Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression

3. Social Transformations and Unintended Consequences in a Depressed Economy

71 3 w Social Transformations and Unintended Consequences in a Depressed Economy The unintended consequences of colonial economic recovery policy as well as local reactions to, and innovation in the face of, rising prices of imports and falling prices of domestic products confounded colonial efforts to draw more Northern Nigerians into the export economy through colonial economic institutions . As I have shown, colonial officials desired increased, not decreased, African participation in, and dependence on, the imperial marketplace as a strategy of economic recovery. The unintended consequences and local reactions analyzed in this chapter served to remove many Northern Nigerians from imperial markets and colonial economic practices and institutions. They also dissuaded others who may have considered the export crop market as a means of escaping further impoverishment. Despite the modest success of the British effort to boost local export agriculture and to engage more Northern Nigerians, the loss of confidence in the world market and in colonial economic practices and institutions compelled many Northern Nigerians to seek more predictable, locally embedded economic vocations. As more Northern Nigerians took their economic fates into their own hands, using both legal and illegal means, the uncompleted colonial project of integrating them into the colonial economy—which the Depression had disrupted—suffered further reversals. Anticolonial and self-help criminality became a veritable weapon in the hands of Northern Nigerians for coping with the crisis. As economic hardship and the state’s economic recovery effort intensified through retrenchment, vigorous tax collection, and pay cuts, Northern Nigerians sought to both cushion themselves from financial peril and escape the unsavory effects of the government’s economic recovery schemes. Retrenched tin 72 w฀ Colonial Meltdown mine workers resorted to petty theft; retrenched railway workers stole railway track components and sabotaged the lines; women cloth makers expanded production to meet a growing demand for local cloth, as imported cloth became too expensive for most people; gold prospectors fanned out in the hope of finding mineral wealth as a way out of poverty; and currency counterfeiters expanded their underground industry to fill the monetary niche created by the prevailing cash crunch. All these efforts, as well as criminal and noncriminal self-help, carried the same objective of escaping the troubled formal, state-regulated economy and exploring ways of avoiding the intended and unintended consequences of state economic recovery. The noncriminalized strategies of economic survival and self-preservation helped reduce pressures for state-provided economic relief, to the delight of British officials. But, along with the criminalized acts, they also undercut the formal economy and its many nodes, hurting state control and ability to collect revenue, regulate economic flows and behavior, and maintain law and order in a difficult period. In the end, state reactions to these strategies; the failures of state interventions; the social troubles on mines and railways and in urban centers; and the entrepreneurial innovations of women, gold prospectors , and other groups all underlined the economic and political insecurity faced by Northern Nigerians. They also increasingly stripped the state of its legitimizing claims. labor troubles The responses of Northern Nigerian colonial authorities to the Depression not only took their toll on peasants and chiefs, they also impoverished laborers —both casual and permanent—as well as those who were laid off as part of the government’s economic recovery policy. Bill Freund has documented one of the major legacies of the Depression on Northern Nigeria—the collapse of the tin industry.1 Most studies have focused almost exclusively on how the tin bust affected the fortunes of the mining companies and mine laborers. Freund shows, among other things, how the Depression intensified the struggle between capital and labor on the mines. An often-neglected part of the story of that industrial collapse are the economic and social problems that accompanied the wave of mine closures of the early 1930s, problems that reverberated through the Jos Plateau and beyond. Evidence from colonial intelligence reports reveals that, in addition to its immediate and predictable outcome—namely the closure of mines and the resulting layoff of workers—the tin bust resulted in an enormous dislocation of normal socioeconomic patterns on and around the mines. With one of the major employers of wage labor in Northern Nigeria beleaguered, only one other major employer of labor in Northern Nigeria, the re-laying of the Kaduna- Social Transformations and Unintended Consequences w 73 Minna railway, remained. It employed about twenty thousand laborers between...