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WHO CONTROLS WARRI? HOW ETHNICITY BECAME VOLATILE IN THE WESTERN NIGER DELTA (1928–52)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2016

OGHENETOJA OKOH
OGHENETOJA OKOH*
Affiliation:
University of Akron
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Abstract

The battle over who controls Warri has been underway for several generations. The most violent eruption of this struggle occurred between 1997 and 1999. This article traces the history of this struggle to the colonial period, during a time of administrative restructuring called reorganization, which began in 1928. Contrary to the recent popular and scholarly understanding of the Warri crisis as an outcome of crude oil politics, I argue that British colonial state intervention set in motion a deadly, ethnicized struggle over political and material resources, which has only been exacerbated by the zero-sum politics of the crude oil economy.

Keywords

NigeriaWest Africacolonial administrationethnicitypoliticstaxationviolence
Type
Regional Struggles in Colonial West Africa
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , July 2016 , pp. 209 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

A Faculty Research Grant from the University of Akron supported research for the completion of this article. I would like to thank my colleagues Abosede George, Abena Asare, Kira Thurman, Stephen Harp, Martha Santos, and Constance Bouchard for their insightful feedback. Author's email: toja.okoh@gmail.com

References

1 O. Ikime, Niger Delta Rivalry: Itsekiri-Urhobo Relations and the European Presence 1884–1936 (New York, 1969); T. A. Imobighe et al., Conflict and Instability in the Niger Delta: the Warri Case (Abuja, 2002).

2 J. Jukwey, ‘Nigeria risks Ogoni-type crisis in tribal feud’, Reuters, 27 Apr. 1997; ‘Warri peace talks’, West Africa (London) 19–25 May 1997; Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, NGA32676.E, Nigeria: the Conflict Between Itsekiri and Ijaw Ethnic Groups in Warri, Delta Region (March 1997–September 1999), 14 Sept. 1999, (http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6ad6864.html), accessed 13 Nov. 2013.

3 We must also keep in mind that the ‘Ogoni Nine’, including well-known playwright and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, were executed by Abacha's regime because of their resistance against the Royal Dutch/Shell Corporation. J. G. Frynas, Oil in Nigeria: Conflict and Litigation Between Oil Companies and Village Communities (London, 2000); Watts, M., ‘Blood oil: the anatomy of petro-insurgency in the Niger Delta’, Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, 52 (2008), 18–38Google Scholar.

4 I. Okonta and O. Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta (San Francisco, 2001); Obi, C., ‘Oil and conflict in Nigeria's Niger Delta region: between the barrel and the trigger’, The Extractive Industries and Society, 1:2 (2014), 147–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watts, ‘Blood oil’. For a representation of media discourse on this subject, see R. Efebakpo, ‘Violence threatens Warri elections’, BBC News (London), 4 May 2003, (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/2918959.stm), accessed 21 Jan. 2015; D. Isaacs, ‘Troops maintain calm in Niger Delta’, BBC News, 21 Aug. 2003, (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/3169277.stm), accessed 21 Jan. 2015; S. Sengupta and N. Banerjee, ‘A nation at war: oil; Nigerian strife, little noticed, is latest threat to flow of oil’, New York Times (New York), 22 Mar. 2003, (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/22/business/nation-war-oil-nigerian-strife-little-noticed-latest-threat-flow-oil.html), accessed 21 Jan. 2015.

5 Much has been done since Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper called for more historical analyses of the relationship between the centers of empires and their peripheries in their introductory essay, A. Stoler and F. Cooper, ‘Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda’, in Cooper and Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), 1–57. This call has provided a deeper understanding of the broad networks and connectivity of empires, exemplified by works inspired by Alan Lester's, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London, 2001) and ‘Imperial circuits and networks: geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass, 4:1 (2006), 124–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the other direction, scholars like Gregory Mann have dug deeply into local and imperial archives to look at how imperial laws and policies played out in the colonies: Mann, G., ‘What was the Indigénat? The “Empire of Law” in French West Africa’, The Journal of African History, 50:3 (2009), 331–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also a recent article by Richard, F., ‘Hesitant geographies of power: the materiality of colonial rule in the Siin (Senegal), 1850–1960’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 13:1 (2013), 54–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 M. Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria (London, 1937).

7 Berry, S., ‘Hegemony on a shoestring: indirect rule and access to agricultural land’, Journal of the International Africa Institute, 62:3 (1992), 327–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bush, B. and Maltby, J., ‘Taxation in West Africa: transforming the colonial subject into the “governable person”’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 15 (2004), 5–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; F. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: the Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996); Frankema, E. ‘Colonial taxation and government spending in British Africa, 1880–1940: maximizing revenue or minimizing effort?’, Explorations in Economic History, 48 (2011), 136–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kirk-Greene, A. H. M., ‘The thin white line: the size of the British colonial service in Africa’, African Affairs, 79:314 (1980), 25–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 In the early anthropological scholarship of this area, Warri communities were considered derivative of their Edo counterparts in neighboring Benin Province, and even the Edo people were considered distant cousins to their Yoruba neighbors further west. R. E. Bradbury, The Benin Kingdom and the Edo-Speaking Peoples of South-Western Nigeria (London, 1964); J. U. Egharevba, A Short History of Benin (Ibadan, 1968); P. A. Igbafe, Benin under British Administration: the Impact of Colonial Rule on an African Kingdom, 1897–1938 (Atlantic Highlands, 1979); and for a more critical perspective see I. Okpewho, Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony, and Identity (Bloomington, 1998).

9 Native Administration in the British African Territories, Part III (London, 1951), 122.

10 Hinds, A., ‘Government policy and the Nigerian palm oil export industry, 1939–49’, The Journal of African History, 38:3 (1997), 459–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. Martin, Palm Oil and Protest: an Economic History of the Ngwa Region, South-Eastern Nigeria, 1800–1980 (Cambridge, 1988); Meredith, D., ‘Government and the decline of the Nigerian oil-palm export industry, 1919–1939’, The Journal of African History, 25:3 (1984), 311–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomson, G., ‘Some problems of administration and development in Nigeria’, Journal of the Royal African Society, 26:104 (1927), 305–14Google Scholar. On the depression more generally, see M. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (Athens, 2009).

11 I treat the 1927 boycott and its place within a broader regional resistance to colonial integration more fully in my dissertation, ‘Making minorities: the Western Niger Delta in colonial Nigeria, 1927–1960’, (unpublished PhD thesis, New York University, 2012). For documents dealing with the anti-tax disturbances in Warri Province, see British National Archive (BNA) CO 583/154/4, Disturbances at Sapele in Warri Province, 1927; Ibadan National Archive (INA) War Prof 3/9-201/27, Annual Report, Warri Province: 1927; INA CSO 26/27999, A Broad Scheme for the Reorganization of Warri Province on Tribal Lines (Lagos, 1930).

12 F. D. Lugard, Report by Sir F. D. Lugard on the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria, and Administration, 1912–1919 (London, 1920); Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh, 1922); W. M. Hailey, An African Survey: a Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara (2nd edn, Oxford, 1945). For Yoruba chieftaincy structures, see J. A. Atanda, The New Oyo Empire: Indirect Rule and change in Western Nigeria, 1894–1934 (London, 1973) and O. Vaughan, Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics, 1890s–1990s (Rochester, NY, 2000).

13 M. Perham, Native Administration, 21. On Indirect Rule in Eastern Nigeria see A. E. Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891–1929 (London, 1972); H. A. Gailey, The Road to Aba: a Study of British Administrative Policy in Eastern Nigeria (New York, 1970).

14 J. W. Hubbard, The Sobo of the Niger Delta (Zaria, 1948); G. I. Jones, The Trading States of the Oil Rivers; a Study of Political Development in Eastern Nigeria (London, 1963); A. G. Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes (London, 1906); P. A. Talbot, The People of Southern Nigeria; a Sketch of their History, Ethnology and Languages, with an Abstract of the 1921 Census (London, 1926).

15 J. O. S. Ayomike, A History of Warri (Benin City, 1988); Ayomike et al., Warri: a Focus on the Itsekiri (Pittsburgh, PA, 2009); P. Ekeh, Warri City and British Colonial Rule in Western Niger Delta (Buffalo, NY, 2004); Ekeh (ed.), History of the Urhobo People of Niger Delta (Buffalo, 2007); O. Ikime, Niger Delta Rivalry: Itsekiri-Urhobo Relations and the European Presence 1884–1936 (New York, 1969).

16 Nigeria, Annual Report on the Western Provinces of Nigeria for the Year 1944 (Lagos, 1945), 17. This fire destroyed most of the district office and treasury papers, as well as irreplaceable local maps and the early reports of the Resident's office. The fire may have also destroyed local census data, as well as the detailed ethnographic data that went into the more than 300 intelligence reports collected in this region. I did interview several Urhobo, Itsekiri, and Ijaw subjects in the field in 2007; however, none of them were either alive or old enough to remember the politics of the 1920s through the 1940s. What I could glean from these conversations indicates how local tensions have become matters of fact, and are perceived as primordial. They could not, unfortunately, help me recreate how local men and women either participated or perceived the changes that took place in the early half of the twentieth century in Warri.

17 BNA CO 583/158/14, J. E. W. Flood on Baddeley's Report, Disturbances in Warri Province, Apr. 1928.

18 BNA CO 583/158/14, Baddeley, Disturbances in Warri Province, Mar. 1928.

19 BNA CO 583/158/14, J. E. W. Flood on Baddeley's Report, 1–2.

20 B. S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: the British in India (Princeton, 1996), 3. Between 1928 and 1938, British officials gathered 367 Intelligence Reports on clans and village groups throughout Southern Nigeria. For more scholarship on the imperial effort to gather intelligence in order to govern, see C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 2000). Jeffrey Stone has distinguished colonial map-making procedures from more scientific cartographic methods. Such data collection, both geographic and ethnographic, was often crude and amateur: Stone, J., ‘Imperialism, colonialism and cartography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 13:1 (1988), 59–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Talbot's census, carried out just before the boycott started, was used at the beginning of reorganization, to assist in the initial collection of taxes, as well as for the collection of ethnographic data. Percy Talbot was the Resident in charge of Warri Province when the boycott began, but he was actually absent through its duration. John Hubbard, a CMS missionary, published the only other major work of ethnography for this region. He collected his rudimentary geographical data by crude, but remarkable methods, given the terrain and lack of resources at his disposal.

21 M. Havinden and D. Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London, 1993).

22 Nigeria, Annual Report on the Southern Provinces of Nigeria for the Year 1932 (Lagos, 1933), 1.

23 Abbott, G. C., ‘A re-examination of the 1929 Colonial Development Act’, The Economic History Review, 24:1 (1971), 68–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meredith, D., ‘The British government and colonial economic policy, 1919–39’, Economic History Review, 28:3 (1975), 484–99Google Scholar.

24 Kirk-Greene, ‘The thin white line’; Berry, ‘Hegemony on a shoestring’, 332. For a contemporary account of this unevenness in action, see Hailey, An African Survey, 428–9.

25 Nwabughuogu, A. I., ‘The role of propaganda in the development of Indirect Rule in Nigeria, 1890–1929’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 14:1 (1981), 65–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 CO 583/154/4, Baddeley, 20 Oct. 1927.

27 CO 583/154/4, Baddeley, 16 Nov. 1927.

28 I take my cue from Olufemi Vaughan's insightful study of Yoruba chieftaincy in his book, Nigerian Chiefs. Even though Yoruba chieftaincy was well articulated before British colonization, the institution never the less had to contend with official tampering to meet the imperatives of indirect rule. At the center of Vaughan's argument is an acknowledgement of creativity on the part of the local elite to maintain power and create new forms of prestige.

29 CO 583/158/14, Flood.

30 John Darwin provides a compelling exploration of how local traditions and ethnicity could be forged out of this very specific experience of articulating local control in imperial space. He suggests that inventing traditions and fixing ethnicity had deeper implications than mere control over local populations: ‘… empire created distinctive kinds of ethnicity, not just by promoting a “tame” indigeneity, but by subsuming local sources of meaning in a new supra-local identity. This “imperial ethnicity” existed “at home” in the metropole, where it had to compete (in the British case) with other versions of English- or Britishness. But its real field of influence lay in the overseas empire.’ Darwin, J., ‘Empire and ethnicity’, Nations and Nationalism, 16:3 (2010), 386–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 C. A. Bayly's detailed study of this approach toward knowledge gathering and cooptation provides useful insights on how the British developed a systematic approach to intelligence gathering within their empire in Empire and Information. Bayly does make it clear, however, that knowledge production relied heavily on the cooperation (and manipulation) of local informants, who also had a stake in asserting control within a shifting political terrain during colonization.

32 For explicit definitions of each of these governing units in Warri Province see, for example, INA CSO 26/27999, Intelligence Report on the Agbadu Clan, Warri Province (c. 1932).

33 See, for example, INA CSO 26/3 (File no. 28903), An Intelligence Report on the Federated Sobo-Aboh Village Groups of the Ase Creek. This document reveals the challenge of ascertaining authority in a heterogeneous zone. The Obi of Aboh did claim sovereignty over mixed Urhobo, Ijaw, and Igbo settlements in this division, but his claim was tentative, and was built on a long history of dissent against his authority in the surrounding areas. This is apparent throughout the report. Despite this, the British included these dissenting communities within the Obi of Aboh's jurisdiction.

34 E. J. Alagoa, The Small Brave City-State: a History of the Nembe-Brass in the Niger Delta (Madison, WI, 1964); K. O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885 (Oxford, 1956).

35 Ikime, Merchant Prince, 39–42.

36 M. Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: the Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, 1985); Spear, T., ‘Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa’, The Journal of African History, 44:1 (2003), 15–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Nigeria, Annual Report on the Southern Provinces of Nigeria for the Year1928 (Lagos, 1929), 4.

38 S. Berry, ‘Hegemony’, 33; Killingray, D., ‘The maintenance of law and order in British colonial Africa’, African Affairs, 85:340 (1986), 411–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Akurang-Parry, K., ‘Colonial forced labor policies for road-building in Southern Ghana’, African Economic History, 28 (2000), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Mason, ‘Working on the Railway’, in R. Cohen et al. (eds.), African Labor History (Beverly Hills, 1978), 56–79.

39 Nigeria, Annual Report (1929), 63.

40 Nigeria, Annual Report on the Southern Provinces of Nigeria for the Year 1929 (Lagos, 1930), 3–4.

41 CO 583/158/14, Hunt, 10 Jan. 1928, 42–3.

42 Ibid. 47.

43 INA CSO 26/3 (File no. 28903), emphasis added.

44 Nigeria, Annual Report for the Year 1935 (Lagos, 1936).

45 The Urhobo and Isoko people are very similar in terms of language and customs.

46 Nigeria, Annual Report for the Year 1932 (Lagos, 1933), 2.

47 Nigeria, Annual Report for the Year 1933 (Lagos, 1934), 64–5.

48 Ibid. 65.

49 I am grateful to the pre-eminent local Itsekiri scholar, J. O. S. Ayomike (19 June 2007), who gave me an extended interview, which provided much needed insight on the title and land disputes between the Itsekiri and the Urhobo communities, as well as the complicated dynamics within the Itsekiri community itself. I was unable to locate any of the original treaty and land title documents he referred to in this interview, however. Even though they are listed in the catalogue at the Ibadan National Archive, they were missing. I spoke to a lawyer I met at the National Archive, Sam Ikporukpo (Apr. 2007) who was himself engaged in a land dispute on behalf of the Ijaw community in 2007. He confirmed that a lot of the documents had indeed been taken from the archive to litigate ongoing land claims in Warri. He provided me with photocopies from the Ibadan National Archive referring to land disputes between the Ijaw and the Itsekiri communities, especially over Ogbe-Ijoh, and none of them refer to any documented evidence of land titles for most of the area around Warri prior to 1928. J. O. S. Ayomike, A History of Warri (Benin City: Ilupeju Press, 1988); Benin and Warri: Meeting Points in History: the Itsekiri Perspective (Warri: Mayomi Publishers, 1993); The Ijaw in Warri: a Study in Ethnography (Benin City: Mayomi Publishers, 1990). Ayomike has published a number of other works, mostly focused on the history of Warri and the intercommunity tensions associated with this city.

50 Nigeria, Annual Report for the Year 1933, 65–6.

51 Ibid.

52 Berry, ‘Hegemony’, 328.

53 Note the change from ‘Jekri’ to ‘Itsekiri’ in the record. There was also a section of Urhobos included as part of the Benin Native Administration in 1932, which were reincorporated as part of the Western Sobo Native Administration in this 1936 re-districting. In order to accomplish this move, the British agreed to an annual payment of rent and a portion of forestry royalties paid to the Benin Native Administration's treasury; yet another complication of the notion of discrete, taxable, ethnic units. Nigeria, Annual Report, 1937 (Lagos, 1938), 67. The later, formal divisional split, led by the efforts of the Urhobo Progress Union, is treated in P. C. Lloyd, ‘Ethnicity and the structure of inequality in a Nigerian town in the mid-1950s’, in A. Cohen (ed.), Urban Ethnicity (London, 1974), 223–50.

54 Salubi, A., ‘The origins of Sapele Township’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 2:1 (1960), 135Google Scholar; INA War Prof 369, vol. I, Urhobo Division Annual Report, 1944.

55 INA War Prof 85, vol. I, Conference of Chiefs, Western Province, 1944–45.

56 Urhobo Division Annual Report, 1944.

57 INA WP 369, vol. I, Warri Province, Urhobo Division, Annual Report, 1944 (1944).

58 See also the resuscitation of the title ‘Orodje’ the Okpe equivalent of Ovie, the titular head or paramount chief among the Okpe Urhobos in Sapele. This title was brought back in 1945. Salubi, ‘Origins’, 135.

59 Nigeria, Annual Report for the Year 1944 (Lagos, 1945), 68. See more positive references and appraisals of ‘federation’ in the annual reports for 1940 (14–15), 1941 (5), 1942 (4), and 1943 (4).

60 Nigeria, Annual Report for the Year 1943 (Lagos, 1944), 4.

61 Nigeria, Annual Report for the Year 1937 (Lagos, 1938), 69.

62 See, for example, INA WP/2/146.F, Development Loans Policy (General), 1950; INA WP/2/146.F, Development Loans – General – Policy Instructions, Volume III, 1955. There are numerous files in the Ibadan National Archives for Warri Province that contain petition files made by ethnic associations, as well as local entrepreneurs for development grants and loans. Most of these petitions were made either with the endorsement of local native councils, or directly to the local colonial administrator.

63 INA War Prof 1/WP 86, vol. I, Olu of Warri: Proposed Change of Title, c. 1944.

64 INA War Prof 1/WP 369, vol. I, Urhobo Division Annual Report, 1944.

65 J. Jackson [Acting Judge at Warri], Itsekiri Land Claims in Sapele and the Jackson Judgment, Suit No. W/37/1941 (1942), (http://www.waado.org/CulturalUnits/Okpe/sapele_lands/jackson_judgement.htm), accessed 11 Nov. 2011; West African Court of Appeal Judgment on ‘Itsekiri Appeal against the Jackson Judgment on Sapele Lands’, Suit No. W/37/1941 (1943), (http://www.waado.org/CulturalUnits/Okpe/sapele_lands/WACA_judgement.html), accessed 11 Nov. 2011.

66 INA WP2 235, vol. II, Association of Marketing Women to the Resident of Warri, Annual Report for Warri Province, 8 Dec. 1950.

67 INA WP2 235, vol. II, Chief S. K. Gabice to the Resident of Warri, 13 Apr. 1951.

68 INA WP2 235, vol. II, Arthur Prest to the District Officer, Itsekiri Division (Warri), 3 Apr. 1951.

69 ‘Tribal disturbances in Nigeria’, Daily Times (15 Sept. 1952). See also INA Ijaw (W) 4, W. I. 145, Urhobo-Itsekiri Unrest Concerning Title of Olu of Warri; Change in Title of Province, 3 Oct. 1952.

70 BNA CO 554/708, Chieftainship Dispute in Warri Province, Nigeria, c. 1952.

71 INA Ministry of Local Government, Western Region (MLG), Un-Numbered Series Papers Re: Title of Olu of Warri, 20 Jan. 1953.

72 ‘Nigerian province re-named: sequel to tribal dispute’, Daily Times (13 Oct. 1952). See also INA Ijaw (W) 4, W. I. 145; and BNA CO 554/708, Letter from Acting Governor of Nigeria to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Disturbances in Warri Province, 14 Oct. 1952.

73 I address the growth of minority politics in the context of Nigerian decolonization in ‘Making minorities’.

74 Hailey, African Survey, 425.