Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression

Epilogue

166 Epilogue This book is not about colonial success in exploiting Africans to cushion metropolitan economic anxieties and problems; that story has already been told. Rather, it is about the colonial failure to exploit Africans—in spite of a desire to do so—in the service of metropolitan economic recovery, and the multifarious fallouts of that failure. What I have tried to do here is write a history of colonial failure and its social, economic, and political effects on the colonized. This is however not a counterfactual exercise in establishing the might-have-beens of colonial economic and social management, since the failure explored here is a real one: the failure to extract nonexistent surpluses and profits from Northern Nigeria in a period of economic barrenness. This book is a history of what colonialists could not do during the Depression and the myriad consequences and repercussions of that brief moment of colonial economic impotence. The narrative raises methodological and theoretical questions about how to document imperial failure in an intellectual environment saturated with discourses of imperial omnipotence. These questions call for more empirical, microlevel studies of colonial failures and retreat. My analysis is obviously set against the backdrop of an impressive and illuminating outpouring of histories of colonial exploitational successes and consistency in Africa and elsewhere and perhaps should be read as a counterpoint to those histories. But the book’s essential argument is not necessarily at variance with the thrust of radical colonial historiography, which contends essentially that colonial powers enjoyed unchallenged and rarely disturbed access to profits and surpluses in Africa. My overarching point is that the consequences of colonial exploitation—during boom years—and of the momentary failure or inability to exploit during the Depression are uncannily Epilogue w 167 similar. This momentary inability of colonialists to exploit, like their ability to extract profits and surpluses in years of economic expansion, resulted in suffering and hardship for African colonial subjects. The economic recovery policies that the financial crisis inspired led to more, not less, suffering for Northern Nigerians. The drastic reduction in state revenue from export surpluses and profits authorized a new regime of indiscriminate grassroots profiteering and exaction in which European, Arab, Levantine, and African merchants took financial advantage of peasant tax obligations to mop up rural food supplies, leading to famine and destitution (chapter 2). This is an outcome that has been traditionally associated in colonial studies with colonial exploitation, not with its cessation. The consequences and legacies of colonial exploitation should therefore not be emphasized in disregard for or in denial of equally devastating fallouts from the failure to exploit. This outcome is an unlikely possible point of convergence for radical colonial historical interpretations and the new, revisionist histories of imperial apologia.1 Denial is not the exclusive province of revisionist scholars seeking to rehabilitate imperial traditions and intentions. It finds expression in the works of radical historians of colonialism in Africa. The argument that the Great Depression represents a period in which “nothing [except exploitation] happened” in colonial Africa stems from a similarly escapist reluctance to give analytical prominence to facts that complicate an established paradigm.2 Contrary to this denial, the contention of this book is that the inability of the Northern Nigerian colonial state to exploit nonexistent profits did not generate a lull in familiar colonial activities but that it resulted in several significant events and encounters. These confrontations occurred as a result of the frustration and anxieties of colonial bureaucrats at the Northern Nigerian grass roots who could no longer engineer the flow of elusive profits. The Depression decade is therefore not an unremarkable period of African colonial history; it is one of the most important decades in the colonial life of Africa and should be treated as such in scholarly discussions on, and the teaching of, African colonial history. Colonial economic frustration intermeshed with and exacerbated the familiar brutalities and exactions of colonial power relations. Without an understanding of the changes that the Depression inaugurated in grassroots colonial relations and in African engagement with colonial power, it is difficult to cultivate an accurate understanding of the rapid advance to political independence after the Depression. The story of the momentary failure and absence of colonial exploitation in the 1930s is a tale of colonial frustration. It is, of course, difficult to gauge frustration, or any other emotion for that matter, that may reside, even if temporarily, at the heart of any power structure. But the consequences of British colonial despair...