Benin–Nigeria border

A meridian and a road

France set up its first protectorate in the area at Porto-Novo in 1863, and Britain took Lagos in 1861. An Anglo-French convention of 10 August 1889 made the dividing line a meridian through the Ajarra creek at Porto-Novo, running north to the 9th parallel, based on a harbour-master’s sketch survey of Lagos’s lagoons.^[1]

A joint commission worked on the ground in 1895 and reported on 12 October 1896. Instead of a pure meridian it followed small rivers and ran 200 metres to one side of local roads, naming which farms and villages went to Dahomey and which to Lagos, and then took the Okpara river north to the 9th parallel. The convention of 14 June 1898 accepted that line and extended the frontier north to the Niger.^[1]

Circles round villages

The present line comes from an Anglo-French agreement of 19 October 1906, with small changes in 1912. North of the Okpara it is built from straight lines, lines kept a set distance west of roads, and arcs of circles drawn around villages such as Okuta, Guri and Yashikira so that they and their lands stayed British. A joint commission finished placing pillars from the coast to the Okpara in 1912.^[1]

Dahomey became independent on 1 August 1960 and Nigeria on 1 October 1960.^[1]

“Thence it follows on the west side of Guri (Gore) the circumference of a circle of 4 kilom. radius, described round the centre of that village as centre…”^[1]

Closing the border

In August 2019 Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, unexpectedly closed the country’s land borders to imported goods, saying it was time to end rampant smuggling. Nigeria’s import controls on rice had led to smuggling from Benin. By October customs officials confirmed that all trade in goods was banned, with no date to reopen. The closure hit Benin, a key food exporter to Nigeria, hard, and pushed up rice prices in Nigeria.^[2]