The Europeans Before the British — Portuguese, Dutch, French, Brandenburg, Danes

The story Nigerians inherit is that 'the white man came' and meant the British. He didn't, and he didn't mean them. For more than three centuries before a Union Jack flew over Lagos in 1861, the coast of what is now Nigeria was a crowded European market — Portuguese first, then Dutch, then a French–English–Brandenburg–Danish scramble — and the British were a late, often-second-rank entrant who only won by outlasting everyone else.

1. The Portuguese (1472 — c.1640): first contact, first cross, first slave manifest. In 1472 the caravel of Ruy de Sequeira, sailing under João II's coastal reconnaissance programme, rounded the Bight of Benin and made landfall near the mouth of the Forcados. He was the first European on record to set foot on what is now Nigerian soil. Within a generation Portuguese factors had pushed inland: João Afonso d'Aveiro reached the court of Oba Ozolua of Benin in 1486, came back with a Bini ambassador to Lisbon, and opened a pepper-and-ivory trade that put Benin bronzes in European cabinets and Portuguese muskets in Bini hands. Augustinian and Capuchin missionaries baptised Bini princes; a Christian quarter rose at Ughoton (Gwato); Warri's Olu Domingos (r. c.1625) was educated in Portugal and married a Portuguese woman. The Portuguese also opened São Tomé and Príncipe as the offshore entrepôt — and turned the Bight of Benin into a slaving coast. From 1500 to roughly 1640 the trade in Nigerian captives was, overwhelmingly, a Portuguese-Brazilian business.

2. The Dutch (c.1600 — c.1740): the first dislodgers. The Dutch West India Company (WIC), chartered 1621, did to the Portuguese on the Nigerian coast what they had already done in Asia — they took the trade by force. Dutch ships were trading at the Forcados and Bonny by the 1610s; by the 1640s the WIC had displaced Lisbon as the dominant European buyer in the Bight of Benin and was operating factories on the lagoon at Offra (near modern Cotonou) and at Jakin. Olfert Dapper's great compendium *Description of Africa* (Amsterdam, 1668) — still one of the best sources we have on pre-colonial Benin and Warri — was compiled from Dutch factors' reports, not English ones. The Dutch never built a permanent fort on the Nigerian coast (their forts were further west, at Elmina, Axim, Shama), but for roughly a century they were the price-setters in the Bight.

3. The English, French, Brandenburgers and Danes (c.1650 — c.1800): the crowded scramble. England arrived late and small. The first English voyage to West Africa was Thomas Wyndham's in 1553 — to Benin for pepper, where most of the crew died of fever — and English trade with the Bight of Benin was sporadic and unprofitable for the next century. It was only after the Royal African Company (chartered 1672, monopoly broken 1698) that English slavers — out of Bristol and then Liverpool — became serious buyers at New Calabar, Bonny and the Cameroons. The French pushed in from the 1670s with the Compagnie du Sénégal and later the Compagnie des Indes, trading at Whydah and probing the Niger Delta. The Brandenburg African Company (Prussian) ran a slaving operation out of Großfriedrichsburg from 1683 until the Dutch bought them out in 1720; Danish ships traded at Christiansborg (modern Accra) and pushed eastward into Lagos and Badagry. By 1750 the Bight of Benin was the second-largest source of African captives shipped to the Americas (after the Bight of Biafra immediately to the east), and the buyers on any given day might be Portuguese-Brazilian, Dutch, English, French, Danish, Brandenburg or American.

4. The Afro-Brazilians (Aguda) and the Sierra Leoneans (Saro) — Europeans-by-proxy. When Brazil abolished the slave trade in 1850 and Britain pressed for full abolition, two streams of returnees came back to the Bight: Afro-Brazilians (Aguda) from Bahia and Pernambuco — Portuguese-speaking, Catholic, often skilled masons and carpenters — settled the Brazilian Quarter on Lagos Island from the 1830s, leaving behind feijoada, akara, bungalow architecture and surnames like Da Silva, De Souza, Pereira, Gomez. Sierra Leoneans (Saro) — descendants of slaves freed by the Royal Navy and resettled at Freetown — came back from the 1840s as Anglican-educated clerks, teachers, printers and missionaries; the Saro produced Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, Herbert Macaulay's grandfather, and the Lagos professional class. Together they were a more powerful 'European' presence on the ground than any actual European in 1850 Lagos.

5. Why the British 'won'. Three things tipped it. First, the 1807 Slave Trade Act and the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron based at Fernando Po (1827) and then St Helena — a 60-year naval blockade that made Britain the only European power with permanent armed ships off the Niger coast. Second, the Niger expeditions (Mungo Park 1796 & 1805; the Lander brothers 1830, who proved the Niger emptied into the Atlantic, not the Nile or the Congo) — geographical knowledge nobody else bothered to buy. Third, steam, quinine and the Maxim gun: by the 1850s the Royal Navy could ascend the Niger in armed steamers, dose its crews against malaria and out-shoot anyone on shore. The bombardment of Lagos (1851), the cession (1861), the Berlin Conference (1884–85), Goldie's Royal Niger Company charter (1886) and the Niger Coast Protectorate (1893) were the close-out moves of a contest the British had spent 80 years winning by attrition — not by being the first or even the most welcome.

The coast Britain finally took had been a European bazaar for fourteen generations. Bini courtiers had been reading Portuguese before any Englishman had read a Bini word. The streets of old Lagos still carry the names of returned Afro-Brazilians who came back speaking Portuguese. The schoolbook version — 'the British came, they conquered, they left in 1960' — is a 99-year story laid on top of a 400-year one. The first European in Nigeria was not Lugard. He was a Portuguese captain who landed at the Forcados in 1472, looking for pepper.