This historicity is good. However, it has to be entertained with some corrections at the margin. For example, the economic aspect of this history is sequentially faulty. The commentator states that the Europeans came to Nigeria first in search of our pepper, groundnuts and cocoa, and later they started taking slaves. This is not true! The correct sequence is that they first came for slaves beginning from the late 1400s. During the 400 years period of the slave trade, palm oil and other food stuffs (like yam and livestock) were also exported to Europe. For instance, according to David Northrup, in 1699, James Barbot bought 50,000 yams at Bonny which had been brought down from the hinterland, as well as livestock, palm wine, firewood, and water. In the 1770s, oil was bought from Old Calabar, and Antera Duke apparently noted two ships taking away oil in 1765-6. But these items were bought for provisioning, for food for the slaves on the middle passage, not for expansion of capitalist production. Therefore, the volume and magnitude was small compared to the volume of the slaves which were by then the major commodity. It was after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 due to the Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s that they reallocated their capital to agricultural produce, such as palm oil, used in factories mainly for lubrication purposes. It was the collapse of the palm oil trade in the 1860s as a result of the discovery of mineral oil that led to the rise of palm kernel, cocoa, rubber and groundnuts trade. Cocoa, for instance, was not a native of Africa, but of the lowland tropical forest of the upper Amazon basin of southern America. It came to Nigeria in 1874 and to Ghana in 1879 via Fernando Po. My conclusion is that in order to put the international economic history of Nigeria in proper perspective, it must commence with slave trade and graduate to the exports of agricultural and forest products and mineral resources: not the other way round as presented in the audio-visual commentary.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 17:43:35 +0000
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