Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Changing Role of the Military in Nigeria, 1900-1970

1976; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1868-6869

Samson C. Ukpabi,

African history and culture studies

The development of the Nigerian army must be seen in its political context. As the British government imposed its colonial rule on the people of Southern Nigeria, in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, each colonial administrative unit raised its own local force. Thus, after Lagos was acquired by the British in 1861, the administrator of Lagos, Captain J. Glover, R. N., raised the Lagos Constabulary in 1862.1 After the Royal Niger Company was granted a charter in 1886, which enabled it to administer areas under its control it raised in the same year the Royal Niger Constabulary.2 Although, the British declared parts of the area east of the Niger a protectorate in 1885,3 yet the actual establishment of a colonial administration came early in the 1890s and was quickly followed by the setting-up of a colonial force, in 1892,4 known as the Niger Coast Protective Force (or Constabulary). The title constabulary as applied to these local forces belied the fact that they were all essentially military forces which possessed artillery and were used to buttress the authority of the governments which they served. At first, these forces were, even for their small size, considered adequate to undertake both military and police duties in their locality. Later, however, as the governments began to expand their influence into the hinterland, and consequently came into military conflict with the inhabitants, they found it necessary to increase substantially the sizes of their forces in order to cope with their larger military commitments. To take but one example, in 1892, the Niger Coast Protective Force numbered about 40 other ranks (its depredations and brutality earned for these soldiers the title, forty thieves). But by 1900 this force had risen to a strong battalion of nearly 1000 men. The suggestion, in 1898, that the Niger territories should be amalgamated,5 coincided with the thinking going on in the War Office and the Colonial Office in London for a more effective force to be established in West Africa through the amalgamation and the expansion of the existing colonial forces. A committee