INTRODUCTION
In 1935, Oba Akenzua II, the King of Benin and Sole Native Authority in charge of Benin Division under the colonial government of Nigeria, gave his consent to the Benin Forest Scheme, a system of intense forest management piloted by the forest department in the Benin Division. In doing so, he agreed to the reservation of 1,000 square miles of land in the Division, even though a substantial part of the division was already under reservation. By the end of 1937, 2,631 square miles (64 per cent of the Benin Division) were reserved, by far the highest percentage of reserved land in southern Nigeria.Footnote 1 How did such large-scale reservation, which has had significant consequences for the landscape and the people of Edo State to this day, come about? Was reservation enforced by the colonial government, or did Oba Akenzua II, and before him his father, Oba Eweka II, have some choice in the matter? If so, why did they agree to reservation with seeming ‘alacrity’?Footnote 2
Forest reservation constituted an integral part of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and has received much scholarly attention in recent decades. One body of work has highlighted the importance of ideas about environmental conservation and ‘wilderness’ among colonial administrators in Africa,Footnote 3 and has shown how environmental crisis narratives about deforestation played a key role in justifying colonial interventionism.Footnote 4 At the same time, forest reservation has been studied as a key arena of colonial territorialisation, state-making, and resource management.Footnote 5 Forest reservation generally took place under ‘scientific forestry’, a system of forest management originally conceived in eighteenth-century Germany and France, then developed in colonial India, and subsequently adopted in other British, French, and German colonies.Footnote 6 Forest reservation presented one of the most keenly felt experiences of colonial regimes in Africa and Asia and caused many local protests. Forest reserves have therefore also been studied as key sites of resistance against colonial governments, in particular in the South Asian context.Footnote 7
Somewhat less attention has so far been paid to the actual processes of reserve creation, namely the negotiations between colonial officers and local authorities. Yet these negotiations often determined the success of colonial reservation attempts, and their effects on local landscapes and people. Moreover, studying these processes provides particular insights into the nature of colonial rule, and contributes to current debates about the extent of colonial power, local cooperation in colonial rule, and colonial interest politics. For example, Richard Grove's study of early attempts at forest reservation in Lagos Colony emphasised the relative weakness of the forest department in overcoming local rulers' resistance to forest reservation,Footnote 8 while Michael Tuck has shown how local rulers were actively involved in forest demarcation processes in Uganda.Footnote 9 This paper seeks to provide an examination of the politics of forest reservation in the Benin Division. Reservation has had a major impact on the landscape of today's Edo State, and continues to shape current land-use patterns and land politicsFootnote 10 – it is therefore important to understand how such large-scale reservation came about in the first place. At the same time, by closely examining the role of the Benin Obas in the reservation process, the paper explores the nature of indirect rule in the Benin Division, and the extent and limits of the Obas' powers in the colonial period.
On the one hand, it looks at the various strategies that the colonial forest department employed in order to persuade the Oba of Benin – Eweka II from 1914 to 1933, Akenzua II from 1933 – to agree to forest reservation, and to ensure that both Obas had little choice, but also strong incentives, to agree to reservation. The latter included the promise to remove unpopular forestry restrictions outside reserves, and to put forest reserves under Native Administration. With these strategies, the colonial government exploited the relative political weakness of the Obas, who in turn used colonial support to strengthen their own authority: a pattern of collaboration that emerged throughout colonial Africa.Footnote 11 Moreover, in the course of reservation negotiations, colonial officers repeatedly used quite disingenuous methods – repeated delays, hidden loopholes, unfulfilled promises – which considerably helped to advance their aims. In this respect, forest reservation provides important insights into the ways in which the colonial state negotiated with local rulers.
On the other hand, the paper explores the role that the Obas themselves played in forest reservation, and argues that both had their own, strategic reasons for supporting reservation. It promised better access to timber revenues and also offered new ways of controlling land. Repeated redrawing of administrative borders created competing claims over land between Benin and other groups. At the same time, the spread of cash crops brought with it individual forms of land use competing with older, communal forms of ownership and threatening the Oba's control over land. In this context, we argue that reservation, itself a radical departure in land management practices, presented to both Obas a way to assert their authority over land; to become, much more literally than before, ‘the owner of the land’. The paper traces how these two factors – colonial strategies and the Obas' own strategic interests – combined to result in such large-scale reservation by 1935. It considers the relative importance of each of these, in order to establish to what extent the Obas were forced to give their consent to forest reservation and to what extent they willingly cooperated. In this respect, the paper highlights the continuities but also the changes in Eweka II's and Akenzua II's interaction with the colonial government.
We then also examine the wider implications of the 1935 Benin Forest Scheme and its immediate aftermath. Large-scale forest reservation caused much local protest, and was increasingly contested by cash-crop producers and the agriculture department. Soon after the vast extension of reservation in 1935, the first de-reservation was already beginning. In the Benin Division, reserve land played a key role not just for the Oba's land strategies but also for local contestations over land, between farmers and forest officers, between local people and chiefs, and between the forest and the agriculture departments. While much has been written about colonial land politics in Africa, the contentious nature of ‘customary land tenure’, and increasing land conflicts,Footnote 12 the key role that forest reservation played in these processes has so far not been appreciated enough.
The paper begins with a brief introduction to forest reservation in the early twentieth century, before looking in more detail at reservation under Oba Eweka II and Oba Akenzua II respectively, and the aftermath of Akenzua's agreement to the Benin Forest Scheme in 1935. It ends by discussing the overall picture of colonial politics that emerges from this.
THE FOREST DEPARTMENT AND FOREST RESERVATION BEFORE THE RESTORATION OF THE MONARCHY, 1897–1914
By the late 1890s, the Benin kingdom was one of the last parts of today's southern Nigeria not under British control. Once a significant regional power, with its capital a flourishing city, at the end of the nineteenth century the Benin kingdom had been in decline for many decades.Footnote 13 Warfare and migration had depopulated the area, resulting in the growth of comparatively large forest tracts.Footnote 14 Closely guarded by Oba Ovoramwen and difficult to access, rumours were rife about its fabled, rich rubber and mahogany forests, which were the motivation for its eventual invasion and conquest by British forces in 1897.Footnote 15 The Benin kingdom was declared part of the Niger Coast Protectorate, and Oba Ovoramwen and a number of his followers were sent into exile in Calabar. In his stead, the then Commissioner Ralph Moor created a new Native Council, including many chiefs of previously little authority.
As soon as Benin City had been captured and the kingdom subjugated, European logging firms and rubber tappers from the Lagos colony began moving into the Benin area.Footnote 16 This was the time of the rubber boom of the late nineteenth century, and tropical mahogany, too, was in demand. High Commissioner Moor was eager to develop the economic potential of the Niger Coast Protectorate and to create revenue for the colonial government. At the same time, aware of the destruction of much of the rubber forests in the Lagos colony, he was anxious to prevent a similar over-exploitation of both rubber and timber in the Protectorate.Footnote 17 Moor initiated the setting up of a forest department in 1899.Footnote 18 In 1903, H. N. Thompson was appointed as Director of Forestry. With twelve years of experience in Burma, where the most developed form of scientific forestry was practised in the British empire, he was to set up a similar management system in southern Nigeria.Footnote 19
His first task was the creation of forest reserves. Scientific forestry's main tools were so-called ‘working plans’ coordinating logging activities and scientific regeneration methods. The drawing up of such working plans required complete knowledge of and control over the forest estate, which made the creation of forest reserves essential. In order to justify large-scale reservation, colonial foresters also claimed that reservation was the only meaningful way to conserve forests and protect them from destruction through shifting cultivation. Like many other foresters in colonial Africa and Asia,Footnote 20 Thompson and his colleagues repeatedly drew attention to the ‘thousands of square miles of forest-covered land … denuded annually’.Footnote 21 They stressed the urgent need for reservation:
the rapid extension of reserves is the only way in which this menace can be held in check, and in this case it is a race between the conservative activities of the Forest Department and the destructive activities of the shifting cultivator.Footnote 22
However, urgent as they were deemed to be for forest protection and management, the creation of reserves presented certain challenges to the forest department. In theory, the former Benin kingdom had conquered-territory status, which meant that the British Crown had ultimate control over its land.Footnote 23 But, with the exception of crown land assigned for urban development projects,Footnote 24 in practice the colonial government did not insist on this control and did not use it as the legal basis for reservation.Footnote 25 In contrast to northern Nigeria, in southern Nigeria the overall policy was to respect and uphold ‘customary’ land tenure,Footnote 26 and local authorities were recognised as the ‘owners of the land’. Their consent was therefore necessary for the creation of reserves. It was important to the colonial government to follow such procedures so that reservation would not appear as wholesale land expropriation. This was partly to avoid criticism at home,Footnote 27 but mostly to prevent popular protest and uprisings within the Protectorate.
The need for a veneer of legality and local consent made reservation rather slow to begin with and, by 1907, only a provisional game reserve, the Gilli-Gilli Game Reserve, had been created in the whole of the then Central Province. After several unsuccessful attempts, it was the Forest Ordinance of 1908 that provided the necessary legal framework for forest reservation. This made provisions that local communities had to be notified and their consent sought before any land was declared a reserve, and that the rights and privileges of the communities over their lands and forests had to be respected.Footnote 28 These rights and privileges referred to hunting and fishing rights only, not farming. On the whole, reserves were to be under the control of the government, or the forest department, but managed on behalf of local communities, who were still recognised as the official ‘owners’.
Under the 1908 Ordinance, the first proper forest reserves were created in the Central Province, all within the Benin District that was, from 1914, the Benin Division: Ologbo reserve (77·7 sq. miles) in 1911, Okomu Reserve (300 sq. miles), and Jamieson (later Sapoba) Reserve (196 sq. miles) in 1912. These were among the areas identified by Thompson in early reconnaissance trips as suitable for reservation because they contained valuable forest tracts.Footnote 29 However, there is otherwise little documentation about the circumstances of the creation of these early reserves. In the absence of the Oba, the ‘owners of the land’ with whom agreements were reached were most likely the paramount chiefs in charge of the territory in which the reserve was proposed. These paramount chiefs may have been motivated to agree to reservation because they were entitled to royalties accruing from timber felled in areas under their charge: timber royalties presented a lucrative source of income to paramount chiefs.Footnote 30
Reservation in the Benin District before 1914. There are no early maps of forest reservation; all three maps here are adapted from a map of Benin Province drawn and reproduced by the Nigerian Surveys Department in 1933, corrected in December 1934 (NNAI, BP 999). Because this is a later map, the boundaries here are those of the Benin Division, but they correspond with those of the Benin District before 1914.
There is also no evidence of what local people thought of forest reserves at this time, but they were quite alien to indigenous ideas about forests and land-management practices.Footnote 31 On the one hand, as in other parts of West Africa, there were strong spiritual associations with different environments – sharp distinctions were made between villages – places where people lived that were spiritually marked by the planting of an ikhimwin (Newbouldia laevis) foundation tree (inyator) – and the bush (oha) or forest (egbo) outside villages. It was, for example, a taboo for a couple to have sex in the bush, which would pollute the land.Footnote 32 Forests, especially high forests far away from villages, were believed to be inhabited by various powerful spirit beings (erinmwin egbo and Oso) and dwarfish spirits (eseeku), while the Iroko trees were the coven of witches (azen). It was necessary to fortify oneself spiritually before venturing into the forest – hence only powerful hunters, priests, or native doctors entered. The forest was also the abode of powerful ancestors who turned themselves into water bodies (streams, rivers, and lakes) and hills or depressions, places that became shrines with sacred groves near villages. During Eken (the fifth day of the week) no one visited the forest because that day was reserved for the spiritual beings to use the forest, and violation could visit disaster on the person or community.Footnote 33 In addition to these beliefs, the forest was also protected by the Oba and was under the administration of the Asuen title-holder. He controlled the exploitation of the forest, particularly liaising with strangers who sought to utilise some of its resources.
On the other hand, Edo farming practices presented a symbiosis of forest and farm that was quite the opposite of the division that European foresters tried to create through forest reservation. People had a few kitchen farms close to villages but yam farms were further away, in the higher forest. Farmers chose a suitable farm area by looking at the vegetation and smelling and tasting the soil. Men then cut the bush but left large trees that were difficult to cut, small trees that could be used as yam poles, and the highly useful oil palms. Iroko could only be cut by the Owina ne Igbesamwan, the woodworkers guild working for the Oba.Footnote 34 Farms were then burnt and planted with yam by men, and plantain, maize, okra, cocoyam, melon, beans, pumpkin, and pepper in between by women. After one or two years of farming, farms were abandoned, and a new farm cleared elsewhere, while old farms were left to lie fallow. The result was a widespread mosaic of many different kinds of forests of different ages, with different social functions and meanings. Importantly, this kind of shifting cultivation fostered the growth of many of the timber species that colonial loggers and foresters were interested in. Mahogany (Khaya ivorensis), Iroko (Milicia excelsa), Sapele wood (Entandrophragma cylindrica), and many others are light-demanding in their early stages and grow particularly well on abandoned farmland.Footnote 35 Thus it was not simply that foresters' narratives about the destructive effects of shifting cultivation were misleading; forest reservation also disrupted the very conditions that had produced the timber trees of the Benin kingdom in the first place.
Overall, the creation of forests as separate spaces inaccessible to local people presented a radical departure from previous, more fluid and organic forms of land management, which thrived on the interaction between farm and forest. At this early stage, however, reservation had relatively little impact. Early reserves were generally situated in quite remote areas that were neither demarcated nor patrolled. In contrast, later reservation under Obas Eweka II and Akenzua II was further reaching and had far more impact.
FOREST RESERVATION AND OBA EWEKA II, 1914–1933
The Benin District was not the only part of Nigeria where reservation was initially slow.Footnote 36 Meanwhile, the outbreak of the First World War brought about severe timber shortages in Britain and proper forest management in the colonies became an important agenda, in order to ensure more reliable timber supplies.Footnote 37 Reservation was therefore absolutely central to the Forest Ordinance of 1916, which was to form the basis for all future management of Nigeria. Following the example of India, Thompson's Ordinance stipulated that 25 per cent of the land of Nigeria should be reserved, the amount deemed necessary to secure a sufficient timber supply.
The ordinance also gave more legal powers to government, containing a clause that enabled the compulsory formation of reserves.Footnote 38 However, in practice the colonial government was again reluctant to take such measures and continued to rely on local consent for forest reservation. In order to gain this consent, the Ordinance promised that all forestry regulations would be lifted once 25 per cent of reservation was achieved. This was an important incentive, since restrictions on local forest use were considerably expanded with the 1916 Ordinance. However, it did not have any immediate success: reservation was still slow. In 1921, the forest department entered separate agreements with southern Nigerian chiefs, whereby the reservation of 25 per cent of land was now to apply to regions, rather than to the whole of Nigeria.Footnote 39 This made it easier to focus efforts on important timber areas that were deemed to be particularly urgent. Moreover, dealing directly with local authorities gave the colonial government much better bargaining power and made the promise to remove restrictions once 25 per cent reservation was achieved much more effective.
It is not surprising that colonial reservation efforts focussed on the Benin area, the most important timber area in the colony. It had not only expansive forests but also many rivers that were ideal for the removal of logs, and the Benin area supplied the largest part of timber exports from the colony throughout the colonial period.Footnote 40 Its political situation, too, provided good conditions for negotiating forest reservation. In 1914, the death of Oba Ovonramwen in exile coincided with the amalgamation of Nigeria, which brought the Lugardian system of indirect rule to southern Nigeria. Both events combined to precipitate the restoration of the Benin monarchy, and Oba Ovoranmwen's son was installed as Oba Eweka II.
The installation of the Oba as head of the Native Authority of the new Benin Division made it easier for the forest department to negotiate forest reservation in the Benin Division, because the Oba could now be officially declared as the overall ‘owner of the land’. The Oba was indeed traditionally referred to as ‘the owner of the land’; this is evident from the saying Oba o re yan oto (‘the Oba owns the Land’). All Bini communities had to pay him an annual tribute called ugamwen (‘service’), and people from outside the kingdom had to secure his approval to exploit the land and its resources.Footnote 41 But, because land was very abundant in this part of southern Nigeria, local people did not need the Oba's direct permission to use land, and farmland was controlled by local communities, whose head represented the Oba. The Oba's ownership of land was therefore ultimately quite abstract and symbolic. The Oba's status as the owner of the land was not an invention of tradition, but it took on a new and more concrete meaning in the colonial period, in particular in the context of forest reservation.Footnote 42
It was also convenient that the Oba's hold on power was rather shaky to begin with. Eweka was initially only granted a one-year probation period on the throne, which made his position precarious. The Oba's prerogatives of conferring titles, formulating policies, and organising activities in his domain had to be approved by the British Officers, who clearly prescribed the limits of his powers.Footnote 43 At the same time, the Oba needed to cooperate with the colonial government in order to strengthen his authority vis-à-vis the Native Council and the paramount chiefs, some of whom had become very rich and powerful during the interregnum.Footnote 44 Generally, the Oba's authority over not only chiefs but Benin people as a whole – frequently contested already in the pre-colonial periodFootnote 45 – was far from given, and after the interregnum Eweka needed to establish himself as the ruler.
In this context, the offer to remove forest regulations proved a powerful incentive to establish more reserves. The new forest regulations under the 1916 Ordinance prohibited the felling of a long list of tree species except on payment of permit fees in Benin City, and violation was punished by imprisonment and fines.Footnote 46 This list was then continuously reviewed to increase the number of protected species of trees and was strictly enforced with prosecutions.Footnote 47 These measures virtually criminalised farming and caused much hardship for the populace, which led to widespread protests and agitation against the ordinance and its strict implementation.Footnote 48
There was so much protest by the people under his jurisdiction that Oba Eweka II and his chiefs pleaded with the government against further implementation of the ordinance.Footnote 49 Ongoing agitations eventually attracted the visit of the Governor in 1922, who ruled that permits for felling of most trees should be issued free to farmers by order of the Forestry Officers or Political Officers.Footnote 50 This regulation was to be implemented on the condition that two more forest reserves were created, in order to enable the Benin Division to attain 25 per cent reservation of its land area, as was required by the ordinance.Footnote 51 The department capitalised on the Oba and council's consent and, over the course of the 1920s – a time when the department was expanding and becoming increasingly professionalisedFootnote 52 – not just two but four new reserves were created: the Obaretin Reserve (40 sq. miles) in 1924, the Gilli-Gilli Reserve (140 sq. miles) in 1927, and the Ohosu River (400 sq. miles) and Owan River (80 sq. miles) Reserves in 1928.
Reservation in the Benin Division under Oba Eweka II in the 1920s.
Given the pressure to remove forestry regulations, Eweka did not have much choice but to agree to reservation. Nevertheless, the location of these reserves suggests that Oba Eweka may have been able to exert some influence in the process, and may have been able to use reservation to consolidate his hold over Benin territory. After the conquest of Benin City, the Benin territory initially comprised all the areas outside the area of the Royal Niger Company and the Lagos and Yoruba protectorates that were known to pay tribute to Benin at this time, including some north-east Yoruba areas such as Akure and Owo.Footnote 53 These areas were placed under Benin paramount chiefs, contrary to the pre-colonial practice of autonomy and tribute payment. During the interregnum, there had been several rebellions against the roughshod rule of the Benin paramount chiefs, which had forced the British to remove the appointed Benin City chiefs from non-Benin speaking areas of the kingdom and to allow these people to be ruled by their own local leaders from 1906. Some of the communities seized the opportunity to assert autonomy from Benin, and the British created for them new administrative areas outside the control of Benin. In addition the British encouraged neighbouring peoples to move into Benin land to exploit the territory and trade.Footnote 54 By the 1910s, some of the migrant and settler communities, particularly around Benin border areas, started claiming ownership of these lands, and were asserting their independence from the jurisdiction of the Oba of Benin.Footnote 55
Oba Eweka II generally sought to maintain and expand the Benin territory. In 1926, for example, he requested the administration to extend his jurisdiction over many areas outside the Benin Division, which, he claimed, were part of his territory before the British conquest.Footnote 56 While welcoming migrants as his subjects,Footnote 57 he resisted attempts by non-Benin people to take over land that he considered to be under the jurisdiction of Benin. He opposed the sale or lease of communal rubber plantations to non-Benin people,Footnote 58 and rejected suggestions by the agriculture department to lease out land to European firms.Footnote 59
While there is no direct evidence that the movement of people into Benin areas motivated Oba Eweka to agree to reservation, it seems plausible that, given his generally protective attitude, forest reservation became a means of asserting Benin control over land. This is reflected in the areas chosen for reservation. While potential reserves – areas rich in timber, close to waterways, and sparsely populated – were usually identified by foresters through reconnaissance surveys, they needed the Oba's permission for their creation. It is noticeable that they were all on the outer boundaries of the Benin Division, contested areas where migrants were moving in: the Ohosu Reserve bordering Yoruba-speaking areas in the west; the Obaretin and Gilli-Gilli Reserves in the south, where Urhobos and Itsekeris were moving in; and the Owan reserve in the north. Even if Eweka did not himself suggest areas for reservation, it is very plausible that he saw advantages in having reserves in these areas, and therefore granted his consent here. Oba Eweka thus had his own motives for agreeing to reservation, and was not completely powerless in the process. Eweka generally became more successful at asserting his authority over his chiefs and people and was nicknamed ovbi-udu (‘the strong-willed’). The large correspondence between the Oba's council and the colonial government shows that he fought hard for his own interests and those of the Benin people. In fact, he was forced to fight by the actions of the colonial government itself, since it was continually trying to outmanoeuvre him.
By 1928, the creation of the four new reserves had brought the total area under forest reservation in Benin Division to 1,214 square miles, or almost 30 per cent of the land area. In principle, this should have been the end of reservation in the division, and should have brought about the immediate cancellation of forest regulations in areas outside reserves. In practice, however, the Benin forests were deemed to be far too valuable to allow this, and the loss of control over all the unreserved areas was a daunting prospect for the forest department.Footnote 60 The department – now headed by J. R. Ainslie, after Thompson had retired in 1927 – used various strategies to prevent this. For one, the removal of the hated forest regulations was delayed by almost a year. It was only when Oba Eweka refused to sign a further reservation agreement, the extension of Okomu Reserve (150 sq. miles), if the forest regulations were not liftedFootnote 61 that an order was finally passed on 19 July 1929, through government notice No. 144, that brought an end to regulations on non-reserved land.
However, even when the Oba succeeded and Order No.144 was passed, it contained a get-out clause, which made it far less effective than it should have been. Crucially, forestry regulations were not lifted from timber areas held by concessionaires, which in fact covered most of the Benin Division; here, the felling of first class trees – those in which the concessionaires were interested – was still prohibited.Footnote 62 The continuing protection of licensed areas had already been stipulated in the 1916 Ordinance, but was never mentioned during reservation negotiations. It meant that the area actually ‘free’ was considerably smaller than 75 per cent of the land that was generally talked about,Footnote 63 and most farmers gained nothing from the arrangement. The Oba and his council protested furiously to have regulations lifted from licensed areas too, but to no effect.Footnote 64
Moreover, the colonial government simultaneously employed a second strategy to ensure both continuing control over timber and further reservation. This was the creation of a Native Authority Forestry Service, to which the Oba agreed in return for having Order No. 144 passed. The idea of involving Native Authorities directly in forest regulation and reservation had already been used in the early struggles with reservation in Lagos Colony,Footnote 65 but it was the 1927 Forestry Ordinance that empowered local authorities to constitute Native Administration (NA) reserves.Footnote 66 Any royalties, licence fees, and other revenue from these reserves would go to the NA. In return, NAs were responsible for the wages of forest guards and the salaries of the forest officers dealing with the allocation of licences.Footnote 67 These measures were designed to make forest regulations more palatable to local authorities and appeal to their financial interests. However, in practice they did not present the concession to local interests that they appeared to be, but were effectively a cover-up to gain more control. For one thing, the Benin Native Authority (BNA) rules were drafted by the government forest department, not by the Oba or local people. These BNA rules protected nine timber species in non-reserved areas. This meant that, just as the old, hated forestry regulations were finally lifted, a new set of rules, now under the BNA, soon took over.Footnote 68 Thus, despite large-scale reservation, no area outside reservation was ever actually freed from forest regulations, even though this had been used so effectively as an incentive for forest reservation.
Furthermore, the potential financial benefits for the BNA were limited. BNA rules only applied to the small areas outside existing timber concessions, and were soon amended to apply to local contractors only. The issuance and renewal of European timber firms' concession licences, even outside already existing timber concession areas, remained vested in the government forest department. This was significant because European hold on licences remained very strong; in fact, after the 1929 financial crash, almost all European firms were bought up by the United Africa Company (UAC), which now held 51 of 93 concessions in southern Nigeria.Footnote 69 The Oba wrote to this effect to the District Officer, asking that the BNA might gain control over licensed areas, too.Footnote 70 While the government delayed making a clear decision over this, and failed to grant the BNA its request, clashes between government forest guards and BNA forest guards were frequent, both operating in each other's area and causing much general harassment and confusion.
Oba Eweka therefore struggled to assert himself against a colonial government that did everything to appear to be following legal conventions and acting in the interest of its colonial subjects, but in practice obstructed local interests in order to gain further control over forests. Eweka had some power and his own reasons for agreeing to the creation of reserves but, ultimately, it was more due to a series of colonial strategies than to his own interests that forest reservation advanced so much in the Benin Division. The government continued to employ such strategies in the 1930s, now negotiating with Oba Akenzua II, Eweka's son.
OBA AKENZUA II AND THE NATIVE ADMINISTRATION BENIN FOREST SCHEME
In the early 1930s, triggered in part by the Dust Bowl experience in the United States, there was a renewed wave of concern over environmental degradation and the destructive effects of shifting cultivation among colonial administrators in Africa.Footnote 71 In Nigeria, following extensive tours by two external experts, E. P. Stebbing in the north and Major J. N. Oliphant in the south, there were many calls for further reservation.Footnote 72 In 1933, the 1921 shift to applying the 25 per cent rule to regions was declared non-valid, which made it possible to press for further reservation in some areas. These included the Benin Division, still the most important timber area of southern Nigeria.Footnote 73 Following Oliphant's tour of southern Nigeria it was chosen for a pilot scheme of intense forest management, as it was deemed to be particularly in need of protection and management. Moreover, it was again politically ideally suited for such a scheme, as Oliphant noted in his report: ‘It has an enlightened ruler in the Oba, who has full control over the land.’Footnote 74
This ‘enlightened ruler’ was Oba Akenzua II, who had succeeded his father to the throne when Eweka died in 1933. He was, indeed, a useful negotiation partner: on 1 April 1935, Akenzua II agreed to the Benin Native Administration Forest Scheme, and thereby to the reservation of a further 1,000 square miles of land. In doing so, he had to overcome considerable opposition from his council, who had fiercely resisted the scheme.Footnote 75 Why, then, was Akenzua himself so supportive of a scheme that involved such staggeringly large-scale reservation? As we shall examine below, it was again, as for his father, a mixture of both colonial incentives and political considerations that motivated him. But, in contrast to Eweka, Oba Akenzua II was initially under no direct pressure, and his interaction with the colonial government was overall less confrontational than that of his father.
Colonial officers themselves stressed that Akenzua had a genuine concern for forest conservation, and that he was cooperating out of an enlightened understanding of the issues, with wisdom and farsightedness.Footnote 76 Akenzua had been educated at King's College in Lagos, had had some training in the Native Authority of Abeokuta, and was generally deemed to be ‘an enlightened’ ruler, broadly supportive of colonial government. Given his education and self-perception as a modern and responsible ruler, he may well have been persuaded by foresters' arguments of the need to preserve forests for future generations. However, considerations over revenue and land control also played into his support for forest reservation.
For one, the scheme offered further control over forestry to the Oba and his council. As a ‘valuable experiment’, the whole of Benin forestry was put under native administration; since ‘half measures and any degree of dual control’, as Oliphant argued, would be undesirable, this included the handing over of existing government reserves to Native Administration.Footnote 77 This promised substantial financial benefits in the form of timber revenues and royalties to the BNA, which would increase its overall power and ability to govern.
Apart from putting all forestry under the BNA, the colonial government also provided a second incentive, namely that, in return for the reservation of 1,000 square milesof land, each year 1,000 acres of reserve land would be available for Taungya farming.Footnote 78 Taungya farming was an agro-forestry method developed in Burma, under which reserve forest land was given to farmers to farm for one or two years. In between the food crops, foresters would plant seedlings of a range of economic species, which grew particularly well on abandoned farmland. To the Oba, it presented a way of making reserve land available for farming in the future.Footnote 79
Like his father, Akenzua also saw forest reservation as a way of strengthening his hold on Benin land, which continued to be claimed by a range of other groups. By the early 1930s, agitations of Jesse-Urhobo settlers within the Benin Division for the transfer of the land that they inhabited heightened as a result of the BNA's and the forest department's policy of restricting the farming activities of Urhobo migrants.Footnote 80 Oba Akenzua II came under pressure from the colonial administration to accede to the transfer of the land settled by the Jesse-Urhobo to Warri Province, in conformity with reforms of indirect rule that people be grouped and administered strictly along ‘tribal lines’Footnote 81. In 1937 he finally conceded the transfer in return for an annual rent of fifty pounds.Footnote 82 In this context, Oba Akenzua II tried to safeguard Benin land from being expropriated by both private and corporate non-Benin interests. He refused a request for a timber licence by a Sierra Leonean contractor, stating that in the past such grants had led to loss of land to a neighbouring Yoruba community.Footnote 83 He similarly rejected attempts by migrant rubber tappers to establish plantations because ‘most of Benin lands already have passed by way of plantations to foreign capitalist-planters including the Nigerian Government’.Footnote 84
Old and new reserves proposed under the Benin Forest Scheme, and demarcated in 1937 under Oba Akenzua II. The map does not show enclaves.
Furthermore, in the 1930s, another form of land use was emerging that also played a role in Akenzua's II support of forest reservation: the expansion of agricultural cash-crop production. Small-scale rubber plantations were set up as early as the 1900s, but were at this stage not considered a threat to forest conservation; in fact, they were set up and organised by the forest department, which, until 1910, actually incorporated agriculture. But, by the 1930s, encouraged by the agriculture department, cash-crop production was taking off, and rubber plantations in particular were spreading rapidly. They caused concern not just for the forest department but also for many rural communities and the Oba. The very first rubber plantations were set up communally, supervised and coordinated by the forest department. In addition, however, the forest department and later the agriculture department encouraged chiefs to establish plantations, using forced labour from the villagers under their jurisdiction to work on them.Footnote 85 Similarly, urban title holders, rich traders, and the educated elite began to invest their money in plantation cash crops. These urban dwellers increasingly converted their food-crop farms to cash-crop plantations and extended them annually using the labour of their peasant relatives and others whom they employed to look after the plantations in their absence.Footnote 86 As one forest officer critically observed:
The device by which uneducated farmers were induced, in many cases by city-dwellers, to sow rubber seeds in their farms must be condemned: in return for a small outlay on his part the absentee ‘landlord’ becomes the owner of the rubber trees and thereby gains a long lease over the land. The net effect of this and of villagers planting for themselves is that much farm land has gone over to cash crop small-holdings.Footnote 87
Such land appropriation through the establishment of private cash-crop plantations became widespread,Footnote 88 and rural people frequently reported community land being taken over by chiefs and the urban elite.Footnote 89 Receiving such complaints, Oba Akenzua II himself became increasingly concerned about land alienation, which also affected his own overall hold on land. It effectively presented a change from communal ownership, which ultimately rested in him, to private land ownership. He wrote repeatedly to the District Officer and others to avoid the alienation of land, and advocated the creation and protection of reserves as a way of preserving community land.Footnote 90
Not surprisingly, the 1935 plans for large-scale reservation met with much protest from plantation owners, supported by the agriculture department. They wrote a petition to the Governor, protesting against the new reservations and demanding the reservation of land for plantations.Footnote 91 This demand was resisted by the Oba, who argued that anyone wishing to expand an existing plantation had to get permission from the Native Authorities, explaining that:
The object and reasons for looking for this safe-guard is to be sure that the remaining Benin land does not unceremoniously fall into the hands of private families. As the Reserves are being constituted for the benefit of the Benin people – present and future generations – there seems to be no reason why private families should have exclusive right to make use of the remaining land outside the Reserves unless and until they can show that their rights so to do are derived from the proper source i.e. if they acquire land in the usual way by applying for them from the Oba in whom Benin lands are vested from time immemorial.Footnote 92
Overall, like his father, Oba Akenzua had many specific reasons to support forest reservation, including both incentives offered by the colonial government and his own strategic considerations. But it was also in line with his claim that Benin lands had been vested in the Oba ‘from time immemorial’. Akenzua was thus making full use of his status as the owner of the land, and using reservation to assert his claims.
There was an overall affinity between foresters and the Oba's beliefs and interests in centralised land stewardship. These understandings of land control competed with those of chiefs and other individuals wanting to gain private control over land, which, in turn, were shared and supported by the agriculture department. Local communities increasingly had to compete against both of these to maintain their hold on land. By setting up the Benin Forest Scheme and implementing further large-scale reservation, the forest department and the Oba were, of all these groups, by far the most successful in gaining control over land. This was because their alliance and matching interests worked very well together, but also, crucially, because conservation and forest management were a priority for the colonial government as a whole in the 1930s. This, however, began to change in subsequent years. Moreover, the alliance between the Oba and the forest department proved not as strong as it seemed in 1935.
THE AFTERMATH OF THE BENIN FOREST SCHEME
It soon became apparent that, once again, the colonial government did not stick to its own terms of the negotiations with Oba Akenzua II. For a start, while Taungya planting never reached the 1,000 acres per year promised,Footnote 93 reservation initially far exceeded 1,000 square miles. By 1937, an additional 1,377 square miles was reserved, which brought the total of land under reservation to 2,631 square miles, 64 per cent of the Benin Division. This included Ehor Reserve (405·5 sq. miles), Ekenwan (128·5 sq. miles), Ekiadolor (272·75 sq. miles), Ologbo Extension (12·8 sq. miles), Usonigbe (257 sq. miles), Iguobazuwa (218 sq. miles), and Ebue Reserve (73 sq. miles).Footnote 94
Moreover, although these new reserves were constituted as NA ones, and the existing government ones re-constituted as NA ones (in order to make the scheme more attractive to the Oba and his council), the financial gains for the BNA were actually quite limited. Under the original agreement in 1935, it was arranged that revenue deriving from timber licences would be shared equally between the BNA and the government, which was still in charge of forestry operations.Footnote 95 The original agreement was supposed to come under review in 1938, and the share going to the BNA possibly increased. This review, however, was delayed until 1939, when the colonial government argued that, due to the outbreak of war, financial insecurities were too great to change financial arrangements. It was decided that the existing arrangements should be continued for another five years.Footnote 96 In the early 1940s, Oba Akenzua II repeatedly wrote to demand a higher share for the BNA, to which some colonial officers were quite sympathetic.Footnote 97 In 1943, the Acting Secretary to the Western Provinces recommended that the BNA should receive 100 per cent of timber fees, like other Native Authorities. He also stressed the political expediency of supporting the Oba and his council, whose good will had been so crucial to the establishment of the Forest Scheme in the first place.Footnote 98
It was finally decided that the BNA should indeed receive 100 per cent of timber fees from 1 April 1944 onwards,Footnote 99 but also that they would pay for forest regeneration, which had been started on a much larger scale under the Benin Forest Scheme. The Chief Conservator himself pointed out that this again was somewhat unfair, given that, before 1935, the government earned considerable revenue and spent hardly anything on regeneration. It was consequently decided to assist the BNA for one year, but not afterwards.Footnote 100
The financial rewards for the BNA were therefore much less than the Oba and his council would have expected. Moreover, the timber industry itself remained almost exclusively in expatriate hands throughout this time, despite an ongoing campaign by the Oba and others to increase the number of logging allocations made to local logging firms.Footnote 101 Employing a range of arguments – that local firms did not pay their workers adequately, and were wasteful and inefficientFootnote 102 – the colonial government largely ignored these calls, and only gradually increased local allocations. In the meantime, in the wake of the 1929 financial crash, the United Africa Company (UAC) consolidated its hold on logging allocations. Later known as the African Timber & Plywood Company (AT&P), it held the majority of all logging allocations until the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 103
Yet for the colonial government, too, the Benin Forest Scheme was less successful than it first seemed. The massive extension of reserves in 1935 took reserves much closer to settlements and farming areas than previous reservation. This meant that many of the new reserves actually contained little forest. As early as 1937, Chief Conservator Weir noted that ‘it is evident from the preliminary examination that the proportion of non-productive land within [the new reserves] is much higher than was anticipated in earlier estimates’,Footnote 104 and discoveries of substantial amounts of farmland within the reserves were repeatedly reported in subsequent years.Footnote 105
Reservation now also met with far more protest from rural populations than before. The new reserves severely reduced the total amount of land available to farming communities and forced them to modify their previous practice of having farms far away from villages, even when reserve settlement officers in charge of drawing up reserve boundaries tried to provide adequate farmland. In Udo, on the northern border of Okomu Reserve, elders today still recall the severe effect reservation had on them:
When the reserve was created, people didn't like it at all, having their land taken away from them. But because it was government, they could not do anything. They had been farming inside the reserve before, but were asked to pack and leave, compartment by compartment.Footnote 106
Designated enclaves also did not take account of other, spiritual meanings that the forest might have to people. During the extension of Okomu Reserve, for example, Urezen people were told to farm in their Ovia shrines, to which they objected.Footnote 107 On the whole, there was much protest from the communities affected by these new reserves.Footnote 108 In 1936, for instance, the Senior Assistant Conservator of Forest wrote that ‘a number of villages and small camps in these reserves have complained of shortage of farmland and have been allowed to farm for this year only pending investigation of their claims’.Footnote 109
Urban planters, too, maintained their campaign against the reserves.Footnote 110 This was all the more the case after the introduction of the Permanent Crops Order of 1937, designed to curtail land appropriation through the establishment of oil-palm and particularly rubber plantations. The order was worked out at a meeting of the Oba, the Assistant Chief Conservator of Forests, and the District Officer in response to the complaints of peasants on the shortage of land resulting from permanent crops, and so was strongly supported by the ObaFootnote 111 but was highly unpopular among the chiefs and rich urban dwellers affected. Combined with other, equally unpopular, measures imposed by the BNA, it culminated in a mass-protest meeting in December 1940, following which the BNA was reorganised to include a much wider spectrum of chiefs, and even ‘ordinary’ citizens,Footnote 112 giving the planting lobby much more power than before.
At the same time, an overall shift in colonial land-use policy was taking place in southern Nigeria. With plantations already rapidly spreading in the 1930s, rubber and particularly palm-oil production were further encouraged during World War Two, when there was higher demand for resources at home in Britain. The Colonial Development Act of 1940 put further emphasis on economic development and agricultural growth in the colonies. While the colonial government as a whole had previously been firmly behind the expansion of forest reserves, this was now changing. By 1945, the forest department's 10 Year Plan for Forest Development stated on the opening page that ‘agriculture must take priority over forestry’.Footnote 113
For all these reasons, de-reservation started almost immediately after the new reserves had been demarcated. By 1943, substantial parts of the new reserves had been de-reserved, including 226 square miles from Ebue Reserve and 300 square miles from Usonigbe reserve.Footnote 114 With ongoing protests and petitions by local people,Footnote 115 further de-reservation was carried out in the Ehor reserve, reducing its original 400 square miles to 115 square miles in 1944.Footnote 116 By 1948, reserved land was calculated to be 39 per cent of the land of the Benin Division, down from 64 per cent in 1937.Footnote 117
CONCLUSION
In the end, forest reservation was therefore not quite as expansive as it had seemed in 1935. Reservation met with increasing resistance from local farming populations, and the relative strength of the forest department waned against the rise of agriculture. However, until 1935, forest reservation had been astonishingly successful in the Benin Division, with long-lasting effects on land-use practices. It was under Oba Eweka II and his son Akenzua II that such large-scale reservation occurred in the Benin Division, and this paper has sought to understand how and why they came to give their consent to it. Overall, we have highlighted two different factors: various ‘carrot-and-stick’ strategies employed by the colonial government to persuade Obas Eweka II and Akenzua II to agree to reservation; and the Obas' own political considerations and attempts to gain control over land. The relative importance of each of these factors changed between the two Obas: while Eweka ultimately had little choice but to agree to reservation in the face of popular resentment of forest regulations, Akenzua agreed to the Benin Scheme more of his own volition, in particular because it gave him the opportunity to strengthen his control over land. Having said this, one cannot from this deduce that Eweka was a victim, and Akenzua a successful manipulator of colonial rule: Eweka, too, saw strategic advantages in reservation, while Akenzua also came to experience various subterfuges by the colonial government. The forest department and colonial government, in turn, do not emerge as completely powerful, relying as they did not only on local cooperation but also on a series of underhand manoeuvres to achieve their aims. Despite these weaknesses, the colonial government was ultimately successful at achieving reservation, and in many of the negotiations with Eweka and Akenzua it had the upper hand.
This paper speaks to the current scholarly interest in exploring the various weaknesses of the colonial state and the many layers of interest politics and alliances between different colonial and local actors. As we have shown, such a nuanced understanding certainly applies here: there was an alliance of interests between the forest department and Akenzua, and both Eweka and Akenzua were strategists who saw advantages in forest reservation. Yet the paper also shows the limits to this approach. Negotiations between the Obas and the colonial government were always on the latter's terms – in the form of agreements, treaties, and forestry regulations that were drafted by forest officers and that the colonial government was able to use to its advantage. Colonial power, therefore, lay not in outright land appropriation but in making everything appear fair and legal – seeking local agreement for reservation and putting reserves under the NA – while gaining control over forests and timber revenues.
Finally, the paper has highlighted the key role that forest reservation played in the transformation of land tenure and land-use practices in the colonial period in the Benin Division. If, previously, the Oba was nominally the owner of the land, in practice land was controlled by communities, and villagers could freely choose where to farm. Reservation not only separated the existing mosaic landscape into distinct spheres of forest and farm; it also put forests directly under the control of the Oba and the government. At a time when new forms of land competition were emerging – between Edo-speaking and other neighbouring groups, and between small-scale community farmers and private plantation growers – reservation ensured the Oba's and the government's strong hold on land. In this way, reservation fundamentally shaped land politics in the Benin Division, and continues to do so in today's Edo State, where the allocation of reserve land has become an important political tool. But that is another story.
