Lagos, ‘A City Beautiful?’Footnote ¹

Lagos and Lagosians entered the twentieth century on uncertain ground. Four decades of British colonialism had led to profits for the administration, but also to continued neglect of the city’s population and environment.Footnote ³ The geography of late nineteenth-century Lagos Island and the lagoons around it bore the scars of decades of political struggle in the region. Eko (as Lagosians called their island and city) was colonized from the water, and one of the most significant consequences of the extended mid-nineteenth-century rivalry between two Lagos princes was eventual British control of the island and city-state. By intervening in their leadership tussle, and bombarding Lagos from the lagoon twice in 1851, British naval men destroyed the western portion of the city, paving the way for a new layer of spatial and political reinvention.

In August 1861, the British annexed Lagos with a view to expanding north and west into the interior. Within two decades, Lagos’ transatlantic trade in enslaved people effectively came to a halt, while the new colonial government used this well-situated natural port to increase trade across the Atlantic, while also attempting to control the lagoon traffic. These redirections threatened the local elite in Lagos, which co-existed uneasily with the strong hand of British intervention. These troubles reverberated for decades across the three islands where Lagosians settled (Eko, Kuramo and Ido), through the eastern and western lagoons and north over the Ogun River as the British expanded their territorial control.

Eko’s terrain is rich with cosmological significance for the history of the city, its people and geography. Yet, this symbolism is not timeless and unchanging – it is instead marked by and responsive to inflows and outflows: of people, crises and ideas. In 2020, Wole Soyinka, the renowned poet and playwright, wrote about how ‘water opened up Lagos to the world’.Footnote ⁴ However, a close reading of the sources and the city also demonstrates how water foreclosed important possibilities for the ara Eko (local inhabitants) from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century. The actions of the early colonial state demonstrated that Lagos could be profitable, even if it was generally uninhabitable. The interventions noted in this article show how the consequences of the subtractions, additions and reinvention of the urban fabric linger into the present.

Between 1882 and 1921, a system of canals, bridges and new roads in Lagos was constructed that narrated the story of social change, segregation and new interventions in the growth of this port city. This analysis also reveals the ways in which ordinary Lagosians understood and experienced space and spatial relations in their city. The Lagos government reclaimed approximately 1,000 acres of swamp between 1905 and 1946,Footnote ⁵ and the extensive records of these reclamations have shaped the historiography of Lagos’ residential districts. Historians and other scholars of Lagos have used the colonial archive to great effect: to study the economic history of the port,Footnote ⁶ the rise of the Victorian eliteFootnote ⁷ and even to analyse the effects of slum clearance, sanitation schemes, bubonic plague and malaria.Footnote ⁸

There is very little environmental urban history of Lagos that focuses on the people, their city and environment. Yet, the environment was and has been an important aspect of Lagos’ economic, demographic, and cultural history. The quotation above from the Lagos Observer in 1882 shows how challenging the Lagos environment was, and how much it shaped the daily experiences of Lagosians. It is impossible to understand Lagos without analysis of its landscape. As a nineteenth-century example of indigenous Yoruba urbanism and its encounter with British colonialism, Lagos is an important illustration of the interplay between indigeneity, the echoes of a post-slavery society, resistance to and co-operation with colonialism and the challenging geographical terrain in which this unfolded. Lagos’ environmental history before the 1920s is poorly understood, as its archival record is fragmented and uneven. Vague ideas about historical quarters and settlement patterns persist in the scholarly literature, whereas their meanings and usage reflect the significance that they held for the local population. The analysis in this article offers a spatial prequel to the twentieth-century and post-colonial city, which in many respects owes its shape, expansion and legacies to the patterns of erosion and expansion projects that began in the nineteenth century.

This special issue on port cities addresses questions about the interplay of local and global processes, linking them to the analysis of water’s role in urbanization. ‘Troubled waters’ looks to establish a social and environmental interpretation of infrastructural interventions, and the range of responses to them in Lagos. This article deals with the port city at the turn of the century, a time when the success of its booming colonial economy was not reflected in the colonial administration’s engagement or investment with its topography and people. While most of the evidence for the island and city in this period comes from colonial documents, I have used the water and city itself as archives of the impact and ambitions of colonial power and diasporic thinking on the west coast of Africa and analysed how these changes were reflected in the public discourse that critiqued colonial plans and interventions. The analysis reveals that the narrative of environmental change in Lagos between 1882 and 1921 is intertwined with protest, collaboration, labour exploitation and the overwriting of Yoruba cultural norms around community and space.

Like Sujit Sivasundaram’s essay on Colombo, this analysis is underpinned by the issue of retrieving non-elite voices and interpreting their perspectives on the new infrastructure in the port. The issue of historicizing local voices in Lagos remains a fraught one. The ara Eko, who by and large were Yoruba, were more versed in oral than written cultures, and have left few first-hand accounts in the traditional archive. At this point, literacy was the domain of the wealthy and Christian, and thus their views and positions are over-represented in the Lagos historiography. In Lagos, newer research by the historian Titilola Halimat Somotan on the 1940s through to independence has shown how these experiences were articulated in the newspapers of the time. Her work casts the Lagosians as ‘popular planners’ who responded directly in their own interest to the interventions by the colonial government.Footnote ⁹ However, for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these voices are more muted and harder to locate.

The bulk of the sources are the historical maps of Lagos, which contain key data about the environment, and the ways people used it. This is still an underused source for the history of Lagos. In addition to analysing the content of these maps, I have used ArcGIS, Adobe Illustrator and other digital humanities tools to draw a new map that interprets space in turn-of-the-century Lagos, and that restores historical and indigenous Yoruba data to this space (see Figure 2). Second, the Lagos press played an important role in covering what was deemed newsworthy and preserved the radical (for the time), often anti-colonial discourse espoused in its pages. The owners of these papers were often drawn from a wealthy, Black, diasporic elite in Lagos, who were by the 1880s invested in preserving their interpretation of African culture and defending it from critiques by Europeans. The third data set is preserved in both the maps and newspapers of the time and represents the use of the city as its own archive. In 1868, a Yoruba-speaking clerk named all the existing streets of Lagos. In so doing, he selected mostly indigenous Yoruba names that pointed to significant people, uses of spaces, historical events, local deities and important Lagosians who were of local or diasporic origin. As the city spread eastward, new streets often retained this same scheme, but at the turn of the century, British names of administrators and others emerged. This archive of street and quarter names of western Lagos is a notable record of the ara Eko in terms of space, time and people, migration, slavery, freedom and the ravages and changes in the environment.

In the sections that follow, I first demonstrate how analysis of these three data sets can be combined with mapmaking tools to rewrite Eko’s turn-of-the-century topography. Next, I use them to reconstruct a topological and socio-environmental portrait of Lagos and Lagosians at the turn of the nineteenth century. Following this is an analysis of the new infrastructure and its cultural impact on the people of Lagos.

Rewriting a portrait of place: maps and methods

Lagos’ geography and urban fabric is nearly invisible in the historiography of the city, outside of the analyses of slum clearance. Further, the changing relationship between the ara Eko and their environment (especially in understanding the intersection of their land and waterways) has been eclipsed by political and economic studies. Emmanuel Akyeampong’s generative ‘eco-social’ approach in his study of the Anlo people of south-eastern Ghana in Between the Sea and the Lagoon highlights the symbiosis between African coastal peoples and their environment.Footnote ¹⁰ In Lagos, something akin to this method emerges with the juxtaposition of the historical maps and the revived Lagos press. Lagos’ population was dense, small, but complex in its composition. With its strategic location at one of the natural breaks in this part of the Atlantic coastline, it had historically been a meeting point for different populations and provided a natural advantage with regard to trade and safety. In Lagos, people found ways to harness the water’s cultural, economic and social power on land. The Lagos newspapers expand the view of the island and city beyond the framing of the colonial sanitation reports. The 1891 trigonometrical survey of Lagos set the stage for the major interventions that followed, but most importantly created an inventory of the cultural and geographical landscape that quickly disappeared within the next three decades.

By 1908, Lagosians occupied approximately three square miles of land over 23 distinct residential and commercial districts.Footnote ¹¹ Yoruba ideas of place making and space came into early conflict with increasing British influence. Slavery and its afterlives continued to pervade the nature of the economy, its demographic profile and the ways that the city’s cultural and social geography changed over time. Waves of migrants joined the indigenous Lagos elite (of chiefs and wealthy traders) to form a small, educated class who were a visible constituency economically, and who through their newspapers challenged and engaged with the colonial government. Between 1882 and 1921, as their social and political views changed, so did their city. These events would have a significant impact on the population of Lagos, especially in the formation of the diasporan elite that first came to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s.

After the British established their consulate in Lagos in 1852, there had been calls to create accurate admiralty maps and town plans for the city, either as evidence for land redistribution or to implement suggestions to make Lagos more accessible via the sand bar, make road infrastructure more orderly and ultimately increase profits. While some sketches emerged out of land disputes with missionaries and other European merchants in the 1850s, the first map of the island and city did not appear until 1859, when John Glover (then a naval officer in transit) created a sketch of the city and soundings of the lagoon.Footnote ¹² The island was annexed in 1861, making Lagos an official node in the British empire. More maps emerged, including sketches to address swamp reclamation in 1883;Footnote ¹³ a town plan for display at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1886;Footnote ¹⁴ a town plan based on a trigonometrical survey in 1891;Footnote ¹⁵ a survey of the harbour in 1898;Footnote ¹⁶ a map showing breeding places for mosquitoes in 1900;Footnote ¹⁷ and a series of town plans published in 1904, 1911, 1926 and 1942.Footnote ¹⁸ A clear picture of the history of Lagos’ topography, infrastructure and residential and merchant communities emerges from these diagrams. As Meredith McKittrick observed in her research on water systems in south-western Africa, ‘maps convey ideological and politico-economic messages and help construct the geographical features they purport to represent’.Footnote ¹⁹ As such, nineteenth- and twentieth-century maps of Lagos and the surrounding islands and waters make a variety of arguments about Lagos, Lagosians and the ways their lives reveal the intersections of land and water.

The plans from 1891 and 1898 chart the Lagos environment clearly. The ambitious 1891 survey, based on triangulation methods to measure the land, focused on the western portion of the island, where the majority of the ara Eko lived. The final version of the survey consisted of 15 large photozincographed sheets, with the city rendered at the scale of 1 inch to 88 feet. When it was on display at the Colonial Survey Department in Lagos, it was said to be a ‘complete and accurate representation of the town from Olowogbowo on the west to Apapa near the new cemetery on the east’.Footnote ²⁰ Reactions in Lagos ranged from indifference to mild irritation at the public inconvenience caused during the mapping project, and in some cases scorn for the perceived waste of resources.Footnote ²¹

Administrators argued that the maps would benefit Lagosians and also address ‘the question of land wrongfully acquired by squatting and encroachments on the public streets and squares’.Footnote ²² Additionally, they wrote that it would also help with road improvement: ‘by this means wide roads are gradually being extended throughout the town, and the intricate bye-ways which delight the heart of the native, and foster prevalent diseases, are being gradually replaced by thoroughfares’.Footnote ²³ The 1898 map of ‘Lagos Harbour’ offers the most detailed glimpse of Kuramo Island, from the mangrove edges to the villages, plantations and farms.Footnote ²⁴

The resulting 1891 survey (see Figure 1) is the first and most geographically accurate mapping of western Lagos Island. While the survey itself has been detached from the archival notes about its development, important information about Lagos Island can still be read from the sheets themselves, and from a handful of newspaper reports about it. Because of the scale at which the streets, markets, squares and geography are rendered, this map forms an ideal source for understanding the ways that Lagos Island exists as an archive of its own past. The map, therefore, can be read and analysed as a text. It provides at least two kinds of significant spatial data. First, and most importantly, it provides the location and scale of the physical geography of Lagos. This map was created before most of the major infrastructural interventions were complete, so it offers a template for the city’s environment. From it, we can see the lagoons, creeks and swamps that form the edges of the island. Second, it maps all the street names and 21 residential quarters in use in Lagos. Because this survey is geographically accurate, each sheet can be georeferenced, joined and used to create a new map of Lagos Island that superimposes the historical shoreline on the contemporary city, and writes in Yoruba place names and ideas on the map (see Figure 2).Footnote ²⁵

Figure 1.

Excerpt from georeferenced sheets from the 1891 trigonometrical survey of Lagos Island, ‘Plan of the Town of Lagos, West Africa’. CO 700/Lagos 14, courtesy of the National Archives, Kew, UK.

Figure 2.

Map of Lagos Island, highlighting the island’s topography in English and Yoruba, and the historical infrastructure from the turn of the century. Map by author. Basemap by ESRI.

Finally, the names of streets (and quarters and water bodies) show most clearly how the city itself can function as an archive of its social and environmental histories. Street names in Lagos are important sites and place markers for the past. Since 1868, when the streets were named and put into the official record, these names have been the most visible public record of the Yoruba understanding of place, power and culture in Lagos. Lagos Island’s historical shoreline is clearly visible in the contemporary satellite images of the city.Footnote ²⁶ Despite attempts beginning in the late nineteenth century to expand, fill in and widen the space, the curved lines and edges of Ẹhin Igbẹti, Isalẹ Eko and Elẹgbata are still visible in the city’s topography. Nowhere is this more clearly delineated than in the streetscape and street names that stretch across the western half of Lagos Island. Yoruba street names are mixed in with the Portuguese and English names of the formerly enslaved, demonstrating how freedom and slavery were written into the urban space of the city. At the same time, the street names reflected the varieties of belief systems in Lagos: the names celebrated Yoruba oriṣa (deities) (themselves brought by migrants from the interior) such as Oju Olokun and Sopona. Others honoured their most fervent worshippers, such as Bamgboṣe (named for a Brazilian returnee who was a worshipper of Ogun).

Water remembers

In his nineteenth-century vocabulary of the Yoruba language, Rev. Samuel Crowther would often use proverbs to demonstrate the meaning of terms. In defining ‘river’ in Yoruba (odo), he wrote: ‘odo gbẹ, ma gbe orukọ’. In English, this translates to ‘the stream may dry up, but the watercourse retains its name’.Footnote ²⁷ While water bodies may have disappeared in Lagos, they still linger in the geography of the city, and in the man-made interventions that carved the names of these lagoons into the street network. Elite Lagosians wrote about their ‘beautiful ọssa’ (the Lagos Lagoon), and its importance to their well-being and livelihood.Footnote ²⁸ Water traffic in Lagos was critical for the economy and circulation. The lagoon was mostly shallow, and to the surprise of colonial and sanitary experts, the salty waters did not breed the mosquitoes that plagued the island.Footnote ²⁹ Lagos’ fortuitous location made it useful for regional lagoon and river trade, as well as oceanic trade. Located at one of the only natural breaks in the coast forming an inlet from the Atlantic Ocean, it was also useful for European traders who wanted access to goods and commodities from the interior. Waterways bound these lagoon communities. Scholars have shown how the lagoons, creeks and rivers between Lagos and cities like Epe, Ikorodu and Badagry created communities that ‘engaged in social relationship, exchanged information, and blended language, culture, and history to the extent that regional meta-traditions emerged’.Footnote ³⁰ Fishing and trading were vital parts of the economy, and the lagoon historically provided enough fish for Lagosians to eat and sell.Footnote ³¹ Men fished for freshwater fish in the rainy season, and saltwater fish in the dry season.Footnote ³²

Lagosians envisioned a clear relationship between their actions, environment, beliefs and practices. By the nineteenth century, they had settled on two islands in the lagoon: Eko and Ido. Kuramo, a large mostly uninhabited island, lay to the south-east of Eko. Two tiny uninhabited islands sometimes labelled ‘Sacrifice Islands’ sit north of Lagos Island opposite the king’s palace (Iga Idunganran) in the north-west.Footnote ³³ Thick mangroves lined the edges of the islands of Ido, Eko and Kuramo, interspersed with small clusters of coconut trees found on both Eko and Kuramo. Kuramo also had at least two coconut tree plantations.Footnote ³⁴

The island of Eko sits very low in the Lagos Lagoon, which is shallowest around this island; its depth rarely exceeded 24 feet on its northern edge, but it was deeper towards the ocean. Ships often ran aground in their approach to Lagos via the lagoon. Eko has a horizontal, slightly rounded rectangular shape that turned north-west at its centre to meet Ido Island and the mainland; its edges were characterized by numerous points where it jutted out into the lagoon. In Yoruba, these points were named ‘ebute’ including Ebute Ero in the north-west. By 1891, the population of Lagos was 32,508.Footnote ³⁵ Lagosians settled in a network of neighbourhoods, bounded by streets that emptied into squares all over the city. Before 1845, there is evidence for several quarters: Iga (where the palace is located and is coterminous with some contemporary understandings of Isale Eko); Idunmota (a district where a Christian missionary wrote of his attempts to proselytize); Olowogbowo; Ọfin; Faji; and Ereko, a quarter developed in 1845 connected to pacifying Kosọkọ’s ambitions to be oba of Lagos.Footnote ³⁶

The historical landscape of the city included creeks on the west like Ẹlẹgbata and Alakoro that provided economic and leisure activities for Lagosians. Similarly in the north-west, the large Idunmagbo Lagoon and smaller Isalẹgangan to its east were destinations for regional markets and carried the histories of migration from the interior. The lagoons and swamps touch nearly every residential quarter in Lagos. In the 1880s, commentators described Alakoro as a ‘neglected creek’, with considerable potential to improve the economy of the island and colony.Footnote ³⁷ Ẹlẹgbata wharf, described as commodious for business, was lauded for having an excellent location on the lagoon, and an easy landing place for goods from the interior, especially those coming down to Lagos from the Egba in Abeokuta via the Ogun River.

The largest lagoon, Idunmagbo, opened into the Lagos Lagoon at a point between Idunmagbo and Isalẹgangan quarters. It formed the edges of five residential quarters including Idunṣagbe, Idunmagbo, Aroloya, Isalẹgangan and Oko Awo. The areas where the lagoon met Oko Awo to Isalẹgangan were particularly swampy.Footnote ³⁸ Historically, Ijẹbu people fished at Idunmagbo.Footnote ³⁹ The wharf at Idunmagbo was a noted commercial hub, and since 1885 the Eagle and Lagos Critic had appealed to the government to pay more attention to it.Footnote ⁴⁰ As it grew in importance, the area became increasingly dense and ‘thickly populated’. It was a launching site for canoe traffic and market activity. Traders converged there from a series of lagoon towns, with canoes arriving from markets at Ẹpẹ, Ejirin, Langbassa and Ikorodu. They would return to this part of Lagos every third, fourth and fifth day with palm oil and kernels, corn, garri (cassava), yams and even cattle, all bound for the Lagos market.Footnote ⁴¹

To the east, the smaller Isalẹgangan Lagoon flowed into the Lagos Lagoon, and formed the boundaries of the Isalẹgangan, Oko Faji and Oke Popo districts. Interestingly, Lawson’s 1885 map added an additional district south of the Isalẹgangan Lagoon, which lent its name to the alternative name of the lagoon: Olusi Waters. This district, likely named after a prominent Yoruba family, does not appear on any other maps, but is immortalized in the name of Olusi streets, which was marked as part of the boundary between Faji, the Brazilian quarter, and Oke Popo.Footnote ⁴²

Kuramo Island lies south-east of Eko, with its northmost tip nestling into the place where Lagos Island juts its middle (labelled either Forbes or Teazer Point during the bombardment) out of Eko south into the lagoon.Footnote ⁴³ The two islands are separated by a narrow creek called Odo Alarun (‘a river for the very ill’ in Yoruba), but which is more commonly known as Five Cowrie Creek (probably because of the cost of crossing between the two islands). In the 1850s, it was labelled Curtis’ Passage after James D. Curtis of the HMS Harlequin. Footnote ⁴⁴ There were at least nine settlements on Kuramo Island. Most were labelled as villages, including Ikoyi, Ipẹru and fishing villages such as Marọkọ.Footnote ⁴⁵ The island itself was divided by a winding creek that ran north to south; Igboṣere Creek connected the Kuramo Lagoon at the southern edge of the island to the Five Cowrie Creek. East of the point were smaller settlements of villages like Ikoyi Village, Sando Ọla Village and Igboṣere Village.Footnote ⁴⁶

A dangerous, fickle sandbar lay at the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean, parallel to the coast. The combination of the heavy surf and shallow lagoon made crossings dangerous.Footnote ⁴⁷ For nearly half the year it was safe to cross, but from June to September, it was practically impassable. After that, it was mostly fine.Footnote ⁴⁸ Before 1851, there is very little evidence of the ara Eko venturing into the ocean; their trades in cloth, food and enslaved peoples were limited to the lagoons and creeks.

Given the importance of water and migration to the settling of Lagos, it is no surprise that many of the deities worshipped and remembered there are connected to water bodies. Yoruba culture and cosmology are closely tied to the environment; the pantheon of deities historically worshipped by the Yoruba demonstrate a clear understanding of the ways that the living and dead are connected to the land and waters. For Lagos, much of this historical material is extant, yet the landscape bears the memories of practices that probably date back to the city’s founding. Oṣun and Yemoja oriṣa have been an important part of Lagos history, ever since the Awori migrated to Lagos, likely as early as the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁴⁹ Further, the street and quarter names are anchored in space, and pay specific attention to important oriṣa. For instance, in Agarawu, Ṣọpọnọ Street highlights where this smallpox deity was worshipped. Oju Olokun Street in Idunmagbo leads to the edge of the lagoon where ara Eko paid homage to Olokun, a deity of the sea. The name ‘Arolọya’, a quarter south of the original outline of Idunmagbo Lagoon, translates to ‘Aro ti Olọya’, the workshop of a blacksmith who worshipped Ọya.

As the city expanded towards the east, Lagosians continued to develop culturally and socially coherent residential districts. The names of the districts and the street names and landmarks within are important cues to reading the city as an archive of its own history and to understanding the ways the city evolved. Most of the original quarters on the island of Eko were settled west of the cemetery and racecourse. Many of the pre-1861 districts such as Idunmota, Idunṣagbe and Idunmagbo gesture towards the history of migration in the city.

Cutting, bridging and filling: ‘When will the Five Cowrie bridge be built?’Footnote ⁵⁰

The Lagos press is as old as the colony itself.Footnote ⁵¹ Since its inception, the colonial administration had developed an adversarial relationship with the newspapers, based on the frankness of their critiques. The Lagos press was clear about its role as an intermediary between the community and the colonial government, with one editorial declaring that in Lagos, ‘newspapers are the legitimate and recognized mouth-piece of the community’.Footnote ⁵² Government efforts to stifle the increasingly strident press were largely unsuccessful,Footnote ⁵³ but after 1914 it supported Kitoye Ajasa in launching a new pro-government paper, the Nigerian Pioneer. Africans faced increasing racial discrimination in cities like Lagos, and their papers were an important outlet for their concerns since many had no decision-making power or positions in the government.

New infrastructure on the island inevitably generated plenty of debate, bringing private administrative plans into public discourse. The colonial administration had its proclamations and circulars, and the educated elite had their newspapers. It is only when these debates arose between them that we see clear evidence of the perspective of the general population of Lagos. While this male-centred and often diasporic elite clashed frequently with the government on questions of power, politics and culture, they tended to agree on the issue of environmental change, despite its impact on the ara Eko.

By 1914, on the eve of the amalgamation of Nigeria, Eko (Lagos Island) had a new look. Now, there was an esplanade that extended Water Street (the Marina), and the lagoon no longer overflowed and flooded past Marina and Broad Streets as far as Tinubu Square.Footnote ⁵⁴ The steam tramway carried passengers around some parts of the city (albeit slowly and infrequently) and connected them across Carter Bridge to the main railway. The old cemetery used to be on the western edge of the city, but was now in the centre. Additionally, a new district named Lafiaji had been reclaimed from the forest and swamp, while construction of the harbour moles improved the crossing of the bar.Footnote ⁵⁵ In 1921, a letter writer noted, ‘I never return to Lagos, even after a brief absence, without being impressed anew by its beauty.’Footnote ⁵⁶ This unusually positive portrayal of a return to Lagos appeared in Ajasa’s pro-government Nigerian Pioneer in 1921, and contradicted most other reports about the state of the island.

The Lagos press’ responses to the failures in the government’s sanitary programmes made room for discussion about how the ara Eko, who continued to be most of the population, experienced some of these changes. For Lagosians, life and death were linked to home and water, and beliefs anchored in maintaining success and good fortune were inextricably connected to their natural environment, which was increasingly being altered. Where administrators or elites saw only ramshackle huts or overcrowded quarters, Lagosians tried to maintain connections in space and time across generations. Since the origins of the press in the 1860s, editorials and letters to the editor were full of suggestions as to how to address the most pertinent issues in Eko: overcrowding, swamps and the dearth of infrastructure to connect different parts of Eko and the islands. Frequent suggestions in the newspapers appeared around how to improve transportation in the city. Using the pseudonym ‘Morale’, one Lagosian wrote to the Observer in 1882 about the need for a bridge across the Ẹlẹgbata Creek. He described the inconvenience for traders and businesspeople who had to cut across the shallow waters to ‘save some 10 to 15 minutes of circum-peregrination’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Most of the infrastructural work was dedicated to dredging and deepening the entrance to Lagos to improve the port.Footnote ⁵⁸ By 1921, the population of this small island had grown to 99,690 people, with the mainland and islands combined. Yet, twentieth-century Lagos Island was increasingly overcrowded as men and women continued to move there for safety and economic opportunities. The districts closest to the mainland were seen as overpopulated, with Ereko, Isalẹ Eko, Alakoro, Faji and Isalẹgangan described as ‘literally overflow[ing] with a teeming mass of humanity’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In colonial Lagos, tight budgets and priorities linked to extraction meant that local spaces were ignored and left to waste. Local populations were increasingly hemmed in or left out, and with the situation out of their hands, responses were at the behest of a colonial administration. In a 1919 editorial, the Lagos Weekly Record noted this density in the residential quarters north of Broad Street: ‘[t]here has been a persistent cry of late as to the congested state of Lagos and the need for expansion’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Several elite Lagos men looked back on John Glover’s regime as governor (1863 to 1872) with nostalgia.Footnote ⁶¹ While he was no friend of the poor, he was governor of Lagos before the hardening of racial lines (expressed through social and civic segregation) in the era of high imperialism of the late 1880s and 1890s.

While canoe, boat and ship traffic had been an important form of communication between the three islands, across the lagoons and the mainland, the British colonial government made plans to shorten those journeys and build connections where they had previously been less efficient. The circuit of small bridges that connected the interior of Eko and Kuramo no longer existed, as it was eventually eclipsed by longer bridges that spanned the islands. Plans for the construction of bridges in Lagos dated back to John Glover’s era as governor, where in addition to the digging of the Offin Canal, he oversaw the construction of new roads in the Ehin Igbeti quarter, where many merchants had their factories and stores.Footnote ⁶² It was Glover who came up with the plan to construct at least one bridge westward from Isalẹ Eko to Ido Island, to connect both islands. This bridge, which came to be known as Carter Bridge, was finally completed in 1901, and the steam tram was extended across it that year.

Governor Glover built the Offin Canal Bridge in the 1860s, which created a convenient interior connection between Ẹlẹgbata and Alakoro creeks.Footnote ⁶³ It was built on iron piles surrounded by a ‘wood superstructure’. While the iron proved durable, the wood often wore away and was easily damaged by weather and wear, leaving the bridge and its users vulnerable.Footnote ⁶⁴ Letter writers to the press contrasted turn-of-the-century Lagos, with its smells, crowdedness and floods, to the Glover era of accelerated road construction, and centralization of elite merchants, chiefs and civil servants. By the 1880s, many of his interventions had been neglected or left unfinished. His era also produced some of the most lasting infrastructure in colonial Lagos: the churches, schools and factories that flourished in the 1860s.Footnote ⁶⁵ A 1910 newspaper editorial pointed out that despite the volume of studies and suggestions, comparatively little had been done. Improvements were needed for streets, overcrowding, the water supply, drainage, scavenging, reclamation and municipal regulations.Footnote ⁶⁶ One part of the government’s response to the criticism was to build new bridges across lagoons in Eko.

Two sets of bridges were built in this period. The larger bridges, Carter and Denton, connected the islands to the mainland. The set of smaller bridges in effect closed the loop around the edges of Lagos that had previously been disconnected by the large creeks and lagoons that interrupted the city’s shoreline. While Lagos was relatively small, these water bodies separated different sections of the island. As shown in the previous section, Ẹlẹgbata and Alakoro creeks dominated the edges of the western portion of the island, while two lagoons – the large Idunmagbo and smaller Isalẹgangan – dominated the north-eastern edge of the island.

In the west, a new bridge over the narrowest section of the Alakoro Creek connected the Offin and Idunmota quarters. Previously, traders and others would have had to use canoes between these areas or go the longer way around Alakoro Creek. Directly east across the island, another bridge was built where the Idunmagbo bridge narrowed at its entrance to the Lagos Lagoon. This bridge, named Princess Bridge, like the one at Alakoro, connected Idunṣagbe and Isalẹgangan. It was later described as ‘the most important connecting link between two of the business centres of the Town and is extensively used by the business community’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Another bridge was built across Isalẹgangan Lagoon and was renamed after Governor Moloney. At the southern tip of Eko, a bridge was started across Five Cowrie Creek to connect it to Kuramo Island. The press reported frequently on the progress of the construction of the bridge, eagerly anticipating the physical benefits of walking from Eko to Kuramo.Footnote ⁶⁸ The iron bridge over Five Cowrie Creek was completed in 1882.Footnote ⁶⁹

Newspaper editors kept a keen eye on the ratio of income to expenditure on public works. Many noted that the local government seemed fixated on profit without improvement in the city. The connection the bridge across Idunmagbo made between the east and western parts of the island of Lagos meant that it was described as one of the ‘principal thoroughfares’ in the city. Without the bridge in service, people had to cross the lagoon by wading across in shallow areas, or by canoe; both ventures sometimes proved fatal because of drownings.Footnote ⁷⁰ Reclamation projects for these two north-eastern lagoons came later.

Reclamation and drainage work was not without danger and came at great cost to the Lagos population. The sanitary and economic reports mostly detail only the loss of homes and the cost of compensation. However, attention to the environment and social relations reveals the impact on a wider swathe of the Lagos community. The labour to finish these projects was often drawn from vulnerable, uncompensated prisoners. In the early 1900s, for instance, prisoners from the colonial prison worked to dig an eight-metre-wide canal across the narrowest part of Eko. When it was completed, it connected the Lagos Lagoon to the Five Cowrie Creek. By the time the sea wall was being built in 1903, the constant protests from the local population were privately reported to be dying down. Governor MacGregor wrote in his report, ‘[t]his work has been so thoroughly well appreciated that although the Marina esplanade must have encroached on scores or hundreds of native owners and occupants, they have put no obstacle in the way of its extension’.Footnote ⁷¹ This was an erroneous impression, as protests and complaints continued.

However, Lagosians found new ways to mark space and enshrine enduring beliefs around this new infrastructure. The loss of the island’s edges and water bodies through bridge construction and reclamation likely had a deep economic and cultural impact on Lagosians, as can be tracked through the movement and displacement of their deities and livelihoods. One particularly intriguing case emerged at the base of the new Carter Bridge, near Ebute Ero, with the emergence of an ‘unquenchable fire’ on the lagoon. The Nigerian Chronicle, known for its evenhanded and even scholarly approach to engaging with the news, dedicated space in two issues to understanding the effects, printing the interpretation of a writer who claimed to be knowledgeable about oriṣa worship in Lagos and the response of the colonial government. Reports from the nineteenth century highlight how Lagos fishermen would appeal to such deities to protect their fishing and provide them with a bountiful catch.Footnote ⁷² In this fire, Lagosians saw a clear sign that they needed to appease their deity.

The colonial government dismissed the idea and conducted experiments on the water to reproduce the fire. The Chronicle printed three letters with pseudonyms including ‘Omo Ibile’, ‘Gratias’ and ‘Querie’ as well as details from experiments by Ralston, the government chemist. As ‘Omo Ibile’ explained in their letter, some Lagosians believed that Ota Omi, a deity who resided in the lagoon (or sea) required attention, and that when neglected, he caused ‘serious calamities at sea.’Footnote ⁷³ There was enough evidence for this in the lagoons. Lagos’ waters were notoriously rough; accidents at the sandbar were frequent and many drowned in the Ẹlẹgbata Creek and at Itolo. As a warning, Ota Omi would send fire to the surface of the lagoon, and this fire was noted to be ‘unquenchable by water’. To appease this deity, worshippers offered sacrifices in the lagoon, near the site of the new shrine under the Carter Bridge.

Notably, the Ota Omi shrine had already been displaced once by the building of the Holy Trinity Church in 1852. The creation of new churches in Lagos was also crucial to the displacement of water deities in Lagos Island. In his 2015 book on the Holy Trinity Church in Ebute Ero, the late historian Paul Osifodunrin showed how at the shrine of Ota Omi, a lagoon oriṣa in Lagos was removed so that Christian missionaries could build a church on that site.

Just as they had adapted to the construction of the cemetery in the 1850s, Lagosians continued to work around their new shoreline and infrastructure. The ara Eko attached new meaning to sites like bridges and canals, even as spaces with ritual significance and features like trees and lagoons were removed or filled in. Where Lagosians lived and died was important to them. Historians have pointed out how indigenous understandings of land in Lagos meant that it was not to be alienated or sold, and families tended to live and die in multigenerational homes. ‘Surely’, wrote one correspondent in the Lagos Standard, ‘the European aught to know by this time that the homestead of the Native is very dear to him’. Further, he added, ‘there is associated with his home, in the mind of the Native, a deep religious idea which causes him to regard it a desecration for strangers to interfere with a site that has been hallowed by the unbroken residence of a long line of ancestors’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The portrait of erosion, expansion and infilling of the lagoon and waters around Lagos offers a complex portrait of a city reimagined for colonial use.

Conclusion: why water mattered

Every year at the start of the summertime rainy season, metropolitan Lagos experiences devastating floods.Footnote ⁷⁶ On Eko or Lagos Island – the site of the original settlement of the city – while the flooding patterns are aggressive and destructive, they also inscribe and follow a historical geography that the city has tried for decades to hide. The flooding persists and is often worst at the site of the old lagoons, creeks and lakes covered up at the turn of the twentieth century. Decades of infrastructural neglect plague Lagosians: the city is low-lying, still flood-prone and densely populated, with many areas still lacking the proper drainage infrastructure necessary to control the after-effects of torrential rain fall and erosion from rising sea levels via climate change.Footnote ⁷⁷

A history of these waters is an analysis of disappeared spaces and recovered infrastructure that no longer exist. This article has explored the resistance to, and public discourse about, the city and its environment at the turn of the century to reveal the forgotten parts of the city, and to centre ideas around the historical and reciprocal relationship between Lagosians and their island and lagoons. Despite efforts to erase this original landscape, the city’s geography and streets insist on remembering their past. Lagos has had a turbulent history, framed through the rivers that connect it to the lagoons that run through it and the ocean to which it lies adjacent. Lagos’ expansion, in tandem with its waters, has always been fragmentary, uneasy and contested. Water matters in Lagos, economically, socially, culturally and politically. While they line and form the edges of the island, these sluggish and brackish lagoons, stilled swamps and the Atlantic Ocean also form important connections to life and death in Lagos.