The City as Archive: Mapping Place, Race and Power in 19th-century Lagos.

Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, University of California, Riverside

Urban questions have taken on a new urgency in Africa, as cities like Lagos continue to grow faster and more intensely, seemingly every day. Most often, engagement with these cities is framed in terms of their problems: too crowded, too disorganized, too frenetic. But how should we understand the ways the past shaped and produced this present? This paper explores the histories of Lagos’s streets as markers of the moments of placemaking, crisis, and displacement in the nineteenth century. It begins with the premise that Lagos’s streets offer important clues and cues to the ways to ask, analyze and frame the historical and contemporary narratives of the city. In 1868, a local English-speaking Yoruba court clerk named all the newly paved streets in Lagos, in the wake of new colonial infrastructure that was quickly taking root. Rather than superimposing British names or even a stripped-down numbering scheme, the mostly indigenous Yoruba names he chose reflect a remarkable archive of local priorities, symbols, events, places, and people. Much like the ways that court transcripts and letters can be read and analyzed to yield insights about the past, streets in Lagos bear witness to the ways that the city’s pasts intertwine. By mapping and analyzing the layers of these streets through space and time using GIS, this paper reveals how crises over enslavement, colonialism and religion were debated and marked in space.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 240. Settlement and Places