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Nigeria Abolition of the Slave Trade
In 1807 the Houses of Parliament in London enacted
legislation prohibiting British subjects from
participating in
the slave trade. Indirectly, this legislation was one of
the
reasons for the collapse of Oyo. Britain withdrew from the
slave
trade while it was the major transporter of slaves to the
Americas. Furthermore, the French had been knocked out of
the
trade during the French Revolution beginning in 1789 and
by the
Napoleonic wars of the first fifteen years of the
nineteenth
century. Between them, the French and the British had
purchased a
majority of the slaves sold from the ports of Oyo. The
commercial
uncertainty that followed the disappearance of the major
purchasers of slaves unsettled the economy of Oyo.
Ironically,
the political troubles in Oyo came to a head after 1817,
when the
transatlantic market for slaves once again boomed. Rather
than
supplying slaves from other areas, however, Oyo itself
became the
source of slaves.
British legislation forbade ships under British
registry to
engage in the slave trade, but the restriction was applied
generally to all flags and was intended to shut down all
traffic
in slaves coming out of West African ports. Other
countries more
or less hesitantly followed the British lead. The United
States,
for example, also prohibited the slave trade in 1807
(Denmark
actually was the first country to declare the trade
illegal in
1792). Attitudes changed slowly, however, and not all
countries
cooperated in controlling the activity of their merchant
ships.
American ships, for instance, were notorious for evading
the
prohibition and going unpunished under United States law.
It
should be noted, moreover, that the abolition movement
concentrated on the transatlantic trade for more than five
decades before eventually becoming a full-fledged attack
on slave
trading within Africa itself.
The Royal Navy maintained a prevention squadron to
blockade
the coast, and a permanent station was established at the
Spanish
colony of Fernando Po, off the Nigerian coast, with
responsibility for patrolling the West African coast. For
several
decades, as much as one-sixth of all British warships were
assigned to this mission, and a squadron was maintained at
Fernando Po from 1827 until 1844. Slaves rescued at sea
were
usually taken to Sierra Leone, where they were released.
British
naval crews were permitted to divide prize money from the
sale of
captured slave ships. Apprehended slave runners were tried
by
naval courts and were liable to capital punishment if
found
guilty.
Still, a lively slave trade to the Americas continued
into
the 1860s. The demands of Cuba and Brazil were met by a
flood of
captives taken in wars among the Yoruba and shipped from
Lagos,
while the Aro continued to supply the delta ports with
slave
exports through the 1830s. Despite the British blockade,
almost 1
million slaves were exported from Nigeria in the
nineteenth
century. The risk involved in running the British blockade
obviously made profits all the greater on delivery.
The campaign to eradicate the slave trade and
substitute for
it trade in other commodities increasingly resulted in
British
intervention in the internal affairs of the Nigerian
region
during the nineteenth century and ultimately led to the
decision
to assume jurisdiction over the coastal area. Suppression
of the
slave trade and issues related to slavery remained at the
forefront of British dealings with local states and
societies for
the rest of the nineteenth century and even into the
twentieth
century.
Lagos, where the British concentrated activities after
1851,
had been founded as a colony of Benin in about 1700. A
long
dynastic struggle, which became entwined with the struggle
against the slave trade, resulted in the overthrow of the
reigning oba and the renunciation of a treaty with
Britain
to curtail the slave trade. Britain was determined to halt
the
traffic in slaves fed by the Yoruba wars, and responded to
this
frustration by annexing the port of Lagos in 1861.
Thereafter,
Britain gradually extended its control along the coast.
British
intervention became more insistent in the 1870s and 1880s
as a
result of pressure from missionaries and liberated slaves
returning from Sierra Leone. There was also the necessity
of
protecting commerce disrupted by the fighting. The method
of
dealing with these problems was to dictate treaties that
inevitably led to further annexations.
Data as of June 1991
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