When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958
288
When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958
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Overview
As Saheed Aderinto shows, British colonizers saw prostitution as an African form of sexual primitivity and a problem to be solved as part of imperialism's "civilizing mission". He details the Nigerian response to imported sexuality laws and the contradictory ways both African and British reformers advocated for prohibition or regulation of prostitution. Tracing the tensions within diverse groups of colonizers and the colonized, he reveals how wrangling over prostitution camouflaged the negotiating of separate issues that threatened the social, political, and sexual ideologies of Africans and Europeans alike.
The first book-length project on sexuality in early twentieth century Nigeria, When Sex Threatened the State combines the study of a colonial demimonde with an urban history of Lagos and a look at government policy to reappraise the history of Nigerian public life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252096846 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
When Sex Threatened the State
Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900â"1958
By Saheed Aderinto
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09684-6
CHAPTER 1
"This Is a City of Bubbles"
Lagos and the Phenomenon of Colonial Urbanism
The title of this chapter is a phrase from Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (1954), which was "acclaimed as the first major novel in English by a West African to be widely read throughout the English-speaking world." Aside from being of immense importance in the development of contemporary African writing, People of the City in so many ways affirmed the significant position that Lagos occupied in the 1950s—a bridge between the demise of colonialism and the birth of an independent Nigerian state. What made Lagos a city of bubbles, as Ekwensi rightly emphasizes, was not only the multiple road lanes, electricity, and tall buildings that adorned the main business districts but the superfluous social life of its residents. Amusa Sango, the main character of the novel, leads a socially complementary existence as a 26-year-old bachelor from eastern Nigeria, a "ladies' man," dance bandleader of calypso and konkoma, and crime reporter for a local newspaper. In attempting to capture Lagos of the 1940s and 1950s, Ekwensi situates Sango within the ambiance of nocturnal socialization, gender relations, popular culture, and even the politics of nationalism. "Every Sunday in this city," Ekwensi attempts to capture Sango's "play boy" feeling toward Aina, one of his lovers, "men met girls they had never seen and might never see again. They took them out and amused them. Sometimes it led to a romance and that was unexpected, but more often it led to nowhere. Every little affair was a gay adventure, part of the pattern of life in the city. No sensible person who worked six days a week expected anything else but relaxation from these strange encounters." But urban living had its darker side and offered inconveniences, not just the pleasures of transient socio-sexual networking. Poverty, bribery and corruption, violent crime, the high cost of living, and noise pollution emanating from the "sounds of buses, hawkers, locomotives, the grinding of brakes, the hooting of sirens and clanging of church and school bells" were only a short list of the ills of city life.
For students of African history familiar with the history of colonial urbanism, Ekwensi's narrative, though fictional, aptly and vividly captures the social changes accentuated by the transformation of Lagos from a little island "of pristine simplicity of a cantonment of African huts and compounds" on the eve of British colonization in 1861 "to the dignity of the Queen city of the West Coast" by the first half of the twentieth century. In this chapter, I lay out the socioeconomic, racial, political, and ethnic contexts of the story of prostitution in Lagos. I introduce Lagosians, placing their experience within the rapidly modernizing colonial society, struggling to reconcile the contradictions between colonial progress and colonial failure. If the story of African involvement in sexual politics in Lagos is different from what obtained in most parts of Africa, it is because the city's social and economic structures are unique. Moreover, prostitution, like other aspects of human socio-sexual relations, did not take place in isolation from other components of society's larger experience but within the broader urban space that served as a melting pot of cultures and ideas. The city more than any other location was flexible in accommodating myriads of social behaviors rarely permissible in the countryside and was a significant site for measuring the "success" or "failure" of the imperialist project.
A "No-Man's Land"
Research has shown that the popular sentiment "Lagos is a no-man's land," which gained currency from the first half of the twentieth century, not only is ahistorical, but also overrides the civilization of the people that inhabited the coastal city before it became a British colony in 1861. The exact date of the founding of Lagos is unknown because of a lack of written records and conflicting oral traditions. What we do know is that it was settled before the sixteenth century by the Awori subgroup of the Yoruba, who were compelled to leave Ile-Ife, the ancestral home of the Yoruba, by ifa (divination) because of a chieftaincy dispute. The migratory group was commanded to follow the path of a basin along the Ogun River and to settle at the point it sank. The name Awori derives from the response to the question: "Where is the basin?" Answer: "Awori—'the basin has sunk.'" The settlement's popular Yoruba name Eko probably derived from the Yoruba word for farm, oko. It could also be from the Bini word eko, meaning "war camp," used by Benin conquerors in the mid-seventeenth century. Lagos, as the settlement would later be called, is derived from the Portuguese designation lago (lake). The earliest immigrants first established a settlement at Ebute Metta (the three landing places), on the mainland, until the need for greater security pushed them to Iddo on the island.
Unlike other polities like Oyo, Ijebu, and Benin in what is now Nigeria, which registered their formidable presence in the Atlantic economic order from the fifteenth century, Lagos remained a backwater settlement for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its earliest inhabitants definitely engaged in farming—despite the fact that the sandy soil was unsuitable for agriculture—canoe building, iron working, salt making, and fishing. A gendered division of labor must have taken a form akin to that in other Yoruba towns: while men engaged in clearing the farm and planting, women harvested, processed, and sold the produce. Children's involvement in economic activities was important, not only as additional help, but also as one means of passing skills to future generations. Political organization was patterned along the lines of conventional Yoruba power distribution. The earliest ruler, named Olofin, defended the community from invaders, made laws of succession, and distributed political power among his immediate family and some members of the larger community. However, he would later be overthrown by the powerful Benin Empire by the mid-seventeenth century. The relationship between Lagos and the Benin Empire went beyond having been conquered militarily, and extended to the creation of a new political institution that has survived to the present: in gratitude for helping to return the corpse of his warrior son killed during the battle with Lagos, the oba of Benin proclaimed the ashipa of Lagos as the new ruler of the town; the latter thus became the progenitor of the dynasty from which Lagos oba (kings) were subsequently chosen since around the 1630s.
Lagos would remain economically and politically insignificant in the Atlantic world until around the 1760s, when it joined powerful states like Dahomey and Asante in the transatlantic slave trade. Popular history recounts that Oba Akinsemoyin (ruled 1760–75), the fourth king of Lagos, and his Portuguese friend, Joao de Oliveira, began to export slaves from the lagoon, first to the Gold Coast and later to the Americas. Akinsemoyin and Oliveira had met in Badagry, where the former was exiled before being enthroned. An estimate of about 575 slaves was exported yearly during the second half of the 1760s. It expanded from almost 4,000 to 14,000 between the first and second halves of the 1780s, respectively. Most of the slaves were captives and prisoners of wars taking place in nearby Badagry and Dahomey. But it was in the first half of nineteenth century that Lagos would become a major slave port, rivaling and surpassing its contemporaries in the Bight of Benin.13 It became the largest slave exporter north of the equator by the 1820s—as other outposts were succumbing to the firepower of the British Anti-Slave Trade Squadron that policed the waters off the West African coast. The reasons for Lagos's eminent position during this era can be located in developments both within and outside Africa.
One external factor was the increasing demand for slaves in Brazil, where prices remained high. Although the prosperity of the Bahian sugar trade declined around 1820, the flourishing of the intra-Brazilian slave trade continued to create demand for human cargo. The decline in slave trading in the Bight of Biafra and the Gold Coast allowed Lagos to take their place. Perhaps the most significant factor was the Yoruba civil wars, which started with the defeat of Owu in 1817, its sacking in 1823, and the collapse of Old Oyo Empire between 1817 and 1826. The end of the Old Oyo Empire, the most powerful Yoruba state before the nineteenth century, created a vicious circle of violence in the whole of Yorubaland, as polities were destroyed to give way for others. The ensuing refugee crisis created enabling conditions for slave raiding, while the endless wars put a premium on slaves as the most important booty. More than 37,000 enslaved Africans who departed from Lagos between 1846 and 1850 came from the war-ravaged Yoruba hinterland. In addition, the sheltered location of Lagos offered protection against the British naval squadron.
Lagos and the Phenomenon of Colonial Urbanism
Although the slave trade brought Lagos into global prominence, it also was responsible for sounding a death knell to its autonomy. The flourishing of the port's trade embarrassed the British and proved the antislavery campaign ineffective. A crack in the internal politics of Lagos exemplified in a chieftaincy dispute between two princes (Kosoko and Akintoye) was all the British needed to invade the town in 1851 under the pretext of stamping out the slave trade. Ten years after its bombardment, Lagos officially became the first part of modern Nigeria to be formally colonized. The immediate impact of the imposition of colonial rule was a decline in slave trading and massive immigration to the city, which permanently changed the structural landscape of Lagos as immigrants established their economic, artistic, and cultural presence there. Among the first set of immigrants were the liberated African ex-slaves who had been converted to Christianity and received Western education through missionary activities in Sierra Leone. They were soon followed by another set of immigrants from the Atlantic world—ex-slave returnees from Brazil, who numbered around four thousand to six thousand in 1873. During the first half of the 1870s, an acting administrator in Lagos remarked that the Brazilian emancipados were the most populous residents after the natives. They and their Sierra Leonean counterparts (the Saro) settled the Olowogbowo and Popo Aguda Districts of the town, respectively.
These two groups of immigrants from the Americas and West Africa laid the foundation of an African-centered entrepreneurial and professional class. They would compete (albeit unfavorably) with large European firms for the importation of European goods, form trade unions, and contribute directly to the effective integration of Lagos into the world capitalist system. All the professionals in Lagos in 1920—numbering some twenty lawyers, twelve doctors, several engineers, as well as architects and surveyors—were of Aguda and Saro origins. But the contributions of the Saro and Aguda transcended the economic and professional spheres; they were also instrumental in the rise of the cultural nationalism that was a significant element of sociopolitical engineering from the 1880s on. Without them, the history of Nigeria's political nationalism and decolonization might have taken a completely different turn or been delayed because they laid the foundations of anticolonial sentiment through Western education. Trailblazers like Dr. James Africanus B. Horton and Dr. William Davies (the first "Nigerian" medical doctors), Christopher Sapara Williams, David Vincent (later known as Mojola Agbebi), and Herbert Macaulay (the so-called father of Nigerian nationalism), among others, received education in some of the most prestigious disciplines of the era such as medicine and law. They also pioneered an African-centered lifestyle that blended African and European cultures to create a distinctive hybrid that appealed to future generations of frontline politicians like Dr. Kofoworola Abayomi, Dr. C. C. Adeniyi Jones, F. R. A. Williams, and Adeyemo Alakija, among others. It was therefore no coincidence that this class of pioneer literates, their descendants, and others they influenced would dominate Lagos elite culture during the first half of the twentieth century. As leading public intellectuals, their stance on sexual morality, among other key social issues, would influence public opinion.
No doubt, the foundation of Lagos's primacy as the economic and infrastructural epicenter of Nigeria was laid in the mid-nineteenth century; however, it was not until the first two decades of the twentieth century that it would fully maximize its strategic location and head start as the bastion of colonial modernity. First, the massive investment in anti-malaria campaigns and improvements in sanitation—after Sir Ronald Ross, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, discovered in 1897 that the female Anopheles mosquito was the vector of the disease—significantly reduced the mortality rate from about 100 per 1,000 in the 1890s to 30 per 1,000 in the 1920s. Slum clearance and swamp reclamation did not totally end Lagos's unsanitary conditions, but it decongested the island and opened up several districts on the mainland. Second, and most important, the choice of Lagos as the capital of southern Nigeria in 1906 and of the amalgamated Nigerian state in 1914 was both cause and effect of massive migration to the area and the attendant economic boom. The population rose from 39,387 in 1901 to 230,256 and then to 650,000 in 1950 and 1963, respectively.
The largest number of the new immigrants, who came mainly from the hinterlands of Nigeria, arrived in search of jobs made possible by the government's investment in major capital projects like the construction of ports, rail and road networks, water and electricity plants, and wharves. Railroad construction—perhaps the most expensive capital project embarked on by the colonialists, following the "pacification" of much of southern Nigeria—started from Lagos in 1895 and reached Kano in 1912. Indeed, throughout the colonial period the Railway Department was the largest employer of wage labor. Aside from opening up Lagos and the interior of Nigeria to international commerce, railways facilitated the massive influx of provincial Nigerians into Lagos. The city also offered several amenities—electricity, public water supply, and educational and medical institutions—that were far beyond the reach of most Nigerians. Electricity was first introduced to Lagos in 1898, and by 1923 the Ijora Power Station was generating 29 megawatts from steam turbines and coal fires. In the 1940s the second phase of the Ijora Power project increased supply to 80 megawatts. In 1915 a public water scheme that was the biggest of its kind in West Africa, with the capacity to supply 2.5 million gallons of water daily to more than 100,000 inhabitants, was completed. Construction of two major wharves in the 1920s (the Apapa and Coal Wharves) further enhanced Lagos's intermediary position between domestic and international commerce.
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Excerpted from When Sex Threatened the State by Saheed Aderinto. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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