Content area
Full text
I
Most historians writing about twentieth-century Africa have, at one time or other, used colonial statistical data. When we do this, we normally add a disclaimer, pointing out that these statistics are likely to be unreliable, and then proceed to use them anyway. But surely, we should be able to say something more definite about the reliability of these data? If we know more about the process by which these statistics were collected, for which aims, and with what preconceived ideas in mind, we should be able to establish, if not a margin of error, then at least some idea of which aspects of colonial statistics are more reliable than others. Furthermore, the process of colonial data-collecting was linked to establishing ethnic and other categories, which have since become generally accepted. This paper addresses these questions in an analysis of the context and contents of the published report of the 1921 Census of Southern Nigeria, and discusses its usefulness as a source for historians. The issues I discuss here with specific reference to this Nigerian census are characteristic for colonial censuses in general and should therefore be of relevance to all historians using colonial census data, and also-more generally-help us to understand how some of the most basic categories describing African societies have been constructed in the process of the acquisition of information by colonial governments.
The 1921 Census of Southern Nigeria was part of the first comprehensive census of Nigeria. Until now I have not succeeded in locating the raw census data in either Nigeria or the UK.1 However, the abstract of the census, included in the four volumes of P. A. Talbot, The Peoples of Southern Nigeria. A Sketch of their History, Ethnology and Languages, with an Account of the 1921 Census (London, 1926) is generally available and commonly used as a source by historians of Southern Nigeria. A companion publication for Northern Nigeria also exists.2 Percy Amaury Talbot, of the rank of Resident, was the Census Officer for Southern Nigeria. Talbot was an obvious choice for Census Officer, being an experienced Colonial Officer with a longstanding interest in anthropology.
Before he was asked to conduct the Census in the Southern Provinces, Talbot had already been conducting anthropological research during intervals of official...