Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760--1900

7. The Changing Meaning of Land in the Urban Economyand Culture

7 The Changing Meaning of Land in the Urban Economy and Culture Commercial development and population growth in Lagos, fueled by the importation of gradually diminishing numbers of slaves as well as by the influx of runaway slaves and free immigrants, combined in the second half of the nineteenth century to increase the demand for dwellings, stores, and storehouses, or land on which to build them. At the same time, colonial rule and missionary activity created a need for houses, offices, churches, schools, and other structures, putting further pressure on urban real estate. The fact that the commercial and administrative center of the town lay on a small island, where much of the land was lowlying and swampy and needed to be improved before building, compounded the problem of land scarcity. In the decades following the annexation , good land in the town of Lagos became an ever more scarce and valuable commodity. Moreover, possession of real estate acquired new uses, value, and meaning in the growing urban economy. By the 1890s, similar changes had begun to occur in rural areas north of the city. During these years, Lagos’s slaves and former slaves sought and sometimes found new ways of obtaining access to landed property and of defining their rights in it, first in the town and later in the nearby countryside. When they succeeded, they gained important new opportunities that facilitated the redefinition of their relationships with their owners or overlords , as well as their status and identity within the community. Large slaveowners and rising new entrepreneurs seeking to mobilize labor and allegiance, on the other hand, strove, in the long run, to maintain control over land and houses as a means of disciplining the labor and support not 238 / Slavery and the Birth of an African City only of the town’s slaves and former slaves, but also of runaway slaves and free immigrants flocking to the colony from elsewhere. Although fundamental changes occurred in land tenure within the colony, opening significant new opportunities to erú, àrótà, and asáforíge, the state ultimately upheld the rights of owners and overlords to property occupied by these subordinates. Struggle between owners and other people of wealth and power and their dependents for control of urban real estate lay at the heart of efforts to renegotiate the terms of the relationship between them. For this reason, an analysis of changes in land tenure, and in the uses, value, and meaning of land in the colony, lies at the heart of the story of emancipation in Lagos. Land in the Precolonial Period Just who owned the land in and around the town of Lagos and how they owned it have been questions of great political importance since the time of the annexation, if not before. Within months of the signing of the Treaty of Cession, by which Dosunmu did “give, transfer, and . . . grant . . . unto the Queen of Great Britain, her heirs and successors for ever, the port and Island of Lagos,” a number of the ìdfjo chiefs protested on the grounds that land in Lagos belonged to them and the oba did not have the right to give it away.1 In subsequent decades, as land became a scarce and more valuable resource, the issue took on major economic signi ficance, as well. Written records and oral traditions regarding land tenure in Lagos have been framed in the context of specific economic transformations and political struggles, by actors—European and African—who had clear interests and advocated particular policies. From the early decades of the twentieth century, for example, British administrators in Africa favored upholding local traditions regarding land and other matters, unless they were repugnant to “natural justice, equity, and good conscience,” in the interest of preserving precolonial authority, managing change, and making the nation’s vast new colonies there easier to rule. Aware that colonial governments were committed to preserving tradition, actors on all sides subsequently invoked and often invented “custom” to support their interests .2 In Lagos, as in other parts of Africa, untangling precolonial norms and practices from the skein of conflicting evidence in colonial discussions of local land tenure presents a difficult task. Two general observa- The Changing Meaning of Land / 239 tions, however, bear remembering. First, norms and practices regarding land rights in Lagos have always been dynamic.3 Second, customary land law as articulated in the...