[¹] Herbert Samuel Heelas Macaulay (1864–1946), often called "the father of Nigerian nationalism," was born in Lagos. His grandfather, Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was the first black Anglican bishop in West Africa. His father, the Rev. Thomas Babington Macaulay, was a leading educator and protonationalist and the first principal of the Church Missionary Society grammar school in Lagos, where Macaulay himself was educated. Macaulay worked as a clerical assistant and indexer of Crown lands in the Lagos public works department until being selected to study surveying in England on a government scholarship in 1890. Returning home in 1893, he worked as a government surveyor until resigning in 1898. He continued to practice privately as a surveyor and began writing the "Janus" opinion column in the Lagos Standard. His newspaper articles and pamphlets attacking the government led to a political career as a leader of the popular faction in the water-rate agitation that divided Lagos in the years from 1912 to 1917. In 1913 Macaulay was imprisoned for misappropriating trust funds (the Mary Franklin case), a misstep which not only temporarily removed him from organizing the antigovernment populist faction but later debarred him, as a convicted felon, from holding elective office. Nevertheless, Macaulay played a leading role in forming the Nigerian National Democratic party (NNDP) in 1923.

Until the mid-1930s the NNDP dominated Lagos politics, winning every contested seat on the Lagos Municipal Council and the Nigerian Legislative Council. Macaulay's championing of traditional rulers and land chieftaincies of Lagos—the eleko and oluwa issues—earned him enormous popularity among the Lagos masses. In 1925 he established his own newspaper, the Lagos Daily News, which ran until the mid-1930s. Another clash with the authorities led to a second, six-month jail sentence in 1928—for publishing a rumor likely to incite a riot. In his writings and his political activities, Macaulay combined an obsessive concern with local politics with a strongly developed sense of racial nationalism; even so, he also displayed an equally pronounced affection for the British imperial connection.

Though Macaulay admired Garvey's stance, the seemingly seditious intentions of the UNIA toward colonial Africa were unacceptable to him, and he is reported to have advised his followers to shun it. Macaulay, never in the forefront of regional pan-Africanism, maintained a distance from the local branch of the National Congress of British West Africa, as well as from the Lagos UNIA.

From the mid-1930s until 1944, Macaulay's political fortunes waned in the face of competition from the rival Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM). However, in the fragmentation of the NYM and the founding of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in 1944 by Nnamdi Azikiwe, Macaulay found a new political arena. As NCNC president he devoted the remaining months of his life to campaigning on its behalf (IU, HM; confidential report by the deputy inspector general of police, Lagos, 28 March 1921, in "UNIA Activities in Nigeria," 27 February 1922, PRO, CO 583/109; A. A. Lipede, "The Political Activities of Herbert Macaulay between the Wars" [M.Phil. thesis, University of London, 1981]; Isaac B. Thomas, Life History of Herbert Macaulay, 3d ed. [Lagos, 1947]).

[²] On 26 April 1919 the Negro World carried a notice calling "every Negro man and woman" to a "monster convention of the race." The rally, at the Palace Casino in New York on 27 April 1919, announced plans for establishing the Black Star Line shipping company.

[³] Until the middle of the nineteenth century a small number of British merchants controlled shipping along West Africa's coast. The discovery in 1830 that the Oil Rivers delta was the outlet for the Niger River opened new possibilities for European merchants to bypass the African coastal traders who acted as middlemen for the interior. The abolition of the slave trade also increased interest in expanding trade in legitimate goods. As Britain's trade in the region expanded throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the British Crown became interested in controlling the trade, but felt that the British public would not support spending public money on shipping ventures. The solution was to establish charter shipping and trading companies that relied on private funding, but had exclusive royal concessions and thus acted as government monopolies. Private steamship lines along the West African coast emerged in the 1850s, with the African Steamship Company and the African Steam Navigation Company dominating. They merged in the 1870s, forming the Elder Dempster line (Peter N. Davies, The Trade Makers: Elder Dempster in West Africa, 1852 – 1972 [London: Allen and Unwin, 1973], pp. 21–69).

[⁴] The officers elected at the first BSL board of directors meeting in June 1919 were Marcus Garvey, president; Jeremiah Certain, first vice president; Henrietta Vinton Davis, second vice president; George Tobias, treasurer; Richard Warner, secretary; Edgar Grey, assistant secretary; and Janie Jenkins, assistant treasurer. Garvey, Grey, Jenkins, Tobias, and Warner were the original incorporators of the shipping line. On 2 August 1919 Warner and Grey were expelled as directors and Fred Powell and Edward Smith-Green elected in their stead (MGP 1:442, 444 n. 4, 560; 5:59–60).

[⁵] This quotation echoes Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part Two (1615): "Forewarned forearmed."

[⁶] Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870–1950) was prime minister of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and from 1939 to 1948. He was responsible for drafting an article of the 1902 peace treaty concluding the South African War, which left the question of the African franchise to be settled by the white minority "after the introduction of self-government" (Parliamentary Papers, 1902, Cd. 1284, p. 12). He was also the architect of the discriminatory regulations of the 1911 Mines and Works Act which reserved thirty-two job categories exclusively for whites. In a 1917 speech in London, he warned against arming Africans in European conflicts and defended South Africa's policy of keeping Africans "apart as much as possible in our institutions, in land ownership, in forms of government, and in many ways" (Times [London], 23 May 1917). In 1920 he piloted the Native Affairs Act, which helped keep Africans out of parliament by creating a Native Affairs Commission and local councils in the African reserves. The same year he inaugurated a "don't hesitate to shoot" policy against striking African workers in Port Elizabeth that led to the killing of more than twenty people. Smuts was also responsible for enacting the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, which legalized compulsory segregation and instituted the registration of all labor contracts in urban areas (H. J. Simons and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850 – 1930 [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1969], pp. 174, 251, 315; DAHB).

[⁷] Smuts spoke at the Savoy Hotel in London on 22 May 1917 to a dinner of the Royal African Society, the Royal Colonial Institute, and other guests involved in South African issues. He stated that

Smuts participated in the British War Cabinet during World War I; when he made this speech he was South Africa's minister of defense (Official Year Book of the Union, no. 7, 1924 [Pretoria: GPO, 1925], pp. 94–96).

[⁸] Bernhard Dernburg (1867–1937) was a banker before he joined the German colonial ministry. His business background was reflected in the reforms carried out under his direction and in his emphasis on the economic self-sufficiency of the colonies (Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978], pp. 188–209).

[⁹] The Royal African Society published Dernburg's remarks along with a complete list of guests and the text of toasts to Dernburg at a dinner held on 5 November 1909. While the words attributed to Dernburg in this document do not appear in his speech, they do capture his sentiment. He stated, in part, that "the interests of all white nations are identical. . . . [W]e knew that unruly natives crossing and recrossing frontiers were a danger as well to the one nation with which they were at war as to the other with which they were temporarily at peace, and that a reported success by the natives over one body of white men would at once endanger the safety of all the rest." Dernberg also referred to white trusteeship of Africans, gave examples of cooperation in scientific and other endeavors among the European colonizing nations, and discussed the need to combine white "superior knowledge" and "guidance" with the "actual work, the menial labour, [which] must come from the black man." While Dernburg did not use the expression "European compact," his speech as a whole assumed the existence of a compact among European colonizers (JAS 9, no. 34 [January 1910]: 113–119, 196–205).

[¹⁰] Sir George Goldie, founder of the United Africa Company in Nigeria, presided over the evening; the guests included Alfred Lyttelton, former secretary of state for the colonies; J. E. B. Seely, undersecretary of state; and Count Metternich, the German ambassador. In their toasts and comments following the speech, Goldie, Lyttelton, and Seely lauded Dernburg's remarks and added further examples of how Europeans "of all parties sink their differences" when dealing with African issues (ibid.).

[¹¹] With the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, Germany accepted sole responsibility for World War I (Article 231). In the arrangement worked out by the treaty, Germany made extensive territorial cessions. Germany's rivers were internationalized, and the Allies were to move in and occupy the Rhineland for at least fifteen years. A strip of land thirty miles wide on the right bank was to be demilitarized by the Germans, who were to pay the costs of the Allied occupation (Derek H. Aldcroft, From Versailles to Wall Street, 1919 – 1929 [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977]; EWH, p. 978).

[¹²] "Man proposes but God disposes" (Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ 119 [ca. 1420]).

[¹³] The number of black men of voting age in 1919 has been estimated at 2,944,440 (NYB, 1918–1919, p. 449).

[¹⁴] A reference to Hilton M. Radley of Ontario, Canada, author of "Is the Negro Coming? His Position in the United States and the Question in Canada: Other Aspects of an Imperial Problem" (African World, Special West African Monthly Supplement, 3 March 1917; reprinted in LWR, 7 April 1917).

[¹⁵] In 1919 blacks owned six hundred thousand homes and one million farms representing twenty-one million acres of land, which, along with fifty thousand businesses, represented $1.1 billion. The value of church property in 1919 was cited as $85.9 million (NYB, 1918–1919, pp. 2–3).

[¹⁶] The Nigerian Council, which was designed by Frederick Lugard, included at least four African members, appointed by the governor, but it had no executive or legislative powers (J. Ayodele Langley, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900 – 1945 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973], p. 270).

[¹⁷] Residents of Lagos had been forced to pay a variety of municipal taxes in return for few services and no elective representation. As early as 1919, the abolition of the Nigerian Council was proposed, along with the creation of a Legislative Council that would include four African representatives: three from Lagos and one from Calabar. This representation was realized in the 1923 constitution (Langley, Pan-Africanism, pp. 270–275).

[¹⁸] Enugu took its name from the Enugu Ngwo community. Between 1915 and 1924 the government acquired substantial tracts of land in the area and began mining coal. Enugu subsequently developed into a major commercial and governmental center of Nigeria's eastern provinces (HDN).

[¹⁹] The Udi District of Nigeria lies approximately one hundred miles north of Port Harcourt. Extensive coalfields were discovered there around 1905 and the area became the primary source of coal in Nigeria. The Udi coalfields supplied all the coal for the Nigerian Railway and Marine Department, as well as large quantities to the Colony of the Gold Coast (The Nigeria Handbook, 10th ed. [Lagos: Government Printer, 1933], p. 92).

[²⁰] The basis for development of the town of Port Harcourt was laid by the Hargrove Agreement of 1913, by which the government appropriated the fishing camps and creeks of the Okrika Ijo and Amodi villages, as well as the Obumutu farmlands owned by the Rumerebisi of Diobu, the area's traditional ruler. A colliery railway and port for the shipment of coal and agricultural exports was constructed. By 1912, with the completion of the railway line linking the eastern and western parts of Nigeria, Port Harcourt became the gateway for the eastern region's foreign trade. In 1926 it became the headquarters of Owerri Province (C. N. Anyanwu, "Port Harcourt, 1912–1955: A Study in the Rise and Development of a Nigerian Municipality" [Ph.D. diss., University of Ibadan, 1971]).

[²¹] With the construction of the colliery and harbor and the expansion of the new town of Port Harcourt, the indigenous inhabitants of Okrika Ijo, Biobu, Amodi, and other neighboring towns derived substantial benefits. Area chiefs were financially rewarded for the land appropriated, while construction work for the port and railway created employment opportunities for more than two thousand people. Local trade was also enhanced (Anyanwu, "Port Harcourt, 1912–1955," pp. 115–152).

[²²] There is no evidence that this requirement applied throughout British West Africa. Macaulay might have been referring to the drastic immigration ordinance rushed through the Gold Coast Legislative Council at a single sitting on 18 March 1914, which was envisaged not as applying to all immigrants but as being "directed ad hoc" against members of Chief Sam's African movement. Immigrants were required to deposit twenty-five pounds sterling as security to cover the cost of their repatriation. The movement's chronicler, Orishatukeh Faduma, describes "the payment of the exorbitant, unnatural and prohibitive sum . . . as 'blood money'" demanded of a people who, after having been "sold into bondage and taken by force to an unnatural home for money, yet cannot return except for money" ("The African Movement," African Mail [Liverpool], 12 March 1915, p. 234) ("An ordinance to make provision to regulate the immigration of persons not born in any part of West Africa," Ordinance 4 of 1914; PRO, CO 96/552/9069, minute).

[²³] The elided text contains a discussion of Britain's historical involvement in the slave trade and of the Crown's 1833 decision to compensate slave owners following Britain's abolition of slavery. There follows a detailed, forty-page survey of the growth of shipping and trade in West Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[²⁴] Macaulay went on to have other contacts and business relationships with African Americans. In 1930 William Kempton Hart, a twenty-four-year-old craftsman from New York, traveled to Lagos, where he met Macaulay. The two became business associates; Macaulay had recently launched the Lagos Daily News, the first daily newspaper in West Africa, and the young New Yorker provided certain insights based on his knowledge of the American press, leading Macaulay to propose that Hart serve as his partner and consultant. Hart returned briefly to the U.S. to purchase a modern printing press for the newspaper, and made plans to settle in Lagos permanently, bringing his mother over to join him (NW, 25 October 1930).

[²⁵] Cape Verde is an alternate name for Cape Vert in Senegal, the westernmost point in Africa; Cape Guardafui, extending into the Indian Ocean at the northeastern tip of Somalia, forms the continent's eastern extremity (WNGD).

[²⁶] Taken from the hymn "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," composed by Richard Heber in 1819. It was adopted by the UNIA in 1918. The first stanza is, "From Greenland's icy mountains, / From India's coral strand, / Where Afric's sunny fountains / Roll down their golden sand; / From many an ancient river, / From many a palmy plain, / They call us to deliver / Their land from error's chain" (MGP 1:278).

[²⁷] The complimentary closing echoes the opening salutation of Garvey's weekly Negro World front-page editorials which began, "Fellowmen of the Negro race, Greeting" (IU, HM).