4 - The Hinterland Phase II: Courts and Constables, 1900–1932

Summary

If the claim by the government of the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria under Sir Ralph Moor that the need to strike a supposedly final blow against the slave trade provided the excuse for the military conquest of the hinterland, the campaign against that evil was once again downgraded as soon as the conquest was achieved, or rather as soon as the government felt that it had got a firm foothold in what before 1902 had been to it largely terra incognita. It can be said that much as the campaign remained on the books, it took the form mainly of proceedings in the courts under the provisions of the Slave Dealing Proclamation of 1901 against those actually caught going against that law. Rarely was any proactive or pre-emptive step taken to hunt down slave traders, or even to understand what happened in that business, how it happened, when it happened, or through whom it happened, apart from the traditionally demonized Aro or Inokun. It has to be said that people were punished not so much for trading in slaves but for being found out, that is, for breaking what Nigerians call the “Eleventh Commandment,” which is said to enjoin: “Thou Shalt Not Allow Thyself To Be Found Out.” The result was that the campaign was for the most part haphazard and for many decades ineffective. In the end it can be argued that if the slave trade died eventually, it died, as has already been suggested, from the gradual erosion of the base of the traditional culture and economy by the pax Britannicathrough the working of its new economic, administrative, social, religious, and cultural systems.

On 7 July 1901, Moor had produced a disquisition on slavery in the protectorate that should have served his successors as a guide in the matter of prosecuting the campaign against the evil traffic. In that document he had, among other things, more or less correctly identified the methods by which slaves were traditionally recruited in the Bight of Biafra and its hinterland.