THE BRITISH IN NORTHERN NIGERIA.
By Robert Heussler '46. London:Oxford University Press, 1968. 210 pp.$5.95.
As a genre, administrative history is characterized by its soporific effect on all except a select few devotees for whom the message is more important than the medium. Robert Heussler's book, however, focusing on the history of British administration in Northern Nigeria, is commendable precisely because it is so eminently readable - a worthy addition to the expanding literature of Africa during the colonial period.
The British in Northern Nigeria deals primarily with the reality behind the term "indirect rule" (or as Heussler prefers, "Anglo- African government"), with the way the British ruled Africans in actual fact and not in the realm of colonial administrative theory. Drawing on a wide range of official source materials, family letters, diaries, and numerous interviews with colonial officials who lived and ruled in Northern Nigeria during the period of British control, Heussler develops and documents an interesting, if not totally unexpected, thesis. Indirect rule, official theoretical intentions notwithstanding, was in practice determined and shaped by the character and personalities of the men-on-the-spot and the local situations in which these officials found themselves. Given a high degree of discretion, practically any officer with a plan which did not deviate too far beyond the bounds set by the prevailing dictum — to keep the costs of administration down and to maintain order in the area—stood a good chance of translating his idea into action. It was only the administrator refusing to play the game according to the understood rules, either because he dared to criticize a superior in an official document or had become known as a "friend of the peasants," who was ignominiously crushed, transferred to some far-flung dustbin of the Empire where he would be sure to atone for his transgression. In this way, according to Heussler, with the odd misfit neutralized, British officials in Northern Nigeria, together with the African "native authorities" with whom they dealt and through whom orders were issued to the general public, "gave that large heavily populated and heterogenous country a blend of order and healthy forward movement that compares favorably with any it had known before."
Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth, Mr. Spitzer, who specializes inAfrican history is taking a group of students for spring term study in Sierra Leone.
