Lost history · 1903-1914
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
Half a century before the oil of the Niger Delta, a small British company drilled beside Lekki Lagoon, struck oil in 1908, and covered the water in it. Then the money ran out and the story was almost lost.
Most Nigerians learn that the country's oil story begins in the Niger Delta in the 1950s. That is true for oil that could be sold. But the first search, and the first strike, happened decades earlier and far to the west, near the eastern end of Lekki Lagoon, around a place called Agbabu.
The historian Phia Steyn, of the University of Stirling, pieced this story together from British and Nigerian archives, from the records of BP and Shell, and from the private letters of a man who was there. Her account starts in 1903. That year two small companies, Nigeria Properties and the Nigeria and West African Development Syndicate, began looking for bitumen, coal and oil in the Agbabu-Mulekangbo area.
The ground there held something odd. Bitumen, the thick black tar used on roads, came up out of the earth, and the sea washed lumps of it onto the beaches of West Africa. Two geologists, Bernard Collins and A. H. Harrison, studied the area between 1903 and 1905. They found large deposits of bitumen. What excited them most was that the tar was still soft, even near the surface in the tropical heat. To them that meant something liquid was still feeding it from below. There was oil down there, they wrote, and probably a lot of it.
Britain wanted that to be true. At the time the country had almost no oil of its own, only a small shale industry in Scotland. Its navy was thinking hard about switching its ships from coal to oil. So from 1904 the government decided that oil concessions in British colonies should go only to British companies, and investors began dreaming of a great gusher somewhere in the empire.
The man who took up the Nigerian dream was John Simon Bergheim, a businessman who had already worked in the oil fields of Galicia and Romania. In November 1905 he founded the Nigeria Bitumen Corporation to take over the two small concessions near the lagoon. A year later he bought a third one next door. Many later writers called it a German company. Steyn shows that this is wrong. It was registered in Britain, and its shares were traded in London.
Bergheim spent much of 1906 and 1907 asking the British government for help. He wanted money, and he kept asking until he got it. The loan, £25,000, was approved near the end of 1907, and the first part was paid in February 1908. He had a strong friend in Sir Walter Egerton, the governor of Southern Nigeria, who believed the colony would only grow if government helped pay for its development.
The work on the ground had already begun in 1906 under a manager named Frank Drader. He was a Canadian of German descent who had drilled for oil in Canada and in Galicia, and most of his crew came from Galicia too. They cleared wide stretches of land beside the lagoon for houses, for a small tramway and for drilling sites. The camp was the company's whole world in Nigeria. Apart from hiring local workers, it had very little to do with the people around it.
Drader loved photography. He set up a dark room in his house on the concession and took many pictures of the drilling and of what it did to the land and water. Those photographs, along with his letters, are now kept by his granddaughter in New Zealand.
Between 1908 and 1912 the company drilled about fifteen wells, under a driller named Van Sickle. In November 1908, well number five struck oil. It had been drilled with a new rig bought with the government loan.
The excitement did not last. In a letter to his wife in September 1909, Drader described what happened when the well came back to life. It began to flow at about two thousand barrels a day. After a few hours, hot water came up instead, and the well settled down to about fifty barrels. He guessed that London would be thrilled by the news. Then he described the lagoon. It was covered with oil. There was so much oil at the company's wharf that the camp doctor, who liked to swim every evening, came out of the water coated in it.
Well number twelve turned out better. It gave good oil, and Sir Boverton Redwood, the leading petroleum expert in Britain, called it the most important thing to happen in all the company's work. His report pushed up the company's shares in 1911.
But the problems were stubborn. Water kept flowing into the best wells, and the crew had no machines to separate it from the oil. In the rainy season the concession flooded. The swampy ground limited where they could drill, there were no roads, and the local communities would not tell the strangers where the richest bitumen lay.
By July 1912 the company had money for only six more months. Bergheim went back to the Colonial Office for another loan, and then, in December 1912, he was killed in a motor accident. Governor Egerton had already been moved to British Guiana, replaced by Lugard. With its two champions gone, and with London nervous after many British oil ventures had failed in Russia, the loan was refused. The company stopped all work at the end of 1913 and was wound up in 1914. Steyn points out that it was this collapse, not the First World War as some writers say, that ended the search.
Bergheim left one lasting mark. He pushed for a special law for oil, and the Southern Nigeria oil ordinance of 1907 was written, mostly copying Trinidad's. It made oil-hunting in Nigeria a British monopoly. When it was debated, the African members of the Legislative Council, led by C. S. Sapara Williams, asked that local authorities get a fair share of royalties from oil found on their land. The governor and his officials voted them down. The Lagos Standard newspaper said the law would hand the government and the European the kernel and leave the Nigerian only the shell.
It would take Shell and D'Arcy until 1956, and millions of pounds, to find oil that could be sold. Agbabu's oil came first, and almost nobody remembers it.
