Did Dr Robert Tignor in this recent article on ‘Colonial Chiefs in Chiefless Societies’ in this Journal, IX, 3, October 1971, not overstate the contribution of certain African chiefs ‘in forcing the pace of social change’?
My aim is to answer this question briefly as far as Ibo chiefs are concerned. It has been argued that they helped with the introduction of taxation, especially since this was not traditional. But the historical records show that most of them were actually opposed to its introduction,1 and that they were not an effective factor in its collection until after the reorganisation of the Native Authority system in the South-Eastern Provinces in the 1930s.2