Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City

Walking encourages a particular kind of exploration that is both expansive and incomplete, a casual adventure that can also double as a research methodology. Or what the historian, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, terms a “walking cartography” (4).Imagine Lagos is built on this methodological turn, which involves a combination of walking the city streets, mapmaking, and engaging with other typical historical sources like administrative letters, government reports, newspaper reportage, legal documents, and oral narratives. A collage of textual and visual sources, Imagine Lagos places itself in sustained conversation with urban historians—who might appreciate its use of mapmaking to interrogate indigenous conceptions of space—and digital humanities scholars, including geographers, who are more likely to be familiar with the intricacies of the various kinds of maps that frame its key arguments.Although this is primarily a history about nineteenth-century Lagos, each of the five chronological chapters in Imagine Lagos begins by situating the reader in what resembles a walking tour of contemporary Lagos Island, the neighborhood where the vestiges of historical disputes over urban space are most visible. These descriptions are supplemented by redrawn historical maps, which are best examined on the book's accompanying website (imaginelagos.com). Through the streets and intersections that Adelusi-Adeluyi highlights in these maps, readers are pushed to see how Lagos in the nineteenth century was not just undergoing seismic socioeconomic and political transformations centered around abolition and annexation, but also spatial ones that were informed by race, ethnicity, religion, the politics of succession, and the politics of repatriation. Over the book's five chapters, Adelusi-Adeluyi suggests that the transformation of this coastal West African city involved both a political and spatial reorientation of the city, which prioritized certain ambitions and perspectives over others. Not just European over African, but also Christian over Muslim and indigenous African religions, abolition over enslavement, Yoruba over other ethnicities, male over female, the elite over the everyday, educated returnees over indigenous elites, and imperial law over local jurisdiction. Overall, Imagine Lagos argues for the centrality of multiplicity, speculation, and erasure in how we understand urban space and how it has been inhabited.In each chapter, more familiar social and political histories of old and colonial Lagos are expanded by closely analyzing particular episodes that highlight how the old city or “Èkó” was transformed to Lagos, a city that came to embody colonial visions of “improvement” and “civilization.” Chapter 1 primarily uses a compendium of street names in midcentury Lagos to examine the ideological and spatial priorities of indigenous Lagosians prior to its bombardment by the British in 1851. The next chapter focuses on the intertwined influence of this bombardment, local civil wars over authoritative control, and the practice of enslavement on the spatial reorientation of the city. In chapter 3, the knotty question of how to reconstruct the city following its bombardment is brought to the fore, and Imagine Lagos suggests, by tracing the spatial remaking of quarters of the Lagos Marina, that the visions of the local population were sidelined in order to prioritize those of formerly enslaved returnees and Europeans. Chapter 4 considers how land grants, which were distributed by Oba Dosunmu (the preferred choice of the British) between 1853 and 1861, led to the transformation of land as a communally owned (albeit royally controlled) utility to an individual commodity detached from “local jurisdiction” and used to consolidate “British colonial and bureaucratic power” (133). The final chapter looks at Lagos following its formal annexation as a colony of the British Empire in 1861, and argues that injustice and inequity were built into the new layout of the Lagos Marina, which directly linked a newly built prison to colonial courts.As part of this retelling of the spatial history of Lagos, Imagine Lagos seeks to reclaim indigenous histories of the city by decentering—not ignoring—the incontrovertible influence of the Atlantic on it and instead, prioritizing how the city's history was influenced by the local “bounded ecosystems” of the Bight of Benin, including mangroves, swamps, lakes, rivers, land routes, creeks, and lagoons (9). For example, we learn that during the British bombardment of the city in 1851, these bodies of water prevented the total destruction of the “eastern portion of Lagos Island” by fire (79). This focused engagement with fire also reveals, if only briefly, the interiority of daily life in Lagos during this period. As Adelusi-Adeluyi writes, “it is through the fires that destroyed houses and spread between quarters that we learn of the proximity in which people lived, how they slept, how they cooked, and how they lived their lives” (76). That fire could be analytically revealing did not mean it also did not conceal and confuse, as in the case of two street names bearing the prefix, “iná”—the Yoruba word for fire. In the course of carrying out archival research, Adelusi-Adeluyi stumbles on a street named Inábèrè in a nineteenth century almanac of street names compiled by John Payne, an English-speaking Yoruba court clerk. Inábèrè means “the fire began and started here,” and its presence in Payne's almanac is read as an “archival trace” of the frequent fires in colonial Lagos (50). Yet, when the author finds herself on a street named Inásá, possibly meaning “the fire fled” and situated less than a mile away from Inábèrè, during a cartographical trek in present-day Lagos, she quickly discovers that it was unrelated to the former, but instead was “more likely a reference to a compound owned by the Inasa family, descendants of the headman Inasa (or Nassah)” (77).Rarely does anyone choose to walk in Lagos today. More often than not, it is a compulsion. Historical research, as Adelusi-Adeluyi observes, “feels like an extravagance given the decaying infrastructure, lack of sidewalks, lack of support for everyday needs, the general din and slowness of traffic, and flooding and trauma everywhere on the island” (20). Yet, although Imagine Lagos only focuses on one part of the city (I wonder what it would look like if the focus was moved inland into, say, Ebute-Metta or even further into places like Agege), it makes a compelling argument for why cities need infrastructure that encourages walking. In the case of Lagos, it provides critical avenues to reevaluate the instrumentality of historical events, people, and ideas in a place where it is becoming increasingly easier to forget.