The Birth Of Nigeria

The Birth of Nigerian Nationalism in the 1920s

By the early 1920s, almost a decade after Frederick Lugard amalgamated the Northern and Southern regions into a single entity, and three decades since British journalist Flora Shaw suggested the name "Nigeria", not many within the geographical boundaries of the colony saw or referred to themselves as "Nigerian" at all. The few European-educater natives of the time were just as reluctant to accept the political boundaries marked by British as the natives in some of the regions were unable to envision a new nation outside the social and political structures they knew before the arrival of the British.

The work of foremost nationalists like Herbert Macaulay, whose journalism and social awareness campaigns in Lagos contributed immensely to the promulgation of the Clifford Construction in 1922, centred mainly on a general antagonism to colonial rule and the consequent treatment of natives as inferior to their British counterparts. Colonial rule was viewed as racist; condemning even the most qualified natives to low-level or menial jobs to the benefit of the European. Such deep-seated dissatisfaction —shared by several members of an exponentially growing class of European and American-educated Nigerias—led to the formation of political unions and pressure groups. While some of these groups sought to improve representation in governance. and some were formed to protect and improve the lot of workers, others were just simply opposed to British rule.

The fact that all the nationalist movements and anti-colonial activists were united in pressuring the colonial administration into becoming more responsive to the interest of Nigeriand is, by far, more responsible for the growth of Nigerian nationalism than any shared notion of patriotism to Nigeria as a nation. Besides, hardly any of the nationalist movements that emerged between the 1920s and 1960, when Nigeria finally attained self-rule, were truly pan-Nigerian in scope; most were distinctly regional and were formed along ethnic lines. The first attempt a pan-Nugerian movement came with the establishment in 1934 of lagos Youth Movement which challenged the NNDP's dominance of the local polity in Lagos.