Dame Flora Shaw, Lady Lugard (1852-1929) and
Frederick Lord Lugard of Abinger (1858-1945)

According to http://www.paxethnica.com/kingmakers-cast/:

Flora Shaw was the first Victorian gentlewomen to rise from the middle ranks of British journalism to its Alpine peak, The Times of London. In Egypt during the winter of 1888-9 as a correspondent for both the Pall Mall Gazette and The Manchester Guardian, she was briefed by Evelyn Baring, and fell under the spell of his New Imperialism, whose cause she then espoused as The Times’s peripatetic Colonial Editor. From 1893 to 1900, in five-hundred articles for what was the Empire’s quasi-official house-organ, she coined the name Nigeria, and approved the expansionary schemes of Cecil Rhodes, becoming a co-conspirator in the 1897 Jameson Raid, the failed plot to bring down the Boer regime in gold-rich Transvaal. In 1902, she made a suitable match with Sir Frederick (later Baron) Lugard, the proconsul who established the giant federation (which she named) Nigeria; it was Lugard who codified the precepts of Indirect Rule (his capital letters) which the British sedulously applied to the Middle East while Lady Lugard became his trumpet, as well as that of the Britannic Empire.

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According to http://www.hh-bb.com/ebooks/:

Flora Shaw was the daughter of a British captain whose family life led her to begin a career in journalism from a young age. Her writings were constantly infused with a burning passion for what she saw as the positive aspects of the British Empire and all of the notions of racial & colonial superiority which went with it.

Appointed as the Colonial Editor for The Times of London, she had carte blanche to travel the vast British Empire at the time and rapidly became a foremost journalist of her time, even if at first she had to disguise her sex under a nickname.

She later married the first Governor General of the British Crown’s West African real estate / trading company district (now Nigeria) – this led her to devise a name which would be a shortened version of the “agglomeration of pagan and Mahomedan States” that was functioning under the cumbersome official title, “Royal Niger Company Territories“.

In this ultra rare article describing the geography of the region, Shaw outlines her reasoning for a name change – the ultimate in colonial tampering.

“The name Nigeria applying to no other part of Africa may without offence to any neighbours be accepted as co-extensive with the territories over which the Royal Niger Company has extended British influence , and may serve to differentiate them equally from the colonies of Lagos and the Niger Protectorate on the coast and from the French territories of the Upper Niger.”

Wow, I never knew that Lord Lugard died long before the independence of our now 'troubled' country. Flora Shaw is a typical example of a successful British woman of her time, but, I still wonder why she had to name this country NIGERIA.

Lord Lugard was indeed a well-travelled British administrator...

flora seemed like a very intelligent woman of her time.

Flora

British Imperialism

The History of British West Africa

Race,History and Philosophy


These are courses I love teaching with a relish

. The name Nigeria was taken from the Niger River running through the country.

TonySpike:
Wow, I never knew that Lord Lugard died long before the independence of our now 'troubled' country. Flora Shaw is a typical example of a successful British woman of her time, but, I still wonder why she had to name this country NIGERIA.

The useless people wey found Nigeria, I wish the guy never know hien way across the Niger, sit down for one hotel after two rounds and draft one problematic sketched called Nigeria..