The Ahmadiyya in the Gold Coast by John H. Hanson

Author:John H. Hanson [Hanson, John H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253029331
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

Muslims in Early Twentieth-Century Lagos

Early twentieth-century Lagos was the administrative and economic center of southern Nigeria, a British colonial territory acquired through treaty making and military conquest during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Southern Nigeria’s palm oil, which was particularly suited to industrial usage in Europe, enticed British imperial expansion in two thrusts. From Lagos British colonial armies fought a series of wars to expand its control over the palm oil groves of southwestern Nigeria. From the Niger River basin in southeastern Nigeria, the Royal Niger Company established control of the river before handing its new possessions to the British government. Lagos grew rapidly as a capital of both regions, once combined under British colonial rule, and British officials relied on Africans with English-language education to staff the lower levels of their growing bureaucratic apparatus. This employment of Africans came, however, as overt and pervasive racial discrimination increased in the late nineteenth century, a development that stimulated assertions of African cultural nationalism. Pan-Africanism was one expression among many in this intellectual efflorescence as Africans drew on diverse cultural heritages to contest the British colonial division between black and white.32 African and Atlantic ideas mingled at Lagos, as they had for decades, but with new intensity as voluntary associations formed to engage with others and promote common interests.33

The Muslim communities of Lagos grew in size and diversity in this era. Muslims reportedly constituted less than a thousand residents in the early 1860s, but by the 1891 colonial census, more than fourteen thousand Muslims resided at Lagos, nearly 45 percent of the population at the time; a decade later Muslims passed the 50 percent threshold, with more than twenty-two thousand residents at Lagos in 1901.34 This half century of Muslim expansion arose from migrations and conversions alike. The immigrants included the continuing flow of African Muslims from Freetown and Brazil.35 Other immigrants were Yoruba-speaking Muslims from the interior: the growth of Islam in many Yoruba states mirrored the upward trend at Lagos in this era.36 This expansion was in part the influence of itinerant Yoruba Muslims from Ilorin, a Muslim state in the hinterland of Lagos and regional center of Muslim scholarship.37 Several Yoruba political leaders at Lagos and in the hinterland Yoruba states became Muslims, encouraging the conversion to Islam of their subjects. Muslim scholars from the Arab world began to visit Lagos in the early twentieth century due to the rising Muslim presence. These developments produced a diverse Muslim community, not only in terms of ethnic heritage but also in terms of their responses to political and religious issues. Muslims began to engage in internal debates, initially over political responses to a colonial water rate hike in 1908 and then after 1915 over control of the central mosque, a dispute that only was resolved in 1947.38

Christians educated in mission schools had an advantage over Muslims in gaining employment in Lagos’s expanding colonial bureaucracy. The British administration, which declared English the official language in the colony in 1882,

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