The beginnings of the British exploitation of Nigerian tin are frequently associated with William Wallace, an ‘intrepid and avaricious agent’ of the National African Company (Freund, op.cit., 32). According to Fell’s 1939 account of the Nigerian tin industry, Wallace in 1884 discovered that ‘tin was being produced by the natives of the Bauchi plateau’, and the discovery was quickly followed up by a prospecting expedition, undertaken by the Royal Niger Company (Fell, 1939, 246; see also Freund, op.cit.). However, although tin was found on the Jos Plateau, the Company did not immediately move to extract it industrially, and it was not until the Nigerian interior had been brought within the Empire proper by Lugard’s conquest that industrial tin-mining became a financially viable prospect (Freund notes that mining projects of a size substantial enough to arouse the interest of the City required investment and infrastructure on a scale that only Government could underwrite (ibid.)).

During the period 1900-1910, the Niger Company (as the Royal Niger Company became after 1900) began to expand into Jos; they came hand-in-hand with Lugard’s conquerors, relying on the military machine to coerce or use open force against Plateau communities if they put up resistance to the British intrusion. The first company established in the area under the auspices of the Niger Company was the Naraguta Tin Mining Company, which had been set up in around 1904; its expansion had been guaranteed by several military campaigns (Morrison, 1977, 207). With the people of the Plateau largely conquered, most of the tin-mining areas were secured as safe for the British by 1907, and British-based traders and companies began to move seriously on Nigerian tin thereafter; the Government issue the first prospecting licences in 1910, and by the following year ‘some 200 European prospectors were at work in Nigeria’ (Freund, op.cit., 37-45).

The following decades saw the rapacious expansion of British tin interests on the Jos Plateau, the location of the primary tin deposits. Numerous mines and companies were opened, a railway line was laid linking the minefields to the coast, and the indigenous industry, including the pre-colonial Northern Hausa interests in tin, were effectively dispossessed and eliminated. Between 1900 and 1930, £30 million worth of tin was exported (Morrison, op.cit., 205). Labour was drawn mostly from the local populace, although some was imported from further afield; the introduction of cash taxation was intended to act as a spur to recruitment. Conditions were poor, and there were often labour shortages. In the early days of the mines there was frequent resort to conscript or corvée labour, supplied by the local Native Authorities, though this practice was stopped in 1920 in favour of ‘voluntary’ labour on the model that was practised in Southern and Central African mines. By the end of the 1920s, around 40,000 people were employed in the Plateau minefields; this figure fell sharply during the Depression, but increased once more during the run-up to war (see Freund, op.cit., 73-109 for a detailed account of mine labour up to 1940).

However, obtaining a stable labour force remained a problem, and during the 1930s many of the companies turned to mechanisation as a solution, investing in heavy digging and sluicing machinery to speed up and increase the volume of the extraction process despite a fluctuating workforce. The largest corporation, Anglo-Oriental, led the field, installing half a millions pounds worth of machinery in its mines during 1936-7. Freund reports that by 1939, ‘58 per cent of earth moved in Nigerian tin production was by electro-mechanical means and only 29 per cent by hand labour’ (ibid.,126). Power for this rapid mechanisation of the minefields came from hydro-electric power-stations, which were built to exploit the steep watercourses, falls and rapids at the edge of the Jos and Bauchi Plateaus. The first two power stations had actually been opened over a decade earlier at Kurra Falls on the Sangha river and Kwall on the Ngell (ibid., 114-5); by the mid-1930s they were owned and operated by the Nigerian Electricity Supply Company (NESCO). Anglo-Oriental’s mechanical expansion and increased demand for power prompted NESCO to build a third station at Jekko Falls, some five miles below the Kurra station, and which would generate current in part from Kurra’s overflow. Fell reports that the new power station was opened by the Governor of Nigeria in December 1938 (Fell, op.cit., 250), and Freund attributes the increase in tin production capacity that Jekko enabled directly to the consolidation of the various branches of Anglo-Oriental into Amalgamated Tin Mines of Nigeria (ATMN), ‘the world’s largest single tin-producing company’ (op.cit., 126). In 1948, 95% of the power generated went to the tin mines (Buchanan, 1952, 314)