Man of Courage and Character

A local study of African resistance to British occupation, by the Idoma people, who today number about two million in Nigeria. The author, himself of the Idoma, presents a detailed account of the Igedde-British war 1926-29, deliberately termed because it was a war the Igedde people were convinced they were fighting. His is an account of a war of self-determination; of how the Igedde, under the leader Ogbuloko, the General of the People's Army, protested against taxation, and expressed the sum of their grievances against the colonial power. Ogbuloko sought to establish a modus-vivendi with the colonial rulers in Idomaland; and later stave off military confrontation, but the Igedde people, in the classic divide and rule scenario, came to represent a great danger to themselves, and would betray their own actions to British forces. The work is an epitaph to the anti-British wars, which swept the length and breadth of Africa; balances western perspectives on the nature of African resistance to partition; and attempts to establish a link between the resistance against colonial rule and the development of modern nationalism in Idomaland.