Conjoined to Empire: The Great Depression and Nigeria

Abstract

The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939, has been largely treated as a period of stagnancy in African history. It was a period in which nothing happened due to the bankruptcy that befell colonial powers and their subsequent preoccupation with economic recovery to the detriment of public works and social projects.1 Many scholars argue that the depression's only remarkable feature is that it was a period of unprecedented exploitation of African resources and peasants as colonial powers sought to transfer the burdens and sacrifices of recovery to Africans. The period is therefore largely portrayed as one that is better forgotten than explained or understood.This interpretive paradigm has largely colored the scholarly commentaries on the depression in Nigeria, Britain's most populous colony in Africa. Consequently, the impact of that economic crisis on Nigerians and on British colonialism in Nigeria has been underappreciated. Similarly, in deference to the notion that the depression represented a lull rather than a watershed, scholars have neither adequately integrated the crisis and its impact into discussions about the legacy of colonialism nor situated the crisis in the literature on decolonization.This paper is an attempt to document and explain the depression experience in Nigeria. It pays particular attention to the impact of the crisis on Nigeria as well as on the economic recovery measures instituted by the British and their consequences. The paper is premised on the hypothesis that an understanding of the depression and its impact on Nigeria is crucial to understanding the economic impact of British colonialism on Nigeria. Such an understanding is also germane to unraveling the crisis of late British colonialism, which culminated in the post-World War II movement towards decolonization.R.O. Ekundare has observed that the Nigerian colonial government reduced some direct and indirect taxes to help stimulate production and export during the depression and suggests that this was also designed to bring some economic relief to the people of Nigeria.1 While this altruistic motive of British economic recovery strategies may be in dispute, Ekundare at least steers clear of teleological explanations in order to unpack the actual economic policies and measures that the British used to combat the depression in Nigeria. His is however a rare, nuanced position, which does not impute British depression-era economic policies with a predatory desire to exploit Africans. Other scholars are not as nuanced, and tend to suggest a more deliberate, sinister economic motive for the responses of the British to the depression's manifestations in Nigeria.' Impoverishment, which was rife during the economic crisis, is presented in much of the literature as both a product and goal of direct British economic agency during the crisis. The spread of poverty is situated in the collapse of prices and in what these scholars regard as harsh tax rates. Bill Freund shows how the collapse of tin mining on the Jos Plateau authorized a regime of labor exploitation on the part of expatriate tin mining companies, enabling them to retrench miners and cut wages. These self-cushioning measures spread poverty and destitution on the Plateau and undermined a vibrant trade in foodstuffs and labor migration linking the economy of the Benue Valley to that of the Plateau.4This paper follows these scholars in affirming the self-interested, self-cushioning recovery strategies of British colonial officialdom and expatriate firms in Nigeria. These strategies had the impact of transferring more wealth and value from Nigerians to the coffers of the British colonial government. Some of this value was removed directly from Nigeria and transported to Britain, such as the case of the currency withdrawals that will be discussed in this paper. But this devastating impact was the incidental consequence of what one might call the advent of a colonialism of the balance sheet during the depression rather than of a deliberate attempt by the British to use the depression as an excuse to impoverish Nigerians. …