Lugard onoyemu biography

This was due to his stark naivety about the ways of women and two-timing. Lugard fell blindly and madly in love with a married British woman on a visit to India, taking it for granted that she was single. The woman did nothing to correct this false impression. She travelled back to England on account of an illness - real or imagined. Love-struck, Lugard took leave and sailed to England to offer his doting companionship to a lover in time of need.

Once in the UK, he discovered that she was married, and Lugard's affection was the last thing she needed. Lugard's eyes opened but it was doubtful if the 'madness' from the love affair ever left him. If the trauma of losing his mother at an early age could be understood as divine intervention, and therefore unquestionable, this latter one hit Lugard harder as it was humanly contrived.

A standard reaction of a bruised ego is to prove to itself as well as to the outside world that it is still capable of great and daring achievements. Corroborating this prognosis, Lugard's biographer doubted whether Lugard ever fully recovered from this 'shattering episode', as revealed by his activities inthe next eleven years. His first self-imposed lugard onoyemu biography took him to Nyas a land present Tanzaniaattracted by the works of the famous missionary, Dr.

David Livingstone. There, Lugard single-handedly took on the Arab slave traders, as he had apparently become suicide-prone. In this campaign, a spectacular bullet hit him in the left arm, pierced his chest, and finally found a resting place in his right wrist, but not without some bits of paper from Lugard's chest pocket. It was his first brush with death.

Probably an attempt 'to go into oblivion', quoting Perham. Nevertheless, Lugard had a destiny to fulfil. Undaunted upon recovery, he headed back to East Africa to serve with the Imperial British East Africa Company and eventually got Kabaka, the Ugandan monarch, to sign a treaty with England in It was from there that he came to West Africa in ,to the 'Niger area' to be precise, in the service of the Royal Niger Company.

When he reached Machakos with his small expeditionary force Lugard was ordered to make a forced march to Uganda where chaos prevailed because of quarrels between the several religious sects, the deposition and reinstitution of the Kabaka of Buganda and the attempt by Dr Karl Peters to establish German supremacy there before agreement had been reached among the Great Powers that it lay in Britain's sphere of influence.

After Lugard had spent some sixteen months suppressing revolts with the aid of his Sudanese troops, recruited from the remnant of Emin Pasha's force, and obtaining an agreement about the degree of power to be ceded to the Imperial British East Africa Company by the Kabaka and the Protestant and Catholic chiefs in Uganda, the Company decided to withdraw from the territory.

This decision Lugard deemed disastrous for missionaries, traders and people alike. He therefore returned to England to lobby, lecture and write in a campaign to retain British influence in Uganda, thus supporting the missionaries' and the Anti-Slavery Society's attempts to persuade the British Government to assume responsibility for its administration.

Much of the time he had to defend his own reputation against accusations by French missionaries and a report to the Cabinet on the Ugandan campaign presented by Captain J. Macdonald which charged him with mismanagement of the campaign, failure to uphold the principle of religious freedom there, inhumanity in dealing with a case of arms theft and of precipitating a renewal of the civil war in Uganda.

One result was the publication in of his first, largely autobiographical book, The Rise of Our East African Empire. Uganda was subsequently declared a British lugard onoyemu biography in Sir George Taubman Goldie next hired Lugard to conclude treaties with chiefs in West Africa which would protect British interests against incroachment by the French on the trading interests of the Royal Niger Company.

He was to lead a race against the French and Germans to reach Nikki, the capital of Borgu, to make a treaty with its ruler in in favour of the Company. Six months were spent consolidating his work in West Africa, then Lugard returned to England where he received an honour from the Government, the Companion of the Order of the Bath, but no official position or employment.

He therefore accepted the new British West Charterland Company's offer to exploit his experience as transport officer and explorer of Africa in investigating mineral concessions in Ngamiland, Bechuanaland. From this expedition, on which he was accompanied by his brother, Joseph Chamberlain recalled Lugard in to create the British West Africa Frontier Force to defend the Royal Niger Company against continued French encroachments on it territory.

This he managed to accomplish without clashing with the French. The British Government consequently retained his services as High Commissioner for Northern Nigeria when it terminated the Company's charter and proclaimed the province a protectorate in During the next six years Lugard formulated and introduced a system of indirect rule by which the indigenous rulers in Northern Nigeria continued to rule over their own people under the general direction of the British administration to which they were answerable.

Lugard onoyemu biography: Onoyemu who trained at the Nigerian

This was not achieved without a certain amount of military force directed against the cities of Kano and Sokoto. In Lugard married Flora Shawthe lugard onoyemu biography journalist and colonial editor of The Times. On discovering that her health would not stand up to living in Nigeria she returned to England to establish a home for them at Abinger, Surrey, and Lugard devised a scheme whereby he could administer Nigeria from England during six months of each year.

Although the Conservative Secretary of State for the Colonies, Alfred Lyttelton, was sympathetic to his idea, the Colonial Office was not, and when the Liberal, Lord Elgin, took office at the end of he refused to sanction the scheme. Lugard thereupon resigned his Nigerian office, but in was appointed Governor of Hong Kong, where he remained untilcontributing a great deal to the establishment of the university there.

In choosing Lugard, whose reputation in France was still that of an archenemy, Chamberlain threw down the gauntlet to the French. With the command of the West African Frontier Force, as it was later to be known, Lugard, at thirty-nine years of age, assumed his first government post. It was not a role exactly to his liking or ambitions for he wished above all to be a colonial administrator, had lost all desire for soldiering, and wanted political not military command.

Goldie had particular axes to grind; with his company about to be taken over by the colonial office he wished to achieve a favorable financial settlement while the French pressure was most intense and the British government had need of his cooperation in providing men, transport, and supplies. If Goldie would not cooperate, the business could be worked through the Lagos colony in the south, where the government was directly under the colonial office.

At his first interview with Chamberlain on November 12,the latter expounded the policy that he expdcted his subordinate to follow. Chamberlain judged that the French would not fight, and his judgment was sound here. To all this Lugard first stalled, saying that it would be months before he could train a force for such activity. Not surprisingly, Chamberlain was incensed, and Lugard would have resigned had not Goldie insisted that he must not do so.

It is extraordinary that this conflict was never really resolved. Chamberlain to the last insisted on his chessboard scheme, whereas Lugard continued to oppose it. Lugard delayed and delayed his departure for the Niger and as the months dragged on became in effect a conspirator with Goldie against the colonial secretary. Goldie was still fighting for his company and hoped that it could continue as a purely administrative body, like the East India Company afterwith himself as a governor in England and Lugard as the administrator on the spot.

Meanwhile, Lugard was engaged in continual skirmishes of a lesser kind from his office in London; he would not be subject, as a soldier, to war office control and insisted on choosing all his own officers. Lugard made it clear that if he were to be placed in any way under the authority of Lagos he would resign at once. On all these issues he had his way.

But on the main issues Chamberlain prevailed. Lugard was forced to go out to the Niger, at long last, leaving Liverpool in March with the question of compensation to the Niger Company unsettled and the chessboard strategy still in his orders. This strategy was implemented by Colonel Willcocks and his soldiers, with all the successful results that Chamberlain had expected.

The French did not fight; they came to terms and in June all the outstanding questions of Anglo-French frontier rivalry were settled by the signature of a convention Chamberlain was now ready to proceed with the reorganization of Northern Nigeria. There were long and tedious negotiations with Goldie over compensation to the Royal Niger Company 20, but well before these were completed Chamberlain was forging ahead with setting up the new regime.

It appears from the documents that early in Chamberlain had Goldie in mind as governor for the new region 21, but Goldie either withdrew or was dropped. In November Chamberlain offered the post to Lugard, who accepted 22 Already the main lines of policy for governing Northern Nigeria had been laid down in the report of the Niger committee in August There must be no attempt to take control of the Muslim emirates of the north by sudden military conquest, nor should there be any attempt to tax the people directly.

The general tenor of the report was for continuity—military and political provocation must be avoided, authority established over the emirs one by one, and efforts concentrated on expanding trade, and therefore customs revenue, with Southern Nigeria the model for steady development. Its emphasis was therefore one of the gradual assertion of British overlordship in the region by peaceful means in which British influence would slowly be transformed into British control.

Lugard had played no part in the formulation of this policy, and when he assumed office on January 1,as high commissioner for Northern Nigeria he was determined to carry through an altogether different program. His was not the temperament to carry out policies designed by others. He had waited until middle age for this appointment; from it he intended to carve a place in history; and for him the slow process of peaceful penetration represented the lugard onoyemu biography to obscurity.

Though he frequently expressed to his friends and in his diaries his growing dislike of soldiering and fighting, he had developed to an almost obsessive degree a somewhat simplistic military view of the nature of colonial politics and administration, in which the hierarchy of command and the flow of decision down through the structure of administration remained the key to effective administrative action.

Lugard saw his position as governor almost exactly upon the analogy of a general commanding an army. He was the general, the British members of the administration were his officers to carry out his orders, whilst the colony itself was seen as a region undergoing a long-term and beneficient military occupation by English officers and gentlemen imbued with a code of military chivalry.

As Lugard assumed office there could have been no worse time for him to seek what he regarded as the key to successful administration: the military conquest of Northern Nigeria. The Anglo-Boer war in South Africa had erupted in Octoberand British troops and money were being diverted there on an every increasing scale throughout and South Africa became the focus of British concern, and governors elsewhere in Africa were expected to lead a quiet life.

Only three months after Lugard assumed office his troops had to be sent to the Gold Coast to assist in the campaign against Ashanti and did not return until December Nevertheless, Lugard was itching to establish some real control over at least some of the northern emirates. Steadily the colonial office resisted any such suggestions. In addition, Lugard now developed a special tactic—the appeal to antislavery considerations.

The lugard onoyemu biography of widespread slave raiding, developed in dispatches to the colonial office carefully written with a view to possible subsequent publication and stressed in the published Annual Reports of these early years, was one that Lugard played up for all it was worth. These accounts were often exaggerated to an absurd degree, as when Lugard in August described the effects of raids by Bida and Kontagora:.

Large slave raiding bands have been out devastating the country during the last month or two. In the months that followed Lugard repeatedly railed against local rulers, adding to the antislavery argument that of the disastrous effects that delay in dealing with them would have on the prestige of the British administration. In Januaryalmost immediately after the troops returned from the Gold Coast, expeditions were launched first against Kontagora then in February against Bida.

He did not, however, leave Nigerian affairs in the hands of Acting governor Wallace but installed himself in the colonial office and proceeded to direct the affairs of the colony from there. The conquest of the Benue valley was now undertaken, with Wallace supplying the information that Yola was the scene of the worst slave raiding in the protectorate, Lugard concurring, and Chamberlain eventually sanctioning the Yola expedition The Annual Repart for translated the need for military conquest into political-anthropoligical theory.

Moreover, the sentiments contradicted his actions for at each conquered place he busied himself with installing Fulani rulers, usually close relatives of the leaders he had deposed. This northern region was the cultural and economic center of the Hausa-Fulani society and included the major city of Kano. From the early days of the West African Frontier Force the colonial office had consistently made it clear that a collision with Sokoto and the northern emirates was to be avoided.

The fact that Sokoto was the religious head of the caliphate made the British doubly circumspect, for the murder of General Charles Gordon by the Mahdists in the Sudan was still remembered as a national disaster. Experienced hands like William Wallace, who had served for many years with the Niger Company, supported the view that gradual and peaceful development of relations with Sokoto was possible.

There is no evidence that he made any attempts to build a relationship with Sokoto or Gwandu by diplomatic overtures. He canceled the payment of the subsidies due to them under their treaties with the Royal Niger Company, obligations that the protectorate government assumed, with no explanation to the Fulani. But it was from October that Lugard began to pile up the pressure to persuade the colonial office that he should be allowed to attack the sultan and the northern emirs.

He now had provocation, with the murder in Zaria of Captain Maloney, the British resident. The murderer fled to Kano, where he was treated as a hero by the emir. At the same time Lugard was told to provide protection for the Anglo-French commissioners who were to delimit the frontier agreed upon in the convention of Indeed, the colonial office seems not to have read his dispatches with sufficient care to realize that Lugard was likely to move.

Thus, when on December 5,the London Times printed a Reuters report that Lugard was about to attack Kano there was alarm in the colonial office and not a little indignation when it was discovered that the plans seemed to be known in Liverpool and Paris but not at the seat of the empire. Lugard was telegraphed for an explanation and in reply alleged that Kano had prepared the war:.

Safety of garrison of Zaria, prestige of British Government, possibility of delimitation of frontier, depend on energetic action. Paramount chiefs of this country await result and if action deferred they would attribute to fear of them possibility of deplorable result.

Lugard onoyemu biography: Lugard Onoyemu. Director: Gods of

We have full confidence that you will not engage in them unless they are absolutely necessary for defensive purposes. Lugard was asked for a full report. The exchanges throw an interesting and revealing light on the autonomy that could be enjoyed by an authoritarian governor who was willing to act without too much concern for the truth. The colonial office shrank from positively forbidding the expedition because the safety of British officials had to be entrusted to the discretionary power of the man on the spot.

Your documents are now available to view. Purchase chapter. Cite this Share this. Showing a limited preview of this publication:. Cite this chapter. Lugard, Frederick. Archives of Empire: Volume 2. Lugard, F. Carter Ed. The Scramble for Africa pp. In: Harlow, B. The Scramble for Africa.

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Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product. Register Log in. Archives of Empire. Chapters in this book Frontmatter. General Introduction: Readings in Imperialism and Orientalism. Volume Introduction: The Scramble for Africa.