Part of review forum on “Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City.”

Imagine Lagos is a much-awaited book. In this study Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi examines different sets of records, including maps, missionary documents, newspapers, and judicial records, to offer an innovative urban history of the largest Nigerian city, the most densely inhabited urban region on the African continent. Lagos is a metropole that plays large in ideas about demographic growth, cosmopolitanism, inequalities, development and gentrification, and violence in the Global South, and has received substantial attention from historians, including important works by Kristin Mann, Abosede A. George, and Lisa A. Lindsay. Going beyond the narrative of Lagos as an overcrowded, violent, or disorganized space, Adelusi-Adeluyi meticulously historicizes the processes of urban transformation, adding new information about specific districts such as Itolo and Ofin. She shows how Lagos has been shaped by the intimate arrival of returnees from the Americas. Imagine Lagos will interest historians, urbanists, geographers, and anyone concerned with understanding urban transformations.

Among the many important contributions of Imagine Lagos is its methodological interventions and its companion website, available to readers at https://www.imaginelagos.com/. The website complements the monograph by offering readers layered maps of Lagos going back to the early nineteenth century. Combining maps, oral narratives, colonial reports, land disputes, and legal records, Adelusi-Adeluyi raises crucial methodological inquiries about reading urban spaces and maps for evidence. She establishes a method she calls “walking cartography” in which she collects, visualizes, and analyzes data and shares it with her readers. In the process, she writes an engaging narrative stressing the role of returnees such as Ṣẹtẹlu, James White, Tom Mabinuori, and Gilbert Lawson, historical actors who experienced slavery and freedom in Lagos, and who have appeared in the work of other scholars, such as Olatunji Ojo and Kristin Mann.

By creating speculative maps, Adelusi-Adeluyi recuperates spaces that have disappeared from contemporary Lagos, including creeks, mangroves, and swamps that have later been filled and occupied as new landfills. In the process she inserts slave barracoons, whipping posts, markets, cemeteries, and mosques, dwellings of ordinary folks, and places of orisha worshiping into the old Lagos. The result is that she shows that women, Muslims, and enslaved individuals lived in old Lagos and shaped it. In most cases, however, women are nameless, such as the women who made a living in Idumota by frying fish, or an unnamed blind woman burned to death in Lagos in 1891. Hopefully Imagine Lagos will instigate more scholarship on women’s historical presence, in part inspired by cases that Adelusi-Adeluyi examined elsewhere such as Awa and Alobon, who surprisingly were not part of this monograph.

Adelusi-Adeluyi places slavery at the center of her Imagine Lagos. Slave traders and enslaved individuals crossed each other in Lagosian streets and intersections. Lagos lodged Brazilian slave traders and anonymous enslaved men, women, and children who performed most of the labor. Returnees from the diaspora and liberated Africans played a central role in the urban reconfiguration of old Lagos as individuals who transformed sections of Lagos filled with slave barracoons into new residential areas by the second half of the nineteenth century. Rather than presenting Lagos as an empty or untouched location until the British annexation in 1861, the author invites readers to insert people and social, religious, and economic markers into old Lagos. Adelusi-Adeluyi creatively reconstructs Lagos’s social and religious life from the destruction records, or documents that reported fires and bombardments, and population removal. She demonstrates that historians have much to gain by engaging with this historical evidence. Imagine Lagos’s methodological intervention can inspire new scholarship about urbanization beyond Lagos, including places such as Santiago, Cabo Verde, or Luanda in Angola, which also contain rich collections of primary sources.

Land is central to Imagine Lagos. Adelusi-Adeluyi reminds us that “this idea of land as something to be cleared, acquired, divided, mortgaged, sold, willed, or inherited has had a profound effect on how the city is understood” (5). Besides land, the author stresses the importance of the ecosystems, including the lagoons, swamps, creeks, and mangroves, as sites of competing economic and political projects. The environment is taken seriously in this study.

In sum, Imagine Lagos stresses the contestations over space, and how Lagosians and foreigners have lived, resisted dispossession, and inserted their historical participation in street intersections, corners, and markers that might be long gone. Adelusi-Adeluyi reminds us of the importance of making historically marginalized communities and spaces visible and central.