Chapter+20+tribal+vs.+colonial+governments

due date** || **Facilitator** ||   //__ Tribal Government- Igbo Tribe__//
 * **Chapter** || **book page #s** || **Topic** || **Discussion
 * 20 ||  || tribal vs colonial governments ||   || Abhishek ||

The largest tribal political group is the village group, which is normally made up of 5,000 people. The people in this group share a common diety, language, meeting place, and cults. Before the British came, a council of rich and wealthy men would make decisions for the village. It came to resemble a centralized government with a king and a council. Land is owned by kinship groups, but it is still available to individuals for farming and buildiing. The Igbo also have a high literacy rate, which helped them assimilate into modern Nigeria after it gained independence. It is important to know that Igbo women are influential in politics and in the economy.



Following the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon, Britain had emerged as the main power in West Africa. To block other nations and to expand their market, the British decided to conquer the coastal chiefs of Nigeria. The British, like other newcomers to the slave trade, found they could compete with the Dutch in West Africa only by forming national trading companies. The first company was the Company of the Royal Adventurers, chartered in 1660 and succeeded in 1672 by the Royal African Company. Only a company with a monopoly on the economy could afford to build and maintain the forts that held stocks and goods. The slave trade in Nigeria also led to warfare between the tribes, which weakened their resistance to the British. Nigeria eventually became a British proctectorate and many British products and manufactures were intoduced to Nigeria. This made the Nigerians dependent on the British for a long time. The British pushed all of the Nigerian tribes into one community. A British man would watch over each tribe and make sure they were cooperating with the new policies. Administratively Nigeria remained divided into the northern and southern provinces and Lagos colony. Western education and the development of a modern economy proceeded more rapidly in the south than in the north, with consequences felt in Nigeria's political life ever since. They also forced the Nigerians to adopt European customs, such as Christianity. In this way, the British tore apart the fabric that held the Igbo tribe together: democracy, allegiance to gods, and clan identity,

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Today, relations between Britain and Nigeria are stable and friendly.

[|British in Nigeria] [|Igbo Gov before British] [|Igbo Government and Social Life]