Alcohol consumption among indigenous people in pre-colonial and colonial Nigeria was a multifaceted affair, mixing concerns on personal, communal and ritual levels throughout the life cycle of the individual within wider contexts: naming ceremonies, entertaining guests at weddings, chieftaincy instalments, funeral obsequies and pouring libations to the ancestors. There existed a variety of alcohol drinks, such as palm wine and fermented grain beers, but pre-colonial Nigerians did not distil spirits. It was not until the Atlantic slave trade, which encouraged the purchase of slaves with rum and whisky, that a taste for European-style imported liquor was fostered. The more potent imported alcohol symbolised a stronger spiritual strength and became a socially prestigious commodity. There were also economic uses for liquor: as a transitional currency and powerful catalyst for trade. When the slave trade ended, the liquor trade continued, reaching large volumes in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹

While British colonial officials and traders tended to favour European-style alcohol, indigenous communities consumed traditional brews and palm wines, as well as imported liquors. This chapter first discusses the impact of European alcohol imports on Nigerian communities, in particular in the southern regions, focusing on colonial debates on the merits of the wider availability of strong alcohol and its impact on African and European races. It then maps the controversial assertion by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) Bishop of Western Equatorial Africa that three-quarters of Europeans in the country died as a result of drinking imported spirits. This detailed case study reveals how the arguments for and against alcohol consumption were heightened, leading a few years later to an inquiry into the impact of the liquor trade on Nigeria which revealed more evidence on both sides of the debate. The chapter then examines the role of alcohol in the lifestyles of expatriates in the country, illustrated by cases of drunkenness, disorderly behaviour and death.

‘A Rum and Gin Civilisation’

The demand for imported alcohol in Nigeria grew in tandem with the growth and expansion of British control over the territory from the 1860s onwards. While Northern Nigeria became an imported alcohol prohibition zone, liquor was the most significant import in terms of volume and value in the British colonies of Lagos, Oil Rivers Protectorate, Niger Coast Protectorate and Southern Nigeria, all of which were eventually integrated into the Southern Provinces of Nigeria in 1914. By that time, Nigeria imported over four million gallons annually of alcoholic beverages, chiefly German Schnapps and Dutch gin.²

Before colonial intervention in the 1860s, the southern areas of what became Nigeria had various types of palm wine, while the north’s cereals provided the basic ingredient for various food-like brews fermented without yeast. Imported drinks did not displace local beverages; rather, they coexisted, complemented and competed with each other. Yet in the view of some colonial commentators, there was too much consumer choice. As the author of an article in the Lagos Standard noted in 1909, ‘The African has his palm wine and corn beer. To him spirituous liquor is a superfluous and dangerous luxury. He does not want it, he needs it no more than a cat needs two tails.’³ But there was no going back to older drinking habits as imported liquor spread inland through the new transport networks to an ever-growing number of Nigerians.

Of course, gin and rum had stronger intoxicating effects than palm wine or grain beer, a fact that critics of the liquor trade kept pointing out to their opponents. Describing concerns over rising palm wine consumption as ‘very much like ignoring the camel and trembling at the gnat’, critics of the liquor trade argued that the taste for alcohol was already in place in Nigeria and that the much more potent strength of imported spirits could wreak widespread drunkenness and destruction on the population in the near future.⁴ Such concerns were mirrored in Fiji, as is highlighted in Jacqueline Leckie’s chapter in this volume (see Chapter 4).

The import of strong liquor provoked fierce debate and concerns about whether the consumption of alcohol advanced development or mired it. The liquor trade was caught between two opposing colonial perspectives on economic development: on the one hand, the civilise-through-trade concept seeking to modernise Africans by enticing the population into the cash economy, and, on the other hand, the paternalist principle that Western civilisation had a duty to protect Africans from bad external economic and moral influences. Humanitarian concerns and economic interests became entangled. Critics of the liquor trade used temperance narratives to further their cause: drinking alcohol was bad, abstinence was good. Arguing that the imposition of ‘a Rum and Gin Civilisation’ would be ‘a hydra that devours the natives’ – halting useful commerce and hindering economic development – they agitated for prohibition and a complete restructuring of the colonial economy along alcohol-free lines.⁵

In the 1930s, a new practice swept through Nigeria: the distillation of illicit gin or ogogoro, a drink similar in strength to imported spirits.⁶ Ogogoro made serious headway against the long-standing imported liquor trade, substituting non-Nigerian drinks with locally made ones. The effect of an unlimited supply of crude, over-proof alcohol on the population raised grave health concerns. As one inhabitant of Aba, Soku Madu, put it in 1932: the consumption of ‘8,000 gallons per day of this Dreadfull [sic] liquor … is very injurious and dangerous to the human health’.⁷ Such anxieties provided a basis on which the colonial government could initially attack illicit gin. Colonial pronouncements were clear. People attending the Sabagreia court in the Niger Delta in February 1932 were told: ‘this crude liquor has very bad effects making people go blind, become paralysed and incapable of producing children’.⁸ An official circular distributed at Agbor in September 1932 listed illicit gin’s noxious side-effects in the following shock phrases: ‘it is a poison’; ‘it causes a wild state of drunkenness leading to death or insanity’; and ‘it can lead to loss of use of legs, wasting away, total blindness and impotence’.⁹ But as the years passed and the anticipated public health disasters did not materialise, colonial officers re-examined their warnings and concluded in 1947 that illicit gin had no more long-term health risks than licit liquor.¹⁰

Debate over the physical conditions that drinking spirits could induce became a key battleground in the liquor trade debate in Nigeria. From the late nineteenth century onwards the concept of over-indulgence in alcohol as a disease emerged, soon overshadowing parallel works by anthropologists that underscored the socio-cultural dimensions of alcohol use and abuse. As the historian Akyeampong has noted in relation to Ghana and Western countries, alcohol abuse became medicalised, and treatment by medical professionals advocated as the only remedy.¹¹ However, the disease concept failed to resonate with the social and cultural realities of alcohol consumption among Nigerians.

Many members of the medical fraternity gave evidence to the 1909 Inquiry into the Liquor Trade Inquiry in Southern Nigeria, set up by the British government to lay to rest questions over the liquor trade once and for all. Apart from Dr John Randle, a Sierra Leonean in private practice in Lagos, all doctors giving evidence were British colonial officers. The large and influential CMS had two medical missionaries, Dr John Miller in the north and Dr Henry Drewitt near Onitsha in the south, but neither of them appeared before the committee, leaving it to their bishop, Herbert Tugwell, to be their sole witness.¹²

Dr Henry Strachan, Southern Nigeria’s Principal Medical Officer, was sure that habitual drinkers suffered more health complaints than those who occasionally indulged in a ‘burst’ or single session of excessive drinking.¹³ With seven years’ experience of Nigeria, Dr Thomas Adam disagreed. He recalled a post mortem carried out by a colleague in the south-eastern town of Calabar on a soldier who he knew to have been particularly abstemious in his drinking. Yet the examination revealed death by acute alcoholic poisoning, the result of drinking half a bottle of gin straight off.¹⁴

Drinking alcohol formed part of a wider debate. Back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientists and physicians theorised on the concept of acclimatisation as an important issue in imperial settings.¹⁵ What was the ability of European colonialists to survive and prosper in non-European environments? And how was alcohol, among other things, part of the intrinsic cultural needs of Europeans far from home?

Medical opinion did agree on one issue: moderation in drinking habits was the healthy watchword, and abstention by those able to do without alcohol was even better.¹⁶ Against the convivial background of social drinking in rural areas, the solitary drinker presented an unusual phenomenon among Nigerians and was viewed with disquiet by all. In urban areas, social relations formed over drink, as opportunities for drinking presented themselves in the bars and clubs of Nigeria’s burgeoning towns and cities.

For the critics of the liquor trade, the prospect of wholesale physical degeneration of the entire African race loomed. In 1895 a Nigerian listed in the Lagos Weekly Record newspaper the unhealthy state of those countrymen who drank too much alcohol:

The majority view among medical doctors at the 1909 Liquor Trade Inquiry was that there were no inherent differences in the physiological effects of alcohol on the two races. However, given the contemporary belief that the average Nigerian was probably physically stronger than the average European, some observers concluded that indigenous people could take more alcohol without ill effects. For example, on the basis of his long experience in Yorubaland, Principal Medical Officer Henry Strachan argued that Nigerians were less susceptible than Europeans to the action of alcohol.¹⁸ That said, Strachan was struck by ‘the paucity of evidence of chronic alcoholic poisoning’.¹⁹ Hesketh Bell, a leading colonial official, claimed that ‘a coloured man, without “turning a hair”, can take a “shot” of rum or gin which would put a European into an almost helpless condition’.²⁰ Indeed, one missionary of the Holy Ghost Society compared the ability of Nigerians to take more alcohol to their ability to eat strongly spiced foods, which outsiders found too peppery for their constitution.²¹

There were also opposing views. Dr Oguntola Sapara, who ran the Ereko Dispensary in Lagos, with over 7,538 and 8,319 outpatients in 1907 and 1908 respectively, stated that, while health problems related to alcohol were on the increase, the dispensary still had only about ten cases on its record books of stomach inflammation due to various initial causes but aggravated by alcohol.²² Sapara believed that his countrymen were more prone than Europeans to the effects of strong spirits.²³

Death from excessive alcohol consumption was expected by some European officials even among the seemingly strong and healthy. Captain Frederick Lugard met the chief of Shaki in Northern Yorubaland in 1897 and found him ‘of magnificent physique and in the prime of life’.²⁴ But this was just his outward appearance; inside, his kidneys and other vital organs were ‘a complete wreck from Lagos drink, and [he was] doomed to a premature death’.²⁵ According to Lugard, only timely medical attention by his travelling physician, Dr Guy Mottram, who diagnosed the problem, turned the chief into a more sober, healthy patient. However, further south in the city of Ibadan, another leading chief was reported to have succumbed to the effects of excessive drinking and died at a relatively early age in February 1899.²⁶ In a further case, a Wesleyan minister in Abeokuta saw two ‘heathen townsmen’ waste away from excessive drinking: one apparently exposed himself after a heavy drinking bout and caught pneumonia; the other lost his appetite and ‘was practically kept alive for weeks on nothing but gin, but eventually he died’.²⁷

Evidence of drink-related medical conditions is scarce and mostly anecdotal. In fact, some reports from medical institutions did not list any diseases linked with alcohol consumption, as was the case for the Warri hospital.²⁸ Similarly, the Abeokuta Dispensary, which treated about 200 patients a month, reported no cases of alcohol over consumption or conditions caused by heavy drinking in the ten months up to May 1909. It was merely noted that people came to see the resident physician, Dr Rupert Welply, with concerns about ‘guinea worm, ulcers, abscesses, and fevers’.²⁹ In relation to the Lagos hospital it was noted that there were few admissions for ‘acute alcoholic poisoning and delirium tremens’ between 1899 and 1905, and that all ten of them were discharged and no deaths recorded.³⁰ Two of the cases admitted at Lagos in 1905 were Europeans. Overall, the number of patients diagnosed with alcohol-related conditions was negligible. In 1903 the records for all government hospitals in Southern Nigeria revealed only one case related to alcohol in a Nigerian.³¹ Between 1906 and 1911, recorded numbers were low, as is evident in Table 5.1.

Are the low numbers evidence of actual trends, official neglect or the difficulty of identifying alcoholics within society? Could there have been some reluctance to identify alcohol consumption as a health problem, or was it merely doctors’ unfamiliarity with the diagnoses of ‘acute alcoholic poisoning and delirium tremens’, or rather a belief in the sobriety of both Nigerians and Europeans that could account for the low figures? After all, this was at a time when the import of European liquor had increased to over three million gallons annually, and a large but unknown quantity of indigenous brews was reported to have been consumed. The collection and recording of official figures on alcoholic-related conditions within Nigerian and expatriate communities and among hospital patients might need to be questioned for their accuracy and comprehensiveness. As they stand, they paint a rather sober picture.

Expatriate officials were granted six months’ leave after every twelve months’ duty in the colonial service. While there is not much official evidence on the treatment of alcohol-related conditions, anecdotal accounts suggest that for Europeans the procedures of choice were hospitalisation and ‘drying out’, with severe cases simply invalided out of the colony and sent home.³² For the indigenous population, health implied wellbeing of mind, body and spirit, and this was expressed in a person’s ability to perform their social roles and responsibilities. The misuse of alcohol was a spiritual ailment, and treatment had to directly address the spiritual dimension.³³ Given these notions, it was in psychiatry that African and European understandings and treatments potentially overlapped. Psychiatric practice in colonial Nigeria confirmed that what came later to be known as ‘alcoholism’ was a spiritual illness. As Sadowsky has shown, Nigerians viewed mental disorders as spiritual ailments, and the treatment of alcoholics in mental asylums from 1906 onwards reinforced the association of alcohol-related conditions with spiritual causes.³⁴ Despite the lack of recorded evidence on the incidence and epidemiology of alcohol-related problems, one man was sure alcohol abuse was rife among Europeans.

Bishop Herbert Tugwell and the number of European deaths due to alcohol

In a letter to The Times newspaper of 27 March 1899, Bishop Tugwell, the chief protagonist in the anti-liquor trade argument, made a bold, eye-opening intervention in the debate on Europeans’ copious alcohol consumption in West Africa:

The Times had a considerable circulation in Lagos and according to colonial official Captain George Denton, Tugwell’s statement provoked ‘a great deal of ill-feeling in Lagos … more harm in Lagos than I can describe’.³⁶ After all, despite imported liquor’s significant role in the local economy as a profitable business for the wholesale selling of it to local retailers and as a desired barter item for the lucrative trading in local commodities such as cocoa and palm oil, European merchants were being directly attacked. At a special meeting under the auspices of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce, local traders voiced their upset at what they saw as yet another of the bishop’s ‘jumped at’ conclusions. They decided to teach Tugwell a lesson.³⁷ Just before he boarded a ship heading back to London for the centenary celebrations of the CMS, the police, armed with a criminal summons for libel, arrested Tugwell. Soon after, the Acting Police Magistrate of Lagos heard the case of John Peacock, Secretary of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce, versus the Right Reverend Herbert Tugwell, CMS Bishop of Western Equatorial Africa. Sir William Geary appeared for the plaintiff, while the defendant chose to speak for himself.³⁸

The prosecution’s case rested on an analysis of the available data relating to European fatalities in the colony. According to the medical certificates for Europeans dying in Lagos, there was no basis for the claim that every three out of four deaths were alcohol-related. Between 1880 and 1892, there were 113 European fatalities: 89 residents and 24 visitors.³⁹ Of the former group, two were alcohol-related deaths: in 1886, the Engineer of Government Vessels, H. Crane, died aged thirty of what was recorded as ‘acute alcoholism’, while in the following year a foreman of works, James Thomas Murphy, died aged thirty-seven of ‘excessive intemperance’.⁴⁰ Incidentally, in the year after the Tugwell debacle, the Registrar-General of Lagos recorded another European death from alcohol abuse: that of Thomas Pearce, aged forty-five, a storekeeper with the Lagos Government Railway, who died on 22 February 1900.⁴¹

Between 1892 and 1898, 106 European men and 17 European women died in Lagos. Only two deaths were related to drink: in 1892 one person died of ‘delirium tremens’, and two years later another of ‘acute alcoholic poisoning’.⁴² During the first five months of 1899, eight European residents of Lagos died, two of whom are known by name and drinking habits: Senior Survey Officer Corporal W. H. Pratt, a total abstainer who died of fever aged thirty-eight on 23 March, and the thirty-year-old District Commissioner G.H. Gill, a moderate drinker who died of dysentery two days later.⁴³

The figures in Table 5.2 show that of 17 deaths recorded for 1893, 9 were due to ‘climatic diseases’ and one was a case of ‘accidental drowning’. There is nothing in that year’s statistics to substantiate Bishop Tugwell’s statement. In 1894 19 of the 23 deaths were due to ‘climatic causes’, while ‘alcohol poisoning’ entered the list, but only in a single case. In that year, seven missionaries lost their lives; therefore, if Tugwell’s claim was true, it would imply that at least two of the missionaries died from drink, as pointed out by the Lagos Weekly Record:

The newspaper condemned the way the bishop had ‘ruthlessly blasted the reputation of the whole European population on the West coast’.⁴⁵ Apart from commercial considerations and some individuals taking umbrage, the prestige of the colonial rulers may have been seen to be at stake, too, as when, some forty years later, the colonial film censors banned Africans from seeing on the big screen ‘drunken white men and women’ and ‘white people drinking cocktails’.⁴⁶ However, like other newspapers, the Lagos Weekly Record soon came to treat the libel action as trivial and absurd, as Tugwell had not brought any particular individual into disrepute.⁴⁷ Indeed, events quickly turned Tugwell into a martyr to the cause of temperance and prohibition. Offers of help, both moral and financial as well as legal, came Tugwell’s way. A Defence Fund was initiated. Back in London, Dr Charles Battersby, the Secretary of the Native Races and Liquor Traffic United Committee (NRLTUC), a CMS-led pressure group seeking alcohol prohibition in Africa and throughout the world, stepped in to defend Tugwell:

Yet Tugwell’s editorial in his own CMS magazine, Niger and Yoruba Notes, tried to downplay the whole affair, and other observers quibbled about the figures calculated on both sides of the argument:

In fact, another editorial by Tugwell in July 1899 stated that his opening salvo’s initial words could only be taken to refer to 7.5 per cent, not 75 per cent, of the European community.⁵⁰ Later that year, Tugwell switched tack, believing that the liquor trade aggravated still further Lagos’s already high death rate.⁵¹ In fact, even with a figure ten times less than first stated, Tugwell’s calculations totalled a higher number than the official records (as collated in Table 5.3). During the 1890s, the death rate peaked at 66.3 per thousand Lagosians, or 6.63 per cent. In the next decade, the rate stabilised at the mid- to low 40s, a rate comparable to that of the early 1890s. While it is acknowledged that such rates depended on the accurate counting of all deaths and the total number of people in Lagos, the differences could be best explained by improvements in public sanitation, not diminishing consumption of alcohol.⁵²

Wider questions about the freedom of speech and the seeming callous persecution of an individual’s idiosyncratic views caused the Lagos government deep unease and embarrassment. It did not want to have a martyr to liquor prohibition on its hands.⁵³ Interest in the case both in Nigeria and abroad became intense. The colonialists decided that the best course of action was to prevent the case from reaching the Lagos court: a nolle prosequi (a formal notice of abandonment by a plaintiff or prosecutor of all or part of a suit) was entered by the Queen’s Advocate to quash the libel action against Bishop Tugwell.⁵⁴ Such a move probably resulted from the fresh arrival in Lagos of Chief Justice Sir T.C. Rayner, who ‘put an end to this vexatious action, and thus to uphold the honour and prestige of our British Courts’.⁵⁵ However, freed from the sub judice of the court case, the Lagos Weekly Record went on the attack over Tugwell’s initial pronouncement:

Alcohol and the enervating effects of the Nigerian climate

There may have been some truth in Tugwell’s claim, however, as expatriate deaths could well have been accelerated by over-indulgence in alcohol. The Acting Governor of Lagos, George Denton, suggested:

For Europeans, the Nigerian climate was debilitating and, coupled with frequent bouts of ill-health, made their residence particularly wearing on both their mental and physical condition. The Liquor Trade Inquiry contended:

Added to these factors was a frugal social life, especially for colonial district officers in rural areas, with loneliness and depression painfully present.⁵⁹ Recourse to alcohol as a prophylactic to stave off the possibilities of ill-health, or as a tonic to lighten one’s spirits, proved to be a favourite option for Europeans living and working in Nigeria.⁶⁰ Alcohol was considered a necessity of life in the tropics. In 1918 the Civil Service Association sought a licence to import 200 cases of whisky because the local Nigerian retail rate was fifty shillings a case more than the price of getting it directly from the Scottish manufacturer. As Governor-General Lugard pointed out, ‘These exorbitant rates are not checked by the Food Controller as whisky is not a food item, but it is a necessary article in moderate quantities in this climate.’⁶¹ Only missionaries, with their generally abstemious practices, did not follow the pattern of over-indulgence in alcohol.⁶² Blaming the climate for Europeans’ excessive drinking was questioned, with some pointing out that the climate was not unhealthy if you drank moderately. One local newspaper, the Western Echo, argued: ‘The climate may be enervating but it is not so deleterious as some wish to make out if Europeans will but use the brandy bottle judiciously.’⁶³

In medical emergencies, the medicine of choice tended to be the same for everyone. Alcohol was almost routinely administered in cases of debility. In one case, Dr John Tichburne gave six to eight ounces of spirits to patients suffering from typhoid.⁶⁴ Finding himself in the bush with a bad attack of malaria and without medicine, Dr Ernest Tipper resorted to imported gin to help him through his fever.⁶⁵ In 1929 J. Olu Johnson, transferring to Lokoja to work for John Holt and Company, got his doctor to issue a prescription to preserve his health en route, which included small doses of brandy.⁶⁶

From 1892 the heads of each department in the colonial service had to ask staff four questions regarding their behaviour, one of which was, ‘Has he been temperate in his habits?’⁶⁷ The view among prominent officials seems to have been that moderate or temperate habits were conducive to the health status of Europeans. The soon-to-be Governor of Lagos Sir William MacGregor, for example, wrote from his previous position in British New Guinea that ‘in my experience people that are total abstainers in the Colony enjoy better health, and have a lower mortality than those that are not total abstainers’.⁶⁸ His French counterpart in Madagascar agreed, cautioning at the International Temperance Congress in Paris against imbibing too much alcohol, and, on one tour, he himself took only water – ‘I never had a brighter idea in the whole of my existence.’⁶⁹ Indeed, an official government guidebook for British colonial officers who were to serve in West Africa had this advice (rendered in bold type): ‘Heavy drinkers should not go to West Africa, moderate drinkers should be very moderate there, and total abstainers should remain so.’⁷⁰ However, as the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies had noted in 1903 in his correspondence with the High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria,

There is evidence of colonial officers being censured for over-consumption of alcohol. Apparently, medical doctors also over-indulged in drink. In 1898 Dr William Murphy, stationed in the Niger Coast Protectorate, was reported to have been ‘strongly addicted to drinks and [had] on one or more occasions been unfit for duty’.⁷² Murphy was sacked. In Northern Nigeria, a doctor named as Sanderson resigned his post in 1902 after appearing under the influence of alcohol at a dinner with other government officials and proceeding to get very drunk. It was noted that ‘his conduct and language during dinner was disgraceful’.⁷³ In 1910 Dr A.B.S. Powell resigned his position in Southern Nigeria when he faced a charge of excessive alcoholic indulgence while on duty; he died a few days later.⁷⁴ In another case, a colonial committee of inquiry in 1910 investigated Dr Stuart Snell, stationed at Ogoja in Southern Nigeria, following allegations that he had been frequently intoxicated. While it was established that he had occasionally over-indulged in liquor, the committee decided that this had not interfered with his work and so dismissed the case.⁷⁵

There was a debate about the number of train drivers in the Railway Department who had reportedly succumbed to the lure of the bottle. The author of a letter to the editor of the Lagos Standard in July 1901 mused on one such employee: ‘Poor fellow, but for the comfort he gets from the obedience of his engine his life would hardly be tolerable. He has to look after everything – guard, brakesmen, station-masters, passengers, wheels, axles, couplings and brakes.’⁷⁶ In early 1902 two railwaymen named Rodway and Smith, a driver and fitter respectively, were reported to have been caught working while in a drunken state.⁷⁷ The Lagos Governor labelled as ‘scurrilous and false’ the newspaper report that ‘several of the drivers were not always strictly sober, with the result that the trains were very often late in arriving at Ebute Metta’ railway station.⁷⁸ However, later that year, in October 1902, the railway platelayer foreman Buckley died from alcohol over-consumption at the age of thirty-seven.⁷⁹ And just a couple of years later, in 1905, the Railway Department dismissed an engine driver named Rolfe for severe intoxication, which had caused him to break up furniture and to become ‘so violent that he had to be strapped to his bed’.⁸⁰ It also gave Henry Dyer, a permanent way inspector, an extra four months leave of absence to ‘dry out’ from his heavy drinking.⁸¹

More cases of excessive drinking were reported in subsequent years. In 1911 A.B. Healey, a sawmill foreman on the Baro–Kano line, was sacked after being found intoxicated on duty twice in a fortnight.⁸² The clinical report of the death of a railway platelayer named Wilson in 1915 indicated a long personal history of intemperance: ‘This man must have been drinking on the voyage out … and … as soon as he got to his station he started again, and finished himself off in a couple of days.’⁸³ In 1916 Rees Champion, a head guard on the Nigerian Railway, was sacked for being ‘addicted to intemperance’.⁸⁴ Alcohol poisoning killed the platelayer William Butler in 1918.⁸⁵ One morning in September 1921, William Rothwell, the district station manager at Iddo on the Lagos mainland, was not at work. He was found drinking in his quarters with two other Europeans and, when asked if he was unwell, he replied, ‘No, I’m on the booze today.’⁸⁶ Rothwell was suspended immediately. Fred Jones lost his driver’s job in March 1922 for ‘having given way to drink and therefore rendering himself unfit for the responsible duty of train working’.⁸⁷ Two years later, the locomotive driver Benjamin Gardner’s pension was reduced by 20 per cent because he was found under the influence of alcohol while driving a train in the last year of his working life.⁸⁸

Other branches of the Nigerian colonial service, such as the police, marine and customs departments, also had problems with drunken staff. James Owens, an assistant commissioner in the Southern Nigeria Police Force, had a five-year-long record of excessive drinking. Being described as a good officer, he was retained, but he was demoted to the bottom of the list for his rank without immediate prospects of salary increases.⁸⁹ The travelling commissioner Lieutenant Richard Morrisey resigned at the end of October 1904 after being found guilty of drunken behaviour.⁹⁰ William Coulter, a foreman carpenter with the Marine Department, died at Forcados in February 1914. His death from sun-stroke ‘was not helped by four “stiff” whiskies and soda taken every evening after dinner’.⁹¹ Thomas Broadhurst’s long-standing alcohol habit finally forced him to seek medical help; he was sacked from the Customs Department in 1917.⁹² William Langdon, the purser of the government steam yacht Ivy, was another case. He exhibited ‘insomnia, nervous depression and a delusion that he was in danger of being murdered’.⁹³ In 1931 a police constable was arrested in Calabar. He was ‘raving and manic drunk. He had to be kept in irons for 24 hours. It is conjectured that this could have only been the result of consuming locally distilled spirit.’⁹⁴

In Northern Nigeria, where the government had imposed constraints on the sale of alcohol and alcohol consumption was more restricted among indigenous communities, Europeans’ lifestyles tended to be sparser than in the south. Still, alcohol figured greatly. In 1902 Charles Russell, a temporary fitter, admitted that he had been on a week-long drinking binge.⁹⁵ Earlier that year, one colonial official, Thomas Robinson, did not even get to the region before being deemed unsuitable for taking up his position as postmaster because of his intemperate nature.⁹⁶ A clerk in Zaria’s Treasury Department, F.B. Graham, tried the local native beer, soon became drunk and turned up for duty while still in that state.⁹⁷ Two Marine Department masters were dismissed for insobriety, having been in Northern Nigeria for only a month: P.W. Matthews was fired for frequent over-indulgence, while Ernest Cleave, on more than one occasion, took charge of his steamer ‘in a muddled state’.⁹⁸ In 1927 an unnamed drunken colonial clerk was found lying at the side of a street in Zaria.⁹⁹

A couple of acts of alcohol abuse were reported in the colonial records as having been aggravated by gross misconduct. One involved the curator in Southern Nigeria’s Agricultural Department, John Williams, who was dismissed in 1909 for drunkenness and ‘indecently assaulting his native [boy] servant’.¹⁰⁰ A secret despatch of 1919 revealed that the assistant district officer L.G. Grant ‘resigned due to being constantly in a state of intoxication and of having committed indecent acts with natives at Ibadan’.¹⁰¹

How was life in West Africa perceived by fellow Europeans who passed through the colony or had retired from colonial service? In regard to the life of European traders who staffed the factories buying the hinterland’s agricultural produce, for example, Mary Kingsley, the adventurer, considered it unremittingly bad:

But for Sir Alan Burns, a former colonial official, such isolation, without European wives and families, had some advantages for the expatriate male community:

Both views are given credence in the autobiography by Raymond Gore Clough, a Niger Delta trader of the 1910s and 1920s. He described in detail the life of the original ‘Palm Oil Ruffians’ and their descendants on the coast of Nigeria. He himself spent two tours working for ‘a hard-living, hard-drinking palm oil ruffian called Hodgson’.¹⁰⁴ According to Gore Clough, alcohol figured prominently when he and his fellow traders and merchants met for supper, which was preceded by ‘much more pink gin’ or other beverages, as in the case of one Scotsman, John Willie, who apparently ‘loved his whisky’.¹⁰⁵ On reaching the factory at Olomo, Gore Clough saw a gathering of the local agents on the veranda for their evening session of whisky: ‘They moved slowly so as not to encourage the sweat; it was still very hot and humid. The drink was always whisky and soda taken in a long glass, the soda prepared in a contraption despatched from England.’¹⁰⁶ It is of course difficult to fathom whether the habits of hard drinking had been acquired back in Europe or had developed or exacerbated in the colony. But it seems clear that alcohol was the European’s consoler and comforter, the balm to a difficult existence.

As was the case in the military and navy, most European factories provided a daily ration of alcohol as part of their remuneration. Whisky and soda were common, some added a gin to the evening’s supper, and others, like Miller Brothers, provided a £2 monthly wine allowance.¹⁰⁷ This system irked Bishop Tugwell when he visited a number of traders at a British factory who were drinking gin given to them free by their employer on a festive day: ‘when intoxicated with it they were dancing about in a most horrible, disgusting, and disgraceful manner’.¹⁰⁸ In 1899 Dr Charles Battersby claimed that the African Association Trading Company would employ only teetotallers, having seen many of its alcohol-drinking clerks die from the climate and disease, resolved to.¹⁰⁹ However, for some, total abstention or moderation was difficult in the long run. One of the Niger Company’s agents, John MacTaggart, was dismissed for alcoholic excesses. Apparently, he had been all right for the first year of his factory work, but ‘then went to pieces and drank heavily, quarrelled with everybody, and left Igassa District in a state of chaos’.¹¹⁰

On the basis of cases of alcohol-related misconduct recorded in official correspondence, travellers’ observations and autobiographies, it seems that local brews and imported liquor were central parts of the creature comforts enjoyed by European expatriates. Among Nigerians, alcohol had social as well as ceremonial functions, as when alcoholic spirits were used to libate the ground and waterways in honour of ancestral spirits. However, whether Nigerians drank excessively, leading to inebriation and ‘alcoholic poisoning’, is more problematic to ascertain. The evidence on drinking behaviours collected by the 1909 Liquor Trade Inquiry was, in its own words, ‘conflicting’.¹¹¹ Evidence for the growing spread of excessive drinking among Nigerians was mainly given by eighteen (out of a total of 149) witnesses, all of whom belonged to the CMS. The Committee of Inquiry was not prepared to conclude that statements of eighteen representatives of a single missionary body should outweigh the bulk of other statements:

The majority of witnesses agreed with the views of a succession of colonial governors. As the Southern Nigeria Governor Walter Egerton, for example, put it in 1909, ‘the statements made that the inhabitants of the country are being ruined by drink are incorrect and contrary to the facts’.¹¹³ In a similar vein, the Lagos administrator Captain Denton had claimed in 1899: ‘A more fallacious idea cannot exist and it is a cruel shame to malign in this way a people whose temperate habits are an example to nearly every other race in the world.’¹¹⁴ Nigeria’s Inspector-General of Police Charles Johnstone compared the country very favourably in its absence of drunkenness with other places where he had served, England and India.¹¹⁵ The head of the Forestry Department found the Nigerian population’s sobriety comparable to that of the Burmese.¹¹⁶ The Honourable Kitoye Ajasa, a noted lawyer and unofficial member of the Lagos Legislative Council, who went to the Lagos horse race meeting for ten consecutive years, said there were no arrests for drunkenness among the crowd made up of Europeans and Lagosians: ‘I am sorry that I cannot say as much for England.’¹¹⁷

Conclusion

Nigeria’s significant trade in imported liquor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provoked passionate arguments about its impact on both indigenous and expatriate communities. At the time, patterns of drinking and addiction were drawn across time, between territories and between races. Yet the perceived and actual level of excessive alcohol consumption requires careful analysis in order not to tar whole sections of the population, indeed, whole races, with the brush of alcoholic degeneration. The exaggerated case put forward by Bishop Tugwell that the vast majority of deaths were drink-related and the fierce rebuttal by local traders showed how far beyond reasoned debate the discussions had reached. Though that episode produced little clarity as regards the impact of the liquor trade, the central role of alcohol in the lifestyles of many expatriates in the country can be illustrated by cases of drunkenness, disorderly behaviour, dismissal from employment and even death.