Part of review forum on “Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City.”
I would like to extend my thanks to Mariana Candido, Monsuru Murtala, Tasha Rijke-Epstein, and Tony Yeboah for taking the time to engage with Imagine Lagos so insightfully and generously (both in this review forum and at the “Author meets Critic” panel at the African Studies Association meeting in Chicago in 2024). I am also grateful to Abosede George for chairing the panel, and to Chris Day for his efforts to pull this together. Each of these scholars brings a different set of regional and thematic expertise to the study of the history of African cities, and their comments and questions raise important issues for how scholars should think about the past in these places.
Several strands from these reviews are rooted in a roundtable discussion at the Urban History Association conference in Pittsburgh in 2023, where a few of us came together to address some of the most pressing questions that scholars of Africa’s urban histories are grappling with. Our debates about sources, methods, geography, land, the environment, and accessibility were the linchpin of an ongoing conversation, and these issues are reflected in the book.
Eko was no tabula rasa , as Candido notes in her review. I argue in the book that there is a blankness to the narration of city space in West Africa, where ironically, there are several populations with historical and indigenous forms of urbanism. Histories of this area tend to veer towards foregrounding politics and cultural and social issues over time, and in Imagine Lagos, I include space and place in my analysis of the city. Further complicating this is the contemporary lack of emphasis on history education in Nigeria. Murtala’s comments highlight the uncertain outcomes produced by historical amnesia in Lagos. He also speaks to the significance of the epigraphs as framing devices, as first-hand accounts from Lagosians are hard to find in the period covered in the book. As a fellow historian of Lagos, he is keenly aware of the impact of historical silences in the record. Further, Candido stresses the importance of both slavery and freedom to narratives about the old city (and new), despite the forgetting that surrounds such fraught subjects.
Thus, there is an urgency to acquiring new sources on African cities, beyond the confines of the colonial archive. We also need new methods and approaches. Nearly every author commented on my creation and use of a walking cartography as a method for collecting and analyzing new data, and then visualizing it. The main catalyst for this came from a dissatisfaction with starting research on nineteenth-century Lagos history from Western archives, where the documentary record (while rich in detail and scope) ultimately privileges perspectives from those building empire in Africa (an outsider’s view). It is also a method that was generated from being in the city itself. Rijke-Epstein underlined the embodied nature of the method, and the importance of being in old Lagos to do this work. Like her, I argue that cities like Lagos retain aspects of their past in their material and urban form, and in the book, I look to the city’s enduring urban core to seek answers to questions about the past.
Yeboah and Rijke-Epstein address the issues of sources directly. Oral sources are vital to understanding Lagosians and their city, but I wanted to use them in a different way here. Yeboah notes the importance of orality to preserving history in West Africa and points out the drawbacks of not privileging oral sources and traditions in the book. While oral narratives and traditions do play an important role, I did not seek out many new accounts or draw from them heavily in this book. Several writers, both academic and popular historians of Lagos, have done this work, especially for the twentieth century. While I agree with Yeboah, in the Lagos case, there are instances where the use of oral sources calcifies a certain understanding of the past especially before the 1900s. Here, I wanted to try two specific things; to reinterpret the ways these oral narratives have been woven into the contemporary retellings of history and to also search for new or underutilized sources for Lagos. With so little emphasis on the period before the twentieth century, histories of Lagos sometimes rely on a static version of the nineteenth century. My work demonstrates that new interpretations of this time period offer fresh ways to think about the present. In Lagos, I show, for example, how street names from the 1860s provide a spatial and cultural record of history that connects to and disrupts static narratives about nineteenth-century Lagos and Lagosians. These street names are a visible transcript at odds with attempts to forget or silence the past in the city today.
Maps and mapmaking are central to my analysis of nineteenth-century Lagos. While recognizing the value and argumentative nature of these mostly European maps, Rijke-Epstein raises questions about just how clearly they can be used to interpret status in old Lagos, especially in understanding distinctions between Lagosians, and as a way of constructing social difference. These are interesting and important questions, and the speculative maps in the book’s segue are an early attempt to answer these questions. The historical maps deserve additional scrutiny, and I address these questions in forthcoming work where I further deconstruct the cultural and spatial meanings of boundaries in historical quarters.
Rijke-Epstein also explores the effect of the “layered histories of specific sites.” She draws attention to the ways that cities, especially now in the Middle East and East Africa, are being reshaped by violence and bombardments. For the nineteenth century, the 1840s and 1850s are key to understanding the changes in ways urbanism was expressed culturally, politically, and spatially in Lagos. I have long argued that the bombardments (and the period before them) are crucial to understanding the city’s past, and what it is now; Mariana Candido’s response highlights the importance of slavery to this intended resetting of Lagos’s history. For Lagos, I have long been drawn to the importance of the two 1851 bombardments, and their impact on the population, the environment, and the reshaping of the city. At the same time, these bombardments, and the ways they have been forgotten were an important catalyst for this book. Rijke-Epstein’s notes on the interplay between verticality and urbanity in these cities are intriguing, and set the stage for new questions.
Candido also highlights the accompanying digital site for the book. Digital histories are increasingly common, and this project joins the research that translates academic concerns and questions into forms that are accessible outside of academic contexts. This is particularly pressing in cities like Lagos where history education is often not prioritized. Every chapter is based on historical maps as data, and a new map that plots this and other archival based data on a contemporary satellite map of Lagos. This is one attempt to visualize the “dialog between the past and present” in the book. These new and historical maps (as well as the infographics) are available on imaginelagos.com.
In creating this project—especially the new methods, text, and maps—I hoped that it would reach an interdisciplinary audience and resonate with others thinking through vexing issues of history, representation, and accessibility in cities like Lagos. Each of the responses attest to the appeal of the project. I am grateful for such diligent and generous readings of the text, and for the opportunity to respond as part of the forum. I could hardly have asked for better readers and critics.
