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  • Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression
  • Philip S. Zachernuk
Moses E. Ochonu . Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009. 224 pp. ISBN 978-0-8214-1890-1, $24.95 (paper).

Moses Ochonu brings into focus the peculiar features of the Depression years of the early 1930s in Northern Nigeria, too often overlooked as a lull in the story of the making and unmaking of the colonial order in Africa. The early 1930s, he shows, marked a moment of crisis that shaped important features of the late colonial period. The core aim of the book is to reveal what happened when, as commodity prices dropped, profits evaporated and mechanisms of economic exploitation faltered, direct exploitation—especially tax exactions—continued and intensified. The harm to Africans increased rather than decreased, to the extent of tax-induced famine. "Baring its fangs" (14) to ensure its fiscal survival, the colonial state also revealed its weaknesses. Pushing chiefs to collect taxes despite collapses in taxable income undermined the legitimacy of indirect rule. Retrenching tin miners and civil servants pushed them to find ways of surviving outside colonial structures. Counterfeiting flourished, railways were sabotaged [End Page 921] for resources and in protest, African self-reliance increased. Following this crisis, the British became more keenly aware of their ability to impose naked power, and of the need to cushion this with promises of development. Africans moved forward better equipped with strategies for protest against, escape from, and subversion of colonial impositions.

Highlighting the ways colonial power worked during the Depression advances our re-evaluation of the colonial state in Africa. As Ochonu points out, this crisis drove the Northern Nigerian state to "economic recovery schemes" that were "a lot more incoherent, convoluted, and a lot less predictable" (19) than officials would have preferred. Colonial power reduced to the brute action of confiscating goats in lieu of taxes secured state revenues at very high cost. Ochonu often pauses to highlight the confusion and self-deception in the Nigerian administration under pressure. The revival of pawnship, or a district's failures to share scarce food supplies, for example, were explained away as persistent African tradition rather than as responses to the crisis.

A weakness of the book is that its insights are locked too tightly into the framework of "radical colonial historiography" (166), building the story too narrowly around the dynamic of colonial actions and African reactions. The story starts with the assertion that "British rule had already been fully established and consolidated throughout the country" (5-6). It may well be that British conquest had "tied the economic tastes, fortunes and destinies of millions of Nigerian peasants and workers to the performance of the world commodity market" (32). But had it tied all Northern Nigerians, and tied them in the same ways? What else were they tied to? Ochonu recognizes that the colonial state "was fundamentally weak and its politico-economic sway over Africans tenuous at best" (8). But instead of casting his story as an ongoing process of change as these limited powers were applied, he sets it as an established colonial order being challenged. Ochonu does not ask more complicated questions about what other historical processes—for example those set in motion by the Sokoto Caliphate—affected northern Nigerians. Ochonu pays special attention in two chapters to Idoma Division, a marginal sector in terms of the colonial economy, and does a better job here of locating how the Depression shaped and challenged an ongoing process of colonial integration. Idoma's "marginality did not originate entirely originate with British colonial policies and attitudes" (121), and the effects of Depression were shaped by earlier policy phases. But the relation of Idoma to regions within the core of the north is not much developed. [End Page 922]

This binary framework obscures potential insights most clearly in the account of elite protest, revolving around the career of Samuel Cole-Edwards. Cole-Edwards, a Sierra Leonean who had arrived in Northern Nigeria with Lugard before 1900 to help staff the state, was by 1930 a trader and colonial contractor. During the Depression, he became increasingly critical of colonial policies. Ochonu...

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