Cars · Act I — CFAO, SCOA and the Trading-House Showroom

The first motor car in Nigeria arrived in Lagos in 1906 — a single-cylinder Cadillac landed at the Marina for the colonial Engineer of Public Works, Mr. Jebb. Within a decade the trade was a structure: CFAO (Compagnie Française de l'Afrique Occidentale, established Lagos office 1902), SCOA (Société Commerciale de l'Ouest Africain, 1907) and the Lebanese-founded Mandilas & Karaberis (1948) became the three houses that imported every Peugeot, Renault, Bedford and Vauxhall sold in colonial Nigeria. Their warehouses on Broad Street and the Marina were the country's first auto showrooms; their spare-parts counters were the only ones.

The colonial state used motor cars as administrative kit, not consumer goods. By 1939 there were roughly 7,200 registered vehicles in the whole of Nigeria — fewer than in a single London borough — and over 60% were owned by the Colonial Service, the Public Works Department, the missions and the trading houses themselves. Africans who bought cars were a tiny merchant class concentrated in Lagos, Kano and Ibadan; the rest of the country moved by rail (see Rail · Act III), bicycle and foot. Petrol arrived in 4-gallon tins from the AGIP and Mobil depots at Apapa; a national network of filling stations only began under the 1948 Ten-Year Development Plan.

What the importing houses produced, more than cars, was a commercial culture that still shapes the trade today: the sole-distributor agreement (one French marque, one expatriate house, no competition); the cash-and-carry showroom (no auto loans, because the colonial banks did not lend to Africans); the dependence on Hamburg, Marseille and Liverpool for every gasket and brake-pad. When independence came in 1960 there were still only about 48,000 vehicles in Nigeria — one car per 800 people. CFAO, SCOA and Mandilas had built the market that the assembly plants of the 1970s would inherit, and the import-dependence that would kill them.