Lagos on my mind

  Kinshasa, despite its local unifying language, is so hobbled by existential conflicts and biblical deprivations that its seething and throbbing populace appears to have lost all hope of political redemption and economic emancipation. Life is war and the country is effectively partitioned going all the way back to the efforts of Moise Tshombe and Joseph Kasavubu. The great city of Dakar, despite a superior Islamic culture that is as forward –looking as it is emancipatory, suffers  from the poverty of  sparse population, the paucity of economic resources and the sheer tyranny of geographical location which deprived it of a huge hinterland and strategic locus.

READ ALSO: Crisis hits Cross River community as bandits plunder forest reserve

   That has left Lagos to take advantage of it all. Lagos is a classic example of how initial disadvantages can turn into great advantages and how historic misfortunes can turn into economic, cultural and spiritual fortunes. The slave trade which carted away millions of Africans through Lagos and adjacent ports has brought back many of their heirs either through liberation, emancipation, manumission or whatever. They stayed on the coast and in the vast expanding city of Lagos. Many of them became sea merchants and businessmen plying the West African coast even as they opened up the huge sub-continental hinterland to itself. The impact on the economy was dramatic. Brazilian returnees changed the face of the island's architecture forever. Trade was modernized and enterprise flourished. According to Professor Ade Elebute, a biographer of the late James Pinson Labulo Davies, Messr Alli-Balogun, aka the Merchant of Lagos, was saved from certain economic ruination when he was persuaded by the more cosmopolitan and savvy seafarer to exchange his stock of cowrie shells which was the dominant mode of exchange then for modern currency. Alli-Balogun, product of a Nupe prince and an Awori woman, became so famously wealthy that he became a reference point for indigenous enterprise.

  Some of the Brazilian emigres became so fabulously rich trading between Brazil and Lagos that their wealth became the stuff of legend and fairy tales. One of these was Candido da Rocha, who returned to Nigeria with his parents at the age of eleven speaking only Portuguese language. But he rallied and made hay, becoming one of the richest men in the history of colonial Nigeria. In his old age, resplendent in material glory and blissful contentment, Da Rocha would appear on the balcony of his palatial mansion at Kakawa Street on the dot of twelve noon. According to Ambassador Dapo Fafowora in his memoirs, the old Brazilian Lagosian would start pushing coins at secondary school students who had gathered to benefit from his legendary munificence. Some of the returnees, like Da Rocha, who was of Ijesha royal stock, traced their remote ancestry to the Yoruba interior but they never relocated from Lagos. It was the ambience of the old pepper plantation they found must convivial and promising.

   And Lagos took them in: cosmopolitan, cultured and clubbable and convivial Lagos took them on and absorbed them into the heady pastiche of a rapidly expanding tapestry of a unique cultural blend with its foundation and flair in Yoruba civilization and accommodating worldview. There were itinerant Muslim preachers all the way from Ottoman Turkey. There were Cuban migrants and workmen who came to build the cathedral and never went back.  There were economic wannabes from the vast interior surging into the pulsating city in search of fortune.

 Many were the fresh-limbed young men and women escaping from the horrors of a collapsed empire and from the multi-dimensional civil wars that embroiled Yoruba land for most of the nineteenth century. Returning recaptives from Freetown who traversed the two countries as if they were neighbouring communities; runaway Hausa slaves who became the nucleus of Governor Glover's military expeditions; former Nupe slaves who became notable military commanders in Lagos in addition to a vast array of regular  settlers. As a new dawn of civilization arrived with the twentieth century, enterprising Igbo traders and unskilled workmen began deserting their cloistered homesteads in droves and heading for Lagos.

 It was quite a heady brew, a memorable mélange and powerful pastiche redolent of promise and progress. But Lagos also had its fair share of issues and teething problems: Pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial. After the Ashipa Settlement that birthed a new indigenous dynasty which satisfied both the Awori landlords and the Benin military aristocracy, the new arrangement faced problems of naturalization which led to family tiffs that resulted in royal suicide, exile, abdication, banishment and outright military confrontation between Oba Akitoye and Prince Kosoko, his uncle who had earlier deposed him and seized the crown in 1845. Civil war followed in 1851 with Akitoye who posed as a campaigner against slave trade gaining the acceptance of the colonial authorities while Kosoko who seemed to retain the popular legitimacy was an adamant slave raider and a no-nonsense warrior primed for punitive exertions which recognized no power on earth. In the ensuing naval bombardment of the city by Commander Forbes, the centre was razed to the ground by artillery fire while Kosoko fled to Epe with his loyalists.

   Labulo Davies, a young naval officer of Yoruba origins who took part in the bombardment, was to later describe the situation in apocalyptic terms. The city centre was completely incinerated with partially burnt skulls littering the entire landscape. The stench from rotting human flesh oozing from sacrificial fetishes that popped up everywhere in the obliterated city centre was unbearable and could have come from hell itself. Such was the industrial scale of the human sacrifice that it must have felt like the conquest and destruction of the Aztec Empire by Hernan Cortes and his fellow conquistadors about three and a half centuries earlier in Latin America. But it was a period of economic, social and political flux when nothing was given and everything had to be fought for. The impact on individual transformation and societal dynamics was unprecedented, hinting at the disruptive force majeure of nascent capitalism on traditional society.

  Within three decades, a former slave boy, the selfsame Labulo Davies, having been decommissioned from the Royal Navy, had become an economic and cultural powerhouse plying his seafaring trade between Europe and the West African coast acquiring plutocratic riches and enormous political influence in the process. His derring-do and social heroics led him to ask for the hand of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, an adoptive niece of Queen Victoria in marriage. The girl herself was a gift to the British monarch, having been captured as an infant by Dahomean troops during a raid on her Oke Odan homestead and handed over to King Gezo who in turn handed her over to a visiting British military commander. It was a landmark society wedding in London attended by premium royalty and the movers and shakers of the British society.

 By the dawn of the new century, Lagos had seen an amazing transformation. Fast-paced modernity knocked at its door with a sense of urgency and implacable resolve. Electricity, a railway to the hinterland, local industry, well-laid out suburbs and the fruits of the Industrial Revolution pioneered by the colonial masters breached the rural sanctity dragging the ancient city to the portals of a new age of human evolution. The new city, retaining the liberality, the civilized ambience, the sophisticated urbaneness, the religious tolerance and cosmopolitan elan of the old, bulged at the seams with new dwellers eventually overwhelming its ancient frontiers and confining the original farmland to a gilded and much-storied enclave at the heart but not the soul of new developments. The opening of Carter Bridge in 1905 opened the door to the vast hinterland. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century and with the coming of Kings College in 1909, Lagos could boast of at least three world class secondary schools. Others like Baptist Academy, Queens College and Igbobi came fast on their heels. For a race that appeared to have been left behind in the civilizational sweepstakes, it was like a race against time.

   Lagos developed a unique character of its own which in retrospect would appear to be best-suited to the post- colonial odyssey of the Black person: bold, confident and immensely self-assured. The intense cultivation of human resources paid off.  The products together with the early coastal elites who had been educated abroad and had returned home to contribute their quota to the emancipation of the Black person gave the colonial authorities hell. They were not going to put up with colonial arrogance and supercilious contempt for the natives. They returned rapid fire for rapid fire and the Lagos firmament reverberated with the thunderous echoes of their journalistic duels. These were not your usual pliant and servile Black people. They knew their onions and the place of their race in the order of universe despite colonial trauma and historic setback. In a huff and angry hauteur, Lord Lugard dismissed them as “uppity niggers”. They pursued him till the end until he was quietly recalled in 1918 after he succumbed to another nervous breakdown due to the mismanagement of the Adubi War.

In 1924, Herbert Macaulay, one of the “uppity niggers”, who had been a thorn in the flesh of the colonial authorities, pursued the case of a land dispute involving the reigning Eleko, Oba  Eshugbayi, all the way to the Privy Council in London and won. There were tales of remarkable personal heroism. John Randle, a medical Assistant at the City Hospital, resigned his appointment rather than put up with the obvious incompetence of the White doctor who did not seem to know what he was doing. He headed for the University of Edinburgh and did not return until he qualified as a doctor. He became one of the leading lights of the new nation and a famed philanthropist.

 These are some of the avatars whose heroic struggles define the very existence and spectacular transformation of Lagos from a small fishing and farming hamlet to the first authentic Black megalopolis. The struggles provided the template for the subsequent political decolonization project. Like all great human beings, a great city is also a product of unceasing struggles: against itself, against the elements, against fires and watery demons; against unhealthy growth-hindering superstitions and against earthquakes both natural and human often resulting in daring advances and stunning retreats. Without these challenges, a city contracts and dies out from sheer somnolence and  self-imposed paralysis of will.

   The Lagos of the future is already here with us, a shimmering and magnificent Black metropolis filled with architectural wonders and state of the art towers. If one can applaud the glittering monuments, the supersonic skyscrapers and the elevated lifestyle of the emergent elite, one must also demur at the deplorable shanties, the gross inequities and inequality of opportunity and the unabating horrors of its feral slums. But then a great city, like a nation, is a permanent work in progress, roiling with emergent contradictions which will take future struggles to iron out.   This is the iron law of societal development. As Governor Jide Sanwo-Olu approaches the final bend in the river with the rites of selection of his successor, we wish him well in all his future endeavours. He has ruled Lagos with technocratic calmness and the even-tempered equanimity of a sober bureaucrat rather than the traditional hubris of a conventional politician. It is only morning on creation day.