Nigeria’s Colonization and the In-betweens: The Agricultural Engine of Empire and How to Turn It into Sovereignty

When the guns fell quiet in Lagos (1851–52), when Benin (1897) burned, and when Ijebu (1892) faced Maxim guns at Imagbon, the prize wasn’t abstract “territory.” It was the palm oil and kernels that greased Britain’s factories and soap kettles; later cocoa, groundnuts, hides, cotton, and food for booming ports. Palm oil, in particular, had become a strategic industrial lubricant and key ingredient for soap and candles during the Industrial Revolution, one reason British traders and officials obsessed over free access to the lagoons, rivers, and hinterland roads.

Companies and then the Crown built the pipes to drain the harvest: the Royal Niger Company first, chartered in 1886, then the Protectorate governments after 1900. Rails and ports were aligned to crops Lagos Government Railway pushed inland from 1901, the Baro–Kano line met it and the two were consolidated in 1912, locking northern produce to the coast. A new eastern port—Port Harcourt, founded 1912 was laid down to evacuate Enugu coal and, soon, agricultural surpluses; the Eastern Line reached Enugu by 1916 and later pushed toward Kaduna, webbing farm belts to ships.

On a humid December night in 1851, smoke rolled across the lagoon as British gunboats opened fire on Lagos. In the morning, markets still opened because they always did. Women unfurled raffia mats, fishers mended nets, and farmers from the hinterland unloaded yams, palm kernels, and kolanuts. Trade did not pause for cannons. It bent and flowed around them.

Ten years later, under the shadow of more guns, Oba Dosunmu signed the Treaty of Cession (August 6, 1861). By 1862, Lagos was a Crown Colony. Far away in Europe, the Berlin Conference (1884–85) sketched rules for “effective occupation,” and what would become “Nigeria” began to take bureaucratic shape: chartered companies, treaties signed at the barrel of a rifle, flags raised at rivers and courts. In 1900, London revoked the Royal Niger Company’s charter and split the map into the Northern and Southern Protectorates, then bound them together in 1914 under a single ledger: The Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria.

Through it all, farms fed the cities and financed the colonial ledger. Cocoa put boys and girls in school in the southwest; groundnut pyramids stacked up like man-made hills in Kano; palm oil financed trade in the east; cotton and hides threaded the north’s caravans. The country learned an early lesson: when politics grows loud, the soil still whispers the terms of survival.

The Staff and the Stall

Colonial rule preferred order over consent. Where it could not rule directly, it ruled “indirectly,” turning palaces into offices. That is why, to this day, a governor presents a staff of office to a king, not the other way around: a ritual echo of a past where statutes and stamps outranked ancestral stools. And yet, even in those years of decrees and warrants, the market women especially in the southeast could still choke a bad policy by refusing to bring their baskets. (When 1929 arrived, they did more than refuse; they raised their voices in what history calls the Aba Women’s War. The empire noticed.)

By the early–mid 20th century, the iconography of Nigerian wealth was agricultural: Kano’s groundnut pyramids and the cocoa boom of the southwest—both tethered to railheads and ports. These weren’t just piles and pods; they were a financial system built on crops, with produce taxes, marketing boards, and export receipts funding roads, schools, and colonial bureaucracies.

The leadership message: why this story should be told everywhere

Kosoko’s exile was about control of a port that moved farm goods as much as it was about a throne. Benin’s sacking was about removing a rival sovereign and clearing a corridor to the sea. Ijebu’s defeat blew open inland roads to Lagos. The colonizer used agriculture to extract power; today, we can use agriculture to build power ours. Rails and ports were aligned to palm oil, kernels, cocoa, groundnuts not sentiment. If we align land, cold chain, standards, and finance to modern product maps (goat meat & dairy, horticulture, grains, spices), we get the same flywheel for Nigerians.

Ijebu (1892) controlled tolls and road access from the Lagos coast into the Yoruba interior; its defeat paved the gates for trade on British terms. Casualties for Ijebu were horrific, approximately 900–1,000 killed at Imagbon precisely because breaking that bottleneck mattered.

Then, in Benin (1897) sat on trade arteries from the hinterland to the Niger Delta; the punitive expedition not only removed a sovereign but dismantled a commercial counter-weight, with looted art auctioned to defray campaign costs. Edo casualties remain uncounted, but the economic message was explicit.

INDEPENDENCE AND UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Flags changed on October 1, 1960. A republic was established on October 1, 1963. But statecraft kept many colonial bones: courts and civil service, the map’s straight lines, and, crucially, how the state thinks about land. The Land Use Act (1978) placed land in each state “in trust” under the governor. It solved some disputes and made planning possible, but it also kept the farmer, miller, and exporter negotiating with gatekeepers who control titles, access, and time. Yet the land remembers more than laws. In 1976, “Operation Feed the Nation” asked citizens to plant again; in 1980, the “Green Revolution” tried to industrialize production; in the 1990s, “Fadama” projects showed that irrigated valleys could turn dry seasons into growing seasons; in 2015, the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme tried to pull smallholders into formal finance, and can do with this history

10 LESSONS FROM THIS HISTORY ON AGRICULTURAL SOVEREIGNTY

1) Make land bankable and block-serviced.
Set up transparent state land banks for agriculture, mapped and dispute-free, leased on 15–25-year terms. Pre-service each block with roads, power, water, and a legal right-of-way—just as the Crown did for rails and depots, but for Nigerians and Nigerian firms. (Think of it as Lagos–Ibadan 1901, but for farm blocks, cold rooms, and mini-grids.)

2) Build logistics like policy, not projects.
A national cold-chain and rail-freight plan that pairs state pack-houses with scheduled reefer trucks and rail sidings along the very corridors empire drew (Lagos–Ibadan–Kano; Port Harcourt–Enugu–Kaduna). Tie each node to commodity clusters—goat meat & milk, ginger, cassava, cocoa—so infrastructure sweats from day one.

3) Standards first, subsidies second.
Fund state labs to certify HACCP, residue limits, animal welfare, fruits and vegetables hygiene, and to issue digital traceability. Without standards, harvest is only hope; with standards, it’s currency. (Groundnuts and cocoa once cleared because buyers trusted the system.)

4) Turn co-ops into companies.
Write a Model Cooperative By-law with audited books, delivery contracts, penalties for free-riding, and brand ownership. Give co-ops the first right to lease state farm blocks if they meet compliance tests (quality, safety, on-time delivery).

5) Finance that learns from history.
Anchor today’s credit on delivery records, not paper collateral: expand an “Anchor-Buyer” pipeline that pays against verified deliveries (the best piece of The Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, launched Nov 17, 2015). Insist on transparent settlement within 7–10 days so farmers can plan seasons, not emergencies.

6) Industrialize near the farm.
Site processing (Oil chilling, deboning and packing for small ruminants, oil extraction, drying, milling) inside clusters, not 300 km away. That’s how the old rails worked—collection → conversion carriage only, now we add power and data.

7) Women’s markets, first-class citizens.
Route working capital through women’s associations and processors; history shows the fastest social return flows through them (the very markets that once could choke bad colonial policy).

8) Use AfCFTA like a local market with a passport.
Trading under AFCFTA began 1 Jan 2021; the paperwork is still maturing, but rules of origin and tariff lines already allow regional plays in goat meat, milk powder, dairy cultures, spices, and cassava flours. Build export compacts with neighbors now; don’t wait for perfect.

9) Fix the last meter, not just the last mile.
A national program to replace abattoir floors, drains, and water systems, certify butchers, and digitize carcass IDs will do more for goat and beef exports than speeches. That’s the difference between cargo and compliant cargo.

10) Teach, then measure.
Fund extension that measures deaths averted, milk quality improved, feed conversion gained. Tie budgets to these outcomes, not workshops held.

Telling the cruelty clearly Lagos bombarded (1851–52), Benin sacked (1897), Ijebu mown down at Imagbon (1892), Okeho punished and uprooted (1916) doesn’t dim the future; it sharpens it. It explains why our present must fix land, law, logistics, and standards and why agriculture remains our loudest, fairest reply. The soil did not keep count in ledgers; it kept count in replanted yam mounds, recast bronze tools, and, today, traceable goat meat and milk, cocoa, ginger, cassava—products that carry our own standards and our own signatures.