Sir (Lord) Frederick Lugard (1859-1945), amalgamated Nigeria on 1st January 1914 Sir (Lord) Frederick Lugard (1859-1945) was one of the foremost archangels of imperialism in the British Empire with a significant place in African history.
He was born on January 22, 1859. His father Frederick Lugard senior had left the family tradition of soldiering to earn a living as an ordained Anglican priest and was appointed an army Chaplain in Madras, India. Lugard’s mother, a Church Missionary Society, CMS evangelist in Madras where she met Rev. Frederick Lugard and married him.
It was a custom of the children born of English parents serving in India to be sent to England for their education, first to a preparatory school, and then to a public school from where a good number of them took up military or diplomatic careers.
Lord Frederick Lugard had encountered two personal crises of varied traumatic nature, the consequences of which set the pattern of his life thereafter, and substantially contributed to his epoch-making achievements. The first life’s crisis came to young Lugard two years after he was sent to England at the age of 5 to start schooling. His mother, a very affectionate and devoted woman died in 1865.
Expectedly, the shock of the mother’s transition left an indescribable mark on him. His feeling of loneliness was only relieved when he was joined later in the school by his younger brother, Edward at whose birth their mother died. In the light of the foregoing, it is easy to capture how at this tender age young Frederick resolved to be brave to show ordinarily human weakness and to succeed where others failed to achieve fame and fortune.
In his days, military career was the gateway to fame. So after leaving Rosser school he went to Sandhurst Military School in 1878 – a school that had to sandwich a two-year program into bare 8 weeks. On graduation from Sandhurst, he was commissioned as an officer. he set off to fight in the Afghan war of 1879 and at the end of the war Lugard returned to India, and for about five years he lived a typical life of an officer in the Indian army.
In peacetime he spent time hunting tigers, riding on elephants, playing polo, and shooting big games. He was a socialite and loved the company of young ladies from where he encountered the second major crisis in his life. At the age of 29, he met a young woman who was on a visit to India with whom he fell passionately in love. When she took ill and went back to England, Lugard obtained leave and sailed hitter to join her, only to discover that she was a “happily married” woman who apparently flirted with him for fun in India. The shock was so traumatic that Lugard nearly went out of his mind as he suffered perennial paranoia.
The colonel in command of his regiment understandably sent him on indefinite leave to enable him to push out his mental gloom and receive his personality. It is doubtful if Lugard ever really recovered from the shattering episode as his behavior seemed to show.
Lugard had served in Nyasaland in East Africa in 1888; a year after this episode he launched a military crusade against Arab slave traders, obviously inspired by the life of Dr. David Livingstone who had died 15 years before.
During the crusade, he sustained bullet wounds and he demonstrated exemplary bravely of a soldier before receiving medical attention. Lugard also offered military service to the imperial British East Africa Company in 1890. He successfully led a caravan from Mombassa to Uganda across a route that had not been ever traveled by a white man. While in Uganda, a civil war erupted and by intervening with his one maxim gun, Lugard singlehandedly brought peace and stability to the war-torn region, exploiting the role he had played in this civil war he got the king, Kabaka of Buganda to enter into a treaty with England.
With his military and imperial exploits, he had found for himself a role in life, a purpose worth living and working for, that is to expand British influence in Africa.
He would try to get the British government to pursue the positive policy of territorial expansion in Africa and failing to do so he would campaign for public opinion to induce the government to do so.
Between 1892-1894, Lugard devoted his time in England writing, lecturing and making speeches all over the country.
He became a notable public figure in England. He joined the service of the Royal Niger Company headed by Taubman Goldie to lead the famous “Race to Nikki” and concluded a treaty with the chief that placed Bornu under British protection.
Again in 1896, Lugard entered the service of another company in Bechuanaland (Uganda) and by this time Joseph Chamberlain had taken charge of the British Colonial Office in London who saw that economic potentialities of the colonial empire for Britain. It was Chamberlain who in 1897 sent out couriers to tract down Lugard in Bechuanaland and summon him to London for an important assignment to build up a British Officered African regiment in West Africa, i.e. the West Africa Frontier Force. This was the force Chamberlain wanted to use to check French incursion in intransigent African potentates in the area British was acquiring in West Africa.
At long last Lugard abilities were officially recognized and he was given assignment agreeable to his temperament and promised rapid advancement. By 1898, Lugard had successfully accomplished this mission and thenceforward, he never looked back. He was moving from success to success, and from glory to glory.
In 1901, Lugard was British Commissioner for Northern Nigeria. In 1902 when he was already 44 years old, he, at last, got married to Miss Flora Shaw – a highly cultivated lady who had been on the staff of The London Times. Indeed, she continued to send dispatches to that newspaper after tying her nuptial knot with Lugard and it was in one of them to the editor of The Times that she proposed the name, “Nigeria” for the territory over which her husband was now presiding. The name was derived from River Niger.
In 1903, Lugard masterminded the military expedition that conquered Kano and Sokoto and in-cooperated the entire Sokoto caliphate into the British Colony; but the tropical climate was not good enough for lady Flora Lugard and in 1907 Lugard was on transfer to Hong Kong as governor. In 1912, he came back as governor and after the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Nigeria on 1st January 1914, he became Governor-general. He held this post until 1919 when he retired from the colonial service. He published The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa (1922) and it became an indispensable handbook to colonial officers in the British Empire.
The British government honoured him by raising to The Peeragein 1928 for his great service in the empire, but the emirs and people of Northern Nigeria held him in deep affection; though his military force had conquered them he had respected their institutions.
He preserved their culture and self-guarded their region from the intrusion of the Christian missionaries from the South, who if unchecked, would have destroyed their culture and their cherished ways of life.
Lugard was a friend and sportsman. For this, Northern Nigeria gave him an honour which had never before been given to a Whiteman before they had dubar from January 1-3, 1913. A building in Kano was named after him as Lugard Hall. He died in his house in Surrey, England in April 1945 – sixteen years after his loving Flora had died. Lugard was one of the rare people one met as a foe and departed from as a friend.
Historians and political analysts have done some surgical examination on Lugard’s amalgamation project. Here is how they juxtapose the enigma called amalgamation. I. F. Nicolson informs us that, instead of administering things (institutions) and developing service, Lugard had been preoccupied with a widespread extension of rule over people and undertaking so unprofitable that it made an amalgamation of the viable South and the bankrupt North both far more urgent from the point of view of home government and far more difficult than the joining of two viable administrations would have been. The immediate task was to free the home government from the expensive milestone which Lugard had fastened around his neck and to transfer the whole burden to the new amalgamated Nigeria.
A post-mortem carried out on Lord Lugard and his pet project has revealed that Lugard was in a haste to execute the project for administrative convenience and not to build a nation. Indeed, the irreconcilable contradictions of nation-building which we encounter today started from Lugard’s dream. Lugard sowed the seeds of the separatist tendency which has plagued Nigerian fragile unity.
He was to free himself from the financial burden of Northern Nigerian administration by tapping on the reserved resources available in the South. The Colonial Office decided to amalgamate the two administrations and invited Lugard who had just completed his 5year term as governor of Hong Kong to come back to Nigeria to undertake a new familiarization tour and submit some concrete amalgamation proposals. Lord Lugard arrived in Nigeria on October 3, 1912, and was sworn in as governor by Chief Justice of Southern Nigeria that same day.
The next day October 4, he traveled to Zungeru (in Niger State) by special train to be sworn in as governor of Northern Nigeria. The contents of Lugard’s letter written at the time to his wife, Flora in London revealed: “his pronounced antipathy conceit is detestful to me. The lack of natural dignity and courtesy antagonizes me”.
After a century of co-existence, Nigeria has been fraught with many political difficulties. In 1953, late Sir Ahmadu Bello, the sarduana of Sokoto, had to remark during a budget session of the House of Representatives in Lagos that, “the mistake of 1914 has come to light” Mr. C. Strachey had said, “Sir Frederick Lugard contemplates a state which is impossible to classify, it is not a unitary, it is not a confederation of states”.
This resulted in the problem of the location of power (economic power in the South and political power in the North) which unarguably led to the Nigerian civil war (1967-1970). Nigeria is practicing unitary federalism where the resources of the south are shared with the needy North.
This unfortunate development gave rise to resource control politics and restiveness in the Niger Delta. In a true federalism, resources are controlled by the component states that contribute the same proportionally to the center. Chief Obafemi Awolowo had enunciated in his book, Thoughts on the Nigerian Constitution(1966) that the unity of the Nigerian nation can only be guaranteed if each of the ethnic components is recognized as a federating unit. Awolowo saw Nigeria as “a mere geographical expression”.
An anonymous writer has pointed out that “God did not create Nigeria, the British created it.” Indeed, Lugard did not envisage self-government for Nigeria, but perpetual British Colonialism. His system of indirect rule, his deep-seated hostility towards educated Nigerians in the South, and his system of education for the North which aimed at training the sons of the chiefs and emirs as clerks and interpreters show him as one of Britain arch imperialists.
Lugard’s amalgamation, therefore, remains an abstract academic exercise devised by the enigmatic genius of Frederick Lugard which had very little impact on the diverse courses that the histories of the components of the country would have been following.
