In October 1908 an African journalist published a commentary in the Lagos Standard that explored at length “the great controversy which is raging around the question of the liquor traffic among the native races.” In it he charged that the Protestant church leaders who were the “apostles of temperance” were deliberately exaggerating and misrepresenting the facts about the import and consumption of European-produced gin in Southern Nigeria in order to promote a sinister, racial agenda. Asserting that the anti-liquor trade controversy was “essentially a race question,” the author further argued that the claims made by the opponents of the liquor trade about the destructive impact of gin on the health of African people and communities were nothing less than an attack on the “Man of Africa” – a tactic in a larger effort to reduce West Africans to a position of racial inferiority. Invoking the memory of the great campaign against the slave trade, the writer charged that temperance advocates were “raiders of our consciences,” who “having removed the fetters from [the African's] loins,” intend “to place them on his liberties and his conscience, to enslave his mind.”

Race and the liquor traffic controversy

The argument for a close link between race ideas and the often impassioned effort to restrict the importation of cheap spirits, known as trade gin, into West Africa – and by extension other territories occupied by native peoples – was certainly persuasive. From the emergence of the liquor trade as an international humanitarian issue in the 1880s, the struggle to impose restrictions on the export of cheap gin and other spirits to Africa and elsewhere had turned on definitions of categories of human difference. The main pressure group promoting the issue in fact announced this by its title: The Native Races and Liquor Traffic United Committee.