The Royal Niger Company occupies an important place in the history of the British colonial acquisition of Nigeria. Although it was chartered in 1886 and thereby obtained sovereign administrative authority over the areas of its commercial activity, a full assessment of the company must start in 1879.
That year, Sir George Taubman Goldie arrived on the Niger. Trade on that river was marked by bitter rivalry between a number of British and French companies. Goldie, a major shareholder in the smallest of the British companies and an astute business negotiator, persuaded the British companies to merge to form the United Africa Company in 1879, renamed the National Africa Company (NAC) in 1882. Goldie also persuaded Lord Aberdare, a British industrialist, influential politician, and president of the Royal Geographical Society, to become the chairman of the new company. Goldie himself took up the administration of the company in Nigeria. From then on, the story of Goldie becomes the story of the company. Against the French companies that had declined to join the merger, Goldie waged a relentless price war and eventually bought them out in 1884. The purchase made NAC the sole European trading firm in the lower Niger. The era of free trade was thereby ended, as the company went on to establish a monopoly hitherto unknown in the history of the Niger trade. In time the company established about a hundred trading stations on the Niger, employing a labor force of 1500.
Contemptuous of the local people, the company dictated the prices it paid for their produce, and sold imports to them. To impress and intimidate the local population, Goldie established a well-drilled constabulary force of 241 men equipped with sophisticated heavy artillery and machine guns, specially designed by the inventor Hiram Maxim in a way so that the shells ignited the thatched roofs of the native houses. Goldie also acquired twenty gunboats which could ply the Niger all year round. Between 1879 and 1886, most communities in the Lower Niger Valley were sacked for resisting the company’s harsh monopoly.
Goldie was as much a businessman as an imperialist. His arrival on the Niger coincided with the era of mounting European imperialism in Africa. To him, British dominion over the Niger Basin was of supreme importance, key to gaining access to the rich west African interior. To preempt other European powers, by 1886 Goldie had foisted 237 “treaties of protection” on local chiefs in the area. The treaties were of doubtful legal validity, as they were extracted from the people mostly under duress. Largely as a result of the NAC’s influence at the Berlin West African Conference of 1884-1885, Britain was recognized as the de facto power in the Niger region.
To cement its control of the Niger trade, the NAC sought a charter from the British government. This was granted, giving the company sovereign rights to levy customs duties, acquire and develop lands, and exploit the mineral and agricultural resources of the area under its jurisdiction. The company was renamed the Royal Niger Company (RNC). The charter enabled Britain to exclude other European powers from the area by creating a facade of effective administration at a minimum responsibility and cost to the British taxpayer.
Goldie took up the new responsibilities entrusted to his company with zeal, quickly enlarging the company’s domain through exclusive treaties with the Yola, Adamawa, Borgu, Sokoto, and Gwandu. By 1892 Goldie had signed some 360 such treaties, which the British Foreign Office quickly ratified. The company then evolved a range of measures to exclude all other trading firms from the Niger trade and to silence its critics. Its employees were bonded to silence with ?1,000 each, and some Christian missionaries were compromised through material benefits they received from the company. Duties levied on companies venturing into the RNC’s domain were so excessive as to make such ventures uneconomic. Trade on the Niger was permitted only at designated “ports of entry,” and the most lucrative oil markets were declared “closed ports” to other trading interests. Defiance of the regulations resulted in the confiscation of the offender’s trade goods. Local traders received no exemption from the restrictions and so found themselves unwelcome strangers on the Niger, which had been their ancestral heritage.
The RNC represents a classic case of exploitation without redress. The company exploited its absolute monopoly to make profits far in excess of what it could have made in a free-trade situation. The company effected no positive social transformations in the area, building no roads, schools, nor hospitals. Until 1905, it stuck to the barter system of trade with the local people because this enabled it to exploit them fully. It spread terror and resentment all along the valleys of the Niger and the Benue Rivers. Having received the charter, the company became even more high-handed and vicious. The slightest local dissent against the company was visited with great venom. In 1888, half of Asaba, where the company had its administrative headquarters, was decimated, and Obosi was razed to the ground the next year, in both cases on the specious charge of the practice of human sacrifice. The soldiers lived off the people’s livestock and food crops, and sexually assaulted their women. In 1897, led by Goldie himself, the company forces invaded Ilorin and Nupe. The pretext was to stop slave raiding in both kingdoms, but the actual aim was to keep the French and the Lagos government off the area.
However, the company’s tactics boomeranged on the trade of the Niger. Many communities resorted to subsistence production to achieve self-sufficiency. Palm oil exports fell from 2,500 tons in 1886 to 1000 tons in 1888. But not all the communities could achieve selfsufficiency. The Brass people, situated on the margin of the saline delta water, depended on the Niger trade for their livelihood. After years of futile negotiations with the company for a fair trade deal, the people resolved to die in battle rather than in hunger. In 1895, they sacked the company’s station at Akassa, and the company’s reprisal action was predictably draconic. By the late 1890s mounting storms of protest against the company forced the British government to revoke the company’s charter, effective December 31, 1899.
Onwuka N. Njoku
See also: Delta States, Nineteenth Century; Lagos Colony and Oil Rivers Protectorate; Nigeria: British Colonization to 1914.
Further Reading
Alagoa, E. J. The Small Brave City State: A History of Nembe-Brass in the Niger Delta. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.
Cook, A. N. British Enterprises in Nigeria. London: Frank Cass, 1964.
Dike, K. O. Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1885.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
Flint, J. E. Sir George Goldie and the Making of Nigeria. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.
World History
