Lifestyle
PHOTOS: HOW NIGERIA WAS SOLD TO THE BRITISH FOR £865,000 IN 1899

This is not just the story of colonial conquest. It is the story of the first OIL WAR, a war not fought over petroleum, but over palm oil, in the territories that would later become Nigeria.
Before the first drop of crude was ever drilled in Oloibiri, there was already a fierce battle for control over a different kind of oil: the red gold of the tropics.
In the 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution thundered across Britain and Europe, the demand for lubricants to keep machines running was insatiable. And at the heart of that demand was palm oil, a sticky red substance extracted from the fruit of a native African tree. This oil was used to grease machines, produce candles, soaps, etc.
The Niger Delta, then part of the region Europeans called the “Oil Rivers,” was the world’s richest source of this commodity. For centuries, the same Delta had served as a major slave-exporting hub, but by the 1870s, as abolition gained ground, slaves were replaced by palm oil as the primary export. The coast once known for bondage was now valued for commerce. African traders, many of them former slaves or descendants of returnees, became immensely wealthy. One of the most famous among them was King Jaja of Opobo, a self-made merchant-king who built a thriving trade empire on the strength of palm oil and personal diplomacy. These African merchants understood global trade and negotiated directly with European companies.
But African prosperity was never allowed to grow unchecked for long. By the late 1800s, European commercial rivalry was boiling over into political intrigue. British, French, and German merchants vied for dominance in the West African market. In 1879, a Cornishman named George Taubman Goldie began consolidating several British trading firms into a single entity. He formed the United African Company (UAC). With this company, Goldie initially envisioned dominating the palm oil trade on the Niger River. After that, he envisioned something more than trade, he wanted sovereignty.
Through aggressive expansion, Goldie’s company secured treaties with local chiefs along the Niger and Benue Rivers, gaining de facto control of vast inland territories. By 1884, Goldie’s company operated about 30 trading posts and used its economic leverage to argue at the Berlin Conference (the infamous 1884–85 summit where European powers divided Africa among themselves) that Britain should be awarded exclusive rights to the Niger Basin.
The British won the argument. The next year, in 1886, Goldie’s company received a Royal Charter from the British Crown, becoming the Royal Niger Company (RNC), a private corporation with governmental powers, similar to the old British East India Company. It could make treaties, raise its own military force, collect taxes, administer justice, and govern the vast areas along the Niger and Benue Rivers.
In effect, Nigeria was not yet a British colony, it was a private corporate colony ruled by a for-profit company headquartered in London.
To the local chiefs, the new company agents spoke of free trade and mutual prosperity. But behind these assurances were binding English contracts designed to establish monopolies, giving the company exclusive trading rights and ceding sovereignty to the British Crown. This meant the chiefs could only sell palm oil to the Royal Niger Company. Any attempt to export independently was treated as economic rebellion. Many chiefs, including King Jaja of Opobo, resisted.
King Jaja of Opobo was one such rebel. Despite his previous cooperation with the British, he refused to be dictated to. When he began exporting palm oil directly to Liverpool merchants, he was arrested in 1887, exiled to the West Indies, and never saw his kingdom again. He died in 1891 on his way home, allegedly poisoned with a cup of tea.
By the 1890s, resistance was rising. In the kingdom of Nembe, in today’s Bayelsa State, a new monarch, King Koko Mingi VIII, ascended the throne in 1889. Koko was an educated Christian convert and former schoolteacher. But he soon found himself at odds with the Royal Niger Company’s chokehold on trade. Like Jaja before him, he tried to bypass the company’s monopoly by seeking commercial ties with the Germans in Kamerun. But the company retaliated by blockading his kingdom from its traditional markets.
Tired of negotiations and betrayal, King Koko struck back. On 29 January 1895, before dawn, he led over 1,000 warriors in a surprise attack on the Royal Niger Company’s heavily guarded headquarters at Akassa. In what became known as the Brass Raid, Koko’s forces captured the station, seized arms and ammunition, including a Maxim machine gun, and took 60 European hostages. Koko demanded that the British lift their monopoly and allow Nembe to trade freely.
The British government refused to negotiate. In response, King Koko executed about forty of the hostages, an act the British termed cannibalism, a fabrication meant to justify vengeance.
On 20 February 1895, the Royal Navy retaliated under Admiral Frederick Bedford, launching a brutal punitive expedition. They bombarded Nembe town (Brass) and burned it to the ground. Hundreds were killed. Survivors suffered famine and diseases such as smallpox.
King Koko went into hiding. The town of Brass was fined £500, a fortune at the time, and forced to surrender weapons and surviving hostages.
In 1898, King Koko, declared an outlaw and unable to rally sufficient support for further resistance, died by suicide in exile. Around the same time, Oba Ovonramwen of Benin was also deposed following the Benin Punitive Expedition in 1897, signalling the final collapse of powerful indigenous resistance in southern Nigeria.
Back in London, the public outcry over the Brass Massacre and the RNC’s excesses led to parliamentary pressure. The British Parliament opened an inquiry, but rather than punish the Royal Niger Company, the Crown did something far more significant, it decided that a private corporation could no longer be trusted with the government of a people.
In 1899, the British revoked the Royal Charter of the Royal Niger Company. But it did not come for free.
The British bought out the company’s rights, territories, and infrastructure for the sum of £865,000, the equivalent of £108 million today. That was the price Britain paid to acquire the territory that would become Nigeria.
It was not a conquest in the conventional sense, it was a transaction. Nigeria was, quite literally, sold.
And who sold it?
The man at the centre of the deal was Sir George Taubman Goldie, the imperialist who had envisioned and built the corporate company that took over Nigeria’s territories. In many ways, he was Nigeria’s unofficial founder, though he never ruled the colony formally. He sold Nigeria to the British Crown in 1899 for £865,000, and for his services to empire, he was later knighted.
On 1 January 1900, the Southern and Northern Protectorates were formally declared under British rule.
The company was gone. But its legacy of economic exploitation, monopolistic control, and indirect rule would persist.
The company itself didn’t die. It rebranded and evolved. The Royal Niger Company merged into what we know today as Unilever, a multinational that still trades in Africa.
This is not just a footnote in colonial history. It is the story of how an entire country people, kingdoms, resources, rivers, was commodified, negotiated, and sold. It reminds us that empire was not only built with gunboats, but also with contracts, shares, and profits.
Nigeria, long before independence, had already been bought and sold.
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The Prestigious Awzaw Title Among the Igbos — As Documented by George T. Basden (1921)

The Awzaw (Ozo) title, one of the highest and most sacred honours among the Igbo, was traditionally divided into two stages: Awzaw-Unaw (conferred first by one’s extended family or “house”) and Nukwu Awzaw (full investiture recognized across the town). It was the most expensive of all titles, with total costs often exceeding £120—a significant sum in those days. Roughly two-thirds of the cost had to be paid in cash, and the rest in livestock, spirits, and other ceremonial items.
Initial payments were made to members of the candidate’s kindred (umunna), followed by larger sums to the Awzaw Chiefs of the local quarter, and then to the rest of the town’s titleholders. The festivities included traditional music, dancers, and ritual displays. A horse—regardless of its condition—had to be slaughtered by the aspirant himself as a symbolic act, earning him the honorary title Otibwu-Anyinya (“he who has killed a horse”), a feat made rare and prestigious by the scarcity of horses due to the tsetse fly.
Following the rite, the new chief entered a strict period of seclusion lasting two months. He was forbidden from staying in his own compound or seeing anyone outside his immediate family. A temporary shelter was built for him, and he was to be covered in white chalk throughout. He also had to remain with only his first wife during this period.
When he finally emerged, the chief paraded through town accompanied by the ogenne, a long, deep-toned iron bell used to announce his presence. He would publicly embrace his first wife and eldest son in a symbolic gesture of reentry into society.
The regalia of an Awzaw Chief included a spear with a twisted iron crown, red camwood-stained ankle cords, an ivory horn, and a special stool reserved for titleholders. Benefits were considerable: freedom from all manual labor, immunity from physical assault by other natives, judicial authority, and rights over domestic and communal disputes. Depending on his ritual sacrifice, he was saluted either as Obwu-Efi (“cow killer”) or Otibwu-Anyinya (“horse killer”). He also received a share of all entrance and administrative fees paid into the order’s treasury.
Note: The famous Igbo Ukwu altar stand reflects the sacred aesthetics and artistic heritage surrounding such elite traditions. (Source: Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art).
Source Kehinde Thompson
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1925 – When Royalty Met Royalty: The Prince of Wales in Kano (PHOTOS)

This rare photograph captures a historic moment in 1925, when Edward, the Prince of Wales—the future King Edward VIII—visited Kano during his royal tour of British colonies in West Africa. In this scene, he is seen meeting the Emir of Kano, one of the most prominent traditional rulers in Northern Nigeria at the time.
The Prince’s visit to Kano was more than ceremonial; it was a calculated gesture of diplomacy, underscoring the British Crown’s ties to its colonial territories and the significance of Northern Nigeria within the British Empire. Kano, known for its centuries-old Islamic emirate, was a hub of commerce, scholarship, and governance in the region.
The meeting symbolized the colonial policy of indirect rule, in which British administrators governed through powerful local monarchs like the Emir. It also served to reinforce British influence by publicly acknowledging and respecting indigenous leadership structures.
Edward would later ascend the throne in 1936 as King Edward VIII, but his reign lasted less than a year. He famously abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée—a decision that shocked Britain and led to a constitutional crisis. After his abdication, his brother became King George VI, father of Queen Elizabeth II. Edward was subsequently titled Duke of Windsor and lived much of his life in exile.
This photograph, therefore, is not just a snapshot of colonial-era diplomacy—it also foreshadows the complex legacy of a British monarch whose personal choices changed the course of royal history, all while standing beside a Nigerian ruler whose authority remained rooted in centuries-old tradition.
Source Jaafar Jaafar
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A Royal Ride Through Nigeria: The Prince of Wales’ 1925 Visit (PHOTOS)

A Royal Ride Through Nigeria: The Prince of Wales’ 1925 Visit
In preparation for the historic 1925 visit of the Prince of Wales—the future King Edward VIII—to Nigeria, a specially commissioned vehicle was shipped ahead to serve the royal tour. The car, a custom-built 25–30 horsepower Crossley touring model, reflected the grandeur of the occasion.
Painted in striking austral red and upholstered with grey antique leather, the seven-seater vehicle was fitted with refined features of the era, including Moonbeam headlamps, an Auster rear screen, a windscreen wiper, an eight-day clock, and two spare wheels—all tailored for both function and style on colonial roads.
To mark its royal purpose, the car bore the Prince of Wales’ feathers in metal on both the front and rear. A specially mounted metal flag mast on the radiator cap flew the Royal Arms, signifying the official presence of the British Crown.
The Prince’s tour of Nigeria formed part of a broader Commonwealth itinerary, reinforcing the British monarchy’s presence in its West African colonies. This car not only transported a royal figure—it carried a symbol of imperial authority across a land rich in tradition, leadership, and cultural heritage.
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