King Koko Of Nembe Resistance & How Nigeria was sold.
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On the 29th of Jan 1895, King Koko of Nembe Kingdom (also known as Nembe-brass) now in Rivers State led a successful attack on the British (Royal Niger Company) Company.
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( #EndSWAT #EndSARSBrutalitynow )

The Nembe are an Ijaw people of the Niger Delta region who are historically related to the Kru people of Liberia, Cote d'ivoire and Cameroon, they are known for their sailing skills, fishing and trading. https://twitter.com/Joe__Bassey/status/1313365256845099008?s=19

Nembe was the centre of an important trade in palm oil, and it had refused to sign a treaty proposed by the British, opposing the Royal Niger Company's aim of bringing all trade along the kingdom's rivers into its own hands.

By the 1890s, there was intense resentment of the Company's treatment of the people of New Calabar of its aggressive actions to exclude its competitors and to monopolize trade, denying the men of Nembe the access to markets which they had long enjoyed.

King Koko aimed to resist these pressures and tried to strengthen his hand by forming alliances with the states of Bonny and Okpoma. He renounced Christianity.

And in Jan 1895, after the death of Ebifa, he threw caution to the winds and led more than a thousand men in a dawn raid on the Royal Niger Company's headquarters at Akassa, with 22 war canoes and 1,500 foot soldiers from the Ijo nation he attacked the RNC depot in Akassa.

They destroyed the warehouses and offices, vandalised official and industrial machines, and burnt down the entire depot, about 70 men were captured, 25 were killed, and 32 white British were taken hostage as part of the spoils of war to Nembe and 13 were not accounted for.

Many of the white men were later executed in cold blood at the "Sacrifice Island" the next day, January 30, 1895.
Koko then sought to negotiate with the Company for the release of the hostages captured by the British, his price being a return to free trading conditions.

On 2 Feb he wrote to Sir Claude MacDonald, the British consul-general, that he had no quarrel with Queen Victoria but only with the Niger Company. Despite this, the British refused Koko's demands, and more than forty of hostages taken by the British were then ceremoniously eaten.

On 20 Feb the Royal Navy counter-attacked. They attacked Koko's city of Nembe killing three hundred of his people. Many more of his people died after the British introduces smallpox to his people.

King Koko fled to Etiema, a remote village in the hinterland, where he died in 1898 in a suspected suicide.
The next year, the charter of the Royal Niger Company was revoked, an act seen as partly a consequence of the short war with Koko.

And with effect from 1 January 1900 the Company sold all its possessions later known as Southern Nigeria protectorate and Northern Nigeria protectorate to the British government for £865,000, considered to be a very low price.

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*Bayelsa State