Most accounts of Britains rule over Nigeria were written by British officials who presented colonialism as a civilising mission to rid Africans of barbaric superstition and corrupt tribal leadership; to educate them and convert them to Christianity. Yet – strangely for a colonised people openly described this way by their oppressors – many Nigerians today still view their countrys time in the Empire through rose-tinted glasses. Max Siollun offers a bold rethink: a clear-eyed, unromanticised history of colonial Nigeria. He asserts that colonialism was not a system with benevolent intentions.
