Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · British West Africa

British Nigeria - September 1, 1939

British Nigeria in 1939 is the largest thing Britain owns in Africa and one of the least examined. The Colony and Protectorate holds something like twenty million people - more than any other British African territory, more than Australia and New Zealand together - across a span running from the mangrove creeks of the Niger delta to the Sahel edge beyond Kano, and it is administered by a British staff so thin it would not fill a large school. That is the design. Governor Bernard Bourdillon governs through indirect rule, the system Frederick Lugard built out of the conquered Sokoto Caliphate and then extended, with mixed results, south into Yorubaland and the stateless Igbo east: the emirs, obas and warrant chiefs collect the tax, hold the courts and keep the order, and the Colonial Office supplies the resident, the railway and the final word. On 3 September the territory is at war, because Britain is at war. Nobody in Nigeria was asked. The strategic identity of the position is exactly that - an enormous, productive, populous country that is a resource in someone else's calculation rather than an actor in its own.

Starting position

The starting board is a colony, not a state, and the distinction governs everything. There is no foreign policy, no treasury independent of London, no army of its own - the military force is the Nigeria Regiment of the Royal West African Frontier Force, a professional formation of African soldiers under British officers, garrisoned at Kaduna, Enugu and Ibadan and answerable to the imperial command in Accra. The economy is export agriculture and minerals, moved on a rail spine from Lagos and Port Harcourt to Kaduna and Kano: palm oil and kernels from the east, groundnuts piled in the famous pyramids at Kano, cocoa from the west, and tin and columbite from the Jos plateau, the last of which matters far more than its tonnage suggests. Government revenue is thin, development spending thinner. Society is not one society: the Muslim north under its emirates, the Yoruba west with its towns, newspapers and lawyers, the Igbo east where colonial authority sits worst and where the women's tax protests of 1929 were put down with rifles. Lagos has a small, articulate nationalist press and a political class the administration regards as an irritant rather than a threat. The pieces are men, crops, ore, a railway, and a legitimacy that has never been tested by anything as demanding as a world war.

What turns the campaign

What Britain needs from Nigeria is extraction without disturbance, and the war raises the first while making the second harder. Soldiers come first: the Nigeria Regiment is expanded far past anything peacetime contemplated, and Nigerian infantry go to East Africa against the Italians, and then - in the 81st and 82nd West African Divisions - to the Arakan and the Kaladan valley in Burma, carrying their own supplies through jungle on a scale that surprises the planners who sent them. Materials come next: palm oil, groundnuts and rubber under bulk purchase at prices London sets, and Jos tin and columbite, which become critical the moment Japan takes Malaya and the empire's other tin supply disappears. Then the geography: Nigerian airfields at Kano and Maiduguri are legs of the trans-African ferry route that flies American aircraft from Takoradi across the continent to Egypt, so a colony with no front becomes a link in the desert war. All of it lands on the same thin administration and the same African population, in the form of conscript labour for the tin fields, requisition, price control and inflation. The campaign turns on how much can be taken before consent breaks - and on what the taking teaches. The men who come home from Burma, and the traders and clerks who spent the war being told this was a war for freedom, are the constituency that makes the post-war nationalist parties possible.

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