People · 1884–1916
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Nana Olomu ran the palm-oil trade of the Benin River for Britain's own consuls. Then the steamers got bigger, the rules changed, and his town was razed.
This story begins with a title that came from London's men, not from Itsekiri custom. In 1851 the British consul for the Bights of Benin and Biafra, John Beecroft, created a post he called Governor of Benin River. The idea was simple. Britain wanted one African chief it could deal with on the river, someone to keep the palm-oil trade moving and settle disputes with European traders. The first man to hold it was an Itsekiri chief named Idiare.
The plan was for the post to pass back and forth between two leading Itsekiri families, the Emaye and the Ologbotsere. That was the arrangement on paper. But when Nana's father, an Ologbotsere, died, the governorship went straight to his son instead of crossing over to the Emaye side. So Nana Olomu became the fourth Governor of Benin River, and from the start some Itsekiri people resented how he got there. Keep that in mind, because it comes back later.
Nana was a palm-oil merchant first. His power came from the trade. Itsekiri traders like him stood between the producers inland, many of them Urhobo, and the European firms on the coast. Oil came down the creeks in canoes, went through Itsekiri hands, and ended up on European ships. The middleman took his cut at every step, and Nana was the biggest middleman on the river.
In 1884 he signed a treaty on behalf of the Itsekiri, giving Britain more rights in Itsekiri land. For a while the two sides got along. Then Europe held the Berlin Conference, the Scramble for Africa began, and everything Nana had built started to look to the British like something in their way.
Two things changed at once. Politically, Britain now wanted to control the whole territory, not just trade along its coast. Technically, ships had got better. European traders could now steam much further inland than before. They no longer needed coastal chiefs to bring them oil. They could go and buy it from the Urhobo themselves.
For a man in Nana's position this was a disaster. In 1892 and 1893 the British signed treaties directly with Urhobo communities, going straight around him. Nana did not take it quietly. His men attacked some nearby Urhobo villages that had been trading with the British. The Urhobo stopped trading, the oil stopped flowing, and the British decided the problem was Nana.
They found allies among his own people. In 1894 several other Itsekiri chiefs signed a new treaty with Britain. Remember that old quarrel over how he became governor? It mattered now. Then the British moved against his town, Ebrohimi, which they spelled Brohemie. Nana had made it his stronghold in the creeks. They razed it to the ground and attacked other towns in the area as well. His wealth was seized.
Nana was captured and put on trial. He was found guilty of several charges, crucifixions among them. Then he was deported to the Gold Coast, in today's Ghana, far from the river he had run.
This is the part most people never hear. Nana did not just disappear. He kept arguing his case from exile. In 1899 the Aborigines' Protection Society in Britain wrote to the Foreign Office on his behalf. They complained of "the arbitrary treatment" he had suffered, and said the government had never carried out the "searching investigation" of his case that he had always asked for. If he could not get his old position back, they asked, could he at least be allowed to run his business freely?
They enclosed a letter from Nana himself. It was a very ordinary, very human complaint: the allowance he was given was not enough to support himself and the five other people who depended on him. A once-wealthy merchant was now writing to a foreign government about his household budget.
The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, answered. He promised to look into how much Nana was given to live on, but he ruled out any return home. A month later the matter came up in Parliament, and the government said again that it would be unsafe to let him go back. The man who had once been Britain's own chosen governor of the river was now too dangerous to let near it.
Nana's name stayed tied to Koko, in what is now Delta State. His palace there survives as the Nana Living History Museum, and it tells the story of his dealings with the British. The historian Obaro Ikime wrote the classic study of his life and called it Merchant Prince of the Niger Delta. That title fits him well. Nana was a businessman who owned the route, until the British decided they would rather own it themselves.
