When the Kingdom of Dahomey broke away from a weakened Oyo Empire, it rose rapidly to become an important military power capturing towns and villages from the grip of Oyo Alaafin. To get slaves, you need war. Port Novo, Whydah, Ouidah, Popo that used to be some of Oyo’s contact with Euro-Brazilian ship owners became important slave trading ports for Dahomey. With the British government becoming proactive with its anti-slavery campaign, Commander Forbes was sent in 1849 to 1850 to meet and persuade the King of Dahomey to switch to trade in cotton, palm kernel and other agriculture items as a key source of income instead of trade in slaves. At the meeting, some slaves had been earmarked to be beheaded for religious ritual. One of them was Aina, then a seven-year-old girl who had already witnessed the killing of her parents when Gezo’s army invaded their Egbado village of Oke Odan in 1848 and took her as a slave. Commander Forbes used everything to persuade Gezo to release the little girl to him. Gezo refused. The game changed when Forbes said: “She would be a present from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites.” But it was not true that Queen Victoria was the queen of the whites and Gezo definitely knew he was not king of the blacks. There were his immediate superiors: Alaafin Abiodun Atiba in Oyo and Oba Osemwende and Adolo in Benin. But being a megalomaniac, by equating him with Queen Victoria, Forbes ballooned his estimate. And Gezo saw that being the Queen’s coequal, he would earn more respect and command more power from Alaafin and Oba of Benin. He released Aina.
When Aina eventually arrived at Windsor Castle on 9 November 1850, the Queen, who never knew Commander Forbes nor asked him to bring back a black girl, adopted Aina and sent her for royal training. The girl not only impressed the Queen with her charm, intelligence and willingness to blend, she impressed the whole of Britain. She spoke English with a royal accent unlike millions of other Britons. Several photographers, illustrators and artists came to document her. Even foreign dignitaries who came to visit the Palace saw Princess Aina with the royal family and wrote about her. Her presence was sufficient to confound and debunk the pernicious racist theory then that blacks were of least intelligence. The phrenologist even came to measure her skull. With the royal family having a black Princess with her own waiting ladies, it was difficult to regard blacks as monkeys in respectable circles in Britain.
During the meeting with Ajayi Crowther at the Windsor Castle, the Queen asked whether Aina’s gifts were due to her noble blood. Crowther answered that she wasn’t a descendant of one of those mighty kings of West African empires or kingdoms but her parents were chiefs of a small town. Since the Queen arranged the marriages of all her six children, she arranged Aina’s marriage too to Captain Davies, supremely confident she was in good hands. The wedding was held at St. Nicholas Church, Brighton on 14 August 1862. The Queen paid for the elaborate ceremony which was the talk of the country. And when both settled in Lagos, they continued the course of civilisation, opening schools, educating the people and discouraging slavery. They were the reason why there was no major uproar against British presence in Nigeria unlike in other countries like Ghana, Kenya and India. They earned the trust of fellow Africans and the colonial governments across West Africa respected them.
In fact, Michael J.C. Echeruo’s remarkable book, Victorian Lagos: Aspect of Nineteenth Century Lagos Life provided rare photographic evidence of black and white Lagosians living together, trading together and socialising together as equals. No party organised by the governor or any elite was complete without the presence of Aina Davies. She was in regular correspondence with the Queen and the Queen sent gifts to her and invited her when there were family functions in London. A word from Aina about cruelty of a British governor or consul would make that governor to be removed. And the governor and consuls were very careful about the impression they were giving Mrs. Davies. Nigeria would not have become a South Africa where theories of racial superiority became institutionalised.
Even Nnamdi Azikiwe’s popular West African Pilot said on Tuesday, May 23, 1939 when drumming up support for the Empire Day celebrations:
“Tomorrow is Empire Day, a day to which school children all over the British Empire look with eagerness. It is a day set apart to remind us of the unblemished deeds and acts of a queen whose memory should never be obliterated from the minds of the African. Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, called ‘Victoria the Good’, was responsible for many kind acts which have helped immortalise her among us. Can we forget the [Lagos] cession of 1862, the gift of a staff to the late King Akitoye, the Bible sent to Sagbuwa the Alake of the Egbas, the adoption of Bonnetta Forbes afterwards, Mrs J.P.L. Davies, and such like?”
But that was pre-war era before USSR penetrated Nigeria with Marxist viewpoint and analysis and British presence became regarded as colonisation and imperialism. But Oyo, Benin, Fulani empires were not seen as imperialism. The liberation from slavery, the mass education by the British, the health and social services provided, the railways, the infrastructural facilities built then, became known tools of colonial exploitative expansion. Hebert Macaulay became regarded as nationalist when in actual fact he was what is today called government critic, human rights or civil society advocate. He never called for the British government to leave Nigeria. Till the last, he swore allegiance to the British crown. In his Justitia Fiat: the Moral Obligation of the British Government to the House of King Docemo of Lagos, he wrote with pride about the role his grandfather, Ajayi Crowther, played in asking the British to take over the political affairs of the country and modernise the place.
Also figures like Captain Labulo Davies, Henry Carr, the inspector of schools of the Colony of Lagos who favoured assimilation with White Lagosians; Otunba Payne, the chief registrar of Lagos Supreme Court in 1877 who prepared the indigenous handbook for white judges to use, became blotted out from the history books once anti-colonial discourse took firm root. And slaveholders and beheaders like Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi were resurrected as heroes.
Today, the slavery disempowering Nigeria is enslavement to the pastor, enslavement to the caliphate, enslavement to the Quran, enslavement to word of God, enslavement to churches and the diviners; enslavement to superstitious thinking. Yet we are not even seeing their grip on our minds as slavery. We thank Professors Adeyemo Elebute and Karen Mann for showing us how overcoming the forces of enslavement and cooperating with agents of modernisation made an icon and a city.
Damola Awoyokun is the author of the forthcoming book ‘Cantilever: History of Nigeria from 1822 – 1970’ Volumes I- III
–The story was earlier published on this site and reproduced to mark Lagos at 50
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