THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IMPACT OF THE EASTERN NIGERIAN RAILWAY ON UDI DIVISION, 1913-1945

This study, based solidly on various archival, oral and secondary sources, reveals the great impact of the Eastern Nigerian Railway on Udiland. From 1901, the British conquest of Igboland was, indeed, undertaken to expedite railway-building to tap cotton, palm oil and also mineral resources. While this intragressive line promoted economic recovery in the English textile and shipping counties, it pioneered big business in Nigeria, thus imposing the culture of the Industrial Revolution upon Udiland. An important discovery was that as from 1913 United States and British technologies reached Eastern Nigeria where a colonial consumer society was emerging.;Evidently, the Eastern railway created the Udi workingclass; increased the mission-trained elite; developed the urban bourgeoisie; introduced a cash economy; and facilitated attitude change. Since urban civilization began at the rail towns, urban protests, strikes, and other movements confirm that modern Nigerian nationalism sprouted on the railway. But while the railway work experience forged a common Nigerian identity among the Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and other ethnic groups--in a railway-united Nigeria--the Colonial Government used the same transportation to disunite the Nigerian peoples till 1946 when the Legislative Council at Lagos made laws with, and also for, Northern Nigerians. Thus railway transportation had political consequences. The General Strike of 1945, therefore, was the great watershed in the emergence of modern Nigerian nationalism. It ended the era of reformism and elitist politics on the railway and ushered in the era of national liberation, mass politics and modern capitalism.;Contrary to received opinion, the Nigerians, not the British overlords, built this railway. As laborers producing work and freight, the Udi people contributed significantly to the transformation of the railway economy. Historians of labor can, in fact, consider the Udi role as autocolonialism. Through railway imperialism, the colonizer exploited the colonized, the railway itself undermined Warrant Chiefs and shifted community power. As urbanization developed through migrations, urban-dwellers formed self-help ethnic unions which preceded national politics and political parties that also superseded the royal nationalism of the contractor chiefs like Onyeama and Chukwuani with their personalized factions.