This chapter is concerned with those parts of West Africa where by 1918 English was established as the principal language of government. They included the independent black republic of Liberia, the British possessions of the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Nigeria, and sections of the mandated territories of the former German Kamerun and Togo which were administratively attached to Nigeria and the Gold Coast, respectively, following the First World War. Varying in size from the Gambia, its 4,003 square miles drawn out along the Gambia river for three hundred miles, to Nigeria, which covered over 356,000 square miles, they encompassed a diversity of ecological zones: coastal swamps, tropical rainforests, savanna, sahel, montane and riverain regions. These contrasts had fostered long-established internal commerce and export trade, sustained in turn by some of the most populous areas in tropical Africa. The pre-colonial political institutions in what became anglophone West Africa had ranged from ancient forest kingdoms and Islamic theocracies to a variety of stateless societies. By 1905 they had been incorporated in a number of colonial polities which were themselves far from homogeneous.

The British West African possessions were constitutionally rather untidy ‘multiple dependencies’, consisting of older coastal ‘settled’ colonies linked to larger hinterland protectorates. In the former the African population were British subjects and were entitled to various legal rights not enjoyed by ‘protected persons’ in the latter. This was further complicated in the Gold Coast by a tripartite linking of the ‘settled’ coastal colony, beyond which lay Ashanti (Asante), a colony by conquest, and the hinterland protectorate of the Northern Territories, each separately administered under the governor, while three British administrators were in charge of the protectorate of Northern Nigeria, the protectorate of Southern Nigeria, and the ‘settled’ colony and protectorate of Lagos.