Waterhouses: Landscapes, Housing, and the Making of Modern Lagos

Against a backdrop of multiple landscapes, awash with several water bodies, Waterhouses: Landscapes, Housing, and the Making of Modern Lagos exhibits a commensurate fluidity in its chronicling of the history of Lagos, the erstwhile capital of Africa's most populous nation, Nigeria. Mark Duerksen boldly asserts that his unconventional view of history “can help map out new branches and new ways of looking at a city that needs new histories as full and forceful as itself” (xi). Albeit the author is mindful about the pitfalls of this atypical approach, seen in statements such as “landscapes speed up our optical processing of a place, its people, and its histories but can be easily manipulated through (sub) conscious choices in visual scapes and cartographic representations to evoke awe, romanticism, or revulsion” (8). For his central argument, the author upholds housing architectures as significant “social, material, and political instruments” (10) for shaping landscapes because this process facilitates the dramatic shifting of their meanings and forms equally revealing the entanglements of power, house building, visual perceptions, and environments in modern cities. This stimulating study of Lagos provides necessary meaningful contexts, and details that are largely ignored in similar studies. All these achievements are made possible through the author's cutting edge reinterpretation of archival documents, building blueprints, and maps, with the enriching lived experiences of interviewees. Of course, Waterhouses positions itself impressively in the forefront of existing literature on the history of Lagos, helping to make it more comprehensive.He daringly demonstrates that the heavy-laden, sandbank-built Lagos environment, obviously with diverse range of structures, ensconces the histories of multiple meanings of home with a formidable footing in the country's values and futuristic vision of its people. Besides possessing sharp eyes for the outlandish “movement of history” (6) in the spatial sprawl of Lagos, Duerksen casts his lot with scholars who turn conventional African urban theory on its head. Hence, in this book, the common presentation of African cities as “chaotic,” “anarchical,” and “disorderly” recedes, yielding room to nuanced interpretations such as their constituting “world metropolises with sophisticated actors and complex layers of culture, aesthetics, and meanings that make up their ‘citiness’” (6).The boundlessness of Duerksen's revolutionary revision of theory in his stimulating view of Lagos as an organic whole or entity, not precluding its personification in which houses as hearts “pump, drive its movement, and hold the warmth and affections that can be difficult to see in the bustling streets” (7) is impressive. This obvious postmodernist perspective facilitates the unearthing of deeper narratives underneath the Lagos landscape hailing “houses as more than just shelter or financial instruments and begins to see them in all of their human meanings, uses, and forms” (9).Duerksen makes the preponderant waterscape theme seep, partly, into the subtitles of the six chapters in his liberal use of words such as sandbars, canals, swamps, lagoons, oceans, and floods, with cartography and photography forming the gridiron in each context. In chapter 1, the impressionistic architecture of prominent and cosmopolitan Lagos residents takes center stage before the expanded European vision of racially influenced entrepôt. It is unfortunate though, that Samuel Johnson's and Leo Frobenius's glowing tribute to Yoruba architecture, culture, and art equally succumbs to the Hamitic myth; and that originality is not exclusively established in this history of Lagos. The structural signifiers of European and African racial difference form the subject matter of chapter 2. Chapter 3 discusses the demolition and eradication of the supposed slums seen as “impediments to a visually sanitized urban order” (31) and the “structured order of the export economy” (113), amid the seizure and control of land through schemes and alliances. The extensive clearing schemes of colonial planners to boost “purely rational principles” (32) in the quest for “. . . architecture with a force in and of itself” (146) are discussed in chapter 4. The focus of chapter 5 on the postcolonial era up to Abuja's supplanting of Lagos as capital city reflects the dichotomy between modern and traditional sections. In this situation, houses occupy the median space mainly as the basis for the connection between homeowners and their clients within the overarching state and petrol economy, essentially giving the former wealth and power over the latter. The last chapter colludes that this unequal wealth–power dynamic seems unrelenting especially under the fervid influence of global investment hence “pushing the city's non-elite residents away from its wealthy core . . . into the rising waters around it” (32) and “sheltering elite's capital, not people” (205). Nonetheless, the detailed discussion of episodes of demolition, eradication, extensive clearing of slums as well as the globalization onslaught lacks an equal exposition of dramatic reactions of the helpless victims.All things considered, Duerksen's methodological approach in this book is apt; especially given situations where colonial archivist and administrators decidedly deprived archives of some incriminating holdings to create a “narrow and sanitized version of history” (169). Besides colonial authorities, he takes a close look at the roles of Nigeria's military as well as civilian government policies and programs, not excluding the activities of large-scale landlords in the emergence of the “spectacular slum scapes of Lagos” (192). Without a doubt, Waterhouses with its focus on extant “historic homes . . . historical maps . . . photographs of houses and . . . built environment” (170) might help reduce the deficit of lost documents. However, a further focus on the experiences of the victims of this aspect of Lagos's history including their scanty documentary evidence regarding exploitation, to counterbalance the regular archival collection would have added to the book's stimulating nature; especially when the emphatically believes in the mantra, “the city is the people.”Duerksen's book is bound to remain a useful resource for students and scholars across a wide range of academic disciplines given its far-reaching insight in taking African cities, houses, and peoples (with Lagos as a case study) on their own terms. In particular, considering its concrete conclusion that “Lagos is more than a Sisyphean endurance;” despite its unending complications, “it has thrived as a center of arts, trade, and innovation into Africa's megalopolis bar none” (201).