Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760--1900

4. Innocent Commerce: Boom and Bust in the Palm Produce Trade

4 Innocent Commerce: Boom and Bust in the Palm Produce Trade Abolitionists and policymakers in mid-nineteenth-century Britain expected that the production and trade of cotton to supply Britain’s burgeoning textile industry would rescue the peoples of the Bight of Benin from the slave trade. Yoruba farmers had in fact long grown cotton for use in domestic cloth weaving. In the 1850s, a number of organizations and individuals —from the Church Missionary Society, to Consul Campbell, to Thomas Clegg, a Manchester industrialist—supported schemes in the interior to promote the growth and trade of cotton for export. Quantities of the commodity shipped from Lagos expanded rapidly in the late 1850s, if from a very low level. Then for a brief moment during the 1860s, civil war in the United States interrupted supplies of the raw material, drove prices in Britain to unprecedented heights, and made cultivation of the staple for sale abroad profitable around Abeokuta and Ibadan.1 During the 1860s, Lagos exported an average of almost 600,000 pounds of cotton annually. With the revival of supplies from the United States following the Civil War and subsequent dramatic fall in prices, however, Yoruba farmers found that they could no longer make good money growing cotton for export to Britain. By the 1880s, quantities of the crop shipped from Lagos declined to about half what they had been twenty years before, worth a paltry £8,500 per year in Britain.2 Despite the efforts of British missionaries, officials, and philanthropists, it was not cotton but palm produce—first palm oil and later also palm kernels—that dominated exports from Lagos, the Bight of Benin, and indeed West Africa as a whole throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.3 118 / Slavery and the Birth of an African City The Rise of the Palm Produce Trade Oil palm trees (Elaeis guineensis) grew wild in the forest stretching 20 to 150 miles inland from the Slave Coast and providing a home to all or part of the Awori, Egbado, Egba, Ijebu, Ibadan, Ekiti, Ijesha, Gun, and Fon peoples. The trees required no cultivation, but they grew best near places of human habitation where the forest had been partially cleared for agriculture . As income from the export of palm produce rose, farmers increased the number of oil palms available for harvest by transplanting seedlings to newly farmed lands, and eventually they began to cultivate the trees. Local peoples had for centuries manufactured and traded palm oil (epo), which formed a mainstay of their diet and was used as a fuel in lamps.4 Martin R. Delany, who traveled from Lagos to Abeokuta in 1859, wrote, “Palm oil is produced [here] in great abundance, as a staple commodity . . . . The oil of the nut is the most general in use among the natives , both for light and cooking.”5 West Africans had exported small quantities of palm oil during the era of the slave trade, primarily to provision slave ships. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the commodity began to be imported into Britain and France on a limited scale to supply their markets for oils, but it was not until the early nineteenth century, following British abolition, that the foreign trade in palm oil took off. Liverpool and Bristol slave traders, worried about mounting pressure for abolition, searching for new exports from Africa, and aware of the changing needs of local industries, pioneered the commerce. In the final years of the slave trade, wrote B. K. Drake, “few slave ships returned to Liverpool without some African cargo on board,” and as much as 20 to 30 percent of net profits from these voyages came from imports of produce.6 All of Liverpool’s seventeen African produce traders in 1809 “had earlier been slavers.”7 Over the course of the nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization created a vast new market for vegetable oils, first in Britain and later on the Continent. West African palm oil was one of the first imports to meet this demand, and that produced in the interior of Lagos was of the highest quality. Several industrial uses for palm oil existed, including as a lubricant for machinery and as flux in the expanding tin plate industry . From the 1840s, moreover, glycerine, a by-product of palm oil, began to be used extensively in medicines.8 But it was changing patterns of urban middle- and working-class consumption , coupled with technological innovations geared to satisfying...