As the last recruit into the British Colonial Administration in Northern Nigeria when the country was on the brink of independence, John Hare was dispatched to serve in some of the remotest areas in the North. He was posted to an area in Adamawa Province, which had been part of the original German Cameroons, until it was divided between France and Great Britain after the Great War and administered as part of the French Cameroons and Nigeria. Unexpectedly, this territory, which was administered under a United Nations mandate, voted in a plebiscite to remain a colony under the British. John Hare explains the tribal politics behind this vote and how, for 18 months, the territory acquired the status of a separate colony with its own Colonial Governor, until a second plebiscite's outcome determined the territory should revert to Nigerian rule.