Part of review forum on “Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City.”
Recent conversations about the future of African urbanism have manifested in both publications and on panels at conferences, including the recent meeting of the Urban History Association in 2023, where I had the honor of being in discussion with some of the prominent scholars of this sub-field. These conversations have lately been characterized by unearthing creative ways that Africans shaped urban landscapes and their unique contributions to global urban formation, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In many ways, this approach to African urbanism challenges the linear narrative of urban history, which typically associates inventions with European colonizers with Africans and the rest of the Global South merely acting as recipients of planning designs and innovations from the Global North. Beyond urban history, we could also think about this characterization along the pattern of imperial studies, where European imperialists are elevated as creators of history, while the colonized are merely viewed as passive historical actors. In Adelusi-Adeluyi’s Imagine Lagos, an important portrait of Africa’s urban landscape is illustrated through the story of Lagos, a mega-city in modern Africa.
Imagine Lagos is a pathbreaking study of Lagos in the nineteenth century, which foregrounds the relationship between Lagosian sociopolitical systems and urban design, aspects of which would become fundamental to the form of the city under both British colonial rule and the postcolonial modern state of Nigeria. Specifically, the book covers the period between 1845, when Lagos experienced a civil war, and 1872, a decade following the establishment of British colonial rule in the city.
Imagine Lagos offers two key contributions to African urbanism. The first considers the geography of Lagos, as an island city strategically situated between the Atlantic Ocean on the western coast of Africa and the Yoruba hinterlands, and how it drew much of its economic and political power from the lagoons that surrounded it. In so doing, Imagine Lagos advances understanding of the ecosystem as a vital catalyst to the growth and transformation of Lagos and West African cities more broadly. This is a compelling interpretation of West African coastal cities, whose past urbanism are generally oriented across the oceans.
The second major intervention is methodological. Much of African urban history and African history have been constructed through text-based archival evidence, and oral histories and traditions. Maps, sketches, and images from the archives are mostly used by historians for illustrative purposes instead of treating them as lasting historical evidence. In Imagine Lagos, Adelusi-Adeluyi creatively assembles maps, mapmaking tools, and ethnographic research to uncover the textured life of Lagos. She conceptualizes maps and spatial evidence as a “walking cartography” to reconstruct the history of the city. The outcome of this methodology is a history of Lagos that not only highlights past interventions by West Africans, but also a history that offers meanings for the contemporary city and its residents. What is very fascinating about the “walking cartography” approach is not just the interpretation of archival maps, but the recreation of new maps using text-based evidence from the archives to reconstruct the city’s histories in a deeply meaningful way to contemporary residents.
For studies on urban design, this methodological approach is productive in helping us reimagine the layouts of cities and making connections between history and memory. That said, this method, as has been acknowledged, may not have reproduced an actual representation of the past, and it is okay: historians try to get closer to the past. And this is why the mapmaking process is termed speculative. Every new map Adelusi-Adeluyi has created demonstrates a deep engagement with the past and present, and thus its effectiveness in reimagining Lagos in the nineteenth century.
One very striking observation in Imagine Lagos is its heavy reliance on the archives, either through land grants from chiefs in precolonial Lagos or court cases in the colonial period to the exclusion of oral histories and traditions. Meanwhile, West Africans are known to have traditionally preserved their past through oral history methodologies. While I admit the challenges of oral history, particularly for a place like Lagos with many competing factions and muddled claims of ownership, authority, and belonging, recreating maps exclusively from the archives, and despite Adelusi-Adeluyi’s novel methodology, produces repercussions for oral history, a dynamic approach that has revolutionized the field of African history since the last five decades. In other words, while Imagine Lagos offers a bold perspective into the centrality of the archives, particularly map-based sources, it remains unclear how they balance other important regional-based evidentiary sources such as oral histories and traditions. And I wonder if this approach has limited vernacular understanding of the logics that regulated the geographies and epistemologies of the Lagosian urbanscape from a traditional West African perspective.
Ultimately, Imagine Lagos is an exceptional study of urbanism that has extended the boundaries of historical methods for Africa and the rest of the world while also underscoring African inventiveness within a tremendous cosmopolitan space.
