forms. Increased foreign investment combined with high world oil prices should push growth to over 5% in 2000-01.Although the Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive in the region that is now Nigeria, it was the British coming into the picture only in 1553 who were to play the starring role in the drama of colonization as well as Nigeria's birth as a modern nation-state. British merchants, initially interested in the region's gold, ivory, and pepper, soon shifted their attention to the slave trade, and quickly became the dominant foreign commercial interest in Nigeria.In the early part of the nineteenth century, as Great Britain reaped the fruits of the Industrial Revolution, the need for African slaves became subordinate to the need for African markets and raw materials. After Great Britain outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1804 a decision driven less by humanitarian considerations than by economic logic that need translated into a vague policy of territorial acquisition. For British merchants based around the Oil Rivers on the coast, the top priority was to penetrate the hinterlands and establish direct links with the primary producers of palm oil, thereby dispensing with coastal African middlemen. But they faced stiff challenges from both the threatened middlemen and from nature. King Ja Ja of Opobo, for example, deployed a number of strategic devices to beat back the British campaign, including direct shipment of his oil to Europe. In 1887, when Ja Ja was lured onto a British vessel "to talk," he was arrested, sent to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) for trial, then sentenced to a five-year exile in the West Indies, where he died.Reforms in the late 1940s through the 1950s allowed Nigerians limited political representation, but southerners pushed for full autonomy. Yet northern political leaders, under the auspices of the Northern People's Congress (NPC), opposed a motion calling for independence by 1956, and agreed to suppo...
