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Economy within an Economy: the Manilla Currency, Exchange Rate Instability and Social Conditions in South-Eastern Nigeria, 1900–48

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Ben Naanen
Ben Naanen
Affiliation:
University of Port Harcourt*
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Extract

This paper studies the effects of the coexistence of the manilla currency and British currency in south-eastern Nigeria, and the way in which this monetary situation created political tensions which eventually led to the redemption of the manilla. When British control of Southern Nigeria was formalized in 1900 and British currency introduced in the south-east in the following year, the inability of the colonial authorities to put into circulation adequate supplies of British coins, coupled with historically entrenched use of traditional currencies, compelled the colonial state to recognize the latter as legal tender. However, the continuing circulation of these currencies alongside British coins created financial and economic difficulties, causing the colonial state to adopt a number of legislative measures to eradicate them. While other traditional currencies capitulated to these measures, the manilla continued to be popular as a result of objective economic factors, and was strengthened by some of the very instruments designed to eliminate it.

Meanwhile, the constantly fluctuating exchange rate of the manilla was generating discontent. These fluctuations were caused primarily by the gyrations of the world market. Improved prices of palm products–the main sources of British currency in the economy of southeastern Nigeria–brought about the appreciation of the manilla. This caused hardship among wage-earners by reducing the exchange value and the purchasing power of their meagre and fixed income which had to be converted to manillas in order to buy food and other locally produced goods and services. Periods of depression, on the other hand, caused manilla depreciation as a result of a diminished inflow of British currency. This reduced the income of peasant producers, while increasing the purchasing power of workers. The ferments generated by fluctuating manilla values have remained, until now, unidentified causal links in the political movements in south-eastern Nigeria, including especially the women's movements of the 1920s.

The discontent intensified in the 1940s, when the influx of cash into the Nigerian economy caused by war-time military spending and the post-war commodity boom caused a continuous appreciation of the manilla. This development made life more difficult for workers, whose incomes were already being decimated by inflation. The resulting intensified political tension, as well as the existing obstacles to trade and smooth collection of taxes (also caused by unabating manilla fluctuations), made the demonetization of the manilla through redemption inevitable. With the elimination of the manilla, which had constituted a sub-system within the economic system of colonial Nigeria, the colonial state's economic control of Nigeria can be said to have been completed.

Type
Economy, Society and Material Culture in Nigeria
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , November 1993 , pp. 425 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 One of the earliest published studies on rural Nigeria is Forde, Daryl and Scott, Richenda, The Native Economies of Nigeria, ed. Perham, Margery (London, 1945).Google Scholar On southeastern Nigeria: Harris, J. S., ‘Papers on the economic aspects of life among the Ozuitem Ibo’, Africa, XIV (1943)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Some aspects of the economies of sixteen Ibo individuals’, Africa, XIV (1943–4). Bridges', A. F. B. unpublished monumental manuscript, ‘Report on oil palm survey: Ibo, Ibibio and Cross river areas’ (Mss. Afr. s.698(1), Rhodes House Library, Oxford)Google Scholar, is an important study, stretching from 1929 into the 1930s. The most authoritative document on the economic condition of Nigerian workers during the manilla era is the Enquiry into the Cost of Living and the Control of the Cost of Living in the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria (Colonial Office, 1946; henceforth Cost of Living Report). None of these sources specifically addressed or even mentioned the additional economic problem of manilla areas.

2 The best known of these uprisings was the ‘Women's War’ of 1929; there was also a lesser movement in 1925 near Umuahia and the Calabar market women's uprising the same year. As argued later in this work, these uprisings had some important linkages with the manilla problem, which have remained hidden from existing studies of the women's movement. See Mba, Nina, Nigerian Women Mobilised (Berkeley, 1982)Google Scholar; Van Allen, Judith, ‘“Sitting on a man”: colonialism and the lost political institutions of Igbo women’, Can. J. Afr. Studies, VI (1972)Google Scholar; Ekpo, V. I., ‘The Calabar market women riot of 1925: a prelude to the Nigerian anticolonial movement’ (unpublished ms., 1992).Google Scholar

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8 Cited in Talbot, P. A., The Peoples of Southern Nigeria (5 vols.) (Oxford, 1926), iii, 875–6.Google Scholar

9 The population of Calabar Province was estimated at 900,825 in 1936 with an average density of 143 per sq. mile, while that of Owerri Province in 1948 was 1,630,000 with an average density of 422 per sq. mile. Ref. Calabar Province, Annual Report, 1936, Minloc 17/1/37; and Owerri Province, Annual Report, 1948, Minloc 16/1/108, respectively.

10 Scarcity of coins occurred frequently throughout the period covered by this study.

11 The British West African currency exchanged at par with sterling.

12 Ofonagoro, The Currency Revolution, 111.

13 Southern Nigeria, Ann. Rept., 1901. In 1896, 60,000 British coins were in circulation in the Niger Coast Protectorate which included parts of Owerri and Calabar Provinces. Cf. Ofonagoro, Currency Revolution, 7. However, since the local populations were generally averse to British coins, it appears the coins disappeared from circulation, shipped, perhaps, to Britain as specie, for the Annual Report on Southern Nigeria for 1899–1900 mentioned ‘absence of coins from the districts’.

14 Ibid.

15 Hopkins, ‘Currency revolution’, 479.

16 Cited by Jeffreys, DO, Special Duty, Ikot Ekpene Div., to Assistant Treasurer, Calabar Prov., 15 May 1933, Ikotdist 14/1/499.

17 The Native Currency Proclamation of 1902 or Proclamation No. 14 of 1902.

18 Hopkins, ‘Currency revolution’, 479.

19 Southern Nigeria, Annual Report, 1904.

20 Ofonagoro, Currency revolution, 8.

21 Ofonagoro, ‘From traditional to British currency’, 643.

22 A more detailed description of how trade in manillas and the British currency was conducted is contained in ‘The manilla problem’, 46.

23 ‘The native woman is conservative, she is the last to abandon the native currency…’: Jeffreys to Asst. Treas., Calabar Province, 15 May 1933, Ikotdist 13/1/499.

24 The ‘World economy’, according to Chaudhuri, ‘when used in the sense adopted by Fernand Braudel, signifies a ‘well-defined economic area under the influence of a central place or central region [with] a functional and possibly hierarchical relationship between the centre and peripheral areas’: Chaudhuri, K. N., Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge, 1985), 230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar According to Wallerstein, a world economy must have a core, a periphery, a semi-periphery, and unequal exchange: Wallerstein, I., The Modern World System (New York, 1974).Google Scholar The triangular trade between West Africa (periphery; raw materials and labour supplier), Europe (core; manufactured goods supplier), and North America (semi-periphery; precious metals, agricultural and semi-processed goods supplier) fits the above description of a world economy.

25 Dike, K. O., Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta (London, 1956), 101.Google Scholar

26 Calculated from Helleiner, G. K., Peasant Agriculture, Government and Economic Growth in Nigeria (Homewood, Illinois, 1966), 501–2Google Scholar, Table IV-A-7.

27 Ibid. The relative decrease was as a result of increased production and improved prices of other products such as cocoa and groundnuts.

28 Baker, ‘Manillas’, 92.

29 Jeffreys to Assistant Treasurer, 15 May 1933.

30 Ibid.

31 DO, Ikot Ekpene, to Resident (henceforth, Resdt.), Calabar Province, 27 Jan. 1943, Ikotdist 13/1/499.

32 Jeffreys to Assistant Treasurer, 15 May 1933. M. D. W. Jeffreys, a highly respected colonial bureaucrat, was amazed by the Assistant Treasurer's view.

33 Jeffreys to Assistant Treasurer, 15 May 1933.

34 DO, Ikot Ekpene, to Resdt., Calabar Province, 23 Nov. 1925.

35 Anonymous Treasury official to DO, Ikot Ekpene.

36 The Daily Service, 9 June 1942.

37 Helleiner, Peasant Agriculture, 557–58, Table V-E-3.

38 Harris, ‘Papers’; idem, ‘Some aspects’ 305–35.

39 Southern Nigeria, Annual Report, 1899–1900.

40 Bende Division, Annual Report 1933.

41 Cost of Living Report, 138–43. The tables in ibid., 106–7, show that expenditures exceeded incomes.

42 Most sources prefer using the term ‘wage-earners’. I think we can conceptualize a Nigerian working class at this point in time in less rigid terms.

43 DO, Uyo and Abak, to Resdt., Calabar Province, 1917, Ikotdist 13/1/29.

44 DO, Ikot Ekpene, to Resdt, Calabar Province, 18 Nov. 1920, Ikotdist 13/1/29.

45 Calabar Province, Annual Report, 1936, Minloc 17/1/37.

46 Owerri Province (Aba Division), Annual Report 1935, Rivprof 9/1/399.

47 Opobo Division, Annual Report 1948, Opodist 3/2/22.

48 Owerri Province (Aba Division), Annual Report, 1935, Rivprof 9/1/399.

49 Cost of Living Report, 33–34, tables 3 and 4.

50 Report of a Committee Appointed to Consider the Adequacy or Otherwise of the Rates of Pay of Labour and of African Government Servants and Employees in the Township of Lagos (1942), para. 15.

51 Cost of Living Report, 62.

52 Report of a Committee, para. 13.

53 Opobo Division, Annual Report 1942, Opodist 3/2/15.

54 The Daily Service, 9 June 1942.

55 Nigeria, Annual Report, 1947, 30.

56 Opobo Division, Annual Report, 1932.

57 Calabar Province, Annual Report, 1936, Minloc 17/1/37.

58 Owerri Province (Okigwe Division), Annual Report, 1929.

59 The trading and wage-earning communities in Ikot Ekpene which sent several representations to the government over the manilla issue were almost entirely non-indigenes.

60 Owerri Province, Annual Report 1925, Rivprof 8/13/310. The movement's aims were initially the increase of fertility and the reduction of prostitution, inspired, according to the women, by God.

61 Jeffreys to Assistant Treasurer, 15 May 1933.

62 Cited by Jeffreys, Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 See Table 1.

65 Jeffreys to Assistant Treasurer, 15 May 1933.

66 Martin, Susan, Palm Oil and Protest: An Economic History of the Ngwa Region, South-Eastern Nigeria, 1800–1980 (Cambridge, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

67 Sir Bernard Bourdillon, Governor of Nigeria, to Malcolm MacDonald, Secretary of State for Colonies, 26 Jan. 1939, Opodist 10 Oct. 1943.

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69 Four-Village Council to DO, Ikot Ekpene, 26 Feb. 1941, Ikotdist 13/1/499.

70 DO, Uyo and Abak, to Resdt., Calabar Province, 1917, Ikotdist, 13/1/29.

71 DO, Ikot Ekpene, to Resdt., Calabar Province, 18 Nov. 1920.

72 The Daily Service, 9 June 1942.

73 The most widely suggested rate was 12 manillas to the shilling.

74 DO, Ikot Ekpene, to Resdt., Calabar Province, 27 Jan. 1943, Ikotdist 13/1/499.

75 Civil Service Union and the Yoruba, Ibo, Efik, Hausa and Cameroons Community to Resdt., Calabar Province, 20 Mar. 1944, Ikotdist 13/1/499.

76 The Village Councils of Ikot Abia, Idem and Ikot Ewang, Ikot Ekpene to DO, Ikot Ekpene Division, 25 May 1942, Ikotdist 13/1/499.

77 Cohen, Robin, Labour and Politics in Nigeria (London, 1981), 159.Google Scholar

78 The authors of the Cost of Living Report wondered how the recycling of money through taxation without additional cash injection could possibly bring about inflation.

79 Resdt., Calabar Province, to DO Ikot Ekpene, 9 Feb. 1943.

80 Members of the Committee were: D. A. F. Shute, Resdt., Owerri Province (Chairman); J. V. Dewhurst, Acting Resident, Calabar Province; R. Welch, General Manager, UAC, Calabar; W. McDonald, Manager, Bank of British West Africa, Port Harcourt; A. D. Dennar, Aba. The meeting at which these recommendations were made was held at Mr Shute's office on Saturday 6 July 1946. Cf. Ikotdist 13/1/499.

81 DO, Ikot Ekpene, to the Group Council, Ikot Ekpene, 11 Oct. 1946, Ikotdist 13/1/499.

82 UAC, Statistical & Economic Review III, p. 56.

83 Ikotdist 13/1/496.

84 UAC, Statistical & Economic Review, IV (09 1949), 59–60.Google Scholar Details of the manilla redemption operation in Ikot Ekpene Division, amount collected at each centre, logistics, etc., are contained in file Ikotdist 13/1/496.

85 Ofonagoro, , ‘From traditional to British currency’, 646.Google Scholar

86 UAC, Statistical & Economic Review III, 50.Google Scholar

87 Baker, , ‘Manillas’, 92.Google Scholar