Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (review)

With its firm place in Nigerian historical studies, it is easy to assume that little of significance can still be written on the Great Depression in Nigerian colonial history. Such an assumption can be put to rest with the arrival of Moses E. Ochonu's superb book, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression. Drawing on extensive colonial and missionary archives, as well as a judicious reading of secondary scholarship, Colonial Meltdown is an engaging analysis of the consistent failures of the colonial state—in particular, Northern Nigeria's nonemirate societies, especially Idoma and Jos Plateau—in the context of the Great Depression. Following a succinct introduction, six comprehensive chapters analyze the dimensions of depression-era crisis in these complex societies, covering subjects as varied as local resistance to colonial taxation, social relations and colonial policy, missionary education and the rise of nationalism, famine and colonial policy, economic crisis and domestic slavery, migrant labor and the rise of nativism, and chieftaincy politics and local administration.

Unlike conventional scholarship that reifies an omnipotent Northern Nigerian system of indirect rule, the book contends that colonial rule in Britain's Northern Nigerian outposts was largely ineffective, arbitrary, and preoccupied with the extraction of taxes from the masses of impoverished rural producers. At the core of Ochonu's argument is the claim that as British colonial administrators found themselves unable to generate surpluses following the collapse of the colonial export trade, British state functionaries consistently enforced arbitrary taxation and other forms of fiscal exactions. These measures then eroded the limited moral authority of colonial administrators in these peripheral societies during the depression.

Ochonu contends that in response to these arbitrary measures local people, rather than retreating, imaginatively engaged their precarious condition as producers of food crops for subsistence, even as the depression intensified. As the income of local producers fell drastically and the prices of imported manufactured commodities rose significantly, colonial subjects became more inward-looking, relying solely on the local economy to sustain themselves as the depression ravaged their impoverished communities. British colonial authorities responded by insisting on the incorporation of these marginal communities into a problematic colonial administrative arrangement through more arbitrary taxation in order to generate badly needed revenue. Thus, confronted by the deepening crisis of the depression, colonial agents implemented draconian tax collection policies that further alienated the impoverished masses.

Altogether, this is a solid historical analysis with deep insight into the contradictions of the colonial enterprise in nonemirate colonial Northern Nigeria. More important, it provides important signposts for understanding some of the structural antecedents to Nigeria's problematic postcolonial developmental state. In this context, Ochonu's book, though fundamentally the work of a diligent historian, has important interdisciplinary dimensions, especially for development studies. It offers an impressive exploration of the logic (or perhaps more appropriately, illogic) of the British colonial developmental enterprise in Northern Nigeria, especially in marginal societies, highlighting the intense incongruity between colonial officials and local producers and linking cash crop and food crop production to the implementation of precarious depression-era policies. Focusing on the political, social, and economic vicissitudes of the Great Depression, this meticulously researched and clearly written book is an important contribution to Nigerian historical studies.