NCJ Number
130593
Date Published
1991
Length
183 pages
Annotation
This historical and sociological analysis of the emergence and role of the police force in colonial Nigeria concludes that standard accounts of orthodox policing are inaccurate and that the main purpose of the development of the Nigeria Police Force was to subdue indigenous societies and to subordinate them to the political authority of the colonial government.
Abstract
Conventional accounts present colonial police forces as agencies set up for crime control, thereby bringing peace and progress to warring, undeveloped indigenous tribes. However, crime control was a later colonial rationalization for the police protection of the imperial economy and its preferred political and cultural order. Thus, the imperial policing of Nigeria protected commercial and extractive interests as well as foreign capital and secured and supervised the labor force necessary for the production of commodities for cash export. It also coerced the payment of colonial taxes to pay for colonial administration and suppressed labor resistance to the new capitalist economy. After 1914 the policing shifted from a purely militaristic approach to a more professional approach designed to ensure conditions needed for sustained economic exploitation of the territory. Tables, chapter notes, and 203 references