Chief Femi Fani-Kayode
In 1916, Lord Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, the 1st Baron Lugard, the fourteenth Governor of Hong Kong and the first Governor-General of Nigeria, said the following: “Lagos has for 20 years opposed every Governor and has fomented strife and bloodshed in the hinterland. I have spent the best part of my life in Africa; my aim has been the betterment of the natives for whom I have been ready to give my life.
But after some 29 years, and after nearly 12 years as Governor here, I am free to say that the people of Lagos and indeed the westerners are the lowest, the most seditious and disloyal, the most purely prompted by self-seeking money motives of any people I have met.” As if that were not bad enough, two years later, on September 25th 1918, in a letter to his colleague Walter H. Lang, Lugard wrote the following: “The Hausa-Fulani has no ideals, no ambitions save such as sensual in character. He is a fatalist, spendthrift and a gambler.
He is gravely immoral and is seriously diseased that he is a menace to any community to which he seeks to attach himself.” Lugard’s words are utterly reprehensible.
They represent the most appalling examples of racial stereotyping that I have ever seen. Yet he didn’t stop there. In his book titled ‘The Dual Mandate’ (pg. 70) 1926 he wrote the following: “In character and temperament, the typical African of this race-type is a happy, thriftless, excitable person.
LACKING IN SELF-CONTROL, DISCIPLINE, AND FORESIGHT. Naturally courageous, and naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity, fond of music and loving weapons as an oriental loves jewelry. HIS THOUGHTS ARE CONCENTRATED ON THE EVENTS AND FEELINGS OF THE MOMENT, and he suffers little from the apprehension for the future, or grief for the past.
His mind is far nearer to the animal world than that of the European or Asiatic, and exhibits something of the animals’ placidity and want of desire to rise beyond the State he has reached.
Through the ages THE AFRICAN APPEARS TO HAVE EVOLVED NO ORGANIZED RELIGIOUS CREED, and though some tribes appear to believe in a deity, the religious sense seldom rises above pantheistic animalism and seems more often to take the form of a vague dread of the supernatural . HE LACKS THE POWER OF ORGANIZATION, and is conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of men or business.
LOVES THE DISPLAY OF POWER, but fails to realize its responsibility… he will work hard with a less incentive than most races. He has the courage of the fighting animal, an instinct rather than a moral virtue…
In brief, the virtues and defects of this race-type are those of attractive children, whose confidence when it is won is given ungrudgingly as to an older and wiser superior and without envy… Perhaps the two traits which have impressed me as those most characteristic of the African native are HIS LACK OF APPREHENSION AND HIS LACK OF ABILITY TO VISUALIZE THE FUTURE.”
There can be little doubt that this arrogant englishman was a rabid racialist who had nothing but the deepest contempt for our people. He was also one of the most uncouth and vulgar souls that ever polluted our shores with his unwholesome and malevolent presence. It is one of the greatest ironies of modern history that this ignorant seafarer was the individual that recommended to the British Colonial Office that the Northern and Southern Protectorates of Nigeria and the Lagos colony, should all be merged into one large country.
That recommendation was accepted and consequently Lord Lugard can legitimately be described as the chief architect of modern-day Nigeria. It was actually Lord Lugard’s wife, Miss Flora Shaw, that proposed the name Nigeria for our country. This was done in an article that she wrote for the London Times on January 8th 1897. She and Lugard got married five years later in June 1902 after which she became known as Lady Flora Lugard. Shaw was well connected.
Her mother was a French lady of Mauritian stock by the name of Marie Adrienne Josephine and her father was Major-General George Shaw, a respected British army officer. She was colonial editor of the Times of London where she wrote an influential weekly column titled ”The Colony”. She was not only stunningly beautiful but she also had vision and substance.
Given that, one finds it difficult to comprehend what an enterprising and extraordinary woman like this found attractive in an abominable scalywag like Lord Lugard. I daresay that this was a classic case of the beauty and the beast.

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