Books by Moses E. Ochonu

Historians of colonial Africa have regarded the decade of Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. This book challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the determined, at times violent, yet instructive responses of Northern Nigerian people to the British colonial mismanagement of Great Depression.

Moses E. Ochonu explores a rare system of colonialism in Middle Belt Nigeria, where the British outsourced the business of the empire to Hausa-Fulani subcolonials because they considered the area too uncivilized for Indirect Rule. Ochonu reveals that the outsiders ruled with an iron fist and imagined themselves as bearers of Muslim civilization rather than carriers of the white man's burden. Stressing that this type of Indirect Rule violated its primary rationale, Colonialism by Proxy traces contemporary violent struggles to the legacy of the dynamics of power and the charged atmosphere of religious difference.