Colonial Conquest and Resistance: The Case of Esan People of Benin Province of Nigeria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Esan (Anglicised Ishan) kingdoms, like other states, kingdoms and empires in the territory known today as Nigeria were conquered and brought under colonial rule by the British between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. With aforementioned conquests, colonial rule was imposed on the people. The people however, did not submit to foreign rule without resistance. This chapter examines the resistance by the people of Esan, in spite of their crude weapons, when confronted by superior and better trained forces. From the onset of their wars of conquest, the British officials underestimated the strength and strategy of African military forces. It was therefore, not surprising that, Captain A.T. Jones, who was commissioned in 1861, by the administration of the newly acquired British Colony of Lagos to report on the army of the Egba, remarked that the pre-colonial African military forces, were nothing but “irregular marching and skirmishing of the barbarous horde” (Ade Ajayi & Smith, 1971, p.139). However, the European forces were to be confronted by these “barbarous horde” for more than twenty-five years before they could bring most of the hitherto independent states and kingdoms under colonial rule. Over the years, the military confrontations between the Europeans and the centralized states such as Benin, Sokoto, Madinka among others, have been given much attention by scholars. On the other hand, the confrontations between the foreign invading forces and the non-centralized or segmentary societies have unfortunately, been relegated to the background. It is noteworthy that the non-centralised societies, offered equal, if not stiffer resistances than the centralised states to European occupation. Any wonder then that Crowder writes that, “the segmentary societies or peoples divided into numerous petty chiefdoms … provided some of the stiffest resistance to colonial forces of occupation experiences” (Crowder, 1971, pp.4-5). As will be shown in this paper, the non-centralized or segmentary societies like Esan, provided stiffer and longer resistance than some of the centralized states to the European forces in their quest to conquer the territories in the hinterland of South-Central Nigeria.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".