Lugard, Sir Frederick, Baron Lugard

views updated

Lugard, Sir Frederick, Baron Lugard (1858–1945). Colonial administrator. Lugard started as a soldier and adventurer, then got drawn into east Africa's religious wars (protestant converts v. catholic converts), until the area (Uganda) was formally annexed by Britain in 1894. Then he helped the Royal Niger Company in the west, and when its charter ran out became British commissioner in northern Nigeria. While there he devised a new way of governing ‘natives’, called ‘indirect rule’, or ruling them according to their own customs rather than by imposing alien ones. He later justified this philosophically, in a seminal book called The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922); but it clearly had practical advantages too. The Dual Mandate's other message was that colonies should be run for the benefit of both their subjects and the world as a whole. That made Lugard an obvious choice for the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission, on which he sat from 1922 to 1936.

Bernard Porter

More From encyclopedia.com