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146 6 w Economic Recovery and Grassroots Revenue Offensives The peripheral stigma attached to Idoma Division returned during the DepressiontoconstituteasiteofcrisismediatedbytheBritishattempttorecapture and reexplore the division as a valuable, revenue-generating colonial unit. Not only a hurried afterthought, this effort became a policy alternative authorized by the economic recovery strategy of revenue generation and the bolstering of solvency. This revenue-centered exploration of the Idoma countryside went beyond rhetoric. It was also practical. The rhetoric of Idoma backwardness gave rise to the supposed imperative of integrating the division into the Northern Nigerian economic mainstream. This imperative in turn authorized the violent invasion of the Idoma countryside in the name of revenue generation. In Idoma Division colonial officials attempted to allay their financial anxieties through tax raids, setting off tense encounters between the Idoma and the British. Revenue generation through taxation emerged in economically depressed Idoma Division as a central colonial project that almost displaced the traditional social and economic preoccupations of British colonialism. The combustive mix of local demands and the official inability and refusal to meet them troubled and sometimes truncated these traditional colonial commitments during the Depression (see chapter 5). Officials pursued taxation and other forms of revenue generation as if they constituted a substitute regime of colonial govermentality .1 It seemed that, in the face of an official retreat from investments in education and other social projects, taxation and its intrusive bureaucracies came to serve as a cheap, fiscally rewarding mechanism of political control, an alternative to financially costly, familiar preoccupations of British colonialism. Seeking revenue on behalf of a financially depressed colonial state, the violent tax raiders provoked a dramatic backlash as the Idoma resisted with both Economic Recovery and Grassroots Revenue Offensives w 147 crudely novel and sophisticated strategies of escape and mockery. Colonial officials rationalized the violence that characterized the tax campaign as a form of economic discipline, necessary in an economically backward colonial backwater. However, like most economic recovery measures of the Depression , the raids elicited local reactions that served to further frustrate colonial goals and to burden colonial officials with an incipient social disorder. More important, the raids underscored the dramatic erosion of whatever control the colonial bureaucracy had built in Idoma Division. The expeditions made up for, and emanated from, a frustrating realization of the paucity of colonial control and the tenuousness of the local embrace of colonial economic and political rhetoric. The reactions of the Idoma to the raids demonstrated in very stark terms their perceptions of British colonial economic distress. The reactions buttressed the view that British rule was a crumbling imperial system that could no longer exploit or control its subjects without crude violence at the grass roots. The economic crisis and the reaction of both the British and the Idoma to it exacerbated the crisis of control that plagued British rule from its inception in 1900. colonial financial anxieties in i doma di vi s i on In a 1932 report Capt. R. J. Lynch, the assistant district officer in Idoma Division , informed his boss, the resident of Benue Province, that trade in the division had reached a standstill and that he “anticipated” that “considerable difficulty [would] be experienced in collecting the necessary currency to meet tax demand.”2 This statement illustrates the degree of frustration with the limited success of efforts to revive trade and bolster revenue in Idoma Division. The captain and the resident appeared more concerned with the implications of the trade depression for tax revenue and with the “embezzlement” of tax money by chiefs—the local intermediaries in tax collection—than with the impact of the crisis on the Idoma economy. Though acknowledged, colonial discourses represented the impoverishing of the Idoma as an inevitable consequence of their supposedly noncapitalist economic practices. The difficulties in tax collection that Lynch anticipated for the 1932–33 tax season stemmed from an apprehension informed by the difficulties of the previous season, which was marked by incidents such as that involving two “hamlet Heads who embezzled . . . sums of money . . . [and who were] sentenced to imprisonment for three months by the Native Court.”3 The district officer also informed the resident of the £7 10s. of tax money from Utonkon District he had to write off “on account of embezzlement.” Embezzlement became a recurring theme in officials’ anxious discussions on taxation. It appears that the topic of embezzlement became both a statement of fact and an administrative rationalization of empirical, perhaps insurmountable, [18.221.53.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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