Until the late eighties when Kaduna State seemed to have slid into intermittent sectarian and ethnic violence, its capital city, Kaduna, was one of the most peaceful, cosmopolitan and politically important cities in Nigeria. These crises have, however, merely diminished rather than eliminated the city’s virtues, thanks largely to the effective measures the authorities in the state adopted from 2000, the year of the worst crisis, to curb the hostilities in the state.
Established in 1912 by Lord Frederick Lugard, first as a garrison town and then as the regional capital of the then Northern Protectorate, Kaduna soon attracted people of all races, religions and cultures. Within two decades of its establishment, it grew from an almost virgin territory of small scattered settlements of the indigenous population, mostly the Gbagyi, to a town of over 30,000 people. This population comprised the British colonizers, artisans from other West African British colonies, artisans and clerks from the Southern Protectorate as well as labourers and traders from the Hausa, Nupe, Kanuri, Fulani and other tribes in the Northern Protectorate.
By 1963 the town had about 250,000 residents and nearly 30 years later, the 1991 census put its population at 1,307,311, a little over a third of the population of the entire state.
Kaduna’s history reflects that of the North in particular and Nigeria in general. This history dates back before 1912, the year Lord Lugard chose it to become the dual capital of the North and Nigeria. The road to Kaduna actually started in 1900 when Lord Lugard was first appointed the High Commissioner of the Northern Protectorate. At that time Lokoja, at the confluence of the mighty rivers Niger and Benue, was the centre of British missionary activities and British trade. It was also the headquarters for its wars of occupation of the North.
Lugard first settled in Lokoja as regional capital to continue with the colonial conquest of the region. Two years later, i.e in 1902, he moved the capital from Lokoja further upstream of River Niger, to Jebba. However, Jebba remained the headquarters for only a few months. Towards the end of the year, he moved even further upstream to Zungeru with the intention of making it the permanent capital of the North. Many Nigerians will remember Zungeru, a major railway town, as the birth place of Nigeria’s foremost nationalist and first president, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe. His father had worked there as a railway staff.
For a while it seemed as if Zungeru had succeeded where Lokoja and Jebba had failed; it remained the regional capital for 10 years. However, with time, Lord Lugard himself began to doubt the wisdom of his choice especially given the vastness of the North which had been “pacified” by 1906. He then began a search for a more central and more accessible location than Zungeru.
His search finally ended at a location on the Zaria plains, roughly in the middle of the region. Not only was Kaduna centrally located and much more accessible than Zungeru, the Zaria plains in which it was located were well served by two major tributaries of River Niger, River Kaduna, which gave the settlement its name, and River Gurara. River Kaduna itself was so called because it was crocodile infested, kadduna being the plural of ‘crocodile’ in Hausa.
Apart from its centrality, accessibility and abundant water supply, the location also possessed a clement environment. Also, following the not-too-happy relationship of the colonialists with the large indigenous population of Lagos as capital of the Lagos Colony and Calabar as capital of the Southern Protectorate, the British considered the virginity of a location an important consideration in their choice of a capital. Kaduna, with its sparse and scattered settlement of the indigenous population, satisfied this criterion.
No sooner had Lord Lugard settled down in Kaduna as regional capital in 1912, than he began to plan for it as Nigeria’s capital, ahead of the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates in 1914. This followed his promotion that same year as Governor-General of the amalgamated Nigeria. As Governor-General, he did not hide his antipathy towards Lagos and recommended that the capital be moved to Kaduna as quickly as possible. “Government House, Lagos,” he wrote in one of his papers, “would make an excellent hotel if the transfer to Kaduna was achieved.”
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