Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression

Notes

175 Notes abbreviations Afr. S. African Studies Afr. T. African Studies “T” Section (MSS African Texts) AH Arewa House Archives LOKOPROF Lokoja Provincial Office MAKPROF Makurdi Provincial Office NAK National Archives of Nigeria, Kaduna NMMDA Norcross Memorial Methodist Diocese Archives Otudist. Otukpo District Files Otudiv. Otukpo Division Files PMMC Primitive Methodist Mission Collection RH Rhodes House Archives SNP Secretariat of the Northern Provinces SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies, London Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. introduction: crisis, colonial failure, and subaltern suffering 1. Rhodes House Archives (hereafter cited as RH), African Studies (hereafter cited as Afr. S.) 1073, W. R. Crocker, diary entry (hereafter cited as Crocker’s journal ), November 14, 1933. 2. Claude Ake, A Political Economy of Africa (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1981); Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Development , trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Press, 1974); Bill Freund, Capital and Labour in the Nigerian Tin Mines (London: Longman, 1981); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981). 3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 322–28. 4. Patrick Manning, for instance, argues that in francophone sub-Saharan Africa, the economic crisis of the 1930s was the peak of French imperial power, as “the authority of colonial governments went almost unchallenged within their borders and without.” He goes on to argue that, while enforcing economy measures on African peasants, French colonial authorities prospered and successfully consolidated their power. Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 1880–1995, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82. A recent work informed by this assumption of imperial economic omnipotence and exploitational expertise is Alvin O. Thompson, Economic Parasitism: European Rule in West Africa, 1880–1960 (Barbados: University of the West Indies Press, 2006). 5. Jeffery Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 3. 6. Catherine Boone, Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32–35. 7. Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 51. 8. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 9. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), chap. 5. 10. The most prominent example of a new kind of imperial history that advances a revisionist disavowal of colonial exploitation as a discursive framework for evaluating imperial systems is Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003). This new history of imperial nostalgia, as one of its critics, Frederick Cooper, has called it, has many detractors. Cooper, “Empire Multiplied: A Review Essay,” Comparative Study of History and Society 46, no. 1 (2004): 247–72. One of the most direct, empirical critiques of Ferguson’s revisionist claims about colonial exploitation and its consequences is Matthew Connelly, “The New Imperialists,” in Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power, ed. Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore (New York: New Press, 2006), 19–33. 11. RH, MSS African Texts (hereafter cited as Afr. T) 16, S. M. Jacob, “Report on the Taxation and Economics of Nigeria, 1934,” 14. 12. See Michael Watts, Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 13. For portrayals of the 1930s as a period of unprecedented colonial exploitation in Africa, see Monique Lakroum, Le travail inégal: Paysans et salariés sénégalais face à la crise des années trente (Paris: L’ Harmattan, 1982); Hélène d’Almeida-Topor, Les jeunes en Afrique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1982). 14. See John E. Flint, Sir George Goldie and the Making of Nigeria (London: Oxford University Press, 1960); R. A. Adeleye, Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804–1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies (New York: Humanities Press, 1971); Obaro Ikime, The Fall of Nigeria: The British Conquest (London: Heinemann, 1977). 15. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), chap. 3. Mitchell’s analysis of a similar British project in Egypt is instructive. 16. For a detailed discussion of the land tenure question, debate, and reforms in Northern Nigeria, see Steven Pierce, “Looking for the Legal: Land, Law, and 176 w฀ Notes to Pages 2–6 [3.21.97.61] Project MUSE (2024...