Rail · Act I — Lagos to Ibadan, Cotton and Tin

The first stake of the first railway on the territory that would become Nigeria was driven at Iddo on 9 March 1896. The work was done by the Public Works Department of the Lagos Colony, supervised by the engineer W. Shelford, with labour drawn from Sierra Leonean and Lagosian wage workers and a substantial contingent of forced labour from the Egba interior. The line reached Otta in October 1898, Abeokuta in 1899, and Ibadan on 4 March 1901 — 193km of 3'6" (1067mm) Cape gauge, single-track, designed not to move Nigerians but to move cotton, palm produce and the salaries of British district officers from the interior to the Lagos Marina.

The second line started 800km east. In 1907 the Colonial Office authorised construction of the Baro–Kano line, 562km from a new rail-head on the Niger to the city the British had just sacked in 1903. The line opened in 1911 with one explicit purpose: to move Kano groundnuts, cotton and Bauchi tin down to the Niger for shipment to Lagos, ultimately to the Lancashire mills that the British Cotton Growing Association had been founded in 1902 to supply. The Jos tin mines, opened by the Niger Company in 1905, generated by 1913 more than £1m a year in royalties — and the entire output rode on the railway the British had built to carry it.

The routes the colonial railway took, and the routes it deliberately did not take, are the geography of the colonial economy. The line went to Ibadan (cocoa), Abeokuta (palm oil and cotton), Ilorin (the imperial frontier), Kano (groundnut), Jos (tin), Enugu (coal, from 1916), Port Harcourt (a port created by the railway in 1912 to ship Enugu coal), and Maiduguri (the late extension of 1964, after independence). It deliberately did not go to the Niger Delta interior, where palm oil could not be taxed at a railhead because middlemen controlled the creeks. It did not go to the Cross River basin, which was reserved for river transport under the Aro and Efik trading networks. It did not cross to Calabar, which lost its capital status to Lagos in 1906 partly because it had no rail.

By 1914, the year of Amalgamation, Nigerian Government Railways operated 1,126 km of track, employed 17,000 workers, carried 1.2 million passengers and 380,000 tonnes of freight, and earned £600,000 in operating revenue. The Director of the Lagos & Kano Railway — a position that did not exist in the political diary of either Northern or Southern Protectorate before 1907 — reported directly to the Governor-General. The railway was the first all-Nigeria institution, four years before there was a Nigeria. It was also the first institution that fully expressed what Nigerian colonialism was for: a freight system that ran palm oil, cotton, groundnut and tin to the Atlantic, and English manufactured cloth and Crown civil servants back the other way.