Part of review forum on “Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City.”
Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi’s Imagine Lagos traces the emergence of nineteenth-century urban Lagos through the world of maps, taking a refreshing approach that excavates the hidden and buried histories of the city’s past. One of the book’s key contributions is the novel methodological framework of “walking cartography” through which the author moves the reader from the body, to streets, neighborhoods, and waterscapes to evade a simplistic, linear history and instead offer layered histories of specific sites. Imagine Lagos invites historians to engage deeply with maps which, in Adelusi-Adeluyi’s able hands, serve as “a dialogue with the past and the present” (9).
Throughout the book, maps anchor each chapter’s narrative. Drawing on her background and distinctive skillset as an engineer and cartographer, Adelusi-Adeluyi creatively employs nineteenth-century maps as snapshots in time, builds on them, and interrupts what we think we know from them about everyday life in Lagos. Pairing British colonial correspondence, reports, and land disputes with colonial maps, Adelusi-Adeluyi reconstructs key moments of urban transformation which she visually conveys in her original, customized maps. In so doing, she returns hidden historical figures into their spatial surrounds, at times overlaying them speculatively onto nineteenth-century maps, and at other times recovering an indigenous past through street names and other evidentiary fragments. Adelusi-Adeluyi extends the work of critical cartography scholars to offer an analytical approach that is at once recuperative and playful, and which holds emancipatory and reparative potentialities for historians and communities alike. Mapping here is itself a production of history through which new historical narratives are cast.
Adelusi-Adeluyi’s treatment of the ways Lagosians negotiated political tensions, shifting kinship alliances, and British encroachment is sensitive and animated. Political competition over the idejo (white cap chiefs) resulted in Kosoko’s seizure of the city and radical upending of long-standing social hierarchies by redistributing land to his formerly enslaved war chiefs. Adelusi-Adeluyi’s careful historicization of the ways wealth and power accrued unevenly across the city through engagement with the transatlantic slave trade reveals the ways city dwellers moved between categories of complicity, autonomy, and dis/empowerment in unexpected ways. Laying bare decades of struggle that reshaped the city’s landscape is a scholarly pursuit with weighty stakes in the contemporary context of “cultural amnesia” around histories of enslavement and slave trade in Lagos. Adelusi-Adeluyi’s study is to be admired not only for its innovative method, but also for its clear-eyed investigation of a difficult past.
Imagine Lagos is an important contribution to urban studies scholarship that raises significant questions about the ideological work of maps and how they can help us rethink spatial politics of cities. Maps tell stories and make claims about the past, and at times maps can facilitate material changes, whether through erasing homes of firstcomers in the service of land dispossession, or renaming streets and places in the service of marking territory. To what extent were British maps crucial in bringing about and crystalizing distinctive categories of status in Lagos such as slave-or elite-descent, ethnicity, class, and religious affiliation? Chapters One and Five discuss Yoruba toponyms, placenames after formerly enslaved people, and Benin linguistic traces on the landscape but I was left wondering the extent to which those, or later iterations of naming, brought about these sociopolitical distinctions in everyday life. In what ways did the demarcation of Brazilian Town on maps, for instance, serve to construct Brazilians (or any other group) as a distinctive, coherent sociopolitical category? Given the tremendous heterogeneity of nineteenth-century Lagos, how were maps part of a broader productive repertoire of social difference? More broadly, how have people crafted or enacted political subjectivities through maps, architecture, and streetscapes of the city?
Building on a robust scholarship associated with the “spatial turn,” Imagine Lagos opens up new possibilities for stretching our understanding of the city beyond the textual perspective. The use of maps in this book invites the reader to fly upward, to move vertically, and to glimpse the nineteenth-century city from a new vantage point. Although Adelusi-Adeluyi was “dissatisfied with the aerial view” (19) the gaze from above is inherent in the book’s many maps, and the powerful purview entangled with histories of colonization is at times inescapable. How might Imagine Lagos lean into this perspective and help us rethink cities through verticality? Historians and urban studies scholars of Africa have largely looked askance or across the landscape, and often unwittingly worked with the same cartographic imaginaries that were inherited from the colonial state. Recent literature on the politics of verticality has been dominated by surveillance studies and segregation histories anchored in US, European, and Israel-Palestine contexts—yet African studies perspectives have much to contribute to these debates. What might closer attention to urban verticality in African spaces afford? What was the relationship, for instance, between power and height? And how might Imagine Lagos help us rethink the politics of urban verticality more broadly?
My questions are testimony to the generative and suggestive nature of Imagine Lagos, rather than criticisms. Thanks to the book’s novel methodological intervention, African studies scholars are better positioned to reconstruct urban pasts through maps and embodied movement as modes of analysis. Adelusi-Adeluyi has offered a poignant study that reveals the relative openness of a society at the crossroads of history and of the everyday spatial tactics through which Lagosians navigated the uncertainties of warfare, enslavement, and colonialism.
