on markets, not cheaper food. The price controls created the very scarcity the British tried to solve.
Commodity Control Boards
The most consequential wartime institution was the set of commodity control boards for palm produce, cocoa, groundnuts, and cotton. Officially, they were created to stabilize prices during WWII so farmers wouldn’t riot during price crashes. In practice, they let the British buy cash crops at low fixed prices and sell the price difference into government reserves.
To Nigerian farmers, this was an enormous reduction in incomes: producers received 10–50% less than the world price. In 1950, for example, cocoa farmers were paid £150 per ton by the board while global prices were £205. That 27% difference was a hidden farmer tax. For cotton, the ‘tax’ was 42%; for peanuts 40%; for palm kernels 39%; for palm oil 17%.
The total reserves accumulated were modest in the context of Britain’s war economy. Still, every ton of cocoa and kernel helped Britain scrape together scarce foreign exchange to protect the pound sterling from further currency depreciation. The boards kept their reserves in London banks, which parked their reserves at the Bank of England, giving Britain a small but needed pool of foreign reserves. You could call this “emergency exploitation” if you’d like.
Labor Shortages
Thousands of Nigerians were conscripted or recruited:
to fight in East Africa, Burma, and North Africa
or
With fewer farmers, staple prices like yams and gari surged.
Imperial Wartime Development
Yet WWII also brought unexpected infrastructure spending. To move troops and supplies, the colonial government expanded:
For millions of Nigerians, especially in the North and interior, this was their first exposure to large-scale, government-funded development.
How WWII Fueled Nationalism
World War II radicalized Nigeria in three ways:
The “World Food Crisis” (1946-1948) caused hardship, riots, and widespread smuggling.
Returning veterans faced unemployment or wages far below what they earned in the military. They had fought for an empire that offered them little in return.
Nigerians saw the colonial government provide social services and economic planning in wartime. The war revealed that a modern state could build roads, hospitals, and schools, raising expectations among Nigerians.
For the first time, Nigerians demanded a government transforming the economy. After WW2, Nigerian nationalists were serious about ending British rule.
#5 1945: The General Strike That Changed Everything
With farmers underpaid, government employees’ wages frozen, official markets suffering from shortages, and black market prices soaring up 200%, the whole colony faced a severe post-war cost of living crisis. Many Nigerians could not survive on their incomes.
That year, the African Civil Service Technical Workers Union demanded a 50% wage increase. When their demands were refused, 17 unions with 30K members launched a 37-day, colony-wide strike, shutting down railway, postal, and telegraph services.
Enter “Zik”: The New Face of Nigerian Nationalism
During the strike, two journalists and protest organizers seized the moment. Herbert Macaulay, the old nationalist, and Nnamdi Azikiwe (“the Great Zik”), the charismatic new leader.
Zik was unique; he felt pan-Nigerian rather than just Igbo. After all, he spoke English, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. He was an Igbo raised in the North since his dad served in the colonial civil service there. He attended Christian missionary schools, studied at the HBCU Lincoln University (1925), and University of Pennsylvania for masters studies in Anthropology & Political Science.
After a sedition conviction in the Gold Coast, he returned to Nigeria and founded the West African Pilot, which became the colony’s loudest nationalist newspaper. By WWII, Zik was already a national figure.
In 1941, he split from the NYM over what he saw as tribal ethnic rivalry. Together with Igbo and Ijebu Yoruba allies, he formed the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), which quickly surpassed the NYM as the most influential nationalist movement.
The Zikist Movement: Nationalism Turns Militant
After Zik claimed the British tried to assassinate him, a militant wing emerged within the NCNC: the Zikists. Some were communists and socialists; all were deeply anti-imperialist. They advocated strikes, sabotage, and at their most extreme, violence to end colonial rule.
But the British crackdown that followed, triggered by a failed Zikist attempt to assassinate the colonial secretary, shattered the movement. Though the wing dissolved, the episode revealed the rising militancy and impatience of Nigerian nationalism.
#6 The Richards Constitution:
After the strikes and attempted assassinations, Britain finally took Nigerian grievances and development seriously. In the UK, Churchill was replaced with Clement Attlee of the Labour Party who was more friendly to colonial development. This, coupled with India’s impending independence (the UK’s most treasured colony), pushed British officials toward constitutional reform.
In 1946, Governor Arthur Richards introduced a new constitution dividing Nigeria into three regions: North, West, and East.
The regional divide wasn’t random. The West was dominated by Yoruba, the East by Igbo, and the North by Hausa-Fulani. As seen below, the map loosely resembled the three original colonies (Lagos, Northern Nigeria, and Southern Nigeria), though not perfectly.
The Richards Constitution provided:
A central legislature in Lagos
Regional houses of assembly for each region
African members in the legislative council
Northerners included in the central legislature for the first time
Nigerian elites felt ambivalent about this constitution. Some hated that it was imposed without negotiation; others recognized its usefulness in a geographically, economically, and culturally diverse country.
Even pan-Nigerian nationalists like Zik vacillated. In the 1940s, he condemned regional divisions as tools of “divide-and-rule”. But by the 1950s, he embraced regionalism and even argued that three assemblies weren’t enough. He wanted eight, so ethnic minorities in each region wouldn’t be dominated by Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa-Fulani.
However, the consequence of a system meant to accommodate diversity instead hardened ethnic blocs. Each region developed its own political party, economic priorities, and vision for Nigeria.
Three Regions, Three Parties, Three Visions
The South West (Yoruba):
After Zik left the NYM, Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba politician, London-trained lawyer, and a cocoa farming magnate, transformed it into the Action Group, essentially a pan-Yoruba party.
The West, containing the capital Lagos and Ibadan, was (and is!) the richest region.
The South East (Igbo dominated):
Zik’s NCNC became dominated by the Igbo State Union. The Igbo region was the poorest, best educated, and most densely populated. Many Igbos swarmed out seeking work as clerks, technicians, and traders, becoming a successful middleman minority like Jews in Europe, the Indians in East Africa, or Chinese in Southeast Asia. This made them resented.
The North (Hausa-Fulani dominated):
In 1949, the Hausa-Fulani elites created the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) to protect Northern autonomy. Led by Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, who famously said of the South: “The whole place was alien to our ideas...might as well belong to another world.”
Three regions. Three parties. Three visions. And only one country. Learn about the countdown to independence in the next piece here.
To give you a preview, this is what the Western leader, Awolowo, said in 1947: “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no “Nigerians” in the sense as there are “English”, “Welsh”, or “French”. The word “Nigerian” is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria and those who do not.”
#7 Conclusion: The Myth of the “Good Ol’ Days”
Amidst corruption, terrorism, and economic issues in modern Nigeria, it is common to hear some Nigerians, especially older generations or online youth, yearn for colonial rule again.
While colonialism did bring obvious signs of development that pre-colonial states did not (ending domestic slavery, bringing rail, modern medicine, airports, and more literacy & education, especially for women), this hankering for colonialism is mainly nostalgia talk for the old, and romanticization for the young.
There were many issues with colonial rule:
50% of government revenue went to British salaries and pensions, not Nigerian development
Colonial Nigeria failed catastrophically in global bond markets
The Great Depression devastated farmers and towns, causing years of extreme agony
Price controls created food shortages and punished market women
Marketing boards taxed farmers too harshly
Independence did not guarantee better leadership (I mean just look at Nigeria now), but neither were British administrators the wise technocrats they are sometimes imagined to be. Nigerian nationalism grew because Nigerians rejected racism, exclusion, and economic misrule.
The irony is that when people today yearn for colonial days, they are remembering the post-1945 period. After years of protests, strikes, and political organizing, Nigerians forced Britain to finally take their development seriously. They’re nostalgic for the fruits of Nigerian resistance, not British benevolence.
It appears that one of the problems still plagueing nigeria today was the creation of its boundaries.
Too many ethnic divisions based on differences in ideologies and religion still plague us today.
Many nations have divided in other to be successful and exist peacefully even though a costly price was paid but was worth it because many such nations have made meaningful progress.
Nigeria is a toxic marriage of extreme differences in ideologies and religion and this has created most of the problems modern day Nigerian is facing.
Fine article. I enjoyed my time reading.
On the process of assimilating smaller ethnicities into larger ones due to indirect rule by the largest ethnicity is a common problem (although with different solutions) for colonial empires. I wonder if a percentage of the current people who identify as Hausa or Igbo were not in fact local minorities just 3 generations ago. As always, great work man