Frederick Lugard, First Baron Lugard

British military and political leader

• Born: January 22, 1858
• Birthplace: Madras, India
• Died: April 11, 1945
• Place of death: Abinger Common, Surrey, England

Employing his impressive military and administrative skills, Lugard played a major role in extending British control over Uganda and Nigeria and developed the administrative system known as “indirect rule.”

Early Life

Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, later Lord Lugard (lew-GAHD), was the son of Frederic Grueber Lugard and Mary Jane Howard, both children of clergymen who had become missionaries to India. Returning with his mother and sisters to England in 1863, Lugard’s early, deep religious convictions were tested by his mother’s death in 1864. His schooling at Rossall in Lancashire was not entirely successful. He was a poor scholar and received constant punishment for his violation of school rules. Failing the India Civil Service examination, Lugard passed the army examination in 1877 and entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

The threat of war with Russia in 1878 ended his military education, and in 1878, Lugard received a commission in the Royal Norfolk Regiment. Assigned to service in India, in 1879-1880 he participated in the Second Afghan Campaign. In 1885, he served in the Sudan Campaign as a transport officer, a position he also filled with great ability in Burma in 1886 and 1887, receiving the Distinguished Service Order. His apparently successful military career was cut short by a turbulent relationship with a married woman. Following her back to England, Lugard was distraught when she proved as unfaithful to him as to her husband. Deeply depressed, Lugard turned to fighting fires in London as a member of the newly organized Fire Brigade. A handsome, physically strong man sporting a large mustache, Lugard possessed obvious military and leadership abilities. At the age of thirty, however, he was emotionally and professionally confused and without a settled career. In 1888, he left England, almost penniless, for East Africa determined to aid in eradicating the Arab slave trade. His meteoric rise to prominence was something few of his contemporaries could have predicted.

Life’s Work

Lugard’s first position was with the African Lakes Company, established in 1878 to develop commerce and Christianity in the Lake Nyasa region. Leading a fight against Arab slavers with mixed results, Lugard was seriously wounded and returned to England in 1889. There he participated in the public campaign to persuade the British government to lay claim to Nyasaland, a decision approved by Great Britain in May, 1891. Although regarded by some as impetuous and receiving little credit for his work in Nyasaland, Lugard had found a career in Africa.

Between 1889 and 1894, Lugard worked for Sir William Mackinnon’s Imperial East Africa Company, which had received a Royal Charter in 1888. Leading a caravan to Uganda in 1890, Lugard immediately became embroiled in the civil and religious wars plaguing the region. An extensive military campaign resulted in Lugard’s establishment of the company’s rule over a united kingdom. The violence associated with his campaign, however, caused a diplomatic crisis with France and sullied his reputation for years. In 1892 he returned again to London, where he wrote extensively, defending himself against charges of brutality and urging the desirability of British annexation of Uganda. Lugard was pleased both by the discovery that he had powerful defenders in Great Britain and by Great Britain’s annexation of Uganda in 1894.

Lugard’s next, and most famous, imperial work was in the region later known as Nigeria , administered for Great Britain by Sir George Goldie’s Royal Niger Company. Threatened by French encroachment from the west, Goldie dispatched Lugard on a race to Nikki in Borgu. Arriving only a few days before a French expedition, Lugard obtained a treaty that strengthened British claims to the region. Following a brief period of service (1895-1897) with the British West Charterland Company in the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa, Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, appointed Lugard commander of a new West African Frontier Force with the rank of colonel. This force was assigned the task of retarding French advances on the middle Niger. Lugard’s military abilities, firmness, and tact were in large part responsible for the favorable 1898 treaty with France delineating the modern boundaries of Nigeria. In 1898, at the age of forty, he returned once more to England, his decade of adventure in pushing forward the frontiers of British Africa behind him.

The revocation of the charter of the Royal Niger Company placed Nigeria under the control of the British Colonial Office, and in 1900, Lugard became the first High Commissioner for Northern Nigeria. Although now an administrator of an immense area, Lugard’s first years necessitated the use of his considerable military talents. In 1902 and 1903, military expeditions succeeded in conquering the ancient emirates of Kano and Sokoto, finally bringing Northern Nigeria under the management of British administration. The remainder of his rule was devoted to establishing a government and administration and the development of his ideas of indirect rule. In 1906, Lugard resigned his position, exhausted from his work and unwilling to be further separated from his wife, Flora Shaw, a prominent female imperialist whom he had married in 1902.

From 1907 to 1912, Lugard served as governor of Hong Kong. Restive under the constitutional restrictions of his new position, Lugard was never entirely comfortable with his largely ceremonial duties. His principal achievement during these years was the foundation of the University of Hong Kong in 1911. Hong Kong was, however, only an interlude in his African work. In 1912, Lugard was appointed governor of the new united Nigeria. Between 1912 and 1919, when he finally retired from colonial service, Lugard devoted himself to building an administrative structure that combined local autonomy with the maintenance of a centralized administration. The success of his work was confirmed by the constitution that Nigeria adopted when it became independent in 1960. Lugard’s work was made more difficult at the time because of the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and his supervision of the conquest of the adjacent German colony of the Cameroons.

Following his retirement in 1919, Lugard remained active in colonial affairs, eventually becoming an internationally recognized authority in this field. Between 1922 and 1936, he served as a member of the League of Nations’ commission on the mandate territories. He also served on an international committee studying slavery, advised the British government on colonial education, and participated in a parliamentary study of the union of Great Britain’s East African territories. For his past and continuing colonial service and for his writings on colonial administration, Lugard received a peerage in 1928, becoming Baron Lugard of Abinger. He died on April 11, 1945, at the age of eighty-seven.

Significance

Lord Lugard’s life and career spanned almost the entire period of British colonial rule in Africa, and in a sense he personified Great Britain’s experience in Africa. During his early years, he was often vilified by both British and foreign critics as a ruthless swashbuckler who would stop at nothing to expand the empire and his own reputation and power. His expeditions to Nyasaland, to Uganda, to the French border of Nigeria, to the Kalahari, and finally back to Nigeria displayed a personal frenzy and impatience similar to the larger “scramble for Africa” by the European statesmen of the 1880’s and 1890’s.

Lugard’s reputation changed, however, after 1900, when he assumed administrative control of Northern Nigeria, Hong Kong, and a united Nigeria. Increasingly, he was viewed as an innovative and successful colonial administrator. Most important, he developed and made systematic the concept of indirect rule. Convinced that Africa could develop best under British rule, he nevertheless also believed that as much responsibility as possible should be left with those administrators on the spot. Averse to highly structured bureaucracies on principle and because of temperament, he maintained that European nations should rule through traditional African institutions and rulers. This arrangement would maintain the integrity of African society and also serve as a means of educating Africans in self-government.

Lugard’s ideas on colonial administration were most fully developed in his The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922). Immensely popular and highly regarded, this book was soon recognized as a classic explanation both of what had been done in Nigeria and of what should be done in Africa in the future. As the title of his book indicates, the dual mandate was to be of benefit both to the British and to the Africans they ruled. Entering Africa for reasons other than pure philanthropy, Great Britain had a right to profit from its rule. On the other hand, Great Britain had the responsibility to make its rule beneficial to the Africans by bringing to them the advantages of Western civilization. Both his concept of indirect rule, often seen as retarding African national development, and his idea of a dual mandate, viewed by some as justifying the economic exploitation of Africa, remain controversial. The fact that such debates remain current, however, confirms Lugard’s place as the most significant British colonial administrator of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Kirk-Green, A. H. M. Lugard and the Amalgamation of Nigeria. London: Frank Cass, 1968. The best study of Lugard’s principal administrative achievement, the unification of Nigeria, and his attempted application of indirect rule.

Lugard, Frederick John Dealtry, Baron. The Diaries of Lord Lugard. Edited by Margery Perham. 4 vols. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1959-1963. The first three volumes cover Lugard’s travels in Uganda; the fourth volume deals with his Nigerian experiences. Essential to an understanding of Lugard’s early African tribulations.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1922. 5th ed. Introduction by Margery Perham. Hampden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1965. Lugard’s masterful literary monument to his life’s work. Gives his views as to Great Britain’s role in Africa and discusses in detail his concept of “indirect rule.”

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Rise of Our East African Empire: Early Efforts in Nyasaland and Uganda. 2 vols. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1893. Lugard’s exciting description and defense of his actions in East Africa.

Muffett, D. J. M. Concerning Brave Captains: Being a History of the British Occupation of Kano and Sokoto and the Last Stand of the Fulani Forces. London: Andre Deutsch, 1964. A fast-moving account of Lugard’s conquest of Northern Nigeria.

Perham, Margery. Lugard. Hampden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1956-1960. The first volume of this standard biography of Lugard covers his years of conflict in East Africa and Nigeria (1858-1898), and the seccond deals with his various governorships and the development of his ideas on native administration.

Shaw, Flora Louisa. A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan, with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria. London: James Nisbet, 1905. Written by Lugard’s wife, the most famous female imperialist of her age. An early defense of Lugard’s policies as high commissioner.

Taiwo, Olufemi. “Reading the Colonizer’s Mind: Lord Lugard and the Philosophical Foundations of British Colonialism.” In Racism and Philosophy, edited by Susan F. Babbitt and Sue Campbell. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. This essay about Lugard’s philosophy of colonialism is included in this study of the relationship of racism and philosophy.

Thomson, Arthur A., and Dorothy Middleton. Lugard in Africa. London: Robert Hale, 1959. The first major biography of Lugard. Well written and interesting but now supplanted by Perham’s work.