Lost history · 1889–1898
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A Christian schoolteacher became king of Nembe, watched a company choke his people's trade, and then led war canoes against it at dawn.
Picture Nembe in the 1880s. It sits in the creeks of what is now Bayelsa, an Ijaw trading kingdom that made its living moving palm oil between the inland markets and the European ships at the coast. Europeans called the place Brass. Its neighbours Bonny and Calabar were richer, and Nembe knew it, so every market it could reach really mattered.
In 1889 the chiefs of Nembe chose a new king, the amanyanabo. His name was Frederick William Koko, and before this he had been a Christian schoolteacher. That was a big part of why they picked him. The leading chiefs, men like Spiff, Samuel Sambo and Cameroon, were Christians too, and they had already ordered the old juju houses pulled down. They wanted a king who shared their faith. For a few years Koko also shared power with an older co-king, Ebifa, who ruled at Bassambiri and commanded in war.
The trouble came from a company, not a rival town. Since 1884 Britain had counted Nembe as part of its Oil Rivers Protectorate. Up the Niger, the Royal Niger Company held a royal charter, and it used that charter to shut out anyone who competed with it. Nembe traders found that markets they had used for generations were now closed to them, or open only if they paid heavy fees. Nembe had refused to sign the treaty the British put in front of it. It had no wish to hand its rivers to a company.
The British consul-general, Sir Claude MacDonald, later admitted he had been hearing these same complaints for three and a half years and could do nothing about them. So when people say Koko struck without warning, keep that in mind. The complaint was old. Nobody with power had listened.
Koko tried to strengthen his hand by making friends with Bonny and Okpoma. Then, in 1894, old Ebifa died. Koko turned away from Christianity and went back to the religion of his fathers. A schoolteacher king had become a war king.
Akassa was the Royal Niger Company's headquarters near the mouth of the Niger, a depot full of warehouses, offices and machines. In the dark before dawn on 29 January 1895, Koko's war canoes came at it out of the creeks. One account says 22 canoes, a historical study counts 31, and the fighters are put at somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred men, drawn from different parts of the Ijaw country. The numbers vary. Everyone agrees the force was big.
They burned the depot. Warehouses, offices and machinery all went up, and the whole station was wrecked. Around 25 people were reported killed. The raiders carried dozens of prisoners back to Nembe, and the accounts say some were killed the next day at a place the British called Sacrifice Island. Historians who worked from Nembe's own memories add a detail I find very human: while the canoes were away, the women of Nembe kept watch through the night, and when the fighters came home they were met with victory songs and gunfire.
Then Koko did something you might not expect. On 2 February he wrote to MacDonald. He said he had no quarrel with Queen Victoria, only with the Niger Company. He offered to free his prisoners if Nembe got back its old right to trade freely. It was a negotiation, and he meant it.
Britain said no. And after that refusal, more than forty of the prisoners were killed and eaten in a ritual. Sir John Kirk's report later put the number at forty-three. This is the darkest part of the story, and the record is clear about it, so I won't soften it. It also helps explain how hard Britain hit back.
On 20 February a Royal Navy force left Brass: gunboats, company steamers, marines and protectorate troops, led by Rear Admiral Sir Frederick Bedford. Nembe had built stockades in the channels, and about 25 war canoes came out to fight. Bedford reported three sunk. On 22 February his men forced a landing after what he himself called an obstinate defence, and they burned Nembe, Koko's house and the chiefs' houses with it. Three days later they destroyed Fishtown too. Smallpox then spread through the defeated kingdom and killed many more people.
Koko was never caught. He went into the bush. By March sixteen of his war canoes had been handed over, and the men of Brass were fined £500. Sympathetic European traders on the river offered to pay that fine for them, which tells you how the traders felt about the company too.
Back in Britain, people began to turn against the Royal Niger Company and its head, George Goldie. Many felt he had pushed Koko into war. The government sent Kirk to investigate. His report went before Parliament in March 1896. It confirmed the killings, but it also took the trade grievances seriously. In June 1896 a minister told the House of Commons that a plan existed to let Brass men back into the Niger markets, but that Koko would not meet British officials, so he had been deposed. A £200 reward was put on him. Nobody claimed it.
He died in 1898 at Etiema, a remote village far inland, and some say he took his own life. The next year Britain revoked the Royal Niger Company's charter. From 1 January 1900 the company sold its African holdings to the government for £865,000. Koko lost his town and then his life, but the company he fought outlived him by only a year or two.
