Sir Gilbert Thomas Carter

Sir Gilbert Thomas Carter (1848–1927) was a career colonial administrator who came to Lagos in 1891 from the Bahamas determined to break the trade blockades that the Ijebu Kingdom had used since the 1860s to keep European traders out of the interior. The blockade was the immediate cause of the Anglo-Ijebu War of May 1892: Carter sent a force of 400 Hausa Constabulary and West India Regiment troops under Col. Francis Scott against the Awujale; the Maxim guns at Imagbon (20 May 1892) shattered the Ijebu cavalry and opened the road to Ibadan, Oyo and the Kiriji battlefront. It was the first sustained use of Maxim guns against Yoruba forces.

Capitalising on the shock of Imagbon, Carter set out on his famous 1893 Interior Tour: from January to March 1893 he travelled through Ibadan (3 February), Oyo (signing a treaty with Alaafin Adeyemi I on 3 February 1893), Ogbomoso, Ilorin border, Iwo, Ede, Modakeke and Ile-Ife (signing with the Ooni Adelekan Olubuse I), and finally Abeokuta (signing with the Alake Oyekan). These Carter Treaties of 1893 ended the 16-year Kiriji / Yoruba Civil Wars (1877–1893), placed the Yoruba kingdoms under British 'protection', and converted the Alaafin, Ooni, Awujale, Alake and Olowo from sovereign monarchs into salaried agents of indirect rule. Without Carter's six-month diplomatic blitz the Lagos Protectorate could not have been declared in 1900.

He also began the engineering of modern Lagos — reclamation of the Marina swamps, the first piped water survey, and the bridge that bears his name (Carter Bridge, opened posthumously 1901, rebuilt 1931 and 1973). He left Lagos in 1897 for the Bahamas governorship, retired in 1898, and died in Bath on 23 November 1927. He is the British figure most often invoked in Yoruba oral history of the colonial transition — for better and for worse.