Changing Tides: The Exclusion of Educated Africans from Colonial Service in Lagos, Nigeria, 1890–1930

From mutual reliance and shared aspirations in the civilizing mission, educated Africans diverged towards different goals and identities from their Western backgrounds. Colonial officials, European merchants, and missionaries increasingly distrusted them, leading to their removal from clerical positions and appointments in public service. Many authors ascribe the collapse of the collaboration between a growing African educated elite and British colonial officers in Lagos to the resurgent racialism of the late 19th century.  In this paper I argue the insufficiency of racialism as an explanation because race considerations were not particularly new, but were always part of the discursive relations.  By focusing on the evolution and growth of colonial service in Britain, a new explanation unfolds in the shifting and contested conceptions of colonial service and the roles of African professionals in it. On the other hand, increasing involvement in indigenous societies helps cast the African elite’s shifting aspirations as reactions to the pulls and attractions of local power and privileges. The pulls of colonial power and local privileges underscore the patterns of colonial bureaucratic relations in colonial Lagos.