Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos 9780821421154, 9780821421161, 9780821445013, 2014020141

Table of contents :
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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a f r i c a n

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MAKING MODERN GIRLS A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos

Abosede A. George

Making Modern Girls

N E W A F R I CA N H I STO R I E S SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN, ALLEN ISAACMAN, AND DEREK R. PETERSON

Books in this series are published with support from the Ohio University National Resource Center for African Studies. David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990 Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid Gary Kynoch, We Are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999 Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku Jacob A. Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei Jan Bender Shetler, Imagˆining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya in Senegal, 1853–1913 Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, editors, Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry, editors, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa James R. Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, editors, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007 Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa Gibril R. Cole, The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century Matthew M. Heaton, Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry Meredith Terretta, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon Paolo Israel, In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos Alicia C. Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon Shobana Shankar, Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890–1975

Making Modern Girls A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos w

Abosede A. George

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS w ATHENS, OHIO

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 ohioswallow.com © 2014 by Ohio University Press All rights reserved To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax). Printed in the United States of America Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ ™ 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

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Cover image: NIGERIA 17. Album, entitled ‘Nigeria Snaps’, containing 129 uncaptioned photographs by H S Freeman, 1900-1920. The album contains a frontispiece stating ‘This album was made by Mr Thomas Henshaw, the Chief Native Bookbinder of the Government Press, Lagos, and his assistants. The photographs were supplied by Mr H S Freeman, Photographer-In-Chief to His Excellency the Governor’ and is divided into nine subject categories. The category the cover photograph is 4) ‘In Lagos.’ Courtesy National Archives, KEW; Reference CO 1069/71

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data George, Abosede A., author. Making modern girls : a history of girlhood, labor, and social development in colonial Lagos / Abosede A. George. pages cm — (New African histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8214-2115-4 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-2116-1 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4501-3 (pdf) 1. Girls—Nigeria—Lagos—History—20th century. 2. Child labor— Nigeria—Lagos—History—20th century. 3. Peddlers—Nigeria—Lagos— History—20th century. 4. Public welfare—Nigeria—Lagos—History—20th century. 5. Lagos (Nigeria)—Social conditions—20th century. 6. Social change—Nigeria—Lagos. 7. Great Britain—Colonies—Social policy. I. Title. HQ792.N5G46 2014 305.2308209669’1—dc23 2014020141

Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction Girling the Subject

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Chapter 1 Working Well Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women in Colonial Lagos, 1900–1920

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Chapter 2 Making the Modern Child in the Era of Imperial Liberalism

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Chapter 3 Setting Up the Welfare City Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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Chapter 4 The Street Hawker, the Street Walker, and the Salvationist Gaze

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Chapter 5 Problem Girls, Private Vice, and Public Secrets in Lagos

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Chapter 6 Delinquents to Breadwinners and Hawkers to Homemakers Gender, Juvenile Justice, and Reform in the Welfare City 171 Chapter 7 For Women, Girls, and the Nation? The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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Conclusion Banning Hawkers Sixty Years Later

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Notes Selected Bibliography Index

233 277 295 v

Illustrations FIGURES

1. Juvenile Court Centre

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2. “Boys gambling in the streets of Lagos”

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3. “The streets of Lagos abound in tempting possibilities”

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4. “Articles left in unattended cars are quickly snapped up”

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5. “Arriving at the Remand Home”

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6. “Raufu has his leg treated”

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7. “Cooking and grinding pepper”

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8. “Some boys have never been to school”

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9. “The magistrates of the Juvenile Court”

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10. “In the Girls’ Remand Home”

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11. “On the threshold of womanhood”

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12. “Please let me play”

195 TA B L E S

1. Juvenile criminal statistics, January–December 1947

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2. Juvenile contraventions of township bylaws, January–December 1947

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3. Girls appearing before Juvenile Court, 1946–50

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Acknowledgments

This project has been supported by a great many individuals and several institutions. The earliest incarnation of this book benefited from the comments and advice of Richard Roberts, Estelle Freedman, the late Kennell Jackson of Stanford University, and Tabitha Kanogo of the University of California, Berkeley. My research was generously supported by the Department of History and the Office of Graduate Diversity Recruitment and Retention at Stanford. Research fellowships from the Institute for International Studies and the Weter Foundation provided funding for a research strategy that addressed challenging travel restrictions. Judith Byfield, Olutayo Adesina, and Wale Makanjuola enabled me to craft an archival research plan that cut through the global apartheid system. The Clayman Institute for Research on Gender provided me with funds to complete the research and a community of feminist scholars with whom to think through some key aspects of the early project. The final iteration as a book was mainly supported by my home institution, Barnard College, which offered me travel and research funding, and by the History Department and Africana Studies Department at Barnard, which granted me much-needed time for additional archival and oral research once I became able to migrate freely. Donna Murch, Deborah Gray White, and the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University also provided financial support and a crucial intellectual community that facilitated my writing during my year as a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers. Outside of, or alongside, the colleagues I met at the Center for Historical Analysis, I have also benefited greatly from the brilliance of less formally structured yet no less inspiring writing groups. These have consistently included, although in varying combinations and at different points in time, Carolyn Brown, Rachel JeanBaptiste, Toja Okoh, Carina Ray, and Benjamin Talton. I thank my Barnard colleagues Betsy Esch, Maja Horn, and Molly Tambor, who ix

read drafts of chapters in the book, and Emily Burrill, Corrie Decker, Simon Heap, Dorothy Ko, Brian Larkin, Benjamin Lawrance, Hlonipha Mokoena, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Steven Pierce, Lorelle Semley, Rhiannon Stephens, and Liz Thornberry, who all patiently endured and generously commented on my efforts to communicate ideas in development. The years of completing my first book were also the years of starting my academic career, and in that larger venture I have benefited tremendously from the support and wise counsel of Carolyn Brown and Kim F. Hall. At the hour when it most counted, crucial material support was rendered by the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University, which helped with publication completion support. The ideas presented in this work have benefited from discussions that took place in the context of the Columbia University Seminar in Contemporary Africa. Many thanks go to the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford for granting me permission to reproduce Alison Izzett’s photos, “Boys Gambling” and “In the Girls’ Remand Home.” Thanks also to Berta Jottar, who created the index for this book. To my old and new friends, too many to list here, thanks for the laughs, the drinks, the sympathy, and solidarity. To the George family in North America, the Ogbeides in Ibadan, the Reis family and the Winyemis in Lagos, mo ki yin. Thank you all for your faith and support through this long process of “working on the book.” To God be the glory.

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introduction

Girling the Subject Olomo lo l’aiye Edumare wa fun wa l’omo amuseye Omo tii toju ara Tii toju ile Tii toju baba Fun wa l’omo atata Tii mu’nu iya dun w To have a child, is to have joy in life Edumare give us a child who will fill us with pride A child who takes care of the family, Who takes care of the home, Who takes care of the father, Give us a precious child Who makes the mother happy

To h av e a child is to have joy when the child is one you can be proud of. So state the opening lines of Abiodun Adepoju’s naming ceremony ewi.1 The first stanza of the poem traces a portrait of an ideal child and expresses desire for this ideal child to come forth. In the poem, “Omo tii toju ara, tii toju ile, tii toju baba . . . tii mu’nu iya dun” is a child who embodies principles of reciprocity and community. Just as the family, the community, the father, and the mother ought to care for the child who comes to them, so ideally should any omo atata delight in taking care of his or her kinfolk in return. Ewi poems are typically performed on occasions of growth in a family’s history, such as weddings and naming ceremonies. Yoruba naming ceremonies, like the occasion that inspired Adepoju’s ewi, ideally take place on the eighth day after a child has been born. They pool together spiritual leaders like a family’s pastor, imam, or oldest members, with the parents of the new baby, and members of the extended family, household, or local community. Key members of the assemblage bestow names and blessings upon the child, while an onijala, if 1

present, recites ewi. An elegant ewi might recount the oriki of both maternal and paternal lineages, thereby linking the new arrival with his or her ancestors, and either exhort the child to follow in their honored footsteps or caution the child to learn from their tarnished legacies.2 The poem is simultaneously a prayer and a command: a wish for the child as much as for the parents. Typically performed in the presence of the new child, such poems enjoin him or her to recognize and manifest himself or herself as the ideal. In the naming ceremony ewi, we see an outline of an ideal child and an idea of childhood. Childhood involved joy and affection as much as utility, responsibility, reciprocity, and collaboration. The poem’s emphasis on the child’s contributions to others as the mark of his or her value suggests that childhood is to be thought of as a constructive, rather than an extractive phase of an individual’s life, when as much emphasis is placed on what the child brings to the family as on what the child derives from the group. The audience for an ewi recital typically includes the infant. Barely able to turn his or her head in order to track the source of the sound, the infant is nonetheless addressed as one who is already active in the construction of the family and the larger social world. Such notions of childhood, the social function of the child, or the idea of an ideal child are neither universal nor timeless; both the literal and symbolic work that children do are as open to critique and as amenable to historical change as any other social phenomena. Colonial Lagos of the twentieth century featured multiple and contested notions of the ideal child and views on how he or she might be brought into being. In literal and symbolic ways, children functioned as subjects of contestation between working-class Lagosians and elites, and between the colonial state and its subjects. Interclass and interracial struggles over children and childhood that linked Lagos Colony to the larger imperial world presented new frameworks for understanding relationships between African children and families, between the African child and the native, and crucially, between African children and the state. Through the introduction of novel legal and governmental instruments along with their underlying ethical principles, the twentieth-century colonial period saw the emergence of new legal and political distinctions between African children and adults and a concomitant reorganization of the relative social, moral, and developmental valences of the African, unmarked, and the African child. 2

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Introduction

The earliest category of children to be made a specific target of colonial governance activity was that of slave or newly freed slave children. For the first half of the nineteenth century to the annexation of Lagos Colony in 1861, the salvation and training of African children who had become estranged from their natal families and communities was principally a concern for Christian missionary groups in Lagos and its satellite towns such as Badagry and Abeokuta. One of the first instances when African children became a specific target of governmental activity was in 1877 through passage of an ordinance that combined ideas of labor regulation and moral protection. In December 1877, the young British colonial government of the Colony of Lagos passed the Alien Children Registration Ordinance, a law that called for “the registration and protection in certain other respects of alien children now residing in or who may hereafter be brought into Lagos.”3 Beginning in 1863, births, deaths, and ordinance marriages that took place in Lagos had been recorded by the colony government registrar. Into those existing rolls of enumerated persons, the Alien Children Registration Ordinance sought to also capture “any person under the age of seventeen years whose parents were natives of Africa” but who had not for whatever reason been “registered in accordance with the law of the Colony relating to the registration of births.”4 Under the ordinance, guardians of children who were new arrivals in Lagos were required to present their children before the registrar within forty-eight hours of entering the jurisdictional boundaries of the colony government. The ordinance explicitly prohibited Lagos residents from transferring the custody of unregistered children back and forth among themselves. In order to transfer custody of a registered child, the existing custodian, the prospective custodian, and the child in question all had to appear before the registrar, who would oversee any needed modifications to the child’s certificate of registration. If registered children changed residence, the ordinance required that this change be reported to the registrar. If they passed away, their deaths were to be reported to the registrar. If children were traveling beyond the jurisdictional boundaries of Lagos Colony, their travel plans were to be reported to the registrar or the governor who would grant (or withhold) permission for the child to be taken out of Lagos. Violation of any of the one dozen rules listed in the ordinance could result in a fine of up to fifty pounds or six months imprisonment with hard labor.5 Irregularities in fulfilling the ordinance’s requirements, such as either failing Girling the Subject

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to register a child within the required time frame or failing to produce a child or the child’s certificate of registration when ordered to do so, could trigger investigations by the registrar general, a district commissioner, a justice of the peace, or any person acting under the authority of the governor. These presumably European persons, accompanied by their interpreters, were empowered to “enter any house . . . at any time between the hours of sunrise and sunset, and require production of all children resident therein, whether registered or not, and make all such enquiries respecting such children as he shall think fit.”6 The Alien Children Registration Ordinance was the first colonial regulation to particularize the experiences of children as colonized subjects. It was both a show of force and a show of humanitarianism in the sense that it imposed a relationship between the state and subjects that was grounded in an ideology of benevolence. The ordinance posited a form of governance in which the state acted on behalf of subjects and positioned itself as a source of salvation for the most vulnerable subjects, children. Through the ordinance, children and their conditions of being were enlisted to legitimize interventionist colonial projects and the power of the state. The ordinance was important for the way that it brokered a relationship between the child and the state and the way that it rewrote space. Spatially, the ordinance opened the domestic threshold to being traversed by the state; it was the first colonial directive to take the state into a domestic arena of the lives of African subjects. The ordinance’s geographic reach encompassed Lagos Island, both its inhabited areas and yet unclaimed swamps; adjoining Iddo Island; and adjacent parts of Ebute Metta, Badagry, and the mainland.7 In precisely specifying the spatial limits of its application, the ordinance also marked the local boundaries of colonial civilization. The Alien Children Registration Ordinance was an extension of antislavery and anti-slave-trading ordinances that had been passed in 1874 and 1875. As Kristin Mann noted in her study of slavery in eighteenthcentury and nineteenth-century Lagos, enslaved people, particularly enslaved children, continued to be brought into Lagos Colony even after passage of the first antislavery ordinance. When a letter to the editor of the African Times brought this state of affairs to abolitionist audiences in London, embarrassed colonial authorities in Lagos intensified their surveillance of canoes entering the colony.8 In short order they confirmed the persistence of slave trading and the high percentage of children, particularly girls, who were being smuggled into the colony. 4

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The Alien Children Registration Ordinance was thus an initial attempt to close a gap in Lagos Colony’s antislavery infrastructure as well as an attempt to formulate a response to a serious public relations problem for the new colonial government. As the scholarship on law and colonialism has amply demonstrated, the law on paper, though enticingly concrete for historians, often bore the most tenuous relationship to actual social practice.9 On paper, the Alien Children Registration Ordinance and the antislavery laws that preceded it posited a radical interruption of the socioeconomic system that existed in slave-trading Lagos; as such, they were fundamental tests of the authority of the new colonial government. But as Mann astutely notes, “The Alien Children’s Registration Ordinance in no way prohibited bringing children, even slave children, into Lagos and putting them to work there; it merely required that such children be registered and stipulated that they could not be removed from British territory without the governor’s permission.”10 Even as the ordinance intensified governmental surveillance of elite Lagosians, their dependents, servants, and existing slaves, it did not impose a moratorium on enslavement of children. Indeed, a delegation of chiefs, elders, and traders who opposed the ordinance successfully argued to the governor that its enforcement would make it harder for them to buy victims of slavery in the hinterland and deliver them to freedom in Lagos.11 By 1876, Mann shows, “Lagosians had already begun to represent the purchase of slaves beyond the frontier for use in the colony as a benevolent act of redemption.”12 Despite its shortcomings as a legal implement for abolitionists in Lagos, in its particular focus on children, the registration ordinance introduced an important innovation to the idea of the child. In enacting the ordinance, the state marked children off from adults and constructed the child and the enslaved child as ontologically distinct from the adult or the enslaved adult. It asserted a hierarchy of suffering and exploitation, of sympathy and humanity, between enslaved children and enslaved adults. In bowing to antiordinance pressures from the delegation of influential slave owners, one government official reportedly stated, “I suppose it is all very wrong, but it seems to me to be ‘much ado about nothing.’ The children were apparently very well treated and contented.”13 In his assertion that the condition of enslavement for children was not accompanied by maltreatment or discontent, the official placed a higher moral value on the welfare of the enslaved child as a child over the freedom of the enslaved child as slave. Girling the Subject

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Enforcement of the Alien Children Registration Ordinance faltered and then faded away over the two decades after the ordinance was passed. Yet it was not forgotten. Half a century later, the law was exhumed by a new kind of government in Lagos—this time, the developmentalist colonial state.14 In the mid-twentieth century, as in the last decades of the nineteenth, the colonial state was once again trying to articulate a form of governance based on saving Africans from each other and from their own repugnant practices. More specifically, the state focused resources on saving children, viewed as members of a universal generational group, from Africans, viewed as members of a particular “racial” group. Thus, at key moments in the history of Lagos, at the late nineteenth-century moment of the imposition and attempted consolidation of colonial power on the island, and later during the mid-twentieth-century crisis of authority that accompanied the Second World War and prompted a reorganization of colonial power, the child was called forth as a vulnerable and imperiled universal subject, whose very existence demanded and legitimized the appearance of a salvationist colonial regime. This book is a history of girls and those who set out to “save” them in twentieth-century colonial Lagos. It examines contested ideas of girls and girlhood in relation to constructions and deployments of vulnerability and techniques and ideologies of salvation as political discourses. Through a particular focus on working-class girls and girl savers in Lagos, this book explores the history of the emergence of the African child as a universal subject during the colonial period. The book argues that before the trade unionist, the wageworker, or the nationalist politician, the child was the first category of native to emerge as a universal subject in Africa. The universal subjecthood of African children contrasted in significant ways with that of their successors—the industrial workers who demanded recognition of their membership in the global working class or the nationalists who demanded recognition of their sovereign right to political freedom. In contrast with these other groups, the universal subjecthood of the African child was an imparted and not a claimed status, which was bestowed upon the child by would-be salvationists. As such, the contested ideas of girls and girlhood that this book examines uniquely illuminate the implication of hierarchical distinctions of race, class, gender, and generation within programs of universal subject making in the colonial era and beyond. 6

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SUMMARY AND GOALS

The book centers on a period in the history of the city when Westerneducated elite Lagosian women, later in collaboration with the British colonial state in Nigeria, tried to reshape the idea and experience of girlhood among the Lagosian working class. As a project of elite women, the transformation of girlhood in Lagos was conceptualized as an indigenous modernization effort that would play a crucial role in the preservation and popularization of “modern womanhood” in the nation. For elite women reformers, expanding the realm of modern womanhood in Lagos required normalizing Western-style education in the socialization of working-class girls and educating all girls to participate as wageworkers in the urban colonial economy. Such a vision of girlhood, which centered on the school as the primary institution of training and socialization, entailed delaying the ages at which girls entered both the institution of marriage and the urban work force. For elite women, working-class girlhood in Lagos prematurely introduced girls to the Lagos markets where they toiled at traditional occupations and engaged in illicit encounters with boys and men. These activities and the conventional practices of girlhood that they seemed to emanate from were read as inhibiting the expansion of women’s education, their participation across diverse sectors of the formal economy, and their ability to command moral or political power. In order to garner support for their revisioning of Yoruba girlhood, educated elite women petitioned colonial administrators and religious leaders, and along with other educational entrepreneurs, began opening private schools where girls would be taught modern subjects and trained in new modes of feminine comportment. Yet for decades they were denied state support. Things appeared to change in the early 1940s, at which point the colonial government also began undertaking projects for the apparent welfare of children: boys first and, later, under pressure from the women, girls as well. Colonial officials came to regard working-class girlhood with a similarly jaundiced eye to their counterparts among elite Lagos women, yet they entertained a crucially different vision of what improvement or progress would look like with Lagos girls. They too sought to delay and standardize the ages at which girls began going to market and trading, thereby inhibiting sexual contact between girls and men in the city. However, unlike the women’s modernization plan, the state’s salvationist project failed to include a plan for mass education of girls and mass incorporation of girls and women into the Girling the Subject

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formal colonial wage labor economy. As a project of the colonial state, the transformation of girlhood was conceptualized as a social development scheme that was vital for the salvation of Yoruba girls while being potentially redemptive of a crumbling colonial enterprise. In looking at the interconnected women reformers’ modernization project and the colonial social workers’ development project, I am interested in exploring two related questions: how girls worked and what work they did. On one level, I mean to investigate the actual labor activities that girls performed and the constitutive relationships between gender, class, generation, and labor practices. On another level, I seek to discuss the various ways in which girls were ideationally constructed and the function of particular ideas of the girl for elites, colonists, politicians, and the state. GENDER, LABOR, AND DEVELOPMENT WORK

There are any number of ways that one can approach girls’ history or the history of ideas of girlhood. This book approaches the history of girls and girlhood via the lens of girls’ labor practices primarily. Through examination of the constitutive relationship between gender, class, generation, and labor, this book builds on scholarship that sits at the intersection of the history of gender, labor, and development work in urban Africa. Scholarship on the history of development work in Africa dates what Frederick Cooper called that “knowledge-power” practice to the years following the West Indian labor crises of the 1930s and Britain’s passage of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940.15 Although development, generally understood as the idea of planned economic transformation, had long been a feature of colonial rule in Africa, the development era that began in the 1940s was different from preceding periods in two important ways. One innovation in colonial development thinking, which other scholars have already remarked on, was that development in British and French colonies was financed at unprecedented levels directly from the treasuries of colonizing nations.16 This marked a radical break with previous practice, which had required African colonial governments to be financially self-sufficient and to not impose any financial burden on European taxpayers. The second innovation was that the significance of colonial development after 1940 extended beyond narrow economic concerns to include an amorphous new idea of welfare. The Colonial Development and 8

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Introduction

Welfare Act of 1940 supplied metropolitan funds for a range of development projects, including social welfare, throughout the British Empire. Social development projects were intended to contain growing unrest in the colonies while demonstrating to critics of colonialism that subjects did indeed gain tangible benefits from British rule.17 Nigerian development projects were detailed in the Ten Year Plan for Social and Economic Progress in Nigeria, and included health, education, rural development, police, prisons, and other more detailed concerns. Social welfare, one of the most underfunded yet broadly defined development projects, was a catchall category for all “activities auxiliary to the work of specialist departments.”18 The new social welfare imperative, which bridged psychological and sociological theories of social change, brought the social development of African subjects, including children and young people, within the colonial state’s sphere of interest. Historians Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard have argued that early development work had as much an ideological as a practical dimension.19 Development projects attempted to transform norms and values by transforming practices, rewarding certain behaviors and punishing others. Studies of the impact of development projects and ideology reveal that subjects did not passively receive these, nor did they obstinately resist colonial government initiatives.20 Rather, colonial subjects actively embraced certain aspects of development work, particularly its underlying modernizing ideology.21 A recurring research interest of leading scholars in the development history field is the question of how development ideology intersected with labor management and mobilization in the colonial period.22 The types of workers that have received the most attention—railway workers, dockworkers, and other kinds of organized wageworkers—were a largely if not wholly male population. Part of the developmentalist ideology that enabled the growth of trade unions in twentieth-century Africa was the idea that men as heads of households could be used to control their extended personal networks and could be most efficiently engaged with through organized trade unions. Lisa Lindsay’s work on the construction of the male breadwinner as a masculine ideal among organized railway workers and Carolyn Brown’s work on miners both look at intersections between labor reform, collective organizing, and the emergence of new ideologies of masculinity.23 As their research demonstrates, the emergence of trade unions and new labor practices was not only about carving out new forms of organization for Girling the Subject

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wageworkers but also about bringing forth new subjectivities and new gender categories—a new kind of African man who would subscribe to, uphold, and try to manage novel expressions of masculine identity.24 Since wageworkers and unionized workers constituted a small percentage of the working population of most colonial African cities, we have the opportunity to explore how development ideologies dedicated to stabilizing the urban work force engaged with workers who were not wageworkers. Building on the historiographical concern with the relationship between labor, development projects, and masculinity, this book draws attention to the interplay between labor control, development projects, and ideas of girlhood in twentieth-century colonial Lagos. This book examines how girls who straddled the divide between workers and small-scale entrepreneurs interacted with development ideology. I focus on the experiences of nonindustrial female workers in the informal economy who appeared to have been excluded from the developmentalist labor programs of the state.25 In addition to examining the impact of development work on the production of new gender categories and subjectivities, this book draws attention to elite Lagosian women’s efforts to direct social transformation. It raises questions about the practical difference between development work and social reform work, why the two topics have developed along separate historiographical lines, and what the distinct concerns of both topics communicate about different programs for social change. Starting during the 1940s, British social workers were deployed to Lagos to carry out the daily work of social development while colonial students were encouraged to pursue study in the science of social work. In Lagos, British social workers encountered elite women’s social reform groups that had been working on urban social problems, particularly those affecting women and girls, since the turn of the century. One could argue that the activities of elite Lagosian women fell within a social reform tradition, whereas colonial officials and the Colony Welfare Office were aligned with development history. But what does that linguistic difference signify when there were overlaps between the development work of the state and the social reform work of the women’s groups? The relationship between development and social reform in the context of “girl-saving” projects in Lagos sheds light on the gender assumptions and nuances in the historiography of the two themes of study. Scholarship that assumes a clear distinction between colonial state development projects and indigenously inspired 10

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reform projects can miss important overlaps between the two. In Lagos, state and community forces led by indigenous and foreign initiative came together to organize social change. The limits of cooperation were reached when the masculinist machinery of social development work could not yield to women social reformers. In an essay critiquing the ideology of development work, Cooper characterized development as something that was designed to be “done to and for Africa, not with it.”26 In twentieth-century colonial Lagos, women reformers made development work something to be done by Africa(ns). In so doing, Lagosian women challenged the knowledge-power hierarchies that underlay the colonial social order. In exploring these movements and convergences, this book sits at the intersection of several underexplored areas in colonial African history. One of these is the history of Western-educated African women. The history of European-African encounters during the colonial period has been fixated on the conflicts, compromises, and collaborations that structured relations between African and European men. Social categories and dynamics that emerged from these interactions—most obviously, the colonizer/colonized dichotomy—have been extended to all European-African encounters, flattening the gendered distinctions that emerge by looking comparatively at interactions between African women and European men. These underexamined interactions featured conflicting worldviews regarding the impact of gender on social experience and social status, and on the place of women in society. In this book, I examine what happened when contrasting worldviews of African women and European men regarding gender norms came into direct contact in the larger context of unequal colonial power relationships. Sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi has argued that the colonial encounter in Africa created a four-part hierarchy of social categories featuring European men at the top, followed by European women, African men, and, last, African women.27 Historical scholarship on the colonial period in Africa has generally reflected this hierarchical configuration and presented European men as the normative rulers, at least in colonial cities, and African men as the normative subjects, with African women somewhere in the backdrop and largely beside the point for understandings of colonial governance. New studies that examine interactions between African women and European men are being written with a focus on intimate interactions in the realms of marriage, concubinage, and related domestic arrangements.28 The Girling the Subject

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new scholarship demonstrates that even within the wider context of racialized colonial societies, intimate interactions multiplied the possible subject positions Europeans and Africans could occupy, challenging the centrality of a hierarchical colonizer/colonized dichotomy as the key locus of conflict in European-African encounters during the colonial period.29 This book adds to scholarship that reexamines the gender and class dimensions of colonial racial orders through a micropolitical and intersectional lens, by considering public, professional, and activist engagements between elite African women and European colonial workers in Lagos. I focus on African women who did not automatically experience disempowerment and did not, for various reasons, understand themselves to be lower-status members of society on the basis of their sex. When they interacted with Europeans whose elevated status was tied to their location in the colonial context, the respective status identifications of these two figures collided in ways that challenged the colonial order of things. By focusing attention on the public and professional lives of African women, the book also draws attention to points of conflict in colonial societies that derived less from received understandings of the hierarchical configurations of colonial societies and more from the subjective identities of individuals who lived in Lagos during the colonial period and who had to negotiate with each other in order to get work done. Elite women reformers and colonial social workers initially formed an alliance to regulate activities that the larger Lagos public considered conventional practices of girlhood. Through regulating girls’ labor and, by extension, girls’ education and sexuality, reformers and social workers hoped to transform local practices and ideas of girlhood and usher novel forms of girlhood into Lagosian Yoruba culture. The alliance between voluntary women reformers and colonial social workers was fraught with thorny gender, race, and class tensions and ultimately fell apart. But before their alliance fractured, the salvationists succeeded in introducing hundreds of Lagosian girls and their families to the interiors of colonial institutions and previously unknown levels of governmental surveillance. At its heart, Making Modern Girls is concerned with examining the centrality of everyday and exceptional forms of coercion in the formation of modern subjects, including children, in a colonial world. The book argues that rather than being incidental to ideas of African modernity and urbanity, children were one of the platforms on which the condition of being a modern urban subject was achieved and expressed. 12

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C H I L D H O O D , Y O U T H , A N D G E N E R AT I O N I N AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES

Although children have long featured in studies of the African past, scholarly interest in childhood or youth as a distinct historical artifact is a fairly recent development. The scholarship on slavery was one of the earliest subfields to deal with the experiences of African children historically. In studies of the history of slavery in Africa, scholars uncovered that in many parts of the continent, the legal abolition of slavery was accompanied by increases in the numbers of children who were made to serve as domestic laborers and pawns.30 In such studies, children featured as a vehicle for illuminating larger economic and political histories but not for considering childhood itself as a historical or theoretical question. The earliest Africa scholars to inquire specifically about childhood and youth in African societies were anthropologists who were interested in questions of socialization and social reproduction. In studies of age-grade societies and childhood rites such as naming, circumcision, and marriage, studies of children, childhood, and youth became bound up with explicating the endurance of traditions and more general ideas of continuity in African societies and cultures.31 A later and far more prolific phase of social science research focused on children and various forms of violence, most spectacularly militaristic violence. The new scholarship was broadly concerned with the relationship between child and soldier, child and rapist, child and murderer, child and war veteran, or child and survivor.32 In posttraumatic societies, it asked, could the concept of child continue to be thought in the same ways as it had been before? How were communities, and importantly, international development agencies, moving to either reconcile the idea of the child and the x, to reinstate children as such following mass traumatization of children and societies, or to simply provide young people with skills that might support their economic survival in contexts that may have marked them off as something other than so-called real children? The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen historians taking great interest in research on African childhoods as well as youth as a social category and a life stage.33 Conferences, workshops, and seminars have been organized around the theme of children and youth in African history. In contrast with earlier ethnographic studies of age grades and childhood rites that sought to uncover mechanisms of social continuity newer studies of African youth have emerged out of Girling the Subject

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thinking about generational conflict as an engine of historical change.34 The new work is more concerned with youth in African history than it is with children or childhood, and it builds on an earlier body of work that was interested in youth and popular culture. Starting with Terence Ranger’s 1975 study of Ngoma dance societies, which brought attention to youth subcultures in African cities by highlighting young men’s competitive dance troupes in Nairobi, youth history has been focused on the experiences of boys and young men.35 Masculinity, urbanity, performance, and popular culture were closely linked themes in earlier studies of juvenile male subcultures. Eventually these became tied to a fifth theme: criminality.36 Through centering on militarist conceptions of conflict, the generational conflict framework has become profoundly male gendered. Even subjects such as the history of marriage, which would seem to more readily incorporate women and girls, reflect a profound male gendering of ideas of generational conflict. Perhaps the most pronounced illustration of how presumptions about gender, particularly gendered agency, graft onto conceptions of generation has been in discussions of contests between senior men and junior men over control of junior women. Brett Shadle’s study of transformations in Gusii marriage provides a critical examination of generational conflict by uncovering the centrality of women’s choices in shaping the course of individual marital careers and the broader patterns that were produced in Gusiiland.37 The overwhelmingly male focus of the study of youth in the African history field raises the question: Where are the girls? Feminist historians working in US, European, and Japanese history fields have written about the history of girls in those places. Wage work and its significance, modern girlhood and its performance, girls’ sexuality and its regulation—all have been central concerns in the study of US American, European, and Japanese girls.38 African girls have been doubly marginalized as subjects of historical inquiry. In the subfield of history concerned with girls’ experiences, the experiences of African girls have been little examined.39 In the subfield of African history concerned with problem youth in Africa, girls have been little studied.40 Scholars have explained the disappearance of girls from African youth history as a symptom of the greater salience of gender identity over generational identity for females in comparison to males.41 Girls, in this view, are better understood as a variant of woman than as a variant of youth; through sexual practices like marriage, girls more quickly transform into women than boys transform into men. Thus due to the 14

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invisibility of violence in girls’ history and a paucity of documentary evidence, the terminal boundary of the history of girlhood in Africa is located at the point where it intersects with the history of sexuality. Feminist scholars working in US, European, and Japanese history have resisted delinking histories of girls and girlhood and histories of sexuality, and have instead worked on understanding how ideas of gender and generation have intersected with ideas of sexuality, to determine how the social category of girl has been imagined, mobilized, and lived in modern history. As the works of feminist historians such as Lynn Thomas demonstrates, the introduction of issues of sexuality into girls’ lives did not necessarily mark the end of their girlhoods.42 Disputes around girls’ sexuality and its control were frequently central to the intergenerational conflicts that appear in girls’ histories. All told, attention to youth and to the question of how generational difference has been active in shaping historical dynamics has facilitated entrées into more complicated African histories that escape the colonizer/colonized dichotomy and incorporate the multidirectional flows of power and responses to power that existed among African people. In this book, I am not so much interested in adding girls to the picture of problem youth history in Africa, or African girls to the study of girlhood in comparative perspective. I am more concerned with using the histories of girls in colonial Lagos as a vehicle for discussing gendered ideologies of childhood and historicizing changes in the ideology of childhood over time. Research on African youth and generational conflict in history has far outpaced the investigation and theorization of children and childhood. But there are good comparative models for investigating how ideologies of childhood reflect and structure theories of social organization and social difference. Looking mainly at British children, sociologists Chris Jenks, Allison James, and Alan Prout have argued that childhood is most productively considered as a social status that is attended with different restrictions and entitlements in different societies.43 As such, childhood offers a window into the workings of social order, social difference, and social inequality. Historian Nara Milanich has studied how inequality is built into the political economic structure of Chilean society, via the lens of a legal and cultural history of natally, economically, or racially marginalized children; her work offers a model of how to think productively about children and social history together.44 Children as embodied beings and their experiences Girling the Subject

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also provide insight into social thought because children often bear the weight of other peoples’ desires and projections in ways that adults do not. In Yoruba cultures, for example, from the moment of naming, a kind of projection or will to act is placed on the infant. A child might be reminded over and over again of his or her name and the expectations that the name signifies. This projection takes place on an individual and a larger societal level where desired fundamental social change is always imagined to lie in the future, the world that children will inhabit. Thus examining children and childhood offers a glimpse into how societies view notions of progress, development, modernity, and futurity at particular points in time. SOURCES AND CHAPTER SUMMARIES

The history of girls and girlhood in Africa is still in its infancy, and the voices of African girls in the archives remain faint. How then can we know about ideas of girlhood? In order to address some of the challenges to researching girls and girlhood in Africa historically, I decided early on to focus my attention on girls in public space, the work they did there, and to analyze adult responses to such girls for what they might reveal about normative ideas of girlhood in an earlier time. From that starting point I was able to gather a variety of oral and archival sources such as city maps, audio recordings, newspaper accounts, biographies, autobiographies, photographs, literary sources, interviews, census and survey data, and a combination of government sources produced by various colonial state offices in the former Western Region of Nigeria. I relied particularly on reports and correspondences concerning the Colony Welfare Office; the records of the Enugu Industrial Home, which was the first state-run juvenile reform institution in Nigeria; juvenile court case records; records of the Lagos Town Council, the Women’s Welfare Council, the Lagos Women’s League, and the Women’s Party, the bulk of which were housed at the National Archives, Ibadan. Important records for this book were also found in the National Archives in Calabar, the Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University, Rhodes Library at Oxford, and the Royal Commonwealth Society Archives at Cambridge. The kinds of archival sources that I used contain a distinct bias toward children and young people who constituted some sort of problem for adults. The sources also contain a distinct male gender bias. This is owing in part to the greater number of institutions that catered only to boys and the more systematic approaches adopted 16

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for reforming delinquent boys and recording the processes of their reformation. Sources on girls are fewer and present a haphazard picture. Yet the silences in the sources regarding girls do tell a story about ideas of girlhood in the colonial period and the relative prioritization of problem girls and problem boys in the juvenile welfare infrastructure of Lagos. The majority of girls never appeared in the official record and probably grew up in complete ignorance of the salvationist projects that are the concern of this book. In order to gain some sense of their realities and the larger context of children’s lives in Lagos, I directed several rounds of oral research with Lagos residents. The first round of oral research for this book was targeted at elderly women traders who had been girl hawkers in Lagos between the 1930s and 1950s. The research goal was to interview women traders about their early lives and careers, as a way of accessing the firsthand experiences and impressions of girl hawkers in Lagos during the first half of the twentieth century. With the generous assistance of statistician Dr. Ore Soluade, I created a survey of market women that asked only for information related to their experiences as young sellers in Lagos. During the spring of 2005 Mr. Wale Makanjuola, who was then a student at the University of Ibadan, preliminarily surveyed elderly women at twelve markets in Lagos. In the fall of 2005 we followed up the preliminary surveys by homing in on the markets that had the largest representation of women in the target age and origin group. The second round of oral research, which actually began before the first had ended and was ongoing for the life of this project, focused on interviewing older natives of Lagos about their childhood and their memories about issues related to problem youths in Lagos from the 1930s through the 1950s. Interviews were conducted from 2003 to 2005 with a small number of individuals ages 57–73. The interviews were held at the homes of my extended relations and friends of the family, mostly in the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area but also in Chicago and Northern California. For the third round of oral research, I designed a multigenerational survey of childhood to be carried out in Lagos. In June and July 2009, surveys and interviews were conducted by three University of Ibadan students, Mr. Peace Nwachukwu, Mr. Shola Abioye, Mr. Rasheed Hassan, and myself with 280 individuals in Lagos. Although less detailed than one-on-one interviews, the surveys were suggestive of broad attitudes and practices that were relevant to children, as well as being useful for tracing the most locally significant transformations in the experience of childhood across time. Girling the Subject

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The book is composed of seven chapters. Chapter 1, “Working Well: Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women in Colonial Lagos, 1900–1920,” opens with a description of the social geography of later nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Lagos and girlhood within the African educated elite class of the city. I create a portrait of the backgrounds of the women who would go on to spearhead the project to modernize working-class girlhood in Lagos. The women had different class backgrounds from the girls, different religious backgrounds, different educational backgrounds, and, in contrast to the girls, they often had diasporic backgrounds as well. All of these factors—religion, language, education, class, and diasporic connections—played into the dynamics between them and the would-be beneficiaries of their activities. As historian Kristin Mann demonstrated in her classic study, Marrying Well, from which I derived the title for this chapter, earlier generations of elite girls were groomed to become suitable housewives for wealthy and powerful men.45 Centering biographical accounts of the childhoods of Charlotte Olajumoke Obasa, a leading figure in elite Lagos women’s circles for the first half of the twentieth century, and the childhood memoir of Kofoworola Ademola, who left a rare first person record of an elite girl’s life in colonial Lagos, the chapter demonstrates that by the early decades of the twentieth century, the literal and symbolic daughters of elite housewives came of age with aspirations to become active in public service. The latter part of chapter 1 examines the entrance of the daughters of the black Victorians into public service through the lens of transformations in their associational lives. By focusing on elite women’s public actions and lives throughout the book, I borrow from the historian Susan Pedersen’s approach to tracing the biography of another daughter of the Victorians, Eleanor Rathbone. In her biography of Rathbone, who was a leading British reformer, Pedersen remarked on the paucity of documents in Rathbone’s archive regarding “the woman behind the public figure.” What, Pedersen asked, could one do with a woman who so emphatically insisted on being known by her works? Taking Pedersen’s suggestion that we follow the archival grain, “take her at her word, and look first to the politics to tell us something of the beliefs that drove her,” I maintain a focus on the actions and politics of Lagos women reformers in order to uncover their aspirations to break away from the norms of elite Christian womanhood that women of their mothers’ generation had embraced.46 18

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Focusing on the Lagos Women’s League, the chapter discusses some early social reform projects of the league in the areas of health provision, education, and work training. It focuses on the league’s work with women and girls and expands on racial, gender, and Yoruba cultural ideologies that made the uplift of African women and girls the responsibility of privileged African women. Elite women’s literal and metaphorical forays into the larger city of Lagos led them to the discovery of so-called women and girls of bad character. The chapter discusses the category of questionable women and girls relative to interclass dynamics and questions of inclusion and exclusion in urban Lagosian society. It closes with a discussion of the practical and ideological barriers that women’s social reform groups faced in trying to impose their ideas of modern womanhood and respectable girlhood onto ordinary Lagosian women and girls. Chapter 2, “Making the Modern Child in the Era of Imperial Liberalism,” switches gears and scale to discuss the rise of humanitarianism in the 1920s and 1930s and its impacts on imperial social policy. The chapter argues that the 1930s witnessed a de-othering of the African child through various empire-wide humanitarian social reform programs, including penal reform. Formerly, African children had been invisible to the colonial state as individual human beings. In colonialist thought African children were enveloped within the unit of the patriarchal African family. The chapter advances the argument that through universalist discourse African children in this period became disaggregated from the family and were inserted into a global class of children. Yet the universal child of the interwar period was gendered male, and institution building for juvenile reform and salvation was focused on boys. The chapter employs a case study of the first colonial juvenile reform institution in Nigeria, the Enugu Boys Industrial School, to uncover changing meanings of the child in this period and ways in which they were gendered similarly to an emerging discourse about the universal worker in Africa. By examining the reform process, we gain some understanding of how young people were constructed as potential threats to colonial order, and how officials imagined the normative citizen-subject, who was to be produced by reform institutions. Chapter 2’s exploration of the Enugu institution shows the negative space that girls occupied in the state’s imagination and it underscores the importance of the fact that Lagos women were the ones who mobilized to draw attention to the circumstances of problem girls in the city. Girling the Subject

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Chapter 3, “Setting Up the Welfare City: Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943,” discusses the emergence of the developmentalist state in Africa in 1940 and its manifestation in the form of Nigeria’s first social welfare office in Lagos. In 1940, Donald Faulkner, an administrator at the Enugu Boys Industrial School, was transferred to Lagos to open the Colony Welfare Office. Reflecting contemporary colonial obsessions with juvenile delinquency, he initially concentrated on reform work with boys. But, as the chapter argues, Lagosian women reformers quickly placed problem girls on his agenda. The chapter examines the meeting of women reformers and colonial social workers, the uses to which women reformers placed the newly available welfare bureaucracy, the rapid unfolding of girls’ labor legislation through the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943, and the initial signs of racial, gender, generational, and class tensions that would strain relations between the two otherwise likeminded groups of welfare activists. Chapter 4, “The Street Hawker, the Street Walker, and the Salvationist Gaze,” examines the category of the girl hawker as a cultural, economic, and historical figure and the narratives that circulated about girl hawkers within welfare-activist circles. The chapter argues that girl hawkers were economic actors, for their households and communities, and they were also generative foci for salvationists who conflated street hawking with street walking. Rather than taking an unwaveringly critical approach to salvationists’ narratives, the chapter takes seriously the notion that girls faced certain threats in the course of hawking and explores the complex relationship between, real, imagined, and unimagined dangers that girl hawkers faced in the course of doing their work. Chapter 5, “Problem Girls, Private Vice, and Public Secrets in Lagos,” continues from the preceding chapter with an examination of the formalized underage prostitution economy and the narratives that circulated about underage prostitution among women reformers, social workers, nationalists, and the public during and shortly after the Second World War. Using primarily investigative reports of underage prostitution cases, the chapter provides an outline of the underage prostitution economy in Lagos that includes the crucial role of patrons and customary practices such as child fostering and proxy marriage. I argue that such narratives heightened the climate of anxiety about the sexual dangers confronting girls in urbanizing Lagos. Yet they did not 20

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displace the central position of girl hawkers and the conventional practices of Yoruba girlhood from salvationist narratives that were produced about working-class girls. Chapter 6, “Delinquents to Breadwinners and Hawkers to Homemakers: Gender, Juvenile Justice, and Reform in the Welfare City,” follows the process that brought most girls into the juvenile justice system. It tracks girls’ experiences from arrest for violations of labor laws, through the girls’ institutions, to eventual release. The chapter also discusses the gender ideology of juvenile reform, contrasts between the practice and ideological underpinnings of girls’ reform and boys’ reform, and correlations between strategies for reforming problem girls and educating ordinary girls during a period of proliferating female gender possibilities. The title of the final chapter, chapter 7, “For Women, Girls, and the Nation? The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism,” borrows from Cheryl Johnson-Odim and the late Nina Mba’s biographical portrait of the Nigerian nationalist feminist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti.47 Following Johnson-Odim and Mba, the chapter addresses tensions between the feminist and nationalist politics of women reformers in a larger context of anticolonial nationalist agitation. These tensions were illuminated through my focus on protests against girls’ labor regulations, and the relationship between these protests and the larger anticolonial politics of cultural nationalism, which flourished in Lagos in the 1940s and 1950s. Through analysis of debates in the Lagos press over girl’s labor regulations, the chapter traces the changing views of women reformers about the benefits of modernizing working-class Lagosian girlhood through the conduit of labor regulation. The conclusion offers a brief recapitulation of the contents, the main arguments, and the most important exclusions of the book. It also points toward the relevance of this study for thinking about African urban history and suggests new lines of inquiry that might be taken up in the future.

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1 w Working Well Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women in Colonial Lagos, 1900–1920

Lago s a t the turn of the twentieth century was a small place. It referred to an island in the Lagos Lagoon spanning approximately three and a half miles from its westernmost point to its easternmost point and approximately one and a half miles from north to south. The northwest corner of Lagos Island, known as Eko by the local Yoruba language speakers, was the part that had been settled the longest. There, around Iga Idunganran, the traditional Oba’s palace, Lagos chiefs had held court since the island was first brought into the political orbit of the kingdom of Dahomey in the sixteenth century. Barely separated from this Lagos were two other islands, Ikoyi and Victoria Island. Not until the 1920s were the swamps that saturated these two territories fully reclaimed, and Ikoyi and Victoria Island settled as residential reserves for European colonial officials. N E I G H B O R S A N D S T R A N G E R S : C U LT U R E , C L A S S , AND THE SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE CITY

By 1900, Lagos Island contained at least five distinct communities of approximately 42,000 inhabitants within its four square miles.1 The five communities were roughly correlated with distinct though porous neighborhoods in the town. In the northwestern part of the island was Isale Eko, the stronghold of the Obas, which housed the traditional chiefs and their followers. South of Isale Eko was Olowogbowo, an area that had served as a landfill for waste from Isale Eko until the midnineteenth century, and before then as an area where slave traders had 22

warehoused their victims while awaiting ships bound for the Americas. From the 1840s to the 1860s, either on the command of the British governor of Lagos Colony or through his own autonomous decision, the Oba granted land in Olowobgowo to Saro immigrants to settle. The Saro were migrants from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Yoruba cities in Western Nigeria such as Abeokuta, Badagry, and Lagos. Their origins lay in Yoruba communities from which they had been seized and sold into Atlantic slavery, often from the ports of Lagos itself. Following the British ban on slave trading in 1807, anti–slave trade squadrons that patrolled the coast of West Africa were able to discover and arrest many slave ships, rescuing their inmates from the horrors of the Middle Passage. The newly liberated recaptives, as they were sometimes called, were settled in the colony of Freetown, a regional center of Protestant missionary activity. In Freetown, many Saros adopted Protestant Christianity, gained Western education, and internalized Western culture, while others adopted Islam. By the 1840s and 1850s as pro–slave trading chiefs in Lagos began losing power to the British and their allies, Saros began to move and settle in the town. Since West Africa was considered an inhospitable environment for Europeans until the end of the nineteenth century, Western-educated Saros from Freetown found ready employment as clerks, officials, and administrators in the emerging British colonial bureaucracy in Lagos, and some became merchants. In Saro Town, as Olowogbowo came to be known, they created a community of affluent families that visibly upheld Victorian notions of morality and respectability. Saro Town was sandwiched between Isale Eko and the western tip of the Marina, the major commercial district in Lagos. Following the British annexation of Lagos, Governor William McCoskry initiated the construction of a sixty-foot-wide harbor-front boulevard that extended along the southern length of Lagos Island. Known as the Marina, this boulevard was later joined with Broad Street, a forty-foot-wide boulevard one hundred yards north that ran parallel for about three-quarters of the same distance. With the completion of Broad Street, both the harbor front and the district bounded by the harbor and Broad Street were commonly referred to as the Marina. From its west to its east end, the Marina housed the customs office, banks, retail department stores, the warehouses of international trading companies, and their individual wharves. Government buildings such as the Public Works Department, the Supreme Court, the Government Press Building, Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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and, before the reclamation of Ikoyi and Victoria Island, the residences of high-level colonial officials were all located in the Marina district. There too were the Wesleyan, Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, and Baptist missions and their schools, the cemetery, and the General Hospital. Roughly in the center of the island was another cultural enclave. The neighborhood of Portuguese Town or Popo Town was originally occupied by Portuguese slave-trading merchants during the height of the slave trade out of Lagos. Following the Malê slave rebellion of the 1830s in Brazil, hundreds of Africans were deported by the Brazilian state to the coast of West Africa.2 Into the 1860s and 1870s as word spread across the Atlantic of Lagos’s status as a free state, growing numbers of enslaved Brazilians who were able to purchase or otherwise secure their emancipation headed to Lagos and other coastal West African cities. Most returnees had adopted Catholicism, although many, as the Malê rebellion demonstrated, were Muslim. Yet others were committed practitioners of Yoruba religions.3 Returnees from Brazil, or Agudas, as they were called in nineteenth-century Lagos, tended to speak Portuguese. As the numbers of Brazilian returnees grew, and the ex-slaves were able to colonize Popo Town, the area was renamed the Brazilian Quarter. By the mid-nineteenth century, the ascendance of British power in the region had transformed Portuguese, a one-time lingua franca for trade in West Africa, into a marginal language. Relative to their fellow repatriates, the Saros, returnees from Brazil were at a linguistic and educational disadvantage in dealing with the British colonial state. Where nineteenth-century Saro returnees had found employment in civil service work and the professions, Brazilian returnees became identified with craftwork, particularly the introduction of a novel architectural vocabulary to Lagos and surrounding Yoruba towns.4 The majority of Lagos residents lived outside Isale Eko, Olowogbowo, the Marina, and the Brazilian Quarter, in neighborhoods such as Epetedo, Lafiaji, and Oke Suna toward the east end of the island, and places such as Faji and Isale Gangan around the center of the island. Amounting to approximately 70 percent of the population, these indigenes tended to have migrated to Lagos from hinterland Yoruba towns such as Abeokuta and Ijebu. They also tended to be adherents of Islam and traditional Yoruba spirituality. Historian Ayodeji Olukoju estimated that the population of Lagos in the first decade of the twentieth century was roughly 49 percent Muslim, 29 percent Christian, and 22 24

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percent “pagan.”5 Thus Lagos at the turn of the twentieth century was a culturally and linguistically Yoruba-dominated city where the vast majority of residents followed Islam but significant minorities followed Christianity or Yoruba religions. Yoruba was the language heard and spoken in the streets, and the norms of Yoruba culture guided social exchange. Within this larger context, there were socially, economically, and politically significant minority communities that combined Yoruba cultural norms with values derived from Western European or Latin American societies. The members of these minority communities were first-generation and second-generation Lagosians who were firmly rooted in Lagos Colony yet still linked in organic ways to other places in the Black Atlantic world. E N V I S I O N I N G A F R I C A I N T H E AT L A N T I C W O R L D A N D T H E AT L A N T I C W O R L D I N L AG O S

The demographic differences among the neighborhoods in Lagos were mirrored by differences in the median wealth of neighborhood residents and the physical infrastructure to be found in each district. In most of Lagos, families lived in small traditionally built houses that featured clay walls and thatched rooftops. Larger families lived in compounds. A simple compound featured several rooms built in a row, and four such rows arranged in a square or quadrangle with the rooms directed inward to face an interior courtyard. Traditionally built compounds tended to have one entrance only from which all guests and people leaving the compound could be seen. The apartments in the compound traditionally had low-lying roofs that were thatched with straw or palm leaves, and they had no windows. This building style was distinctly vulnerable to fire, and in fact there were many fires. The government repeatedly tried to ban building with thatch in the city because of the fire hazard, but they met intractable resistance owing to the prohibitive costs of the suggested replacement, tin. Nevertheless, by the turn of the century in Lagos, the traditional house design had been modified to substitute tin or tile for straw and palm roofs, and to incorporate slatted wooden windows for light and ventilation. The traditional house was cool and dark on the inside. It was mainly a space for storage and for sleep. Important activities of life such as cooking, bathing, socializing, and trading took place outside the traditional home, in the enclosed outdoors of the compound or beyond the compound gates. Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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The homes of wealthier Lagosians who were descendants of immigrants differed from traditionally built compounds in scale and in style. They tended to be significantly larger than the common compound; status was signified by the number of stories in one’s home. Homes in the Brazilian Quarter featured whitewashed interiors and exteriors, ample windows, and ornately decorated exterior surfaces. In their internal layout, they could be quite similar to the traditional compound in the sense that they could feature a number of rooms facing each other, but here under a single closed roof with a hallway or large room occupying the center of the ground floor of the house. Within its walls, as historian Mariano da Cunha argued, the Brazilian town house in Lagos was a reproduction of the traditional Yoruba compound but built under a single roof.6 Saro homes were also multistory whitewashed brick constructions. Some were live-work spaces that featured a storefront on the ground floor and residential space on the upper floors. Nine-foot ceilings, internal staircases, and earth or water closets for the convenience of household members were built into modern upper-class Lagosian homes. From the time of the construction of Iga Idungaran to the present, architecture has reflected increasing and spreading inequality in Lagos. Where the key class contrast was initially between the Oba’s circle and the Oba’s subjects, with wealth in people being the central basis of class differentiation, the introduction of new forms of currency, new and varied forms of value and valuation systems, new material goods, and new architectural vocabularies, inequality became more pronounced and more readily apparent. Within certain neighborhoods, and at the blurry boundaries of others, different architectural styles rubbed against each other, visually symbolizing the cultural diversity and economic disparity among Lagos residents.7 From the publication of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, the status of places such as Lagos Colony in scholarly constructions of the Black Atlantic has been in question. As several critics have already noted, African space is a troubled and troubling space in Gilroy’s seminal text.8 The Black Atlantic scholarship has maintained narrow geographical fixations on Europe, more specifically England, and the United States. It is still unclear how European countries such as France, Portugal, and Spain, for example, fit into conceptualizations of the Black Atlantic world imaginary. The status of Africa is by contrast much more clearly laid out as a genetic 26

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source base, which assigns Africa to an earlier, premodern time. To borrow from Kristin Mann’s reading, Africa frequently figures in Black Atlantic projects as an “object of retrospective rediscovery,” which is passive and past, elsewhere and elsewhen. Drawing attention to the curious temporality of the Black Atlantic idea, wherein Africa exists in a distinct and prior time stream from Europe and the United States, anthropologist Charles Piot argued for a recharacterization of Africa as being itself diasporic and derivative of the Atlantic slave system. Piot argues, in short, that the Atlantic slave trade, which was the formative trauma for the Black Atlantic diaspora, was also formative, or at least fundamentally transformative of Africa as well, such that in significant political, economic, cultural, and intellectual ways, the Africa of the nineteenth century was a whole new world. Piot’s argument intersects with a long-standing debate among black studies scholars in the Americas, which was a debate about the impact of the Middle Passage on Africans who experienced it and their descendants. The question was framed as one of whether the Middle Passage was best understood through the metaphor of exile attended with the gifts of memory and a possibility of return, or through the metaphor of death attended with reincarnation in an entirely new form. The originality of Piot’s contribution to the debate was that he proposed that this question could be asked of Africa as well. Scholars of the history of slavery in Africa, most notably Richard Roberts, Paul Lovejoy, John Thornton, and Walter Hawthorne, have considered the question of social, cultural, and political change in African societies through the prism of transformations in slavery, to argue that the rhythms of the Atlantic slave trade reverberated within Africa as much as they did across the ocean, albeit in different ways.9 Even as the Africanist scholarship complicated the Atlantic World scholarship, some wondered whether it was reproducing the tendency of earlier generations of scholarship to leave Africa behind. Most of the scholarship tends to focus on cities that dot the western rim of the continent from the Bight of Benin to Angola. The question was: Were Atlantic connections and networks being emphasized at the expense of more continental affiliations, and to what end? I would argue that this line of questioning presents a false opposition. African Atlantic cities are simultaneously embedded in African and Atlantic World networks and affiliations just as Sudanic cities are simultaneously embedded in local, regional, and Saharan networks.10 Piot’s argument could be extended Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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with further geographic precision. Not all of Africa would have been equally affected by the Atlantic slave trade, nor would they be equally embedded in the Atlantic world. Differences in the duration of their integration into Atlantic world economies and cultures, differences between places that came into being through the Atlantic slave trade system and places that already existed, places that functioned as economic centers within the Atlantic trade system and places that were in the hinterland, would seem to be salient distinctions to be made when trying to ascertain how Africa really figures into our understanding of the Atlantic world. It is reasonable to assume that coastal West African cities such as Lagos, Luanda, and St. Louis, may have developed a more Atlantic world inflection than their inland neighbors. Within cities as well, one could observe further historically contingent and class-determined variations among city residents in their degrees of participation in Black Atlantic imaginaries. RICH GIRL / POOR GIRL—NEW GIRL / OLD GIRL: CHILDREN’S WORK AND CONSTRUCTIONS OF N O R M AT I V E G I R L H O O D

If her father was well-to-do, and even more so if her mother was too, a Christian girl growing up in Lagos at the turn of the twentieth century would have lived much like her middle-class contemporaries in London. Each morning, the door to her bedroom or the children’s room might have been opened, and she might have been roused from sleep by a caretaker who was responsible for attending to the daily needs of the children in the family. The girl would likely have brushed her teeth with a toothbrush and paste and bathed in an indoor bathroom. She might have put on a dress and leather shoes before descending a flight of stairs to sit for breakfast. In more religious families, our girl might also have gone to the local church for early morning services. She would have been conversant in both Yoruba and English, having been addressed by her parents in both languages since infancy. English-language competency was required for the girl’s mission school that she would have attended. If she was younger than school-going age or if there was no respectable school for girls nearby, she might have received daily lessons at home in reading, math, or music from an older sibling, relative, or tutor who had been hired by her parents for just that purpose. Most days, our girl might have spent the late afternoon and evening hours on the piano or playing with her brothers, sisters, and numerous 28

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real or adopted cousins. They might have played indoors or outside on manicured lawns, or simply in her encircled family compound. Perhaps her parents put on the gramophone and the family listened to records in the evening, or perhaps they had a household storytelling ritual. Perhaps one of her parents told stories, or maybe the gardener, the cook, the driver, or the nanny told traditional folktales to the children. Perhaps some evenings, our girl went for escorted strolls down the Marina or along the beach. She would have had birthday parties to attend and cake to eat every time there was a child’s birthday to celebrate in her family or among the children of her parents’ friends and associates. Each Easter and Christmas when Lagos streets transformed into open festival grounds, she could expect to receive new imported clothes and shoes to celebrate the holiday; she and her friends might travel from house to house showing off their new garments to one another. The world for our young friend was not confined to the walls of her parents’ house or the boundaries of Lagos Island. As the daughter of a wealthy family, she could have expected occasional trips to Europe, the Americas, or to other West African colonies to visit relatives and friends. More frequently, she and members of her family would leave Lagos for visits to the “country” in order to get some fresh air. The country included nearby territories in the hinterland of Lagos Island and the protectorate of Southern Nigeria where one of her parents might own farmland or where they might have originally come from. She might have traveled to the country by motorcar, by truck, by boat, or by horse. Furthermore, she would have had books, modern classics and newer stories, picture books and seemingly infinite texts, to transport her to faraway places of the imagination. Charlotte Olajumoke Obasa, the first of six children in one of the wealthiest families in nineteenth-century Lagos, was born a rich girl.11 She was born Charlotte Olajumoke Blaize in Lagos in 1874. Her father, Richard Beale Blaize, and her mother, Emily Cole, were both firstgeneration Lagosians of Sierra Leonean or Saro heritage. Charlotte’s father was a “merchant prince” who had grown rich through the palm oil trade and the real estate business. He owned motorcars at a time when rickshaws and bicycles were the main means of transportation in Lagos. Blaize was a newspaper publisher, a leader in the Royal African Society, and generally a man of influence in Lagos’s business and political circles. Charlotte Blaize attended St. Paul’s School, Breadfruit, and then the Anglican Girls Seminary. Following secondary school in Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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Nigeria, she traveled with a chaperone to Britain and other parts of Europe to “round off her education.”12 She returned to Lagos upon the death of her mother in 1895. Six years later, she married Dr. Orisadipe Obasa, a government surgeon. The Blaizes were such a prominent family that at Charlotte’s 1901 wedding to Dr. Obasa, even the governor of the colony was in attendance. In the same year, she began her career as a voluntary social worker by coordinating the Lagos Ladies League, an organization formed to assist government officials with educating the public about the causes of infant mortality in Lagos.13 Girls like Charlotte numbered among their friends and relatives, doctors, lawyers, capitalists, and politicians in Lagos, throughout West Africa, in Europe and in the United States. The late-nineteenth-century world that Charlotte grew up in was a cosmopolitan universe where wealth, pedigree, and status interacted in complex ways with racial prejudice. Charlotte Obasa’s niece, Kofoworola Moore, leaves us a rare record of the early twentieth-century world viewed from the perspective of an elite West African girl. An autobiographical essay written when she was a twenty-one-year-old student at Oxford University presents a firsthand perspective on elite girlhood in the first decades of twentiethcentury Lagos.14 Moore’s essay, titled “The Story of Kofoworola Aina Moore, of the Yoruba tribe, Nigeria,” was written at the prompting of the anthropologist Margery Perham, who was a friend of her parents.15 At the time, Perham sought to combat what she saw as a “lack of mutual individual understanding” between the English general public and colonial subjects by presenting English readers with profiles of African individuals.16 Perham’s project was directed more at the English public, whose stereotyping practices had greater consequences for colonial subjects, than the other way around. The finished volume was composed of six biographies of Africans written by European anthropologists and missionaries, and four autobiographies written by Africans about themselves. Kofoworola Moore’s contribution was one of the self-authored pieces. By the time she wrote her autobiographical essay, Kofo Moore had spent the first half of her young life in Lagos and the second half in England. Her essay hints at a peculiar form of biculturalism that was produced in elite colonial children through their early life migrations between home countries and imperial capitals.17 Kofo Moore’s writings on pan-Africanism, cosmopolitanism, race, gender, and color difference reflect a critical insider voice of a young person who felt that she 30

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was at once a Yoruba girl and a British person. It also displays an acute sensitivity to the complications of being a junior racialized member of a hierarchical imperial community. Kofo Moore, who became Kofo Ademola after marrying, was born in Lagos on May 21, 1913. Her parents, Eric Moore and Arabella Vaughn, were of diasporic heritage. Kofo Moore’s paternal kin hailed from the United States and her maternal relatives from Sierra Leone. Her grandfathers on both sides were British-trained ministers, and both of her parents received what was considered advanced Western education for their sex respectively and for their time. The Moore family shuttled between their large house in “a very central part of town” and Kofo’s mother’s farm, which was situated outside of Lagos. Due to the small size of her family—Kofo had two sisters—relative to their wealth and the size of their home, the Moores usually had several young relatives living with them at any given time. In the large household of school-aged cousins and siblings, the younger children like Kofo received early exposure to the English alphabet, a bit of spelling, English songs, and so on. In short, children like Kofo were socialized early on toward schoolgoing. Kofo’s formal education began in 1916 at the same Church Missionary Society (CMS)/Anglican Girls School that her mother and aunts had attended. When she reached ten years of age, she was taken to England for health reasons and for secondary school at Portway College.18 From there she went on to St. Hugh’s College at Oxford University where she wrote down her reflections on her childhood in Lagos. Young Kofoworola and her siblings were, as she put it, “brought up against the background of essentially Western ideas.”19 In Lagos they were oriented toward “Western culture” and not, as far as she could observe, toward what she termed “the background of untouched tribal life.”20 Western cultural orientation was a deliberate practice in the Moore household. Although her parents did not “set themselves to be blatantly Westernized,” they did raise their children to be familiar with quotidian aspects of middle-class English culture. Kofo recalled English language use as a crucial conduit for and index of Western cultural orientation in the household. “We learnt . . . to converse in English with our parents: their method was to make us speak English the whole day every Sunday.”21 As Kofo recalled, any child who violated the English-only Sundays rule was penalized. “I look back with resentment,” she wrote, “to that particular Sunday when in rebellion against Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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this rule, and insisting on asking for my favorite pudding in Yoruba, I had to go without it.”22 One can only speculate about why the Moore household maintained an English-only Sunday rule and what the connection between English and Sundays meant to the Moore family elders. Clearly, the day of the English language was also the day of the Christian God, an overlay that would have had some significance in a family whose patriarchs on both sides were trained Christian ministers. Although Yoruba-language use appears to have come more naturally to early twentieth-century Lagos children, families considered it important for young people to learn English; in well-to-do families like Kofo’s, English-language proficiency was considered important enough to merit additional home-based language study time that went beyond what children were learning in their schools. English was the language of government, Western education, international commerce, and the Christian churches. It was in many ways a preserve of elite and colonial society; if one wanted to participate in British-dominated society it was essential to have command of the English language. An important contribution of Kofo Ademola’s biography is that it provides a means of addressing the question of the status of women in scholarly constructions of the Black Atlantic and its intersections with class. From foundational texts like Gilroy’s Black Atlantic to the latest scholarship, accumulated silences on the diasporic practices of black women and on questions of gender have threatened to turn the subfield of Black Atlantic studies into a set of meditations on Black masculinity in an imperial world. Feminist scholars working on women in different parts of the Atlantic world have critically articulated this problem as one of erasure and as one of methodology. In a discussion of diasporic hegemonies, Tina Campt and Deborah Thomas note that the scholarship has developed typical vehicles for forging and performing diaspora that, in studies of the colonial world, tend to exclude women as agents in processes of diasporic formation. The privileging of ideas of migration, dispersal, and travel as defining elements of the diaspora, Campt and Thomas argue, tends also to “privilege the mobility of masculine subjects as the primary agents of diasporic formation, and perpetuate a more general masculinism in the conceptualization of diasporic community.”23 Yet even working within the hegemonic modalities of Black Atlantic studies, one can readily locate black women actors. As historians Judith Byfield, LaRay Denzer, and Anthea Morrison argue in the introduction to their edited volume, Gendering the African Diaspora, 32

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“Earlier generations of writing on the African Diaspora obfuscated women’s engagement in the heavy work of traveling, building networks, and imagining the diaspora.”24 Adopting a biographical approach, Byfield, Denzer, and Morrison respond to generations of obfuscation of black women agents in the making of the Black Atlantic by populating the Atlantic world with agentive black female presences. The autobiographical writings of young Kofoworola Ademola similarly illuminate the unselfconscious integration of West African coastal cities and agentive women and girls into the making and practice of Atlantic African diasporas beyond the era of the slave trade. Importantly, it also draws attention to the upper-class composition of the community of Black Atlantic women travelers. Where men could traverse the Atlantic in a range of capacities, as sailors, soldiers, cooks, or deckhands in the maritime economy, as well as in the capacity of merchants, writers, artists, and other positions that implied a certain privilege, because of gendered ideas of labor in early twentieth-century shipping industries, transatlantic women travelers were most likely to have been paying travelers and women of some means. Not every Lagos girl was a Charlotte Blaize or a Kofo Ademola. If her father was working-class, her mother likely was too. A working-class girl growing up in Lagos at the turn of the twentieth century would have led a very different life from the ones outlined above. She might have woken up each morning in a thatched-roof, one-room or tworoom home that she shared with members of her immediate family, her extended family, or other related or adopted kin. She would have been more likely to clean her teeth with a chewing stick than a toothbrush and to bathe and use the toilet in outdoor facilities. Chances were that if she did receive Western-style schooling, she would have been instructed in one of the many unregulated independent schools that were opened by educational entrepreneurs to feed local demand. So many girls lived in this way that it was unremarkable, and there are no firsthand accounts of working-class girlhood from that time. In order to address this problem, I adopted oral research methods in the hope that more generalized experiences and ideas of childhood could be accessed through Lagosians’ memories even though they were not in conventional archives. The most temporally proximate records of girls’ lives in early twentieth-century Lagos were generated in the course of researching this book; they are relevant to the childhoods of individuals who had been born during the 1920s. In the course of Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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conducting my 2008 multigenerational survey of childhood in twentieth-century Lagos, my research assistants (three final-year students from the University of Ibadan history department) were able to interview twelve individuals, six women and six men, between the ages of eighty and eighty-five. Although we met all of them in Lagos, only five identified Lagos as their place of origin. But by age ten, the age that we asked them to focus on, they were all residents of Lagos. All twelve individuals identified themselves as Yoruba. The seven immigrants to the city had moved to Lagos from other parts of western Nigeria, such as Oyo State, Abeokuta, and the Delta region. Five of the respondents were born into families that followed traditional religions; four were born into Muslim families; and three characterized themselves as having been born into Christian families. Respondents came from fairly sizable families and grew up in fairly sizable compounds. They were asked how many siblings they had via their mothers and how many they had total. The smallest number for either response was five; the largest number of maternal siblings was thirteen and the largest number of paternal siblings was twenty-four. Respondents reported living in households of nine to twenty-five individuals when they were aged ten, with one respondent stating that she was unsure of how many people lived in her household at that time. All of the respondents characterized their childhood communities as having had agricultural economies. Cloth weavers and traders also featured prominently in the recollections of seven respondents. Five reported mixed economies in their childhood communities, with farmers, craftworkers, traders, office workers, civil servants, and professionals being present. All the respondents reported having domestic work responsibilities such as “fetching water,” “washing plates,” “sweeping,” “washing clothes,” “cooking,” “feeding animals,” and running errands. They were not asked about the frequency with which they had to perform these tasks, but these were tasks that could be expected of tenyear-old boys and girls in the 1930s. Tasks did not appear to have been gendered in any significant way; given the gerontocratic basis of Yoruba culture, children were more likely to have been assigned such domestic tasks on the basis of their age, size, and status in the household rather than on their sex. Only four individuals reported performing any paid work when they were about ten years old. One boy’s job was to “gather materials for house builders.” Three girls were paid to “help parents on farm 34

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labor,” for “weaving,” which may have meant fabric or mat weaving, and for “selling.” In the examples provided, compensation for paid work was calculated and exchanged between the employer and one of the child’s senior relatives, an older brother, mother, father, or uncle. These older relatives would then either give the child “a token” of the earnings for spending money, purchase something for them out of the earnings, or dispose of all of it. The point is, by no means did children in the 1930s keep control of their earnings. As always, children in the 1930s were attuned to differences among themselves. We asked our respondents to discuss children that they may or may not have personally identified with, such as spoiled, wealthy, poor, or poorly treated children. When asked, our respondents described spoiled children as those who “will not do any house chores or support the family business,” “the children who did not know how to do any housework because they were either the only child or just lazy.” They also said, “Their parents did everything for them. Even simple home chores.” Children who had no siblings and children who appeared to be free of any requirement to do housework were viewed as spoiled. In other words children who, to all appearances, seemed to be free of work responsibilities including housework, were considered by their peers to be remarkable, wondrous, and spoiled. The rich child, who was sometimes conflated with the spoiled child in respondents’ minds, was one who lived in “block and zinc houses at that time,” “whose parents had farm hands,” or whose fathers owned bicycles. “You would know,” one respondent offered, “by the way they dress and the way they spend money.” The children of wealthy families were identifiable by their “good clothes,” “expensive clothes,” or “beautiful and expensive clothes,” and their conspicuous enjoyment of leisure time. Contrasting with the spoiled child was the poorly treated child. Like the spoiled child, the poorly treated child had his or her own typical features. Respondents characterized poorly treated children as those who were frequently beaten, who generally wore torn or otherwise shabby clothes, and those who were overworked. Without prompting, respondents specifically named absent birth mothers as a feature of the poorly treated child. Poorly treated children were those who “did not feed well and were beaten almost every day by their stepmother” or those who were “made to work till late night and yet still wake up earlier than necessary because they were not with their parents.” Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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Only four reported attending school when they were about ten years old. Whether this meant that the others had previously attended school and stopped or that they never attended any kind of school at all is unclear. It is also unclear whether or not those that did report having some schooling were distinguishing between Western-style schools and other kinds of schools such as Quranic schools, and how this might have influenced their responses. As the preceding biographies, autobiographies, and oral recollections show, a crucial difference between working-class girls and their wealthier counterparts in early twentieth-century Lagos had to do with the centrality of work or Western-style study to their respective lives. A working-class girl was far more likely than a wealthy girl to have borne the responsibility of household chores such as sweeping the floor inside her home, the ground outside, or for bathing and generally tending to any younger siblings she might have had. She was also far more likely to have had the responsibility of collecting water for her own personal use and for her household’s use. More likely than not, once her household chores had been completed, she would have been expected to assist with housework, child-minding duties, craftwork, if her mother was an artisan, and certainly with trading, if her mother engaged in trade. The trader’s daughter would trade with her mother in a market, in front of their home, or throughout the city streets until evening when it was time to have the evening meal, visit friends, tell stories, and finally go to sleep. If her mother attended a night market, things would, of course, have been different. But just as the central occupation of a wealthy girl’s daily life would have been some form of schooling, the central occupation of most working-class girls’ lives would have been trading and related activities. I provide these outlines of schoolgirls and young traders, elite girls and working-class girls for two reasons. First, because without a basic appreciation of the centrality of class as the premier axis of social difference in colonial Lagos, it is impossible to make sense of the city’s history of struggles over what constituted an ideal girlhood. Second, understanding the centrality of class as the premier axis of social difference in colonial Lagos is necessary for making sense of the perspectives of the elite Lagosian women who played central roles in shaping struggles over girlhood. Girls were never women, but all women had once been girls. As they matured, the imprint of their girlhoods determined how women would view and try to shape the lives of the girls who came after them. 36

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Turn-of-the-century Lagos was an intimate place. And yet elite girls and working-class girls growing up in that island town on the Atlantic might as well have lived worlds apart from one another. On her way to or from school, a wealthy girl may have paused to buy something from her poorer counterpart. These brief transactions may have marked the limits of contact between elite and working-class girls in Lagos. For a long time, there was no real cause for anyone to trouble this state of affairs and bridge their two worlds. But things began to change around the turn of the century. Both crossing social, cultural, religious, geographic, and economic divides, the daughters of the Lagosian elite met the daughters of the Lagosian working class in dramatic fashion around the first infant mortality campaign in 1901. In that early encounter, class played a salient role, as elite Lagosian women, authorized by their intimacy with state power, ventured into the homes of working-class women as saviors and patrons. FROM “EDUCATED LADIES” TO PUBLIC MOTHERS: THE FIRST INFANT MORTALITY CAMPAIGN AND THE RISE AND FALL OF THE LAGOS LADIES LEAGUE, 1901–1908

At the turn of the twentieth century in Lagos Colony, West Africa, babies were dying at alarming rates. Sir William Macgregor, a medical doctor and the newly appointed governor of the colony, calculated that between 1892 and 1900, more than 40 percent of children born in the town died before their first birthday. The death toll for 1899 struck him as average. In that year, 864 infant deaths were recorded. Gauging by the Lagos experience, one could say that the coast of West Africa at the turn of the century may have been more the burial place of black babies than it was the much-touted “white man’s grave.”25 Addressing a class of medical students at Glasgow University, Macgregor attributed the high infant mortality rate to three causes, two direct and medical, one indirect and social. The two direct causes of infant deaths were malaria and dysentery. The indirect cause was the reluctance of Lagos residents to adopt governmentmediated strategies for dealing with the illnesses. Lagos, which he called “a notorious haunt of malarial fever,”26 was a lagoon-enclosed and swamp-dotted island whose highest peaks rose scarcely twenty feet above sea level. Already a naturally hospitable climate for the anopheles mosquito, the appearance of Europeans and their waterintensive personal-hygiene habits, seemed, to the governor’s mind, to Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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have only aggravated matters. “It is a fact,” Macgregor observed, “that mosquitoes are much more numerous about European quarters than about native dwellings. . . . The reason of the difference seems to consist in the tanks and other receptacles for water, and in the greater frequency of pools about the quarters of Europeans.”27 If the humid coastal air seemed for the greater part of the year to be filled with malaria transmitting menaces, most of the ground underfoot was, by some people’s descriptions, equally filled with human waste. As in New York, London, and other great cities of the time, human waste disposal systems in turn-of-the-century Lagos were in a word, basic.28 Casual evacuation of liquids and solids was a common sight. So were cesspits. Some wealthier residents of the town utilized earth closets for their evacuation needs, and others who owned rooftop water tanks used indoor water closets. Ordinary Lagos residents dumped their household waste in empty clearings, and the contents of government-built public latrines were dumped into the swamps, the cesspits, and even into the lagoon.29 As awful as parts of the city must have smelled on the wrong afternoon, the real public health danger of the waste-management system was linked to the fact that Lagos residents relied on wells for the bulk of their drinking water. By 1900 the township contained at least 200 public and private wells of varying depths, ranging from 12 to 18 feet. The government chemist tested 201 of these wells. Varying accounts report that either none or at most only one of the wells in Lagos were found to be free of dysentery-causing organisms. Between the anopheles mosquito and the dysenteric wells, it was no wonder that infant mortality had reached such alarming proportions.30 Governor Macgregor initiated a number of measures to fight the spread of malaria and dysentery among the town’s 40,000-plus European and African inhabitants. The most spectacular strategies were his swamp-drainage projects and the development of a “Midnight Express” on the tramway system, which was dedicated to daily collecting the contents of “thunderboxes” from European and Saro households and depositing them well away from the town in the mangrove swamps beyond Five Cowrie Creek.31 Less spectacular public-health measures included encouraging the construction of covered brick wells, the use of gauze mosquito netting indoors, and making quinine available to European and African residents of Lagos for use as a prophylactic. Although African elites and colonial officials readily made use of the medicine, Macgregor found it difficult to extend the treatment to the 38

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ordinary classes, within which infant deaths were concentrated. Dramatic reductions in mortality rates among European colonial officials at the beginning of the century were not matched by similar patterns among the African infant population. The infant mortality problem persisted. For various unknowable reasons that may include unfamiliarity with quinine, distrust of white medicine, the inconvenience for some of traveling to the sole dispensary that served African patients in the township, or perhaps due to the expense of going to collect the quinine, the masses and their babies seemed to be unreachable. A solution was devised in the formation of an organization of women home visitors that came to be known as the Lagos Ladies League. The members of the league, who were all characterized as “educated ladies of Lagos,” were asked to implement an infant mortality reduction campaign that would involve their visiting private homes and “administering quinine to native children and others suffering from or specially exposed to fever.”32 Macgregor hoped that because they were fellow Africans, the league members would be able to “induce many natives to take quinine that otherwise would simply refuse it.”33 During its first year of existence, 1901, a newlywed twenty-sevenyear-old Charlotte Olajumoke Obasa and one Mrs. M. B. Johnson (probably Molara Johnson) jointly headed the Lagos Ladies League. The emergence of the Lagos Ladies League is often read as part of the history of elite women’s social clubs, which is to say nonpolitical organizations. It is also read through the lens of histories of the collaborating elite as one of the forums within which “collaborating elites” did their collaborating.34 This is a limited reading that de-emphasizes the activities of the organization’s members and the meaning of the organization’s work for its members and interclass relations in Lagos. The league was a dedicated service organization. The Lagos Ladies League was one of the first voluntary associations to be enlisted in the service of colonial state policy. Colonial hegemony on a shoestring required administrators to incorporate, and even rely on, indigenous leaders and experts in order to enact colonial governance projects.35 The Lagos Ladies League was an early example of a quasi-governmental organization, which was used to implement colonial public policy. Through the history of the founding of the Lagos Ladies League, we see an instance of cooperation between elite African women and the colonial state around the governance of ordinary Africans. Finally, we also see access to Western-style education being advanced as a criterion Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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for legitimating African women’s authority to play a substantive role in urban governance. Although they were married women, and no longer girls, the league members had been girls at some point, and as girls, they had been raised in churches and schoolrooms. Their earlier fulfillment of the schoolgirl ideal of girlhood marked them off from the majority of Lagos girls and, in Macgregor’s view, qualified them to be asked to play the very public and controversial role of home visitors. Their roles as home visitors, working publicly in the service of the local colonial government, marked them off as a new generation of women in the Christian elite community of Lagos. Historian Kristin Mann’s study of the political economy of marriage in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century elite Lagosian society demonstrated that one of the preoccupations of turn of the century elite families was with marrying their daughters well.36 In nineteenth-century Lagos, following British annexation in 1861, Western cultural allegiance or at least cultural fluency, which could be demonstrated in speech, dress, taste, and marital styles, were assets that African men used in their efforts to build wealth and gain status in the colony. Entering Christian marriages with Western-educated women signaled Western cultural allegiance, making Western-educated brides a bankable asset. The turn of the twentieth century in Lagos Colony saw the emergence of a generation of African women who were largely Christian and Western-educated, who came from upper-class families and had diasporic backgrounds, who had been raised to idealize Western cultural institutions such as monogamous marriage and to dedicate their early lives to building their value in the educated elite marriage market; yet they found themselves questioning this fundamental tenet of their African-educated elite community. Around 1900, as Mann notes, “domestic problems,” particularly those concerning the control of marital finances, “provoked elite women to begin reconsidering aspects of Christian marriage.”37 The key domestic problem that educated elite women encountered in their ordinance marriages was the problem of becoming financially dependent on their husbands. Increasing numbers of educated elite women found that the monogamous marital ideal they had been raised with, in which a woman’s sole occupation was to be a wife and homemaker, had the undesirable effect of making wives fully dependent on their husbands for money—a dangerous situation for women when their marriages fell apart. By contrast with elite women the vast majority of Lagos women were firmly allied with 40

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Yoruba cultural norms regarding marriage and gender roles, and as a consequence they tended to earn independent incomes through their craftwork or trading. The central question in the debates about marriage at the turn of the century was whether educated elite women should devote themselves to being homemakers as missionaries and the colonial marriage ordinance seemed to require or whether it was legitimate and desirable for them to dedicate time to earning personal incomes outside of their homes. The question centered on marriage, wifehood, femininity, and respectability. Thus it also involved elite masculinity. Was the provider ideal viable or desirable for African men, and if not, what did this say about their civilizational status? Put differently, the question was, Should educated elite women conduct their marital lives more in the style of unlettered Yoruba women? What appeared to be a new kind of woman, a woman who worked outside the home, was only new in the elite Christian community. In traditional Yoruba communities in Lagos and the broader region, women of various faiths worked outside of their homes as farmers, traders, and artisans, and they grounded their respectability as women in their roles as providers. In an inversion of Victorian ideals, motherhood and the responsibility it implied to care for one’s children, even financially, was prioritized over wifehood as a feminine gender ideal.38 Playing the literal mother in intimate relationships with one’s own children was a marker of female maturity, while playing the figurative public mother, an older woman who was respected for her successes as a social advocate, was a recognized marker of female authority.39 The Yoruba public mother ideal found her counterpart in the figure of the Euro-American social reformer. As Seth Koven and Sonya Michel demonstrated in their survey of women social reformers in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Western Europe and the United States, maternalism was a key organizing principle that European and American women used in their political work. In emerging welfare states, maternalist ideologies “exalted women’s capacity to mother and extended to society as a whole the values of care, nurturance, and morality.”40 Having grown up in Lagos and attended schools in England, educated Christian women were more or less equally versed in Yoruba and British gender norms, values, and ideologies. Although they had had been trained to identify more strongly with the latter and to seek futures as Victorian homemakers in patriarchal households within a European-dominated colonial world, they could readily imagine, and Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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even see all around them, multiple and contrasting gender possibilities. In what spheres of activity, then, could the Yoruba public mother intersect with the virtuous Christian wife? What were the requirements of being a public yet respectable woman? The question of the role of elite wives vis-à-vis their husbands, whether as assets, partners, or dependents, was echoed in another question about the role of elite women vis-à-vis the larger society beyond their closed elite communities. Although some critics asked what financially dependent elite wives were doing for their husbands, others asked what elite women were doing for the less fortunate residents of the town. Ideas for the transformation of elite women’s positioning relative to workingclass Lagosians were hashed out in elite women’s social clubs. Lagos was a city of social clubs, most of which were homosocial. Men and women belonged to occupational clubs, religious clubs, recreational clubs, and neighborhood clubs, among others. Educated elite women formed community in clubs with names like the British West African Educated Girls’ Club, which often suggested exclusive membership and narrow interests. The emergence of the Lagos Ladies League marked the beginnings of a new vision of what elite women’s clubs could represent and accomplish and what elite women’s roles could be in the larger society. Without sacrificing their long-standing function as spaces where women who shared similar backgrounds could commune and reaffirm their membership in the educated elite class, ladies’ social clubs became viable spaces for imagining social transformation. To be sure, this implied the transformation of the broader urban society more than educated elite subgroups, and in Lagos Colony more than the larger protectorate of Southern Nigeria, but it was transformation nonetheless. It was against the backdrop of elite debates about transforming the position of elite women in their families and in the larger society that the Lagos Ladies League was formed to carry out the citywide infant mortality reduction campaign. The infant mortality reduction campaign took women out of their homes and out of the narrow circles of elite society. It brought them into contact with ordinary people, while preserving their feminine respectability as public mothers in both Yoruba and Christian moral orders. The most detailed account of how the league conducted its work comes from G. O. Olusanya’s biography of Charlotte Obasa. Olusanya’s account is pulled from documentary and oral sources, including interviews with Obasa’s contemporaries. According to Olusanya, the 42

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founding league members divided Lagos into two districts. “Each district was placed under the control of one member who was charged with the responsibility of visiting the district, dispensing medicine, advising on child care and offering help wherever and whenever it was needed.”41 Although the Macgregor administration supplied the league with leaflets on the proper use of quinine, eyewitnesses reported that the league assumed the major costs associated with the infant mortality campaign. For one thing, the league members freely supplied their labor, their own transportation, quinine, and food, in cases where simple malnutrition proved to be a sick infant’s fundamental health problem. The league organized dances and balls in order to raise funds for their work, and its members also appealed to their fellow wealthy Lagosians for charitable donations. Given its membership, the league can be understood as both an elite organization and also as a distinctly Lagosian organization of mainly Saro descendants. As an organization of educated elite women formed to reach out to commoners by literally reaching into their homes, the league’s work on the infant mortality campaign readily illuminates an aspect of interclass dynamics in early twentieth-century Lagos. But it also illuminates underexamined intercultural dynamics among Lagosians. Although Obasa could well afford carriage rides, she was said to have conducted her visitations on horseback because there were many parts of the town where the streets were neither wide nor firm enough to permit horse-drawn carriages. The carriage ride story may have simply been about unnavigable streets. But a carriage would also have been an ostentatious announcement of wealth and difference. Traveling on horseback may have been a deliberate choice designed to decrease apparent social distance between Obasa and the would-be beneficiaries of her assistance. Yet even on horseback, she would still have towered above her “clients” in a figurative and literal way. Further, if Obasa had appeared in the kind of Victorian-style gown that was reportedly current fashion among turn-of-the-century elite Lagos women, she would have further underlined the class difference between herself and her involuntary clients.42 The league was a new kind of organization made of new Lagosians, who may or may not have been culturally identified with the indigenous Yoruba majority. It was an organization of people whose origins came in some way out of the African diaspora and whose domestic, marital, sartorial, and even linguistic habits bespoke their diasporic backgrounds. Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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In the infant mortality campaign, wealthy diaspora-descendant women were charged with saving the natives and their babies from the malaria vector and from their own suspicions about or ignorance of colonial medicine. The area of governance that the elite women of the Lagos Ladies League were active in is significant. At the turn of the twentieth century, the activism of elite men in Lagos was focused on expanding black political rights in the colony and pushing back against their racially motivated marginalization from the colonial bureaucracy. Elite women’s public activism, by contrast, was concentrated in the realm of social welfare. Where elite men expressed their public engagement through issues like political rights and taxation, elite women were asked to deal with issues of the weak—with the visitation of sickly infants and the urban poor. Thus even as elite women at the beginning of the twentieth century were forging different paths from those their mothers had chosen by seeking status in the public realm, their public engagement took very gendered forms that allowed or required them to continue displaying conventional traits of colonial femininity and public motherhood. The Lagos Ladies League went into decline in 1908. Scholars have linked the league’s decline to the ascendance of a new governor in Lagos. Unlike his predecessor, the new governor, Sir Walter Egerton, was uninterested in the physical and material welfare of colonial subjects. But while the lack of governmental support surely played some role in the decline of the Ladies League, Egerton had been in office fully four years before the league was phased out. What probably played a larger and more direct role in the demise of the league was the climate of racial antagonism that Governor Egerton built up in Lagos. Egerton was a notorious racist who longed for escape from the natives of Lagos. He blamed them for all of the city’s problems, particularly any urban problems related to health or sanitation. Egerton instituted aggressive surveillance policies, including employing a virtual army of health inspectors to ransack the homes of working-class Africans for evidence of unsanitary conditions; he promoted house demolitions, slum clearances, and other aggressive measures against working-class Lagosians. Under Egerton’s regime, Lagos became polarized by a debate over a proposed water tax. In 1907, a proposal for a new pipe-borne water system in Lagos had been presented before the Legislative Council. Unlike an earlier public works project to install electric lights in the 44

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town, the pipe-borne water project was to be financed through the direct taxation of Lagos residents. Most Lagosians, including the traditional chiefs, opposed the water project because of the taxation requirement. They argued that Lagosians already had access to water that was freely available from wells and from the lagoon. They further argued that homes and buildings with built-in water pipe systems, which were chiefly occupied by Europeans and wealthy Africans, would enjoy disproportionate benefits from the proposed plan while ordinary Lagosians who were made to pay the tax but did not have water-pipe systems in their homes, would pay unfair costs. Various segments of Lagos society, the traditional chiefs, the water carriers, the nationalist press, and others opposed the piped water and taxation plan for different reasons. But some early critics of the plan among the educated elite wavered in their position. Orisadipe Obasa, for instance, was one of the co-founders of the Lagos People’s Union, a coalition of traditional and educated elites that joined forces to fight the piped-water tax project. In 1915, the Lagos People’s Union sent a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies requesting a stay of activity on the piped-water project pending the end of the First World War. Their request was met with accusations of sedition and disloyalty to the British Crown. In response, educated elites in the Lagos People’s Union shifted strategies to demand a reduced tax rate instead of a complete moratorium on the project. The LPU’s compromise introduced a split between the traditional elites and educated elite members of the union and also signaled to ordinary Lagosians that some members of the elite could not be relied on to stand in solidarity with them against the piped-water rate project.43 Along with issues of taxation and representation, the water-rate project brought up issues of personal hygiene and public health, racial solidarity and class difference that the women home visitors in the Lagos Ladies League were implicated in. According to Olusanya’s sources, “What finally led to the League’s inactivity was the hostility of a greater portion of Lagos women. . . . They regarded its members as ‘detectives’; that they were government spies who came to inspect the houses in order to report the unhygienic conditions to the government.”44 Such accusations of being detectives or agents of the state have to be read against the backdrop of a deeply polarized Lagos in which the Lagos Ladies League members could only be seen as being either advocates of the working people or agents of the Egerton regime. Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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The impact of the water-rate protest on casting African elites as politically, ideologically, and culturally suspect challenges presumptions of a static hierarchical relationship between urban elites and working classes based on class difference. In their refusal to be surveyed and inspected by the league members and the colonial state, common Lagosians asserted that assistance, uplift, or development could not be unilaterally imposed; it had to be received as well. The ostensible beneficiaries of governmental or paragovernmental largesse exercised the power to extend or withhold recognition of the beneficence of wouldbe patrons. Patronage was a negotiated relationship, at least between generational equals. As historian Liora Bigon showed, urban planning projects were constantly thwarted, particularly when the notion of the public that they reflected consisted primarily of Europeans.45 The state had to continually rely on coercion to implement its sanitation projects as it did not enjoy unchallenged authority with Lagos residents. Neither the white man’s medicine nor his public health measures were respected by the Lagosian working class. In fact, Lagosians who withheld recognition of the colonial state’s authority in their homes continually and successfully challenged the state on a range of its development projects. The consolidation of the role of patron thus relied in large measure on clients complying with a social and moral order that assigned patrons and clients those specific roles.46 DEFINING THEIR OWN AGENDA: THE (RE)EMERGENCE OF THE LAGOS WOMEN’S LEAGUE C. 1924

The Lagos Ladies League went dormant as a social welfare organization from about 1908 until the early 1920s when the association resurfaced under a new name, the Lagos Women’s League. Scholars have speculated that the organization’s name change indicated a desire to broaden the membership base to include ordinary Lagos women.47 Yet it seems that the notion of a radically broadened constituency signified by the name change was perhaps more aspiration than actuality. In 1924, the reconstituted league sent a letter to the new governor, Sir Hugh Clifford, which had been signed by eighteen members “on behalf of the women of Lagos.”48 Of the fifteen readily identifiable signatories, at least ten were members of diaspora descendant families, and the other five most likely were as well.49 The new league, which was headed by C. O. Obasa, just as the original league had been, had 46

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extremely wide-ranging interests. Some of the members’ concerns had to do with the quality of infrastructure and basic services that were available to Africans in Lagos. For example, they were concerned about the inadequacy of drainage in the city. The league argued that the physical environment of Lagos served only to “increase the death toll and retard progress.”50 This was most conspicuously the case in neighborhoods on the western part of the island around Isale Eko, Isalegangan, Oko Awo, Oke Arin, and farther east in places like Lafiaji. These neighborhoods, they claimed, remained under water throughout the rainy season, perpetuating the very conditions that prompted the first infant mortality reduction campaign. Relatedly, they charged that the health-care infrastructure for Africans was completely inadequate. Nurses in the African hospital, they protested, were “untrained and inexperienced.”51 Conditions were so poor in the African hospital that patients who had the misfortune of having to stay there were forced to make private arrangements for food with their relatives and friends. Beyond life-and-death issues, the Lagos Women’s League also raised quality of life issues. They protested the proliferation of rudeness, lewdness, and other vices in the streets of their fair city. “Vulgar and obscene language,” they noted, could be heard throughout the streets of Lagos, while “prostitutes from all other parts of Nigeria” were “making the town their headquarters.”52 All of these forms of indecency, they complained, took place in full view of the police, who appeared to be completely unconcerned about the declining “tone” of the city around them. Yet how could the police show concern for the “tone” of urban life when the state listened only to the melody of tinkling coins? In a comment on the liquor traffic, which was a hotly debated issue at the time, the league joined the chorus of voices that opposed the importation of European manufactured alcohol to West Africa. “Surely England, which has done so much for Africa, will not now for the sake of filthy lucre sell the body and soul of those she holds in trust.”53 The league’s accusation of colonial exploitation went beyond arguments against the liquor traffic. It also came up in their discussion of moral debts owed to what they called “backward races”—those peoples who “still go about without clothes on their bodies,” who had been left in “a half wild state.”54 They analyzed the persistence of backwardness among colonial subjects as a deliberate and key aspect of a governmental strategy of colonial exploitation. “It appears to the Christian women in particular . . . that Government has for some years now adopted the Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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system of leaving the more backward races in Nigeria almost entirely alone in their backwardness, making no effort whatever as in the days of the Good and Great Queen Victoria to civilize them.”55 Perhaps anticipating the arguments of late twentieth-century dependency theorists, the league charged that among the backward races, “it appears that the chief concern of Government after prohibiting human sacrifice and slavery, is to establish civilized systems of collecting revenue . . . to enrich other lands and give the owners nothing stable in return.”56 In this critique, the league asserted a materialist definition of civilization and civilized governance while negatively comparing the current regime’s effectiveness in governing with that of its predecessor. Backwardness was here defined as the condition of existing in the European-dominated world and creating wealth for it, while being restricted from consuming the novel products that such wealth produced. The reference to the days of the Good and Great Queen was, of course, a reference to the nineteenth-century world of Obasa’s girlhood before the discovery of the antimalarial properties of quinine. It was a reference back to a time before the construction of a racist European-run bureaucracy, when Lagos’s African residents exercised the rights of imperial citizens. Bundled in with the league members’ disillusionment with the Clifford regime was a simultaneous idealization of the Victorian era and the years of their childhoods. One of the new league’s most significant concerns, and certainly the most sustained one, was with expanding access to schooling for girls. The traditional view of the education of girls in Lagos saw Western-style schooling as an asset to elite girls in forming good marriages. In an influential essay titled “The Education of Women,” Henry Carr, a prominent member of the Lagos elite and a long-standing administrator in the education department, argued that “unless the girls and young women of native communities in contact with Christianity and civilization were given a suitable education, they would not only fail to be helpmeets for their husbands, but would also come to be out of sympathy with them and prove a real hindrance to the advancement of these communities.”57 Male community leaders such as Carr who spoke on the issue of educating girls and women focused only on a very narrow population of girls, those from “communities in contact with Christianity and civilization,” the girls who might be adequate helpmates to the civilized Christian men of society. The primary function of education for women and girls was, in one view, to supply civilized men with aides to their political, 48

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social, and economic advancement, and to serve the consolidation of the elite community and its reproduction into the future. What was novel and significant about the league’s appeal for girls’ education was that it included all girls, elite and working-class, Christian and otherwise. From the beginning, all African education, not just the education of girls, had been handled by the missionary societies, which over time began to receive subsidies for their service from the colony government. Schooling was an exclusive enterprise. Followers of Islam or traditional religions were required to convert to Christianity in order to be considered for admission to mission schools; some mission schools even barred members of other Christian denominations from gaining admission. To be sure, there were Quranic schools available throughout the city and dozens, if not hundreds, of independent schools that had been opened by entrepreneurial individuals to satisfy popular demand for Western-style education.58 But Quranic schools did not offer training in the forms of knowledge that were required to find work in the colonial economy, and independent schools were judged to offer poor levels of training to their students. For better or worse, the mission schools were considered to offer the highest quality education to students. By the early 1920s, the mission schools that were in existence were few in number and unable to satisfy popular demands for African education. The league demanded nondenominational government schools where religion would not serve as a barrier to access to education and where moral instruction would cease being a responsibility of the state. Against the protests of individuals like Carr who argued that Christian religious training was a vital part of the curriculum for African students and for the making of a cultured public,59 the league retorted, “Ministers of religion, parents and guardians,” they wrote, “will have to be more alive to what is only their duty and impart to their children the religious training which is not given at a Government school.”60 The league certainly wasn’t alone in calling for government to expand educational opportunities in the colony. Yet by advocating for more schooling for ordinary girls who did not come from “native communities in contact with Christianity and civilization,” or from a long-standing tradition of schooling like they did, the league members were introducing new elements to the discussion around African girls’ education. Beyond advocating for universal education for girls and for the separation of church and school, the new league was also demanding that Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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government and its institutions, rather than voluntary or charitable organizations, should play a greater role in attending to the human development and social needs of African subjects. In effect, the women were advocating for government to serve the poor, for institutions to help the poor, and for schools to play a greater role in training girls. The league’s proposal that government bring forth a class of new and first generation school-goers had potentially radical implications for the transformation of mainstream girlhood, African womanhood, and Lagosian society. For the league, the shortage of educational facilities for girls was evidence of the government’s deliberate plan to extract wealth from Lagos while transferring back nothing material and modern in return. Perhaps, the league suggested, the colonial state could take tips on human development from other more advanced countries. “Schools after the style of those established in America for negroes,” they wrote, “would be most beneficial.”61 Their understanding of American schools for blacks was that these were institutions where “both literary and industrial training is given side by side and girls are turned out with very high literary and musical attainments, and are fully qualified in various industrial subjects.”62 Girls who passed through “American schools for negroes” were imagined to “come out to the world fully equipped in every respect and are quite an asset in their respective towns, for alongside with their books they were taught the dignity of labor.”63 When the league spoke of American schools where literary and industrial training was given to black students and where learning the “dignity of labor” was paramount, they were clearly influenced by the Washingtonian approach to mass education and racial uplift. Booker T. Washington’s thoughts on the crucial problems of black people in the United States and how heightened industrial and moral training might help them gain respect from, if not equality with whites, would have been familiar to a newspaper reading audience in Lagos since Washington and his accomplishments were ordinarily reported on and celebrated. By the early 1920s, Washington was, of course, long dead. He had passed away in 1915. But his ideas had been taken up by policy think tanks and charitable organizations working on “Negro problems” around the world. The Phelps Stokes Commission, for example, which in the first quarter of the twentieth century had been heavily involved with shaping education policy for blacks around the world, adopted a Washingtonian approach, which prioritized industrial training and character building by preaching a gospel of the dignity of labor. The 50

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Phelps Stokes Commission had recently sent a delegation to consult with civic leaders in Lagos, and any member of the reading public would have encountered newspaper reports on the delegation’s visit. In closing their petition to the governor the league members said, “The Christian women knowing how much they have been benefited by the knowledge of the religion of Christ and of education and civilization, pray that it may please Government to grant the same advantage to their backward sisters and brothers throughout Nigeria.”64 The league’s shift from administering colonial government projects for the urban working class to advocating for “their backward sisters and brothers” invites comparisons to black clubwomen activists in the United States. Comparisons can be made between women’s organizing efforts in Lagos and women’s organizing among black women in the United States, in the sense that both groups of women conceptualized themselves in opposition to a sexist and racist state culture. The black clubwomen’s movement emerged as a critique of the women’s auxiliary model that had been the context of women’s social activism in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. In the United States, the consolidation of organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women announced the emergence of a new practice of political association wherein black women, not black men or white women who had previously benefited from the labors of black women’s organizing, were at the front. As was the case with Lagos social reformers, black clubwomen tended to be Western-educated, Christian, and well-to-do. A significant percentage were also teachers or school proprietors, education being one of the few fields besides domestic service within which black women could readily find work. Paula Giddings’s characterization of the clubwomen as a class that neither questioned “the inherent superiority of middle-class values . . . or had any romantic notions of the inherent nobility of the poor, uneducated masses” would be an apt description of women reformers in Lagos as well.65 They too were firmly situated within their identities as members of an elite social class, from which they viewed the urban working class through the lens of social problems and solutions. But unlike black American clubwomen, Lagos women’s group members did not understand their destinies to be tied up with the destinies of their less fortunate sisters on the basis of race. Giddings argues that in black clubwomen’s work, racial affiliation was a more significant organizing principle than class membership. For black racewomen, or “women of Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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the race” in the United States, it seemed that “all Black women were perceived in the light of those who had the fewest resources and the least opportunity.”66 For women reformers in Lagos, however, racial affiliation was not central to structuring their relationships with different groups in the society. In their correspondences and petitions one finds a deeply ambivalent framing of their fellow Lagosians that pulled together a disaffiliating discourse about the backward Other with an intimate discourse of kinship about “sisters and brothers throughout Nigeria.”67 Despite their differences, the similarities between black clubwomen in the United States and elite women reformers in Lagos are important to recognize and understand. To all appearances, it would seem that black clubwomen and Lagos women reformers traveled parallel roads that had been laid down by diverse local conditions within a larger colonial world. Yet it is possible that clubwomen and women reformers did not simply travel parallel roads but also directly referenced each other. Women had been traveling back and forth across the Atlantic for generations, forming diasporic communities and maintaining ties of friendship and kinship. In her autobiographical essay, young Kofo Ademola opened with a portrait of her extended family. “My grandparents on both my mother’s and fathers sides were well educated. My great-grandfather was at an English public school before he was likewise ordained for the ministry. The paternal branch of my mother’s line originated from America. We are still in touch with these relations. Two of our cousins have visited Nigeria and my mother and elder sister have been in America in recent years.”68 In that extremely brief description, Africa, Europe, and the Americas were pulled into intimate diasporic relations that were grounded in ties of kinship and religious affiliations. The grandfathers who served as ministers were embedded in filial, spiritual, and professional networks that crossed multidirectionally across the Black Atlantic. In the course of their transatlantic migrations, women reformers and clubwomen from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa may have had opportunity to become acquainted with each other’s racial uplift work. P R O B L E M A T I Z I N G A N D P O L I C I N G G I R L H AW K E R S : S E X U A L D I F F E R E N C E , U R B A N R E S P E C TA B I L I T Y, AND IDEAS OF MODERN CHILDHOOD

The league tied improvement in colonial society to the spread of Westernstyle education, particularly among Lagos girls. Their projection of the 52

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ideal common Lagosian girl as a schoolgirl stood in opposition to a more immediate view of common girls: the idea of the girl as a street hawker who walked about selling petty goods. In early August 1926, Charlotte Olajumoke Obasa, in her capacity as secretary of the Lagos Women’s League, sent a letter to the British Resident of Lagos Colony. Obasa’s letter covered a number of topics, one of which was the control of child hawkers. In the letter, Obasa asked the Resident to curtail the “influx of women and girls of bad character,” and to repatriate those who had already arrived in Lagos back “to their own homes.”69 Obasa further repeated a request the league had made previously that “government . . . prohibit children of both sexes from hawking about the streets until boys have attained the age of 12 and girls 16.”70 These restrictions were, in Obasa’s view, urgently needed because of the “stealing and immoral practice” young hawkers were “daily” exposed to.71 Obasa’s letter survives, but in incomplete form. Thus her letter presents a number of ambiguities. For one, did Obasa mean to suggest that boys and girls were engaging in theft and illicit sexual behavior and had to be, in a sense, quarantined for the greater social good? Or was she arguing that boy and girl hawkers were themselves being robbed and, as she might have put it, morally exploited? Another open question bears on whether Obasa meant to suggest that boys and girls were equally participating in “stealing and immoral practice” or whether she understood each activity to bear distinct gender patterns with girls predominating in one and boys in the other. Whatever Obasa’s precise intentions were, it is clear that by the mid-1920s, ideas of child hawkers were in some way, in the minds of elite women reformers, tainted by association with ideas of immorality. A couple of points bear noting about the letter. First, it does not discuss hawking as a child labor issue. Second, it differentiates between the relationship of hawking to theft and its relationship to sexual misconduct. Even intact, Obasa’s letter would have left a lot of questions unanswered concerning the exact nature of the issue with girl hawkers. Fortunately, Obasa and the Women’s League members were not the only ones paying attention to the problem of child hawkers in Lagos. The testimonies of other observers may help clarify the somewhat vague remarks found in Obasa’s letter. In February 1922 the linguist and ethnographer Sylvia Leith-Ross sent a letter to the International Work section of the British Association for Moral and Social Hygiene responding to some inquiries they had made about moral conditions in Lagos. The association was Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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interested in, among other things, the situation regarding interracial sexual relations in Lagos and street hawking by children. Leith-Ross’s own observations were quite superficial, undoubtedly because her sense of local mores was, as she put it herself, “a little hazy.”72 But an extract from a police report that she appended to her reply provided a much richer if deeply problematic reading of the situation regarding child hawkers in Lagos. The report, which was produced in 1922 by R. C. A. Cavendish, the assistant commissioner for criminal investigations, opened with some general observations on child hawkers and the importance of trading to the social and economic life of Lagos. “The petty traders of Lagos,” he wrote, “represent . . . a considerable proportion of the population of the town.” The traders employed children, boys and girls, to hawk “yams, farina, gari, dried fish and other native foodstuffs, oil, cloth, crockery—in fact every article of common use and general demand” to supply the daily needs of “the labouring and poorer classes of the community.” Cavendish determined that most of the child hawkers he saw in the city were new migrants to Lagos who came from hinterland towns like Badagry, Epe, and Ikorodu, or further beyond from places like Oyo, Abeokuta, or Ijebu Ode. “A certain number of boys are employed in this business and generally speaking they are youths who have come from the country to Lagos for the purpose of education. There would appear to be nothing in this practice that can be reasonably condemned or criticized, except perhaps as regards the entire system of hawking in this town, which will be commented upon later.”73 The opening of Cavendish’s report offers two remarkable observations on the population of child hawkers in early 1920s Lagos. First, child hawkers were characterized as being newcomers to the city proper from hinterland Lagos and further beyond in the provinces of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate. Up-country children who migrated to Lagos, they worked as hawkers for the sake of earning their keep in Lagos households and, more important, in order to earn fees for Lagos schools. The child hawker was thus actually a scholar in disguise. But then Cavendish was careful to specify that the hawker/ scholar was male gendered. Boy hawkers in particular exercised the agency to “hire themselves to traders” in order to defray the costs of a type of Western-style education that they could not easily access in their hometowns. Shifting to answer the question that naturally follows, the report continued: 54

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With regard however to the young girls who are employed as hawkers, a very different state of affairs exists, and one which is a standing disgrace to the town. A very large number of girls of the poorer class are employed to hawk wares in Lagos. Some of these girls are natives of the town but the majority, as in the case of the boys, came from the provinces adjacent to Lagos. Their wages are from 5/- [shillings] to 8/- per month and they are boarded and lodged in addition by their employers. Every day, in every street and at all hours these young girls are to be seen with trays or baskets on their heads, ostensibly carrying on their business. Their ages vary between nine and fifteen years. Actually, however, their trade as hawkers has become merely incidental to the more profitable profession of prostitution. With full appreciation of the gravity of the statement, I say that almost every single one of these so called girl hawkers are prostitutes of the most profligate and abandoned order. Regardless of their age (and some are under 9 years of age) from the day they first hawk a basket of wares, they are instructed in the art of prostitution by their elder experts with such success that they themselves become experts at the age of 10 or 11 years.74

When it came to girl hawkers, the commissioner’s description was not as concerned with their work as hawkers, how they got into or what they got out of such work, as it was with making claims about the sexuality and indecency of “the poorer class.” In this gendered reading of child hawkers, Cavendish’s appraisals echoed the duality found in the league’s critique, which also presented girl hawkers as quite distinct from boys. Further, in his report, Cavendish mirrored the sexualizing reading of girl hawkers that one finds in the league’s discourse. Girl hawkers of between nine and fourteen years of age, he wrote, rightly earned approximately 5 to 8 shillings per month from the traders who employed them, yet they made far in excess of that amount from carrying on their own illicit sexual commerce. One girl who was arrested at a brothel claimed to make between 3 and 4 pounds per month from her sexual work. There is no mention in the police report of whether girls, like boys, also earned payment in kind from their employers in the form of school fees. Nor is there any suggestion that the police investigators ever asked the girls about such things. Such questions were overshadowed by the commissioner’s conviction that “their trade as hawkers has become merely incidental to the more profitable Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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profession of prostitution.”75 Just how profitable was explained later when the commissioner calculated that girls made a net profit of about 9 pence on each sexual transaction with a man after subtracting overhead expenses like the cost of renting a room in which to have their sexual encounters. There are in Lagos a number of houses to which these girls resort every morning and afternoon, while they are supposed to be selling their goods. The owners and occupiers of these houses are common procurers who specialize in children, for the needs of their fastidious acquaintances . . . between 9 a.m. and 12 noon or between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. almost every day, these girls collect in numbers at their well known haunts for the purpose of prostitution. The owners of these houses are not however alone concerned with satisfying the extreme tastes of their male visitors. They have a pecuniary interest in the form of “bed-money.” This is a recognized fee of 3d [3 pence] which is paid by the girl to the proprietor for the use of the bed in the case of each man with whom she cohabits. The charge made by these girls to the men for cohabitation is fixed at 1/- [1 shilling], so that the net profit for each is 9d. Prostitution in these houses is carried on in the most shameless and open fashion, frequently in the presence of other girls and men.76

Child hawkers, in short, were never simply what they appeared to be. Although young, they exercised certain forms of agency. Boy hawkers were invariably entrepreneurial young scholars who hired themselves out to earn their education costs from traders. Girl hawkers also hired themselves out, although for reasons that are never made clear or presumably even inquired about. Instead, “moral depravity,” “utter profligacy,” and their membership in “the poorer classes” were presented as explanations for girls’ sexual behavior. Besides the girls and the brothel keepers, the participants in this trade were unnamed in the Cavendish report. The male customers were unidentified in terms of age, race, occupation, or ethnicity—all of the markers that one might consider salient to the investigation. The girls were also unidentified in every way, except occupationally. Thus the idea of girl hawker, an occupational category for which generally speaking “there would appear to be nothing . . . that can be reasonably condemned or criticized,” became wedded to and subsumed beneath the idea of underage prostitute, a 56

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fundamentally problematic moral category.77 The linkage between girl hawker and underage prostitute was firmly lodged in Cavendish’s mind as it was in the minds of women reformers. Although colonial staff came and left Lagos as their terms of service expired, elite women reformers remained and persisted in their views of what differentiated problem girlhoods and ideal modern girlhoods. Yet even as the sexualization of girl hawkers was taking hold in the minds of influential Lagosians, elite women, and colonial officials, another unanswerable or perhaps unspeakable question lurked around the edges of the discussion about problem girl hawkers. Reformers were wedded to a particular idea of what girlhood was like, and it was an idea that involved notions of innocence, modesty, and chastity. Preserving the idea of girlhood in that way required designating girl hawkers to bear the burden of notions that fell outside their idea of girlhood. By the 1920s girl hawkers were viewed as immodest, unchaste, and definitely not innocent. In this way, girl hawkers remained in question, while girls could continue to be girls. The unaskable question was whether African girls were the ones behaving in these ways, and it was just a coincidence that they were hawkers. Did bargirls, housegirls, schoolgirls, and daughters also have the capacity for such alarming behavior? Were girl hawkers a particular social category or were they simple girls who happened to have been employed as hawkers when their practices of having sex with older men, and apparently for money, were discovered? In his report, Cavendish referred to a police investigation of a house on Lagos Island at which it was rumored that girl hawkers frequently gathered in order to have sex with men for money. On December 7, 1922, at around 11:30 a.m., plainclothes policemen visited 216 Bamgbose Street where they met seven girls, later judged by a medical doctor to be between the ages of twelve and fifteen, waiting on the verandah. Upon questioning, the girls revealed with “shameless bravado” that they came to the house regularly, as did their friends, to have sexual relations with men for money. In his report, the investigating officer wrote, “They even vied with one another in their estimate of the number of men with whom they could cohabitate in a single day and their average monthly earnings. One girl told me that when fit she could take as many as ten men in succession and had actually done so. . . . Sex relationship is an open book to them and they even discuss the manner by which they avoided conception.”78 Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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The permanent occupants of the house, two employees of the Posts and Telegraphs Department, were arrested and ultimately sentenced to six months in prison each. Yet Cavendish feared that this punishment would not yield the desired result of halting sexual encounters between men and girls. “In addition to this systematic and wholesale procuration of children for the purpose of prostitution,” he wrote, “individual and very successful efforts are also made everywhere in the town by men who prefer this means of gratifying their desire. The child is usually enticed to the house in the first instance, under the pretext of purchasing some of her goods, and then there she is carnally known, generally it must be admitted, with her consent.”79 It is clear that Cavendish was deeply ambivalent about the girls whom he repeatedly depicted as free agents in the underage sex commerce and, at times, even as aggressors. “So common has prostitution among the children of Lagos become,” he wrote, “that it is only necessary to pause interestedly near a young girl and she will, as likely as not, come forward and positively solicit.”80 Following the investigation and arrests at Bamgbose Street, the girls were detained, medically inspected for venereal diseases, and, the report suggests, released to their families. “These girls were all natives of Lagos, and in each case, were working for their mothers, who were petty traders. The mothers assured me that they were horrified at the tale which I unfolded to them, of their daughter’s lives, and that they were one and all under the impression that their children were still innocent.” Ever suspicious, he quipped, “This of course cannot be credited and it is my opinion that, in many instances, the mothers or employers, as the case may be, accept some of the money earned by these children in this manner.”81 The only person who even hinted at the unaskable question—was underage prostitution a practice of girl hawkers or a practice that some girls engaged in?—was the police commissioner. He had opportunity to interview the girls and to hear and observe their responses to being accused of prostitution. At least some of the girls reportedly answered as if they had been asked for a record of their sexual prowess. Cavendish’s conjecture that despite the closing of underage brothels, other strategies would inevitably be devised for bringing men and girls together, in perhaps more ad hoc ways, raises questions about the sexualization of girls, youth, and hawkers by men, on one hand, and about the sexual cultures of girls, youth, and hawkers, on the other. Taken together, the commissioner’s report and Obasa’s letter demonstrate that influential Africans and Europeans in the city did agree 58

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across racial divides on the view that working-class child hawkers were deeply problematic figures. The two documents demonstrate some differences in viewpoints. For example, the gender distinction between girl and boy hawkers is more dramatic in the police account. For Commissioner Cavendish, boy hawkers were completely unproblematic whereas girls were seen as completely depraved. In Obasa’s letter, both boy and girl hawkers are viewed as potentially problematic, although in different ways. Although it is not entirely clear whether and how women reformers and colonial officials shared information or in what direction the information flowed between them, Obasa’s letter to the Commissioner of the Colony suggests that women reformers were the ones drawing government attention to child hawkers and not the other way around. The letter testifies that league members were making judgments about working-class Lagosians and that they were unfavorably remarking on the lives of working children in their midst. They did not do so privately; rather, they took their critiques to the state (and later to the daily papers and the public) in attempts to enlist support for the expulsion or strict regulation of questionable children. By the 1920s league members were focusing critical attention on children in public spaces and conceiving of children who did not demonstrate the qualities that they associated with childhood to be, by definition, strangers to the city. This easily overlooked move, the correlation they made between certain objectionable childhoods and the condition of being nonurban, reflects an implicit association that elites, and possibly other Lagos residents, made between urban space and a particular form of childhood. Were there ways in which Lagosians behaved, interrelated, and so on, that marked them off from non-Lagosians? Where, when, how, and from whom did one learn to exhibit proper urbanity? Whereas non-Lagosians, foreigners and other Nigerians, certainly had ideas of what it meant to be Lagosian and wrote about those ideas over the decades, the overlaying of spatial and behavioral boundaries that one finds in Obasa’s letter hints that some Lagosians, self-styled custodians of the city, had their own ideas as well. In the association that women reformers made between urban space and cultural practices of childhood, the league underscored how urban citizenship and exclusions from it were encoded in everyday lived practices of being Lagosian. Being Lagosian and performing urban style required, among other things, curtailing the mobility and visibility of girls and providing daughters with Western-style education. Gender, Status, and Social Reform among Educated Elite Women

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An important difference between the original Lagos Ladies League and the new Lagos Women’s League is that the new league turned to the colonial state to bring changes to the lives of Africans in Lagos. Under Macgregor the Lagos Ladies League had been asked to take on the labor of decreasing the infant mortality rate among common Lagosians. The new league, by contrast, was making demands and articulating an expectation that the state might rightly be the key agent of social change. In so doing, the new league did not go to ordinary Lagosians in order to bring them assistance but, rather, bypassed them and went to the state instead. Although they were articulating concerns and desires that were widespread among Lagosians, in calling for improved health facilities, schools, and access for girls, they were effectively pursuing a strategy whose mantra might have been: if the government builds it, they will come. This strategy combined a lesson from the water-rate protests—that the majority of Lagosians did not have the means or inclination to pay for public works projects like mass schooling—with an attitude that contrasted the backwardness and silence of common Lagosians with the leadership and advocacy of educated ladies. Elite Lagosian girls who underwent Christian marriages in the middle to late nineteenth century prided themselves on forming economically valuable marriages and creating properly Victorian households. Their literal and metaphorical daughters, girls who came of age around the turn of the twentieth century, explored more varied interests than their mothers had and sought opportunities to assert and perform elite status in more public arenas. By contrast with their mothers, whose status and respectability was linked to their roles in the private sphere, the daughters of the Black Victorians sought fulfillment and recognition as public social actors. Their upper-class and schoolgirl backgrounds enabled them to be incorporated into colonial governance projects as experts in the handling of difficult natives and to be heard by colonial officials as advocates for native women. Along with the privilege they were granted to advocate for the urban working class came the authority to make critiques. In its views on the common people of Lagos, the new league made a stark distinction between those who were backward but could be uplifted and those who were cast as irredeemable; those girls who could be young scholars and those who could not; those girls who could be properly urban, modern, and an asset to Nigerian womanhood in Lagos and those whose movements were best restricted, preferably to outside of the city’s borders. 60

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As historians of childhood have shown, the modern model of childhood featured increasing survival rates for infants and young children, decreasing birth rates for families, partly as a result of the former and partly as a result of the growth of urbanization, and the introduction of schooling as the special and primary occupation of the child.82 In industrializing and urbanizing societies, this last feature of the modern model, the reorganization of childhood around the institution of the school, took large numbers of young people around the world out of the labor pool and gradually invalidated previously held beliefs that children could and should perform income-generating work. The normative child under the modern model became a bearer of entitlements that were conferred on the basis of their social status, and the child’s chief responsibility became the satisfactory demonstration of childlike behavior. As the modern ideal of childhood was ever more associated with notions of innocence, powerlessness, dependence, and irrationality, the danger of failing the test of childhood increased, and the modern childishness of young people who demonstrated independence or shrewdness could be called into question.

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2 w Making the Modern Child in the Era of Imperial Liberalism

Th e interwa r period was a time of avid petition writing for elite women activists. It would also have been a time of frustration as their carefully phrased demands that government should in some way exert control over problem boys and girls seemed to fall on deaf ears. It certainly was not the case that officials had not received their appeals. Reminiscing on a 1925 visit with her brother Sir Upton Fitzherbert Ruxton, who was the lieutenant governor of the Southern Provinces of Nigeria at the time, Sylvia Leith-Ross noted that while Lagos in the 1920s appeared to be “free from the many social problems” that would bedevil it later on, “the file labeled ‘Child Hawkers’ lay already on the LG’s desk, growing heavier day by day.”1 The child-hawking file, which was filled with complaints against young hawkers, was one that LeithRoss recalled seeing “again and again all down the long years.”2 By the mid-1920s, high-ranking colonial officials were well aware of the concerns of elite Lagosian women. Yet they did not take any action until the voices of local elites began to be echoed by those of liberals based in the metropole. During the interwar period, what one might call the age of imperial liberalism in Africa, colonial governments began to interest themselves in the lived experiences of formerly marginal subjects. Liberalism in the metropole, as the historians Patrick Joyce and Nikolas Rose, paraphrasing Foucault, have written, introduced new forms of engagement between governments and their subjects, such that the ruled were enjoined to see themselves as “active in their own government.”3 Metropolitan liberalism featured “a new resolution 62

between government and knowledge,” in which governmental authority became “inherently bound to the authority of expertise.”4 Thus liberal government in the metropole situated the state as a zone of expert knowledge on the means of producing the well-being of subjects while it fostered subjects’ compliance with state projects through the logics of self-interest and empowerment. When liberal governance came to the colonies, it was, as in the metropole, directed toward enhancing what the state understood as the well-being of the ruled. Doing so required constructing the subject of rule, his or her problems, and the various dimensions of the problems’ resolutions. The crucial difference that the colonial context presented was that in the colonies liberal governance was coupled with illiberal notions of the relationship between rulers and the ruled. This is to say that it did not depend on “a novel specification of the subjects of rule as active in their own government.”5 As Achille Mbembe puts it, liberal government in the colonies took the form of a gift; it was given as “a burden, which yet is not a contract.”6 Where previously nonnormative subjects, women, convicts, the poor, and children, had been formally invisible to the state, new imperial actors and discourses emerged to heighten state interest in these populations, to render their problems more clearly and them more clearly as problems. Filtered through frameworks of imperial liberalism and the emergent field of social work, the African child became articulated as a sign of vulnerability, African pathology, and the paradoxical (im)possibility of African development. The emergence of social work added a new twist to the recent anthropological turn in colonial governance. As the historian Karuna Mantena demonstrated in her study of social theory and imperial politics, colonial policy makers took an anthropological turn following a series of paradigm-shifting revolts in the British empire, particularly the 1857 Rebellion or Mutiny in India. Where the previous liberal project had constructed colonial subjects, specifically Indians, as being like the British, only at an earlier developmental phase in which they were encumbered by tribe, tradition, and superstition, Mantena argued that for nineteenth-century theorists “the great danger lay in the rapid dissolution of the elemental units of native society and the concomitant transformation of India into an inchoate mass of individuals.”7 Indirect rule was thus introduced as a strategy for averting the disintegration of native societies and the emancipation of volatile social forces imagined to lie within them. The indirect rule system became the dominant The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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governance strategy that the British adopted, particularly in their African colonies, although exceptions were found in places such as Lagos, which were the administrative strongholds of the colonies. In these administrative islands, something like direct rule was the preferred governance strategy. The direct rule system rested on a more Benthamean ideological foundation, which assumed that all individuals had “a universal psychological structure . . . that implied that all peoples could be expected to respond in similar ways to common institutional incentives once they were abstracted and freed from the distorted influence of informal social ties and irrational customs,” as Mantena writes.8 Colonial capitals were spaces that had already been conceptually and politically abstracted from local contexts. Freed from local customary uses, they became available for sovereign use of colonial governments. Africans living in colonial cities were similarly imagined to have been abstracted and freed from the influences of informal social ties and customs, whether these were deemed to have been fundamentally damaging or fundamentally stabilizing to native psyches. Anthropology, which had been the premier discipline of colonial governance, became an unnecessary and at best inefficient means to utilize in trying to apprehend the natives. In its stead the interwar period saw the strengthening and adoption of social work as the discipline through which one might best understand, interpolate, and assimilate the natives into imperial logics. LIBERAL GOVERNANCE, SOCIAL WORK, AND N A T I V E C H I L D R E N I N T H E I N T E R WA R P E R I O D

It is well known that “the native” was often constructed in colonial discourse as being like a child. In the nineteenth century, the alleged childish helplessness of natives was used to justify the establishment of protectorates that would save and shield them from the clutches of ruthless slavers. In the twentieth century, the League of Nations famously announced a mandate system for governing “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves.”9 The native in the League of Nations’ formulation was even more immature than a child; the native was like an infant, all soft limbs and undisciplined thoughts, whose wellbeing, development, and most importantly, “tutelage” Woodrow Wilson recommended leaving in the hands of more “advanced nations.”10 Metaphorical infantilizations of Africans have enjoyed a long run. As scholars of African labor history have demonstrated using West African and Southern African case studies, far into the twentieth century, an 64

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African man in the village was always subject to being thought of and treated like a boy in the colonial town.11 The scholarship has been interested in colonial constructions of African adults as children. But what I am asking about here is constructions of young Africans as children, toward a liberal project rather than a racist one.12 How might centering actual children in our analyses affect our understandings of the colonial state and its processes of subject formation, knowledge creation, or infantilization? How does the young African, once symbolic of the native, the particular, the metaphorical child, become normalized to emerge in colonial contexts as an actual, meaning universal, child? Through what means and in what contexts did infantilization of colonial subjects shift from reflecting racial ideology to also, and possibly mainly, reflecting generational thinking? One way of getting at histories of children and childhood is by anchoring them to the histories of institutions for juveniles. To date, the scholarship on institutions for juveniles in colonial Africa has been primarily concerned with how those spaces compared, ideologically and materially, to adult prisons and metropolitan juvenile institutions. Focusing mainly on settler colonies such as Kenya and South Africa, scholars have investigated the extent to which juvenile institutions were concerned with and capable of reforming inmates or whether, like their adult counterparts, they functioned mainly as reservoirs of unpaid labor for the colonial state.13 Building on Foucauldian frameworks, which associate the birth of the modern prison in Europe with the extension of political rights to increasingly broad swaths of the population, scholars have also inquired into the relationship between penal institutions (including juvenile institutions) and colonial forms of government that were based on withholding political rights from the broadest possible swaths of their subject populations. If one shifts perspective from the institution to the juvenile, it becomes clear that what has been left unproblematized is the figure of the inmate, especially the female inmate, in the juvenile institution. What is the nature of the relationship between the juvenile, a category that is operative only in legal and institutional discourse, and the child, a category that combines and concentrates social, political, and affective associations? How might we think about the juvenile institution in relation to colonial histories of the child? The juvenile institution strikes me as a useful location for thinking about the particularity of the child in the colonial period because as The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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the contributors to Florence Bernault’s 2003 edited volume, A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa argue, carceral institutions in colonial Africa, such as the prison, the mining camp, or the reform school, were viewed as islands of European hegemony in an otherwise volatile sea of unpacified African societies.14 They were colonies inside the colony. Within the walls of the institution, European officials attempted to design self-sustaining worlds where African inmates, torn away from their communities and kin, could be made to adopt the precepts of European colonial culture. In the prison, as Foucault argued, we find the premier device of modern surveillance and knowledge production. Although there were many significant differences between the French prisons Foucault wrote about and the ones that Europeans created in Africa, not the least of which was that most African societies had no prior experience of incarceration as a form of criminal punishment, carceral institutions nonetheless played a key role in the colonial reimagining of young Africans as ordinary children. In this chapter I examine the Enugu Industrial School, the first government-run juvenile carceral institution in the Southern Protectorate of Nigeria as a pivotal site of production of the idea of the child. There were other reform institutions that preceded it, such as a boys’ prison on the outskirts of Kano that was run by native authorities. The institution at Tudun Maliki, about two miles outside of Kano, was used for detaining boys who had been convicted of offenses by native courts and who either did not have guardians that might have taken responsibility for them or who were considered to be beyond parental control.15 At the Enugu Industrial School, young Africans were disciplined, punished, confined, and also produced as children. Even as individual inmates aged out of childhood through long periods of confinement, colonial officials were reconceptualizing young Africans through the same frameworks applied to thinking about children in the metropole. During the interwar period when European nations were erecting new infrastructures of coordination among themselves, surveys inquiring into the status of workers, women, prisoners, slaves, and juvenile delinquents among others were circulated throughout the colonies to detect inconsistencies in the experiences of different colonial subjects.16 International meetings were convened to explore what the international community might do about vulnerable groups. In investigating the status of children, nongovernmental women’s organizations joined with others like the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and 66

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Women, the Save the Children Fund, the Union Internationale de Secours aux Enfants, or the Association Catholique International des Oeuvres des Protections de la Jeune Fille, among others, to act as pressure groups “on behalf of those least able to defend or care for themselves,” as Paul Gordon Lauren writes.17 By 1924, the League of Nations Advisory Committee for Child Welfare passed the first declaration on rights ever adopted by an international organization; this was the 1924 Declaration of the Rights of the Child, a deceptively simple statement that held that: 1. THE CHILD must be given the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually. 2. THE CHILD that is hungry must be fed; the child that is sick must be nursed; the child that is backward must be helped; the delinquent child must be reclaimed; and the orphan and the waif must be sheltered and succored. 3. THE CHILD must be the first to receive relief in times of distress. 4. THE CHILD must be put in a position to earn a livelihood and must be protected against every form of exploitation. 5. THE CHILD must be brought up in the consciousness that its talents must be devoted to the service of its fellow men.

African children were listed among the new era’s vulnerable groups, and the period saw increased European and colonial state interest in the affairs of African children and young people. Where previously the management of children’s affairs, including children’s health, education, and moral training, had been left to families, native authorities, missionaries, and clerics in the colonies, the interwar period saw the affairs of young colonial subjects being taken up by nongovernmental organizations in the metropole as well. For example, in 1931 the Save the Children International Union organized a conference about African children in Geneva, which was attended by representatives of missionary societies, scientific, educational, and welfarist organizations, as well as the representatives of various colonial governments.18 Henry Carr of the Education Department in Lagos and Gladys Casely-Hayford, on behalf of her mother Adelaide of the Sierra Leone branch of the National Congress of British West Africa, were among the African The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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delegates who attended and gave papers.19 Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children International, had organized the conference to discuss extending the provisions of the 1924 Declaration of the Rights of the Child to children in Africa.20 In organizing the conference, Jebb and Save the Children International, which had originally been founded for the relief of starving European children after World War I, looked further afield to the lands of colonized peoples for new classes of children to save. The African children’s conference was just one example of a trend that followed the end of the First World War. As scholars of the interwar period and the 1930s have noted, African colonies were deeply affected by the costs of the First World War and by the Great Depression because they were treated as resources for the financial recovery of the empire.21 In the interwar period the colonial governments of territories like Nigeria took, or rather imposed, great pains on their subjects to meet recurring debt payments to metropolitan bankers, even in the face of a depressed global market for colonial products. Meeting debt payments meant increasing production of export goods where possible, proliferating taxes on colonial subjects, and cutting already thin government staff lists and services. In Nigeria, as Moses Ochonu has shown, the interwar period saw the colonial government divesting from “its traditional claims of uplift and civilization” even as it sought to rhetorically uphold those claims.22 Nongovernmental organizations in the metropole and voluntary groups in the colonies, as well as private individuals, attempted to fill the emergent gaps in welfare provision. Colonial Office committees were formed to investigate previously overlooked dimensions of colonial life. In 1930, the juvenile delinquency subcommittee of the Colonial Penal Administration Committee, which was composed of prison reformers, abolitionists, and so-called native affairs experts, assembled to discover and evaluate “arrangements . . . in force in Dependencies . . . in connection with the trial and punishment of young offenders.”23 The committee was headed by Dr. T. Drummond Shiels, and its members included A. G. Bushe, a legal adviser at the Colonial Office, Sirs Alison Russel and E. S. B. Tagart, each of whom had served as administrators in various parts of the Middle East and Africa, Lady Lawrence, who was active in the Child Guidance movement, Alexander Paterson, and S. MacNeill Campbell.24 The juvenile delinquency subcommittee members were distinguished persons known for their support of liberal reformist 68

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causes. Drummond Shiels, under secretary of state for the colonies, was known within liberal reform circles for pushing for the repeal of nineteenth-century masters and servants’ ordinances in the colonies.25 E. S. B. Tagart, a former secretary for native affairs in Rhodesia, was at the time conducting a critical investigation of servitude practices in Bechuanaland.26 Alexander Paterson, the sitting commissioner for prisons, was a leading figure in imperial penal reform debates during the 1920s and 1930s.27 Under Paterson’s influence, juvenile reform in early twentieth-century Britain had been recentered on the four following ideas: the principle that environmental factors played a definitive role in encouraging or constraining delinquent behavior, the inclination to consider urban contexts to be inimical to ideal moral development in young people, the tendency to view juvenile delinquency as a social problem to be addressed by the public, and last, the idea that longterm social problems with juvenile delinquency could be thwarted by providing young offenders with opportunities for paid work.28 Although it continued earlier practices of using incarceration and work regimes as methods for dealing with the problems presented by delinquent and poor children, the ascendance of the Paterson approach also reflected a defeat of eugenicist ideas about constitutionally criminal classes and races as well as the incorporation of individual improvement into the civic obligations of a modern state to its members. The juvenile delinquency subcommittee reviewed blue books, prison reports, and judicial returns submitted by a number of British colonies to conclude that the colonies were in grave need of “modern opinion” on methods of trying and punishing young offenders.29 The report that followed their inquiries combined their research and findings with a ten-page sample juvenile reform ordinance that was intended to illustrate the theoretical and practical underpinnings of modern juvenile justice and welfare work. The report addressed the definition of the terms “child” and “young person,” the organization and procedures of juvenile courts, procedures for arresting, trying, incarcerating, and releasing young offenders, questions related to the death penalty, the liability of parents for their children’s actions, the staffing and running of probation offices, and permitted and prohibited punishments for young people, among other topics.30 The key recommendations of the model ordinance were that young offenders should be prevented from associating with adult offenders while in government custody, that detention of young people in state custody should be avoided as much The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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as possible given the lack of youth-only institutions, and that the state should embark on a project of opening institutions for the reformation of delinquent youth. Modern methods of juvenile reform, as conceived in the report, dictated that state agencies should shoulder the responsibility of placing delinquents in an ameliorative environment, preferably in a rural context but certainly not an urban one, and that in the rural context the malady of delinquency could be treated through vocational training, and delinquents could be made into productive workers. The juvenile delinquency subcommittee’s report represented an attempt to extend liberal influence and ideas from metropole to colony, and from citizens to subjects. The report was disseminated to colonial governors, prison officials, and other relevant parties, with the expectation that the sample ordinance would be replicated in the various colonial locales. The committee’s recommendations initially met a tepid reception from local officials in Nigeria. Some colonial officials argued that serious juvenile offenses in the colony were so few as to obviate any need for dedicating government resources to address them. Others argued that African authorities had such effective methods for correcting or punishing young offenders that further colonial state involvement was completely unnecessary.31 The financial costs of instituting the reforms were also presented as a deterrent to introducing the committee’s recommendations. But the fundamental problem may have been, as F. P. Lynch, secretary of the Southern Provinces argued, that it seemed as if the model ordinance had “been framed to meet conditions far more ‘Westernised’” than could be found in most parts of the country. It was doubtful, he wrote, “whether it could be applied at present outside the area of Lagos Township.”32 When Lynch protested that the juvenile delinquency subcommittee’s recommendations had been “framed to meet conditions far more ‘Westernised’” than he could see in Nigeria, we have to consider that beyond geographic and infrastructural considerations, the fundamental challenge of the “conditions of the country” rested in the local residents; young Africans and the families and communities that produced them were themselves unsuited to Western modes of juvenile reform work. Arguments about the unsuitability of modern or Western approaches to the trial and punishment of young African offenders emerged from notions of fundamental difference between Africa and Europe, colonizers and subjects, the African child and the universal child. Until 1934 70

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Africans still represented particularity and difference, and the child was enlisted to serve as an emblem of African exceptionalism. By the 1940s, however, things looked different. At that point, the colonial government in Nigeria began opening a network of residential reform institutions, industrial schools, approved schools, and hostels to contain and hopefully remold troubled and troublesome young Africans. In the metropole, as was to be the case in the colonies, volunteer social reformers, the majority of whom were women, whose authority to shape social policy and individual practice was grounded in their moral respectability, were steadily being displaced by professionals trained in the new scientific practice of social work, many of whom were men. These efforts were concentrated in Lagos and overseen by Donald Faulkner, who would serve for almost twenty years as the colony welfare officer and later the chief social welfare officer for Nigeria. The records of the colony welfare administration show that by the early 1940s, colonial officials had come to think of young Africans through universalist frames. That is to say that colonial officials had become convinced that young Africans could be shaped by environmental factors, corrupted by urban contexts, and purified by rural air; in short, young Africans could respond to modern methods of juvenile reform and welfare. Modern methods of juvenile reform reflected a secularization of what had formerly been moral work. The records of the Colony Welfare Office reflect a new articulation of the young African as a universal child and a parallel rearticulation of African families, households, and traditions, as implicated in producing the problems of modern children in Africa. In the welfare office records, the normative modern child, like the normative colonial subject, was male, and his characteristics and interests were seen as different from and opposite those of young females. In the case of troubled boys, for example, welfare office records present a general understanding of traditional society as a key source of the corruption of young boys. For problem girls, by contrast, tradition was understood as a space of refuge and reform, whereas diverging from tradition was cast as a common source of girls’ problems. Between 1930 and the early 1940s, overcoming the barriers presented by “local conditions” required collapsing the distance between the young African and the child through rerendering the young African as a child, turning the constitutional challenge of applying modern methods to young Africans into a technical challenge of producing colonial The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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children as liberal subjects. The modern colonial child emerged as such, as a sign of vulnerability, who confronted domestic threats from a newly (re)imagined Africa and its traditions. The welfare of the modern child in Africa became a part of colonial state business in the period that overlaps precisely with the time when Europe was experiencing crises of faith in the nation-state as a viable political formation in a desired future. At the same time, depleted imperial coffers were being refilled through heightened production demands on the colonies. Through the work of emergent international humanitarian groups, and later the colonial state, the appearance of the modern child in Africa served to require and legitimate interventions in African domestic worlds and potent new projects of subject formation within the empire, the colony, and the home. Through the child, imperial liberalism became imaginable as an enterprise of proliferating vulnerabilities that (re)instated colony, empire, and imperial nation-states as guarantors of humanity and rights. EXPERIMENTS IN MOLDING THE MODERN SUBJECT AT T H E E N U G U R E F O R M AT O R Y F O R B O Y S

The status of childhood has its boundaries maintained through the crystallization of conventions and discourses into lasting institutional forms like families, nurseries, schools, and clinics, all agencies specifically designed and established to process the child as a uniform entity.33

Despite initial hostility, colonial officials in Nigeria did have debates about which, if any, of the Shiels Committee recommendations could possibly be implemented in Nigeria. Key among the adoptable recommendations was the issue of providing separate places of detention for juvenile offenders. Debate centered on whether it was more suitable for children to be contained in centralized government-run locations or whether it was better for their punishment to be decentralized and individualized. One administrator recommended that local chiefs be made responsible for the detention of young offenders, while another recommended that parents bear that responsibility provided they were “trustworthy people of good standing.”34 Yet under a new secretary for the Southern Provinces, W. E. Hunt, the experiment in applying modern methods to Nigerian delinquents was launched in January 1933 with the opening of a juvenile prison known variously as the Enugu 72

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Reformatory, the Enugu Approved School, HM Approved School, the Enugu Institution, or most often, the Enugu Industrial School.35 The first director of the Enugu Institution was Victor Mabb, director of prisons for the Southern Provinces. In 1937 Donald Faulkner was brought in to run the institution. Following a period of working in U.K. reform schools for persistent adolescent boy offenders, Donald Faulkner’s first Colonial Office assignment took him to Nigeria where he served as director of the Enugu Institution from 1937 to 1941.36 By 1941, the Enugu experiment had proven to colonial administrators in Nigeria that modern institution-based methods of juvenile reform could be effectively applied to young Africans. Faulkner’s second colonial appointment took him to Lagos, where he spent fifteen years as the head of Nigeria’s first welfare department, effectively designing the welfare city. Through individuals such as Faulkner, the practices, ideologies, and even personnel of the Enugu Institution were dispersed to other cities in the country. In early inmate recruitment circulars, Victor Mabb provided a brief description of the Enugu Institution’s operations. The institution, Mabb explained, was funded and administered through the prisons department and governed by the Native Children Custody and Reformation Ordinance. The Native Children Ordinance set no limits on the lengths of inmate sentences except to pronounce that none could be held past age eighteen.37 Inmate sentences could vary greatly according to the offense and according to the judgments of individual magistrates. Yet employing medical discourse to characterize the reform experience, Mabb recommended that the minimum length of a sentence be set at three years, because, in his opinion, very few cases could be “successfully treated” in a shorter amount of time.38 The institution initially offered accommodation for thirty boys but was expanded to take in sixty by April 1934.39 During its first fifteen months of operation, the institution held only seven inmates. Its inmate population crept up to seventeen by the end of 1934, a relatively significant growth rate that nevertheless left its eighty beds grossly underutilized.40 In order to address the empty-bed problem part of the early work of the institution’s director was to cultivate, through outreach to district officials, the very population of juvenile delinquents that gave it a raison d’être. Scholars of marginalized youth cultures in urban Africa have argued that the juvenile delinquent was a post–World War II figure, who appeared in cities such as Lagos as a symptom of a crisis of urbanization.41 It is The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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clear that the juvenile delinquent as a legal category, who in his new inscription and legibility to the state becomes governable and subject to state discipline, was invented to validate the institutional and political imperatives of prison officials in the colonies and interwar liberal reformers in Europe. What may be the only physical description of the Enugu Institution was provided in the report of a 1950 inspection of juvenile correction facilities in Nigeria. In the words of the inspector, Mr. Chinn: The Approved School run by the Prisons Department occupies a former Army Camp which consists of a large number of scattered buildings situated in both sides of the main road to Enugu. The School is in the charge of a Prison Officer with Borstal experience, an African Headmaster and an all-African staff. There were one hundred and eighty boys in the school which could accommodate three-hundred . . . The school appears to be very well organized but it is run more on Borstal than Approved School lines. Its present site is not very satisfactory; the buildings are too scattered and the main road is something of a menace. There is no opportunity for agricultural work owing to the danger of subsidence due to mine workings and it is questionable whether a permanent school should be established on this site.42

Chinn’s description shows that even as its inmate population expanded, the institution was still operated below capacity two decades after its opening. It was located at a former army base some distance from the town of Enugu proper and in close proximity to a mining compound. Precisely what happened within the institution can currently only be speculated about. Case files of some of the inmates exist, but each consists of only a handful of pages, typically the letter assigning the boy to the Enugu Institution, his discharge papers upon release, letters between the institution and the district officer in his home province, and occasionally, postrelease letters between the institution staff and boys or their parents. Memoirs of life in the institution or life histories of former inmates that reflect on their time at Enugu, are nonexistent. Conducting oral histories with Nigerians who had been incarcerated as children poses methodological and ethical problems akin to those encountered by scholars of the history of slavery in Africa. As Martin Klein noted in his discussion of the methodological difficulties surrounding “studying the history of those who would rather forget,” historians working on 74

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stigmatized aspects of identity confront the problem of compounded reticence; the reticence of the material archive and the reticence of the living who would rather forget.43 These methodological constraints on reconstructing reformatory practices notwithstanding, it is clear that the Enugu approach to juvenile reform was an institution-based approach that extracted offenders from familiar contexts and held them in a statecontrolled environment. Offenders were typically kept at the institution for the duration of their sentences; three years was considered an ideal run. The Enugu Institution was located some distance from the nearest population centers; the physical distance reinforced the isolation of inmates from local societies. Occupying the same space, although at different points in time, miners, soldiers, and delinquent boys in government service or government custody were all similarly cordoned off from mainstream society. Underscoring their status as state property, boys wore khaki uniforms that were probably made of the same governmentissue fabric used for making soldiers’ uniforms. At the institution, boys received physical training and basic formal education. They practiced skilled trades; they were responsible for food cultivation, and undoubtedly worked on maintenance of the institution’s grounds as well. Each boy received training in up to two skilled trades. For case files displaying both primary and secondary trades, gardening and cooking were listed as the secondary trades for 80 percent of the inmates, which suggests that they might have been assigned by institution officials. Primary trades, which inmates may have selected on their own, displayed greater variety; tailoring and carpentry were the most popular occupations, and shoemaking and bricklaying were distant seconds.44 Training in carpentry and blacksmithing subsidized the maintenance of the institution’s buildings and costs related to housing its inmates. Training in tailoring and shoemaking subsidized the costs of clothing inmates, and agricultural training subsidized the costs of feeding them. While boys were still in custody, the profits earned from their labor were returned to the institution’s coffers, from which the boys could expect a small gratuity upon release. As a colonial-state institution however, Enugu was built and largely funded using tax revenues that were collected from Nigerian subjects. The institution’s partiality for gardening and cooking as secondary trades raises the question of how officials imagined the postinstitutional lives of their charges. Although gardening and cooking could certainly help boys to be self-sufficient in the outside world, even as it reduced the institution’s operational costs The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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while the boys were inside, it is also likely that gardening and cooking were the most common secondary trades because officials anticipated that these skills could qualify inmates to find work as houseboys. Of all occupational fields in colonial society, the domestic service sector was one of the most accessible for African youth. Europeans in the colony typically retained male staff, cooks, guards, gardeners, and houseboys to attend to their domestic needs.45 All the occupations boys received training for prepared them best for entering the urban colonial economy. Carpentry and blacksmithing were useful for the building trades, but most rural Africans would have built their own dwellings or relied on the labor of kin and clients for help. Tailoring implied a professional reliance on European manufactured tools even though it may have had an African consumer market as well as a European market. But shoemaking, as the institution’s first ex-inmate learned, was a distinctly unprofitable occupation outside of larger colonial towns and cities. The director of the institution was European, but most of the institution’s staff, the guards, the cooks, the messengers, and the teachers, were African. The Enugu Institution gathered boys from throughout the southern provinces of Nigeria. As such, it would have been a linguistically diverse place. Enugu inmates were sentenced to detention by supreme courts, magistrate courts, provincial courts, and in at least one case by order of the commissioner of the Western Province. The most common offenses of Enugu inmates were nonviolent crimes like stealing. But there were also extreme cases, like that of Michael O., the first boy to be released, who had been convicted of manslaughter. Confinements ranged from two to four years with boys as young as thirteen being sent in for reform. On occasion, inmates were permitted to leave the institution for short periods.46 Such occasional freedoms were doled out within a larger institutional framework that emphasized inmate constraint. Hints of how the mobility of Enugu inmates might have been constrained can be gleaned from the records of Tapa House, the first boy’s remand home in Lagos. In a list of instructions that the colony welfare officer sent to his staff, he told them that the remand home was to be run as much as possible “along the lines of the Enugu Industrial School.”47 The two pages of instructions opened with a warning to remand home officers that “inmates should never be out of sight and round of the supervising officer. . . . All inmates should be kept together in a group in one place and not be allowed to scatter.”48 Following instructions on exercise, sanitation, and the proper use of 76

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chewing sticks, among other things, the report closed with the contradictory statement that “all officers must realize that Tapa House is simply and solely a place of safe custody and that no escapes must occur.”49 The Enugu Institution would similarly have been a place of locked doors and surveillance where boys would have been hard-pressed to distinguish between safe custody and imprisonment. Michael O., who has already been mentioned, was the first product of the Enugu approach. He was convicted of manslaughter in the Benin Provincial Court on 24 June 1933 when he was approximately fifteen years old and sentenced to detention at the Enugu Institution until he reached age eighteen. While at the institution, Michael was reported to have been a cooperative and well-behaved inmate. His release papers stated that he had chosen to learn shoemaking as his primary trade, and given “reasonable opportunities” was “quite capable of earning his own living.”50 Upon release, Michael was escorted back to his family home in Ogwashi-Uku, granted £2 to be steadily doled out by the local district officer, and he was equipped with “some shoemaker’s tools,” including one ball of hemp, one hammer, one sewing awl, one set of nippers, one wheel sheet, a shoemaker rasp, an awl’s peg, pincers, a knife, a stick size, an iron forepart, and “some Hausa leather to start him off.”51 Noting that Michael was the first inmate to be discharged after serving “a full three years of training,” and he had “reached the age when a further conviction will result in his imprisonment,” director of prisons Victor Mabb enlisted the Benin Province Resident and the district officer of Ogwashi-Uku to monitor Michael’s progress in the outside world.52 The significance of his postrelease success or failure extended beyond Michael himself. “If he establishes himself and runs straight,” Mabb wrote, “it will have a good effect on the boys still undergoing treatment. If he falls and is committed to prison the effect on the other boys will be bad.”53 Implicitly, the effect on the institution and its prospects could be bad as well. At first, Michael had work. On Commissioner Mabb’s recommendation, colonial officers and African clerks in the region of OgwashiUku sent Michael their shoes for repair.54 Michael himself sent around solicitations advertising his services. One read: Dear Sir I greet you very well. I am a boy who learnt shoe-making work at Industrial School Enugu, under the Director of Prisons and The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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he sent me through the D.O. at Ogwashi-Uku named Mr. _are. I can repair shoes with English sole, leather full or half sole. I have repaired two pairs for this D.O. who just left from Agbor. Please sir, if you have some shoes to repair write to me here as quickly as possible. So that I may come to take the shoes as soon as I receive your letter.55

The advertisement indicates several important things. First, it indicates that Michael was definitely literate when he left the institution, although it is not clear whether or not he was literate when he went in. The letter also reflects the voice of an individual who was aware of himself as being a skilled professional. His signature “Michael O., Chief Shoemaker,” suggests that Michael had cast off his prior label of juvenile offender and confidently assumed his new identity as chief shoemaker of Ogwashi-Uku.56 Second, it also suggests that the stream of clients was not unending, and Michael had to cultivate a customer base in order to keep his business going. Third, Michael’s use of the term Industrial School to name the institution hints at the overlaps between colonial schools and correctional facilities as well as the institution’s success in getting juvenile delinquents to understand themselves as pupils in an educational setting rather than inmates in a prison. Reporting on Michael’s condition after his first three months of freedom, the district officer wrote, “His demeanor is happy, his appearance clean and tidy. He informs me that he has made over £2 since he set up for himself as a shoemaker. . . . O. informs me that he is treated kindly by his village folk and I gather that he is a well behaved citizen.”57 Michael enjoyed a significant amount of encouraging attention from the administration through direct patronage from clerks and other officials, as well as an additional grant of shoemaker’s tools from Enugu.58 But the support of local colonial officials was insufficient to create a sustainable market for his services. Michael’s client pool in Ogwashi-Uku region seems to have evaporated fairly quickly. This was undoubtedly because he found few clients among his own country people and perhaps also as a consequence of colonial staff turnover. A 1938 update on the progress of the first inmate to complete a full three-year term reported that “the youth has now gone to Boji-Boji, Agbor where I have no doubt there will be more scope for him to ply his trade than in Uburuku. The people of his village mainly go bare foot so whilst at home he has not had much opportunity to progress.”59 The district 78

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officer’s remark that Michael had to leave his community because his new skills were of no use there—the residents of Uburuku mainly went barefoot—highlights one of the failings of the reform institution and the ideology behind it. The institution lifted its practices and goals wholesale from the metropole. Novel skills cultivated in the institution preceded the markets for them, which were left to be engineered by the state. In the reform process boys were trained to serve a European market, or at least an urban colonial market rather than local rural markets. Inadvertently perhaps, institutional training caused some boys to leave their communities as opposed to facilitating a return. Charles N. was considered to be another success story. Charles was an inmate of the Enugu Institution from age twelve to age seventeen.60 On 12 September 1938, he was convicted of stealing by the Supreme Court at Ebute Metta on mainland Lagos and initially sentenced to three years of detention. His sentence was later extended to five years, and he was finally discharged in September 1943. In the exceedingly brief comment that mentions the extension of Charles N.’s sentence, from the equivalent of a fifth of his life to over a third, one finds suggestions of the arbitrariness and improvisation that were features of the institutional regime. Charles’s discharge notice revealed that his parents were alive and living together in Ibuzor Town, Asaba Division. There is no indication of how long his parents had been living there, or whether they had been in Eastern Nigeria when their twelve-year-old son was convicted of theft in a distant Lagos suburb. While at the Enugu Institution, Charles got basic education up to Class IV (the fourth year of primary school) and was judged to be “of average intelligence, fairly honest and reliable.”61 He studied tailoring as his primary trade, and no information was given about his secondary trade. His case file indicates that because Charles’s release date coincided with the Second World War when resources were scarce, he was not given tailoring equipment as would have been done under ideal circumstances. He was instead presented with a grant of £3. At least six months before his discharge date, Charles had expressed some interest in signing up for the war effort as an army tailor. Enugu officials made arrangements on his behalf, and in September, a one-line letter from the District Officer Asaba Division notified Charles’s father that his son had “enlisted as a Military ‘Learner Driver’ . . . at his own request.”62 The record of Charles’s transition from a juvenile reformatory that was once operated as a military barracks to an active wartime army The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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provides us with an opportunity to try to imagine the kind of ideological environment boys might have been immersed in at the Enugu Institution. The juvenile institution, like the barracks, was as much a space of routines, discipline, and order as it was a space of containment. In the institution, boys who had by definition experienced tumult and stigmatization in their short lives on the outside world were assigned a position within a total system and commanded into routines of schoolwork, manual labor, meals, physical exercise, and rest. The institutional clock imposed order on their time and on their lives. So did the wardens, the teachers, and most of all, the institution director. The juvenile institution had a clear temporal order as well as a fixed social order. Like the military, the juvenile institution was a deeply hierarchical world in which a European man stood visibly at the head modeling loyalist imperial masculinity. Beyond providing models of loyalist imperial masculinity, institutional staff may have actively encouraged boys to consider military life in their postinstitutional planning. The army was actively and aggressively cultivating new recruits. Regional newspapers regularly published advertisements announcing the attractions of military service, the kinds of modern tools that conscripts would work with, and the lucrative modern skills that they would acquire. Advertisements displayed muscular men of diverse cultural backgrounds, symbolized by their dress or facial markings, to signal that all were welcome into Her Majesty’s armies. One imagines that in the institution, officials maintained a keen interest in the war effort and routinely extolled the virtues of the British and Allied cause. The boys in government custody were ideal audiences for such messages and attractive candidates for military work. They were young; they had received sustained fitness training; they were literate; and they were accustomed to the rigors and routines of institutional life under European leadership. At impressionable ages, they had absorbed models of loyalist imperial masculinity and might have been primed to desire fuller membership in Her Majesty’s community. One way of doing so was to serve in Her Majesty’s armies. In addition to the above, the period of the Second World War was a time of economic contraction. The economic constraints of the period were brought home to outgoing inmates who were awarded fewer resources for starting productive lives than earlier generations of inmates had been given. The economic forces that pushed civilian men into the army affected the Enugu inmates as well. Terse as 80

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it is, the record of Charles’s transition into the army, another colonial institution, just three days after his release from a five-year sentence at the Enugu Institution suggests something about the complexity of the forms of identification, desire, and value that may have been cultivated among inmates and their keepers. When the Enugu approach worked well, boys experienced frictionless reintegration into their families and communities, and found ready employment in modern industries. The examples of Animashaun S. and Emmanuel L. are cases in point. On 3 February 1949, seventeenyear-old Animashaun S. was discharged from the Enugu Institution after serving a sentence of four years and a day. His discharge papers did not record his offense. While at the institution, he adopted carpentry as his primary trade and cooking and gardening as secondary trades. Animashaun got basic education up to Standard Two, or the fourth year of primary school, and his character was considered “Fair.” At the end of his sentence, he was given £4 for carpentry tools and gratuity, and he was sent to live with his father, “a respected Ibadan business man.”63 Animashaun was fortunate to find work with the town engineer as an apprentice joiner a short while after he returned home.64 The town engineer’s six-month evaluation of Animashaun’s work found that “he is willing, conscientious and a good timekeeper and he is interested in his work.”65 Emmanuel L. was released from the Enugu Institution in January 1951 following a sentence of at least sixteen months for an unnamed offense.66 By the end of his term he had earned his school leaving certificate and a gratuity of £5. He returned home to Ibadan on 20 January 1951, where he was received by his father, a manager at a pharmaceutical company.67 Reporting to officials on his son’s progress in postinstitutional life, Emmanuel’s father wrote that his son’s return featured no trouble at all.68 Shortly after his return to Ibadan, Emmanuel O. began working with his father for the Onibeji Trading Ikorodu Association Chemist and Druggist Stores. For the remainder of the year, Emmanuel O., gainfully employed and happily reconciled with his family, proved to be a model product of the Enugu Institution’s approach to juvenile reform. Case files from the 1940s and 1950s suggest that government institutions had become normalized as an aspect of the local disciplinary landscape and that families and communities were adopting the logics of delinquency, reform, and institutions. Enugu inmate case files The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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began to reflect increasing family engagement in the institutional reformation process. Parents held the state accountable for setting their sons on the right path, just as Enugu officials held parents responsible for keeping ex-inmates on track or, for the opposite, derailing their postinstitutional progress. Contrasting markedly with Emmanuel’s and Charles’s cases were the cases of Opetunde O. and, to a greater extent, the case of Amachi D. Neither boy found gainful employment, and both abandoned their fathers for what they must have considered more sympathetic guardians shortly after returning home. Opetunde O. was sentenced to the Enugu Institution by an Ibadan Magistrate on 18 January 1949 for an unnamed offense. He started his sentence when he was roughly thirteen years old and was released two years later at age fifteen. While at the institution, Opetunde was trained in bricklaying as a primary trade and cooking and gardening as secondary trades. He received basic education up to Standard One (the third year of primary school), and his character was evaluated to be “very good.” On release, he was sent to live with his father, supposedly according to his wishes, and he was granted a £1 gratuity and an additional £4 to enable him to buy tools for his trade.69 Opetunde’s stay at his father house was marred by significant conflict. In two letters reporting on his son’s postinstitutional condition, Mr. O. told officials that his son displayed “no improvement” after the Enugu experience, and had in fact gone from “bad to worse.”70 In the first letter, he wrote, My first duty for the boy according to your instruction, on his arrival I brought boy to you, and your kindness that showed to me on that day, not to forgetting by give letter to the town engineer in order that he may get job to do, in fact- the Town engineer said that no job presently the boy should hold on, for some time, then we return home, and we reach home my second duty is these, I bought the bricklayer’s tools for about £4 = 16, 6 for him (what a wonder) instead of the boy to use the said tool for small home job before he can get better under the engineer, he simply sell off the tools and spent the money and go away, the information reached me with wonder, I do not know what to do and I do not even see the boy.71

To paraphrase, after an unsuccessful effort to get his son a job with the town engineer, Mr. O. bought his son bricklayer’s tools using the 82

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equipment grant from Enugu. These, Opetunde simply resold and used the money to leave home, giving his father no indication of where he was going. Further down in the letter, Mr. O. related that some relatives had seen Opetunde in the town of Akure in Abeokuta, and also in Lagos. In Lagos, O. finally confirmed, Opetunde had found his mother and decided to live with her. Pleading with the state for assistance, Mr. O. wrote, “I shall be grateful if the Government can get any remedy again about the boy, the boy gives many worriness [sic] before he left here to Lagos, these make me tyed [sic] of the boy.”72 Opetunde’s postinstitutional life began on a sour note with an unsuccessful job hunt and conflict between him and his father. His father’s letters reflect a parent’s expectation that given sufficient time and effort, government institutions should be able to “remedy” his son. They also reflected the voice of a man who had intimate experience of government institutions, had been frustrated in his own postinstitutional job hunt, and who considered himself to have made the best of his situation. He wrote, “As an ex-serviceman, and as there is no job for me under Government, these made me to go to farm to fight for my daily bread there.”73 An ex-serviceman and a farmer fighting for his daily bread, O. had no patience for a son who would sell £4 worth of bricklayer’s tools for an escape to Lagos. Amachi D.’s postinstitutional experience was even more disappointing than Opetunde’s. Amachi was released in November 1951 with a £5 gratuity and his school leaving certificate after four years at the Enugu Institution. Neither his offense nor his age on release are known, but based on the age limitation in the Native Children’s Ordinance, it is safe to assume that he was either fourteen or below fourteen years of age when he entered Enugu. Amachi experienced an unusually short stay on the outside world. Two months after his release, he returned to the Enugu Institution in what was described as “a destitute condition,” telling a tale of the scandalous reception he had received from his father. Amachi also claimed that he had never received his £5 discharge gratuity. Outraged, the principal at the Enugu school asked the district officer to interview Amachi’s father for an explanation. Ades D.’s response was swift and angry. His evaluation of his son and the Enugu approach throw the limitations of the institutional method into relief. D. wrote: My son Amachi arrived here from Enugu November 17 and stayed with me up to Dec 17 when he was chided for being rude. The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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He was to have gone to Lagos, where Mr. Ernest ___ has arranged to get him employed at the Marina. I had also taken him out to Joe Allen, U.A.C. (where he was to have taken up a job as apprentice mechanic) the ___where also he has promise and I asked him to take him back at the end of December. On Monday December 18 he left and slept out and quite naturally I was annoyed and so spoke to him sharply. I left for work and after arranging for him to travel to Lagos by ___ bus, I return to find my own home broken into and ___ money, clothes, three fountain pens, and other things removed. Locked trunk boxes and portmanteaux were also broken and it was after a fortnight that I found him being escorted to the Police Station by a man who told me he was a driver of a produce lorry belonging to John Holt and that my son Amachi had stolen or was suspected to have stolen his wallet containing £12. I pleaded so much that I even offered to pay the amount if indeed he was sure the boy stole that amount. Later he left the boy and I knew not what happened next. A voucher for £5 was cashed and paid him through me by the A.D.O., Ibadan from which he was provided with clothes and pocket money before he was to leave for Lagos. Apparently, he had that money on him and so was able to travel back to Enugu. I am sorry I disown him from date and regret ever having a son like him. He lies at will and it is all too plain that the four years at the HM Approved School have still not made a better boy of him.74

The Amachi D. file contains little other information such as what happened after Enugu officials saw Mr. D.’s letter, whether Mr. D. took his son back in, whether Amachi was placed in the custody of another responsible adult, and so on. What we do know is that even after four years of institutionalization, Amachi continued to be accused of criminal offenses, including by his father. Amachi’s apparently voluntary return to Enugu signals that for whatever reason, being at the institution seemed preferable to him than living with his father. In frustration, D. renounced his son, implicitly assigning him to the continued custody of the state that had “still not made a better boy of him.”75 In the two preceding cases, Opetunde’s and Amachi’s fathers both indicated in their letters that they expected government to either 84

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“remedy” or make “a better boy of” their sons.76 Such statements suggest that by the mid-1940s, government institutions had been substantively integrated into the local ideologies of juvenile discipline and reform. During a conversation about Tapa House, the boy’s remand home in Lagos from 1943 to 1945, one of my informants described the institution as a widespread bogeyman, a place of banishment that parents threatened their misbehaving children with.77 Government institutions did not just become part of parents’ new disciplinary repertoires; for some they seemed like the sole vehicle for gaining parental control over their children or for providing their children with hope of a productive future. This kind of relationship to the reform institution as a place of punishment and correction, from which one could later return to normal society, may have been as novel as the idea of the reform institution itself. As Bernault argues, the prison was a colonial innovation in Africa;78 prior to the advent of colonialism, antisocial crimes were addressed with fines; or banishment from society, depending on the severity of the offense. The reform institution was a place that delinquent youth entered for correction and later exited cleansed of their criminal aspects. It presented the possibility that parents would no longer have to write off their morally lost offspring; they could submit them to the state for correction instead and later reassimilate them as upstanding members of their families and communities. The father of one ex-inmate, Christopher A., pleaded with Enugu officials to remain involved in his son’s life. Christopher A. was discharged from the Enugu Institution on 1 September 1947 after serving a four-year sentence that began when he was thirteen years old. While at the institution, Christopher studied tailoring as his primary trade and cooking and gardening as his secondary trades. He finished with a primary school education, and his character was judged to be “Fair.” At the end of his sentence, Christopher was granted £4 for tools and gratuity, and sent to live with his father who was reportedly “ready to receive him . . . with much delight” in Issele-Nkpitime.79 Beyond a warm reception, Christopher’s father felt he had little to offer his returning son. Government officials had taken thirteen-year-old Christopher away and trained him; he returned a young man with school leaving certificate, tailoring skills, and £4 to his name, His father thought that the government was in a better position than he was to influence Christopher’s path. Awudu O. wrote this letter to Enugu officials: The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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Sir, I beg you sincerely because I do not want my son to stay idle, because without you I have not body that will assist me. Anything that you know it will benefit my son any kind of work at all. Sir you have know quite well that you have started to train my son that is why I depend upon you to try your possible in any way that you know more over he still under Government at present today . . . Sir you have know [sic] that we are poor people altogether. Sir try and play your part to send me the money if there is not vacant in any Department so that he will start with that little amount.80

It seems that there were few opportunities for Christopher in IsseleNkpitime. By January 1948, four months after his release from Enugu, Christopher had left home again, this time headed for unknown parts in hope of finding productive work.81 Somewhat differently from Amachi and Opetunde’s cases, Christopher Awudu’s case demonstrates that parents of Enugu ex-inmates viewed the government institution as a potential resource for their children. Although the basic function of the Enugu Institution was to incarcerate convicted African boys, it was also designed to equip them with resources for negotiating the colonial economy as either workers or entrepreneurs. Through the reformatory experience, delinquent boys were supposed to be transformed into working contributors to the colonial economy. Practical training in skilled trades was designed to provide boys with legal, independent sources of income. Underlying the Enugu approach was the philosophy that juvenile offenders were not intrinsically corrupt but were themselves victims of inadequate education, poor moral and practical training, and few opportunities to make positive contributions to society. The Enugu experiment tested the hypothesis that given a rural environment, controlled basic and physical education, and practical training in a trade, African juvenile offenders could develop into model modern colonial subjects. The deliberate location of the Enugu Institution away from population centers carried with it a critique of the city and some belief in the therapeutic benefits of rugged rural living. Yet paradoxically, boys at the institution were being trained in occupations that were most viable within the colonial economy, specifically the urban colonial economy. Cities were considered to be natural spaces for skilled employed workers and, perhaps, their families. For the unemployed, underemployed, or 86

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otherwise problematic figures such as juvenile delinquents, cities were spaces of temptation and corruption; the correction of problematic subjects entailed expulsion from urban space and, for redeemable juvenile delinquents, reformation in rural institutions.82 Thus even as the colonial state was devising strategies for stabilizing its urban labor force, modern juvenile welfare theory continued to reflect profoundly contradictory underlying readings of the valence of rural and urban spaces in Africa. GENDER AND THE LIMITS OF MODERN REFORM W O R K : D A D A , T H E G I R L I N M AT E

Modern methods of juvenile reform in the colony reflected both spatial and gender logics. The spatial logic of modern methods extended beyond the construction of rural space as therapeutic and urban space as economic. The reform institution in the colony was additionally, in contrast to ideas of the reformatory in the metropole, a kind of island of normalcy and universality within a larger ocean of pathology and particularity. The gender logic of modern methods is glimpsed through the sole case of a girl who was sentenced to confinement before 1940. Fourteen-year-old Dada, as she was called, was convicted of murder and sentenced to detention at Akure on 22 February 1939. Because there was no Enugu-style institution for girls, Dada’s sentence was carried out at a Catholic convent at Asaba. Her case file gives little indication of what happened to her at the convent. We don’t know if she received schooling while she was there or if she was given any vocational training. What her file reveals and what is most telling about the different experiences of a girl convicted of murder as opposed to a boy, is the process of her release. Dada was released after serving only two years on the recommendation of the Mother Superior who held that she had “reached a marriageable age and should therefore be suitably placed in her own country where her future will be assured.”83 The key condition for Dada’s release was, in effect, sexual maturation. Once Dada was judged to be eligible for marriage, the Mother Superior eagerly released her from state (and church) custody. For male juvenile offenders, turning eighteen signified social and, more important, legal adulthood, which meant that convictions after age eighteen could result in a sentence to an adult prison. Although the ordinance concerning age limitations on juvenile status for purposes of imprisonment was The Era of Imperial Liberalism

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technically gender neutral, Dada’s case shows that in practice, legal juvenile status was both sex specific and context specific. Because the state did not have institutions or standardized practices for reforming girls convicted of serious offenses, it relied on voluntary organizations to carry out this work. Based on her personal evaluation of Dada’s preparedness for married life, the Reverend Mother was empowered to declare her prisoner reformed and free to take up life as a reproductive contributor to society. More than anything else, expectations for the postinstitutional life of juvenile offenders reveal reformers’ visions of society and gender relations. Where boy offenders were released once they were deemed ready to occupy roles as productive workers, girls were released to take up “their assured futures” as reproductive wives and mothers. Long before the emergence of reform institutions, children had been the primary constituencies of other colonial agents, missionaries foremost among them. Medical, spiritual, and educational missionaries had long gathered social and moral capital from healing and educating African children.84 In the juvenile reform institutions, the colonial state bypassed the missions and launched a direct strike against the natures of their African subjects and the polluting influences of their natural home environments by modeling and ritualizing an alternate and supposedly ameliorative culture. In colonial Nigeria, Europeans rarely had prolonged domestic contact with African children, and even more rarely in a kind of custodial relationship. In colonial societies, as Ann Stoler has argued, there was a politics of race making and race policing that relied on the maintenance of racial and generational distance; this distance was most acutely threatened in domestic spheres. “Domestic and familial intimacies,” she writes, “were critical political sites in themselves where racial affiliations were worked out.”85 In juvenile institutions such as the remand home, the approved school, or the industrial school, a certain kind of interracial domestic space was produced. In these spaces that featured African children and European guardians, in the various senses of the word, racial and other kinds of multidirectional affiliations were worked out and produced between inmates and their keepers. The idea of quarantining African juvenile offenders from the larger community as a strategy for producing normative colonial subjects, meaning productive young men, was first put into practice through the Enugu Industrial School for boys. By the start of the Second World 88

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War state institutions had been substantially legitimized among officials as zones of juvenile welfare and juvenile reform work. Juvenile welfare and reform had been embraced as dimensions of government activity, and the growth of urban populations and the heightened visibility of itinerant youth seemed to underscore the need for them.86 The modern child in Africa helped shore up the legitimacy of certain emergent forms of liberal government and, more precisely, the authority of fledgling international institutions such as Save the Children and the League of Nations. With Faulkner’s transfer to Lagos, the Enugu experiment became the practical and philosophical prototype for juvenile welfare work in Lagos.

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3 w Setting Up the Welfare City Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

THE GROWTH OF LAGOS AND JUVENILE D E L I N QU E N C Y I N T H E 1 9 4 0 S The waif and stray is the neophyte of the underworld. With a little instruction he quickly becomes the Artful Dodger to the numerous Fagins operating in Lagos in circumstances singularly reminiscent of Charles Dickens. —D. Faulker and H. J. Savory, “Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos”

Lago s in the 1940s was a rapidly growing city in an empire at war, which meant that not only were people coming and going in and through the city, but they were also coming from and going to far-flung corners of a diverse and unequal world. Although there is no census data for 1940s Lagos, scholars agree that between 1931 and 1950, the population of the city more than doubled.1 Sources record a jump from an estimated 126,000 in 1930 to between 250,000 and 350,000 by 1950.2 Despite the discrepancies in the exact figures for population growth, it is clear that Lagos continued to attract new immigrants throughout the 1940s. The majority of migrants were Yoruba, but the Second World War also drew immigrants from various parts of British West Africa, from Europe, Syria, Lebanon, and other parts of the world.3 Transferring the Enugu Institution model of juvenile reform to Lagos was not a straightforward proposition. In the city, the numbers and varieties of children, their problems, their needs, understandings of the same, and approaches to dealing with them were multiplied. The 90

city, its children, and its existing community of reformers demanded a different vision of juvenile reform: one that included attending to children’s welfare and, especially, one that included Lagos girls. Elite women reformers were crucial to making problem girls visible as such to the state and to constructing hegemonic narratives of the problem girl in 1940s Lagos. The people of Nigeria have not advanced to that stage of civilization where it has become necessary for the state to make provision for its destitute members. The family or clan is still a very vital force and its members look after and support one another, in sickness, old age or any other misfortune.4

Each year from 1931 to 1940, colonial officials recycled the preceding statement in their annual reports on social and economic progress in Nigeria. Despite growing evidence that family support systems were under strain, some of which made its way onto other pages of the annual reports, the state maintained the position that, for the most part, Nigerians did not require state-regulated social support institutions of the kind that existed in Britain. Whether this was because Nigerian societies supposedly faced simpler challenges or because Nigerians did not generally look to the colonial state as a source of relief for their social problems is unclear. But according to reports, except for a handful of “orphans, mental defectives, and destitute old women” in the custody of the Salvation Army and religious groups, the subsistence needs of the greater majority of mentally and physically sound Nigerians with kin were all taken care of by the family or clan.5 This seeming celebration of the vitality of Nigerian families, which was the colonial state’s position, should not be understood simply as a comment on the domestic lives of Nigerians. Assertions that the state did not need to intervene in securing the welfare of marginalized people indicated more about the limited means or interest of the colonial state in addressing social problems than they did about the continued viability of customary social welfare institutions within Nigerian societies. Praiseful statements about the vitality of family support systems masked a relatively constrained economic context. As the depression of the 1930s progressed, diminishing numbers of Nigerians were able to endure on family support, individual initiative, and private charity alone. In the largely agrarian southern provinces, there were many indicators that clans and families could not withstand the pressures of population growth, the Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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economic depression, and decreasing profits on agricultural goods. One indicator of the stress on customary social supports in agricultural communities was the large population of immigrant young people in the cities. The 1930 census counted over 132,000 people under fifteen years old in Lagos, fully 40 percent of Lagos’s total population.6 That a significant proportion of these children were immigrants to the city indicated that rural families were becoming fragmented. School-age children were no longer unquestioned economic contributors to their rural households. The high cost of clothing, housing, and educating young people made them an increasing burden for cash-strapped agricultural households. As the wage labor and war industries capital of the southern region, Lagos attracted young immigrants looking for work and an education. Many new Lagosians migrated from regional agricultural communities that were incorporated into the war effort in paradoxical ways. For example, many soldiers were conscripted from crop-producing areas, which led to a decrease in agricultural productivity in the region. Lagos was not a significant crop-producing territory.7 Much of the city’s food was imported from the mainland and further inland areas. During the Second World War, the colonial administration tried to manage the regional food economy by instituting a number of crop-production and price-control measures, the most despised being the infamous Pullen Scheme.8 The scheme, which was first launched in 1941, introduced food-price controls to contain inflation in the prices of staple food items during the war, brought on as a consequence of decreased food production in agricultural areas. The scheme seemed to only exacerbate the problem and was blamed for price inflation in Lagos and the proliferation of a black market in staple foods such as gari and salt. The paradox of wartime food price control schemes was that they created disincentives for farmers to produce the very products that the price-control schemes were supposed to manage and distribute. Farming became an unprofitable business, and additional farmhands became a financial liability. With the weakening of Nigeria’s agricultural base, many left the farms for the cities. Alongside economic forces driving people away from the farms, there were lures pulling them into the city. In the Southern Provinces, for example, the building of new infrastructure to support the war effort was centered on Lagos and its ports, attracting job seekers from throughout the region. An inquiry into the rising cost of living in Lagos 92

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found that “large numbers of workers have been attracted to Lagos for defense and similar works. . . . In general there is evidence of the intensification of those causes which had led to the pre-war level of unemployment and overcrowding.”9 The report attributed the surge in migration to Lagos to “a natural human desire for economic opportunity and social betterment,” which led rural dwellers to migrate to the larger Protectorate towns and “the centres of government activity—Lagos.”10 The report recommended remedies to the problems of overpopulation, overcrowding, and unemployment: “Industrialization should not be concentrated near Lagos. Similarly central and higher educational establishments should be dispersed into the Protectorate.”11 For good measure, it was recommended that there should be “care taken to ensure that Lagos educational facilities do not [advance] unnecessarily far ahead of the Protectorate thus providing further cause for immigration.”12 Lagos employers were implored to deny employment to casual laborers from the Protectorate of Nigeria unless “their return thereto is guaranteed.”13 For individuals in search of adventure, experience, or income, Lagos seemed the place to be. The most mobile and employable populations were children and young people. Young migrants were leaving the rural areas to evade tradition and taxation, and traveling to the cities in search of work and education. A number of wartime government regulations had made agricultural work progressively less profitable. Included among these measures was the establishment of a monopsony through the West African Produce Board, which artificially depressed the price of cocoa to a bare minimum. The produce control board even went as far as destroying entire crops, thereby squandering the time and labor of thousands of Nigerians.14 In Lagos, the young migrants met with Asians, Europeans, and foreign Africans. They met with young people like themselves who were newly embarking on the search for fortune and adventure, and soldiers who were returning home from fields of war. The New Lagosians of the 1940s were mostly young, little educated, and poor. The colonial and Lagosian elite saw the swarming of cities by people who were abandoning the rural areas as an indicator of the erosion of rural life, traditional society, and customary social controls. Once inside Lagos, young migrants assumed or were assigned new identities based on how they fit into Lagos society. Some disappeared into private compounds, often as houseboys or housegirls to support the social and economic progress of Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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their employers. Others worked in the streets, becoming members of the visible underclass. In the larger context of twentieth-century Southern Nigeria, child labor was an unremarkable aspect of social life. In agricultural areas, children helped with the cultivation, processing, and marketing of agricultural goods to the extent that their physical abilities would permit. They learned craftwork as members of craftworking lineages. Children in town and agricultural areas worked normally in their households, cleaning, cooking, fetching water, and carrying whatever they could. For the most part, young immigrants to Lagos had limited or no access to wage employment. They worked as houseboys, housegirls, and hawkers, as apprentices to various craftsmen and tradesmen, as assistants to bus drivers and others in exchange for room, board, tuition, or training.15 Young people also survived by begging, by giving performances, by apprenticing themselves to thieves, by forming gangs, working as pimps, touts, barmaids, or personal assistants to prostitutes. There were many different kinds of occupations juveniles could perform, and Lagos was full of working children. Despite their numbers, the large population of juvenile and adolescent immigrants was not the population group that immediately came to mind when officials thought about rural to urban migration. The normative native immigrant was part of the “virile element,”16 a man between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, suspected to be a “defaulting ‘bush’ tax-payer”17 on the run from rural tax collectors. Officials responded to this type of immigrant with mixed feelings. On one hand, he was evading the law and depressing tax revenues for the state. On the other, he was an asset to rapidly growing urban spaces, bringing with him the health and vigor of the countryside, which raised life expectancy statistics in the cities. Ambivalence about the normative urban immigrant echoed colonial ambivalence about the city itself. On one hand, the city was the natural dwelling of wage-earning civilized men. On the other hand, it had degenerative effects on people, enough to necessitate a regular infusion of purer, more virile, less degenerated rural stock. The normative rural to urban immigrant was at least ten years older than 40 percent of Lagos’s residents. Children and young people up to age twenty-four were officially overlooked as a significant part of the immigrant labor group because of their youth. The only attention paid to younger people in Lagos was in education returns that recorded the slow climb of literacy rates and in reports on 94

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the progress of the Scout movement in Nigeria. Before 1940, children and young people were conceptualized primarily as students. To the extent that they fell outside the student category, they lost their sole positive political identity. They were generally not regarded as workers, household providers, or household contributors, although they very often were. Urban population growth brought on by the demands of the Second World War heightened government anxiety about the restlessness of colonial subjects. During the war, Nigerians were asked to contribute manpower, produce, industrial raw materials, and cash to the defense of Britain and its allies.18 In return, they received price controls, declining profits, and a thinning male population where they were most needed—on rural farms. Wartime constraints in rural areas combined with infrastructure development in key port cities such as Lagos attracted large numbers of the underemployed and unemployed seeking their fortunes in the colonial government’s stronghold. Lagosians, expatriate volunteers, and colonial officials all noted rising numbers of young vagrants in the city. Colonial officials feared having to divide manpower between pacifying subjects within the empire and fighting enemies abroad. Prior experience with the West Indies made the prospect of just such a two-sided conflict quite real. In 1936, W. M. Macmillan predicted violent consequences for the British planter class if the wretched social conditions of black workers in Trinidad were not immediately addressed. His predictions were confirmed when labor riots racked the Lesser Antilles and Jamaica throughout 1937.19 Working men without work and men with work but inadequate compensation posed the most vocal threats to colonial governments. By 1938, the West Indian Royal Commission was set up to make sense of the riots and present recommendations for their prevention in the future. Building on the West Indian crises, empire-wide schemes for the social development of colonial subjects were devised to prevent a repetition of the West Indian riots in other places, notably Africa.20 The first major scheme was the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act supplied metropolitan funds for a range of development projects, including social welfare, throughout the British Empire. Nigerian development projects were detailed in the TenYear Plan for Social and Economic Progress in Nigeria, and included health, education, rural development, police, prisons, and other more Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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detailed concerns. Social welfare, one of the most underfunded yet broadly defined development projects, was a catchall category for all “activities auxiliary to the work of specialist departments.”21 It is against the backdrop of urbanization, labor unrest, anticolonialism, and demographic shifts that Donald Faulkner was able to rapidly build up the social welfare department, with its particular focus on children and young people in Lagos. In the rainy season of 1941, Faulkner was a young juvenile reformer based at the Enugu Institution for delinquent boys who was waiting for a ship in Lagos to take him on home leave to the UK. Faulkner faced the prospect of a two- to three-week wait in Lagos before he could complete his journey. Victor Mabb, the director of prisons and Faulkner’s supervisor at the Enugu Institution, suggested that he might want to fill his weeks of waiting with investigating “the problem of Boma boys and juvenile delinquents in Lagos.”22 Faulkner enlisted H. J. Savory, the education officer in Lagos, to collaborate with him on the project and following their investigations the two produced a report titled “Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos.” Despite the expansiveness of its title, the report basically amounted to a four-part taxonomy of delinquent boys featuring “the over twelve group,” “the under twelve group,” “the delinquent adolescent,” and “the Boma boy.” The boma boy, they wrote, was “one who acts as a guide or a tout for houses of ill-fame.”23 Delinquent adolescents were “vagrant boys who are living by crime” and who “after several convictions . . . give up hope and accept themselves as outcasts from society.”24 The over-twelve boys were generally “inexperienced youths who for one reason or another find themselves destitute on the streets.”25 They were said to “wander about, living from hand to mouth,” until necessity and opportunity led them to become thieves, boma boys, or some similarly more hardened delinquent.26 The final category of delinquents was the under-twelve group. “This group,” Faulkner and Savory found, “is composed of children left stranded in Lagos . . . truants from school, runaways from home and boys brought to Lagos by older people for the express purpose of being trained as thieves. They live by begging, petty theft, and are in poor physical condition. Some are tired pitiful creatures of as young as six years.”27 The report may be less interesting for its findings than for the research methodology that underlay it. In order to discover each of the four types of Lagos delinquents, Faulkner and Savory consulted with police officers and with reformers at the Salvation Army Home and the 96

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Green Triangle Club, two overextended voluntary agencies that had supplied the only residential reform institutions for delinquent boys in interwar Lagos. Faulkner and Savory also interviewed hundreds of boys to assess their subjective understandings of the forces that had led them to an early life of crime. Police officers assembled approximately four hundred boys aged fourteen and under, who were “found sleeping out of doors under Carter Bridge, market places, Marinas, wharves or in the shelter of public buildings,”28 for the two men to interview. “Owing to the large number of boys,” Faulkner remarked, “there appeared to be no difficulty in obtaining them and in all cases they came voluntarily.”29 Through what must have seemed like a mysterious and intimidating process for most of the boys, the researchers conducted their work. In the presence of Faulkner, Savory, the arresting officer who may also have served as a translator, and possibly other adults, each boy was asked to “give particulars of himself and relate the circumstances leading to his present position.”30 The police officer was then consulted, in full view of the boy, for corroboration of his story. Younger boys were said to make “little attempt to give false statements,” but some of the older boys “distorted their stories to some extent to make their own case.”31 From all available evidence, Faulkner and Savory’s interest in the input of Lagosians stopped with the staff of the Green Triangle Hostel, the Salvation Army, and the delinquent boys themselves. The researchers did not systematically solicit comments from members of the general Lagos public or from African-led and -run reformist organizations in the city. This last oversight perpetrated two instances of colonial ignorance. First, it erased young girls, who, although a minority in the juvenile delinquent population, did nonetheless exist. Second, by ignoring African reformers, Faulkner silenced the voices of African women who had long been a central presence in Lagos’s reformist circles. In the Faulkner and Savory report, we find a turn away from privileging native informants as guides to understanding colonial societies. Neither deep knowledge of local cultures nor the input and preferences of native authority figures was considered to be of any special use to the work of governing Lagos delinquents. We also find a turn away from anthropology as the premier discipline of colonial knowledge and efficient colonial governance. In place of anthropology, the science of social work with its more universalist underpinnings was enlisted to construct and correct the maladjusted child in Lagos. Concurrently, Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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the city was constructed as a cultural terra nullis, a place with no dominant deep native cultures, no native authority, and therefore no limitations on the behavior of juvenile delinquents. Bureaucratically speaking, the city was an island of direct rule within an ocean of indirect rule. As such, it was possible to reimagine it as an enclosed space, comparable to what the Enugu Institution had been. The report, “Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos,” was sent to highlevel colonial administrators, including Victor Mabb, the director of prisons; J. A. Maybin, the chief secretary to the government; and W. E. Hunt, the commissioner of the colony. Faulkner and Savory’s primary recommendation was that first offenders and destitute boys should be removed from the streets as quickly as possible to prevent their being corrupted by more experienced delinquents or by adult criminals. For this to happen, a hostel should be built to house children while investigations were made into their backgrounds. Church missions and tribal unions in Lagos, as well as district officials outside Lagos, were to assist with the investigations. Following investigations, boys who had been brought into Lagos from other parts of the country could be returned to their communities. Boys who were from Lagos would be returned to their parents or guardians, who would be admonished to take better care of their children. Faulkner and Savory additionally recommended that native Lagosian delinquents, most of whom had some elementary education, should be provided “post school vocational training” as a strategy for busying them during their impressionable adolescent years and hopefully reducing the future criminal population. A government office that was specifically dedicated to reducing juvenile delinquency could coordinate all of this work, Faulkner and Savory maintained. Mabb’s comments on the report were extremely enthusiastic. “There can be no argument,” he wrote, “against such suggestions as an organisation to deal with the children concurrent with the action taken by the police; a hostel for housing children during investigations of their cases; the co-opting of Missions, Native Administrations, Tribal Unions, responsible Africans, and,” most importantly, “the appointment of a trained social worker to organize and co-ordinate the various efforts.”32 The urgency of the situation, Mabb further argued, demanded a determined governmental response and was too serious to be left to voluntary organizations. “The prevention of crime, from whatever source it springs,” was seen as “essentially a function of Government which should be directed and controlled by Government.”33 98

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Voluntary organizations, even those supported by government, could only make “spasmodic efforts” since their staff “can only devote their spare time to the work.”34 The Salvation Army was a special target of Mabb’s opprobrium. Since around the mid-1920s, the Salvation Army had been operating a boys’ institution on the mainland in Yaba. The Salvation Army Home was apparently a great source of annoyance for Mabb, who complained that “for sixteen years Government has made an annual grant of £1000 toward the maintenance of this institution and all the Salvation Army can show for it is a badly designed and unsuitably sited institution which, according to recognized health standards, is hard put to accommodate forty boys. When I think of what could have been accomplished with £16, 000 under practical and common-sense management I grudge them every penny of it.”35 The Salvation Army home may or may not have suffered from overcrowding and financial mismanagement as Mabb asserted, but his polemic against the organization and voluntary social work in general must be read with awareness that Mabb may have been deliberately trying to enhance Faulkner’s image to Lagos administrators in order to present Faulkner as the solution to a flawed volunteer-dominated system of juvenile welfare and reform. Whether Mabb genuinely felt as resentful of the Salvation Army as he sought to project, he still used the case of the Salvation Army Home as an example of the pitfalls of leaving the work of trained government experts to voluntary organizations. Faulkner and Savory’s report held a similar though less forceful recommendation for government involvement. In it they included a reference to the low cost of food in Lagos and how this would help keep down the cost of maintaining a hostel. They recommended that missions, tribal unions, and native authorities be enlisted to help with investigations into children’s backgrounds as a cost-saving measure. Their attempt to persuade their readers by highlighting cost-cutting opportunities in their report suggests that they had a bureaucratic audience in mind, which might have been wary of new expenditures. Like Mabb, Faulkner and Savory also imagined that government, and not voluntary organizations, would be primarily responsible for addressing the problem of juvenile delinquency in Lagos. The commissioner of the colony, G. B. Williams, was generally in agreement with the spirit of the Faulkner-Savory report, inasmuch as it emphasized preventing juveniles from becoming delinquents, involving various segments of Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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the community in juvenile welfare work, and envisioning investments in delinquency prevention as future savings in crime control. Yet Williams did list a number of critiques of its recommendations. He disagreed with the strategy of returning Lagos delinquents to their families because, he argued, “if they are returned to their homes they will still be surrounded by the influences which have led or driven them astray.”36 On the point about government taking primary responsibility for juvenile reform work, Williams was again at odds with Mabb and the investigators. He pointed out that the Green Triangle Club was just concluding a seven-year-long process of establishing a social welfare center for young people.37 The proposed center enjoyed the support of Sir Adeyemo Alakija, a prominent Lagosian attorney and businessman, who was providing the land that the center would be built on; Police Commissioner R. W. H. Ballantine, whose staff would round up the inmates; and some of the tribal unions in Lagos, who promised to help with repatriating their less distinguished countrypeople back to their homelands.38 Given all this cooperation between traditional and modern elites, colonial officials and the tribal unions, there seemed to be no need for a distinct government-led juvenile reform project. In the final analysis, a compromise was reached between the proponents of a government-led approach to juvenile reform and colony administrators who favored placing Lagos’s juvenile delinquency problems in the hands of voluntary groups and tribal unions. Faulkner was released from his duties in Enugu and asked to return to Lagos following his leave.39 Lagos administration was not yet convinced of government’s centrality to juvenile welfare work in the township, but it had incorporated someone who was. This would prove to be significant for Faulkner’s relationships with Lagos women’s voluntary social reform groups. When Faulkner returned to Lagos, the first three projects he established were a matrimonial conciliation center, a reformatory, and a model boys’ club to demonstrate the benefits of associational life and citizenship to young people.40 The last two, which, unlike the matrimonial conciliation center, are explicitly concerned with juvenile welfare issues, were both designed with only boys in mind. Whether regarded as “sophisticated and cynical” boma boys, delinquent adolescents, or young children more in need of protection than punishment, problem youth were initially assumed to be boys.41 Girls in Lagos did not feature in any of the initial conversations around creating a government office to address juvenile problems. Girls made 100

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no appearance whatsoever in the Faulkner-Savory report and they figured awkwardly in Faulkner’s understandings of juvenile delinquents, what their internal motivations were, and how they could be reformed into productive members of society. Years later addressing an audience of penal reformers in London, Faulkner likened the boys of “Outcast Lagos” to iconic figures pulled from the cultural landscape of metropolitan boyhood.42 As the epigraph that opens this chapter illustrates, they were Dickensian characters, Olivers and Artful Dodgers. Faulkner admired them; he saw them as resourceful and courageous, relying on camaraderie and their wits to survive in the city. The delinquent boy was subject to none and loyal to his friends; he lived freely off the land, or at least the city. He was strong, savvy, and agile; representing a kind of juvenile urban cowboy, he was undomesticated. Wayward yet fundamentally innocent, delinquent boys in Lagos were constructed as profoundly familiar children of the modern world. As modern children, they exhibited a natural love of freedom, play, and camaraderie. They were innocent yet resourceful, vulnerable and to be pitied rather than inherently criminal and to be scorned. One of the chief problems of African, particularly Yoruba juvenile delinquents in Lagos, Faulkner argued, was that they were growing up in a society where “childhood is not to be a period of protection and shelter, while the young learns though play and is taught through the experience of others, but is to have responsibility thrust on it at the earliest possible moment.”43 In this alternate universe where attitudes toward childhood were “fundamentally different from that existing in other civilizations,” childhood was viewed as “a time when children must curb their desire to dream and romanticize the world around them.”44 Given this evidently hostile ideological context, eliminating the juvenile delinquency problem in Lagos would require that government “popularize modern ideas on the upbringing of children . . . to produce an awareness in the community of the needs of children and their normal difficulties of adjustment to the demands of society as they grow up.”45 The particularity of the Yoruba child in colonial Lagos was thus that he or she was surrounded by a society of adults that was unfamiliar with the latest findings on the psychology of children and was, therefore, unable to effectively usher children into society. The Lagosian child was constructed as being like children elsewhere and everywhere, a universal child who would respond to the same principles and methods of juvenile reform that were applied to children in Europe. Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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P L A C I N G P R O B L E M G I R L S O N T H E W E L FA R E AG E N D A : T E N S E A L L I A N C E S B E T W E E N T H E W E L FA R E O F F I C E A N D T H E L AG O S W O M E N ’ S L E AG U E

Members of the Lagos Women’s League, which had worked on welfare issues related to women and girls for decades, could not fail to comment on the unequal attention the state devoted to problem boys and problem girls. Over time this situation would change but only at the initiative of Lagos women’s groups who observed the systematic marginalization of girls and their needs by the emerging social welfare office. From the very beginning of his tenure as chief welfare officer, Faulkner collided with Lagos women reformers over his office’s policies regarding problem girls. At a league meeting that took place shortly after Faulkner’s return to Lagos, group members noted that “opportunities for work have been given boys & men but not women & girls.”46 They stressed “an urgent need for Government to establish work centres for women and girls, literate and illiterate, where they would be able to earn a living.”47 At the same time, league members called again for a prohibition on hawking by girls younger than thirteen years of age, “owing to the . . . immoral practices prevalent among hawkers.”48 The economically deleterious effects of a prohibition on hawking were to be offset by the opening of the work center where both literate girls, who were primary school graduates, and illiterate girls, who had not completed primary education, could hope to find legal wage-paying jobs.49 Back in 1926, the league had proposed measures to regulate both problem girls and boys. But by 1942 they looked squarely at girls. Three things changed between 1926 and 1942 to narrow the league’s focus from both problem boys and problem girls to problem girls alone. First, Lagos in the early 1940s was a port city in a British empire at war. It served as a transfer point for British ships and military personnel during the Second World War. This meant that there was a large and visible population of foreign men in the city whose sexual desires and willingness and ability to pay for sex seemed to present a new factor in the corruption of girls in Lagos. Second, the colonial state did not display clear interest in girls in Lagos. For state officials, the normative juvenile delinquent and the normative child in need of care and protection, both on their way to becoming dangerous and expensive criminals, were boys. By contrast, girls seemed to pose a negligible threat to persons and property, which made them a lower priority for government spending. Furthermore, as the case of Dada from the 102

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preceding chapter shows, problem girls were expected to be a problem for the state only until they got married. At that point they were expected to disappear from public view into the responsible custody of their husbands’ households. A third crucial factor in the league’s shifting attention to girls was related to demographic change in the city. Migration to Lagos from hinterland areas increased during and after the economic depression of the 1930s. Fluctuations in earnings in the regional agricultural sector and the expansion of the war-related economy brought new migrants to Lagos. Since girls and women were largely closed out of the wage labor economy, many worked in the streets and in the markets, making them a visible growing population. To summarize, the new foreign military presence in Lagos, the visible growing population of immigrant girls in Lagos, and the colonial state’s apparent lack of interest in girls all led elite women in Lagos to train their attention on girls, particularly girl hawkers. Faulkner supported the league’s proposed ban on hawking but not the work center idea. Discussions regarding the work center had not even begun to address the details of exactly how the center would operate or how many it would serve before Faulkner moved to stall the entire affair. Commenting to the commissioner of the colony, he wrote, “Mrs. O. has a bee in her bonnet re this. While I agree more employment will have to be given to educated girls, her idea of Govt.-owned work center can hardly be considered.”50 Taken together, Faulkner’s support for the ban coupled with his opposition to the work center would have created a situation in which “illiterate” girls, who formed the majority of girls in Lagos, would have been excluded from government-facilitated employment programs as well as being prohibited from earning their livelihood through the most available means. Instead of a work center, Faulkner hoped to direct the women’s efforts toward establishing a different kind of institution—a residential hostel for problem girls.51 Toward that end, Faulkner convened a coalition of voluntary social welfare groups, which would be known as the Women’s Welfare Council. The Women’s Welfare Council was composed of staff members from the Colony Welfare Office and the Salvation Army, as well as members of the Lagos Women’s League. After 1944, a new organization known as the Nigerian Women’s Party, whose membership overlapped with that of the Lagos Women’s League, also took part in Women’s Welfare Council meetings. It appears from the sources that Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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certain individuals may have been designated by each of the component groups to be representatives to the council. According to its first secretary, the Women’s Welfare Council had sixteen members;52 a compilation of various WWC records produced between 1942 and 1944 finds that Mrs. Oyinkan Abayomi, Mrs. B. Ajose, Mrs. A. Alakija, Mrs. Brucknor, Mrs. M. Butler, Mrs. C. E. M. Cadle, Ms. Millicent Douglas, Mrs. H. M. Ekemode, Mrs. H. V. Johnson, Mrs. C. O. Jones, Mrs. Charlotte Obasa, Mrs. G. Shackleford, Mrs. R. Timson, Brigadier Bigwood of the Salvation Army, Mr. Akinwande Jones, Mr. BankoleWright, and Donald Faulkner of the welfare office were all active on the council at various points in time.53 Archival records suggest that the majority of council members were elite women reformers, many of whom had some background in the field of education or in child welfare work. Starting with the infant mortality campaign of 1901, Charlotte Obasa had long experience directing voluntary social welfare projects for the colonial government in Lagos. Miss Aduke Alakija had completed a degree in social science at the London School of Economics and was pursuing further training in social welfare work.54 Along with some of her associates on the Women’s Welfare Council, Mrs. Cadle and Mrs. Abayomi, Miss Alakija also served on the Lagos Juvenile Employment Exchange, which was a committee of influential Lagosians that was charged with placing school leavers in wage-paying jobs or in apprenticeships that might evolve into wage-paying jobs.55 Another member of the Women’s Welfare Council, Mrs. Oyinkan Abayomi, was in many ways Charlotte Obasa’s successor as the leading figure in Lagos elite women’s groups. She was a committed educator and an activist for girls’ education. Abayomi was born in 1897 and raised as the only child of Sir Kitoyi Ajasa and Lady Lucretia Cornelia Olayinka Ajasa of the Williams family in Abeokuta. Her father, who had been knighted in 1929, was a successful lawyer, a member of the Nigerian Legislative Council, and founder of two newspapers, The Standard and The Nigerian Pioneer. Her mother was a graduate of the Wilton House School in Reading, England, and an accomplished pianist.56 As a child, Abayomi attended the Anglican Girls’ Seminary School in Lagos. Her biographer noted that during the day, she attended Anglican Girls’ with her cousins and friends, and in the evenings, she often came home to a house full of music, boarders, and prominent figures in Lagos political circles. In 1909, when she was about twelve years old, Oyinkan followed the path traveled by many women of the educated 104

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elite class and left Nigeria to study in England.57 While in England, Abayomi first attended Ryford Hall in Warwickshire, where she studied music, drama, and literature. After Ryford, she attended the Royal Academy of London’s Associated College of Music for approximately two years and finally returned to Lagos in 1920. During the decade that she was away, some progress had been made in the area of girls’ education. Her alma mater, renamed the Anglican Girls’ School, had been expanded to include a secondary school, and she returned there as an instructor of music and physical education.58 Besides being an educator, Lady Abayomi, as she would be known after 1951 when her husband was knighted, was a staunch proponent of the Girl Guides movement, a female equivalent to the Boy Scouts. She served the Girl Guides in various capacities from the 1920s until she retired her position as chief commissioner of the Nigerian Girl Guides Association in 1982.59 She was also instrumental in the 1927 founding of Queen’s College, the first nondenominational government-run secondary school for girls in Nigeria.60 She was a trustee of the Lagos Ladies College Fund, which granted young women scholarships to attend Queen’s College.61 The composition of the Women’s Welfare Council reflected the dominance of elite women in the Lagos social welfare scene. It also reflected the Pan-African subjectivity of Lagos elites. The council’s first secretary, for example, was H. Millicent Douglas, M.B.E., a businesswoman and journalist from the Caribbean. She had been born into an elite political family in Grenada where her father was the last black politician elected to Grenada’s Old House of Assembly.62 Typical of girls of her class throughout the empire, Douglas received her higher education in England. There she met her peers from other parts of the West Indies and Africa. Her Pan-African consciousness and connections would have been formed through the various organizations that she joined in England. These included the UNIA, or Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Union of Students of African Descent, the African Progress Union, and possibly, the West African Students’ Union. In England, she discovered Nnamdi Azikiwe’s leftist newspaper, the West African Pilot, and negotiated a three-year contract with the paper that brought her to Lagos in 1939. A brief biography introduced Douglas to readers of the West African Pilot as a social worker and “a well known feature writer of over 20 years standing,” who had contributed to The Negro World and who had been an associate editor on The African Sentinel, among other publications.63 Douglas was Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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an anticolonialist, a Pan-Africanist, and an advocate for women and children. She supported campaigns for mass education in Nigeria and went on to be the founding editor of the Children’s Own Newspaper, a weekly government-funded children’s magazine that ran from 1944 into the early 1950s.64 In short, she was an elite Pan-Africanist who might have understood herself to be something of an expert on children’s welfare and, therefore, socially, intellectually, and professionally at least the equal of welfare office staff members. The WWC’s first meeting took place on 5 October 1942 at the Kakawa Street home of Donald Faulkner. That day the members agreed to open a hostel for girl hawkers and other girls in moral danger. To do so, they could either build a residence or buy one, and they decided on the latter. An expeditionary team of three, comprising Faulkner, Mrs. Bucknor, and Mrs. Shackleford, another member of the West Indian community in Lagos, went to see several residences but returned to the group without having reached consensus on any.65 One of the points of debate within the search committee had to do with how much money government was prepared to commit toward purchasing a girls’ hostel. Council members claimed to be “working in the dark,” as they had “no idea of the amount Government has—for this purpose.”66 A second heated point of debate had to do with where the girls’ hostel would be located. Writing to the commissioner of the colony, Millicent Douglas reported the council’s dismay with the failed search for a suitable girls’ hostel. Marble Hall, the building favored by Faulkner, was considered “unsuitable” because it was located near “the threestory CMS building on the one side, and the two-story building on the other side.”67 It was also “opposite to the Grand Hotel,” where taxi drivers congregated and “the language of the crowd” would be within earshot of the girls staying at the hostel.68 Hotels, taxi drivers, male students from the Church Missionary Society school, and foul language were precisely the types of moral dangers from which council members thought the hostel was supposed to shield girls. It would not do, they felt, to have girls living in close proximity to all of these vices. When the search committee returned with no consensus on a site, the women held Faulkner responsible. The affair of the Lagos Girls’ Hostel was one of the first indications of status conflicts in the WWC. Douglas’s letter to the commissioner not only stated that the council seemed to be working in the dark but also went on to charge Faulkner with being the weak link in communications between the commissioner and the 106

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WWC. In effect, Douglas negatively evaluated Faulkner’s work performance and reported him to his superior officer.69 Faulkner’s responses to Douglas’s letters provide further evidence that status issues were central to the dynamics of the WWC alliance.70 In one memorandum, Faulkner wrote, “I commented elsewhere that Miss Douglas had some scheme afoot but that I didn’t know what it was. I do now. She has found me a little unsympathetic and is now trying to ‘bye-pass’ me. The letter on reverse is not from the W.W.C., nor had it been authorized by them—it is a purely personal effort on the part of the Hon. Sec. . . . I doubt if Miss D has the authority to [text illegible] on to the W.W.C. The African members will know better than I—they spend [the] best part of their lives attending committees which they make into an end in themselves.”71 Perhaps, as Faulkner claimed, Douglas’s views did not represent those of the other women reformers on the council, and she simply had a personal mysterious ax to grind with him. But this is not likely. Even more than the previous example, Faulkner’s own descriptions of the climate of WWC meetings is telling of the workings of ideas of status and power in interactions between the women reformers and colonial social workers. In a report to the commissioner, Faulkner wrote, “From minutes passed at the last meeting it was obvious that Mr. Bankole-Wright and myself . . . are considered to be not important. The opinion was expressed that we should not [serve as] members of the Council but should only [provide] consultation.”72 Faulkner’s note indicates that regardless of their race or gender, colonial social workers were marginalized in WWC meetings; they were considered “not important” and may have found themselves relegated to playing a consultative role. Status conflicts plagued the WWC because both Faulkner and the women reformers expected to dictate welfare policy and practice relevant to Lagos girls. Faulkner was not willing to defer executive authority to the women, and the women were not willing to defer to him; consequently, tension riddled their interactions. WWC members regarded Faulkner as lower in the colonial social hierarchy than they were. Exchanges between Mrs. Obasa and Commissioner Williams or Mrs. Abayomi and Commissioner Hook, directly or through their representatives, were understood by women’s group members to be exchanges among social, if not yet political, equals. Most women’s group members were in their forties and above. They came from highly gerontocratic societies in which relative age was a salient marker of Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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social status.73 As a comparatively younger man in his thirties and a civil servant, Faulkner would not have been regarded as a social peer. The women reformers’ actions suggest that they considered government officials to be present at WWC meetings primarily in order to execute their ideas. Council members felt free to suggest what work the welfare office should do, what properties government should buy, whom government should hire as social welfare workers, and so on. Frustrated, Faulkner found that “the tendency has been to make impossible statements and jump to conclusions and then blame Govt. for everything. The Council at the moment meets once a month, passes resolutions, and expects Govt. to take over and enforce the findings.”74 It is clear from Faulkner’s records that he never intended for the Women’s Welfare Council to become independent of his control, yet that is precisely what happened. He designed the organization to be a civic auxiliary of the Colony Welfare Office and was frustrated at the women’s blatant refusal to conform to his plans. “It was my hope,” he wrote the commissioner, “that they would through this organization attempt to educate the public on questions of social importance, e.g. the care and treatment of children (not necessarily babies) and try to sway public opinion, build it up on the side of any agency work against evil.”75 The council’s mandate in Faulkner’s mind was restricted to propagating messages about child welfare and child rearing, which followed the juvenile welfare agenda laid out by the state. Faulkner imagined that the welfare office would be able to use the women’s groups to filter their messages to the masses and he had specific ideas for how the council should perform this work. “The Council would need from time to time, to concentrate on special points and after investigation, produce reports. Such facts as were thus gleaned could be used to advantage.”76 In short, Faulkner imagined that the voluntary women reformers would supply expert colonial social workers with information on the natives that the state could then use in shaping and implementing social policy. Women reformers had a more elevated vision of their role in the structures of governance. Faulkner’s experiences working with the women dashed his expectations, later leading him to conclude that “perhaps this conception is too abstract or too arduous.”77 Quite clearly, Faulkner had gotten himself involved with a group of women who did not subscribe to received colonial gender or racial hierarchies. Elite women reformers in the Women’s Welfare Council had no intention 108

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of becoming agents of either the welfare office or Donald Faulkner and seemed oblivious to the notion that this might have been their appropriate role. Relations between Faulkner and the women’s group members deteriorated steadily and ultimately led Faulkner to withdraw from the WWC alliance in 1943, leaving Mr. S. Bankole-Wright, a Harvard-educated Nigerian social worker with the responsibility of liaising between the welfare office and the women reformers.78 “MODERN METHODS” OF GIRL SAVING: THE CHILDREN AND YOUNG PERSON’S ORDINANCE OF 1943

In 1943, a new piece of legislation, the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance provided the welfare office with a larger measure of independence from voluntary groups.79 The ordinance was significant for two major reasons. First, it signaled a shift in colonial policy toward greater state intervention in the disciplining of Nigerian children and young people. Second, the ordinance established new legal institutions and procedures for transacting exchanges between the colonial state and young Lagosians. The Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943 was intended to “make provision for the welfare of the young and the treatment of young offenders and for the establishment of juvenile courts.”80 Put differently, the ordinance was to create mechanisms like the juvenile court to manage problem children according to the most modern principles for juvenile reform work for the time. But the question of precisely how the concept of welfare of the young was to be understood, how welfare would be delivered to young colonial subjects, and who among parents, citizens, and the state was most empowered to make determinations about the welfare of the young—all became topics for argument and foci of struggle between Lagos residents and the colonial state. These contentious questions found concrete expression in the Street Trading Regulations, a subsection of the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance. The 1943 Street Trading Regulations were the first of a string of laws passed in the latter half of the twentieth century that would make itinerant trading or hawking by children a punishable offense.81 The street trading regulations prohibited all children under fourteen from selling petty goods in the street and from “playing, singing, or performing, for profit.” Girls ages fourteen through sixteen were subject to further restrictions dictated by the time of day, their relationships to their employers, and the social geography of the city. Girls ages Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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fourteen through sixteen were prohibited from hawking, unless they could supply evidence on demand that they were working for their parents and not for a guardian, employer, or other nonsanguinarily related person. All children were prohibited from hawking after 6:30 p.m., and “young females” were specifically prohibited from hawking in the central business district, heavily European neighborhoods, and in the vicinity of bars, brothels, and military barracks—in short, wherever military men or foreign men were easily found in the town.82 The ordinance thus sought to impede sexual contact between young girls and men, and interracial contact between Africans and Europeans. Penalties for violating the street trading regulations could be applied to either children or their adults and could take the form of fines of up to £50, imprisonment for up to six months, or a combination of fines and imprisonment.83 Hawking, like market trading in most of Yorubaland, was a largely female-gendered activity.84 Accordingly, although the language of the regulations was gender-neutral, Lagos residents understood very well that the street trading regulations were effectively a ban on hawking by girls. The most important new institution created through the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance was the juvenile court, which was supported by its auxiliaries—approved schools, hostels, a probation system, remand homes, and juvenile prisons. Some of these auxiliaries, most notably the juvenile prisons, had been in existence fully a decade before the first juvenile courts were even opened.85 The Children and Young Person’s Ordinance was not the first of its kind in Nigeria’s colonial history. It built on the Native Children (Custody and Reformation) Ordinance of 1917, which in turn built on the Native Children (Custody and Reformation) Ordinance of 1899.86 The 1899 version of the ordinance applied to two categories of native children, defined as anyone under the age of fifteen who had at least one African, not necessarily Nigerian, parent. The first group comprised children who had been convicted of having broken a law of the colony, and the other comprised children who were considered to be orphans or those who had been “removed by force or fraud” from their relatives. Paraphrased as an ordinance to “make provision for the care and custody of neglected or deserted children,” it was mainly concerned with identifying what to do with children who broke Lagos Colony laws or who appeared to not have any custodian. The ordinance provided that such children would either be placed in the custody of a 110

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Christian mission station, a government worker, or a private person, for the duration of a term that the governor of the colony might set.87 The Native Children (Custody and Reformation) Ordinance of 1917 was the immediate precursor to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance. Like the 1899 ordinance, it essentially laid out the procedures for apprehending, detaining, and punishing child offenders.88 The 1917 version was modified to extend its application beyond orphans and offenders to include child slaves. It also specifically prohibited imprisonment of children younger than fifteen years of age and recommended that those convicted of offenses that were ordinarily punishable with imprisonment should instead be sentenced to whipping. These amendments suggest that the persistence of slavery or social conditions that closely resembled it were still a problem by 1917. They also suggest that Christian missions and government-approved individuals were no longer as available to serve as the custodians of problem children as they had been at the turn of the century. What made the ordinance of 1943 radically different from its predecessors was the specific creation of juvenile courts, a space designed to differentiate the hearing process for children from the hearing process for adults, and to give more sympathetic consideration to the youthful age of juvenile offenders. The expansion of formal and theoretically predictable mechanisms for dealing with children promised to diminish the welfare office’s reliance on volunteer reformers and the informal or ad hoc reform methods of the past. Before 1943, juvenile welfare work in Lagos was an ad hoc practical and ideological enterprise. Young offenders were tried in the same courts as adults. There were no standardized procedures or segregated spaces for hearing the cases of children and young people. Sentences, punishments, and referrals were made at the discretion of magistrates, the police, Faulkner, or other authorized officials. The Children and Young Person’s Ordinance gathered together the resources needed for modern work, and in comparison to an earlier period, standardized the methods as well. The ordinance reflected the principle that juvenile problems were produced by the environments that children lived in and were not inherent to the individual child. Central to modern methods of juvenile welfare work was the idea that the home context held potentially ameliorative effects on the behavior of delinquents, just as it held the potential for the opposite. The challenge for welfare officials was to transfer problem youth from polluting homes to purifying homes. The state, Prelude to the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943

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welfare officials believed, could open purifying homes to rescue Lagos juveniles and provide examples of effective parenting to the general public. The Children and Young Person’s Ordinance provided new legal tools and a juvenile justice framework to do just that. The Children and Young Person’s Ordinance was modeled on a British law, the Children and Young Person’s Act of 1933, which was a statute that underlay juvenile justice policy in England until the 1960s.89 One of the most significant innovations of the Children and Young Person’s Act of 1933 was that it empowered the state to “rescue boys and girls from dangerous home surroundings.”90 Following passage of the act, “where parental control was inadequate, it was more likely than before to lead to the State stepping in.”91 Thus the Children and Young Person’s Act of 1933 admitted the state into the homes of juvenile delinquents in England and empowered state officials to remove young people from their natal homes to reform institutions. After 1943 problem youth in Lagos navigated a similar legal process that took them from one “home” to another.

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4 w The Street Hawker, the Street Walker, and the Salvationist Gaze

Wh en socia l welfare agents looked at problem boys in Lagos, they saw pitiful waifs, carefree cowboys, enterprising urban desperados, and fast-growing gangsters. Girls, by contrast, appeared to be a much less varied group displaying only one type of problem. Regardless of their apparent ages, statuses, or backgrounds, welfare officials consistently associated working-class girls and girlhood in Lagos with sexual danger. Certainly, girls who ended up at the welfare office were often in some sort of trouble. Yet they were not always in immediate sexual danger. At the welfare office, girls facing sexual danger came to stand in for the normative Lagosian girl. Their experiences were read as typical for and pervasive among Lagosian girls. The regard of welfare officials was a salvationist gaze. Welfare officials did not just observe the problem girls who appeared in their offices or the working-class girls they saw in the city streets, they also proposed to deliver the girls from a variety of real and imagined perils. The salvationist gaze was an official, a colonial, and a racialized gaze; as such, it was a profoundly partial gaze. Welfare officials were closed out, in fundamental ways, from the lived subjectivities of ordinary girls in Lagos. Their perceptions of what it meant to be an African girl in mid-twentieth-century Lagos were limited to and defined by the dimensions of Lagos girlhoods that they most frequently encountered. Women reformers also wielded a salvationist gaze through which they diagnosed and proposed remedies for the problems of workingclass girls. But for women reformers the larger payoff for correcting 113

problem girls was the expansion of the realm of modern womanhood within Nigeria. Girl-saving work in development-era Lagos owed a debt to the missionary tradition. Where religious missionaries working in churches, schools, and clinics sought souls to save, sometimes through training native minds and other times through healing native bodies, salvationists of a different stripe, scientists implementing the latest theories from the discipline of social work or women activists seeking more fundamental social transformation, proposed to save problem girls, each for their own vision of a modern society. Due to their visibility, girl hawkers who worked, played, and lived the better part of their lives in public view were a focus for the attentions of women reformers and colonial welfare officials who wielded the salvationist gaze. To a large extent, working-class life was lived outdoors and in public view. The homes of working-class people tended to be small, dimly lit, and poorly ventilated. Cooking was done outdoors. Bathing was done outdoors, even if in outdoor enclosures. Buying, selling, socializing, playing—the most common daily activities—took place in full view of one’s neighbors. Interior space was dedicated to storing goods and the most private activities like sleeping, making love, healing from sickness, or plotting intrigue. The salvationist gaze onto girl hawkers, the most visible girls in the city, was filtered through the lens of girls in sexual danger. Where it was unclear whether girls would fit into the salvationist narrative, officials decided that they actually did, but in hidden ways, or that it would be just a matter of time before they did, because sexual danger was an unavoidable and inevitable aspect of an ordinary African girl’s life in Lagos. “MORAL DANGERS IN THE COMMUNITY”: T H E A M B I G U I T Y O F S A LVA T I O N I S T C O N S T R U C T I O N S O F T H E G I R L H AW K E R

The impending enactment of the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance and its subsidiary Street Trading Regulations was supported with a publicity campaign involving the welfare office, elite women reformers, and newspapers such as the Daily Times, an organ of the nationalist Nigerian Youth Movement. In the course of the publicity campaign, social workers submitted articles to the major dailies on the causes of juvenile delinquency, and dramatic reports of the trials and sentences of young offenders were circulated in the press.1 In the press and at public events, elite women reformers joined the effort to orient public 114

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opinion toward, what was for them, a long-awaited set of regulations. At one event that was billed as a “Protest Meeting,” women reformers put forward their arguments for the merits of restricting hawking by girls. On the evening of 8 August 1944, Lagos residents heard a free panel discussion on the topic “Moral Dangers in the Community.” The list of seven panel members, five women and two men, would have read to contemporary observers like a who’s who list of the city’s African elite. S. L. Akintola, managing editor of the Daily Service newspaper; Dr. Ibiyinka Olorun-Nimbe, a rising physician in the community; and Oyinkan Abayomi, M.B.E., president of the newly formed Nigerian Women’s Party, were joined by Mrs. L. Timson, one of the secretaries of the Nigerian Women’s Party; Mrs. Evan Williams; Mrs. Ajose; and Mrs. C. E. M. Cadle to identify and discuss the most pressing moral dangers facing the city of Lagos: underage prostitution and hawking by girls. What might ordinarily be regarded as two distinct issues, the exploitative commodification of youthful sexuality and the itinerant peddling of petty goods, were closely linked in the minds of panelists. Abayomi was said to have “attributed much of the moral laxity among girls to hawking of goods about the streets.”2 Mrs. C. E. M. Cadle echoed her by tracing “much of the prostitution among girls to the habit of hawking goods about the streets.”3 Deducing by unknown means that “their guardians or mothers were partly responsible for their falling into temptation,” Cadle explained to the assemblage, “A girl would be asked that she must sell all the goods handed to her within a specific period. If she could not get people to buy them she would somehow find ways and means of obtaining money to give to the mother or the guardian.”4 Another panelist, Mrs. Timson, marshaled further evidence of the depravity of working-class girls by directing the audience’s attention to their consumption practices and leisure activities. Timson talked about a new music and dance style called Apala, noting that “the very sound of an ‘Apala’ drum was sufficient to drive girls of low morals wild.” Girl hawkers would reportedly put down their wares, pool their funds and engage itinerant drummers in order to dance to the Apala tune. They would then start “turning, twisting, rolling and rocking in all forms of disgraceful contortions.”5 It is not exactly clear what Mrs. Timson might have found so objectionable about Apala music. My informants described Apala dancing as fairly slow and contained.6 Apala music itself can be described as a religiously inflected popular form with workingclass and Islamic associations. One informant suggested that because The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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being a musician was not considered to be a respectable occupation, and because most Apala musicians were Muslim and only performed in their vernacular, and further because most patrons of Apala music were working-class people, the lower-class and Islamic associations of Apala music combined with the vernacular performances of early Apala musicians may have elicited disdain among members of the educated Christian elite of the time.7 One thing is certain. Girl hawkers had recreational outlets. They enjoyed a good dance and were known to pool their meager resources for the sake of a song.8 Charging Apala music and dancing with “leading the girls to immorality” and undermining the “pristine delicacy and grace associated with womanhood,” Mrs. Timson finally emphasized “the necessity for banning the curious dance.”9 For elite women reformers, the chief dangers of underage prostitution and hawking lay in the ways that the two practices threatened to undermine the moral uplift of women in Nigeria. In their work and their play, girl hawkers seemed to flout the value system that would lead toward what women reformers considered respectable modern womanhood. Although women reformers did not avow that it was the case, modern womanhood was in all but name Christian womanhood. In contrast, the futures of the girl hawkers were consistent with Yoruba values, and their lives in the present were consistent with both Yoruba and Muslim values. As Enid Schildkrout demonstrated in her work on girls in Kano, child hawkers were a crucial part of the economic life of pious Muslim communities.10 Their labor allowed women who observed purdah to earn independent incomes while preserving their religious respectability. For elite women reformers, the girls were not girls per se but women in the making. Their full realization and their full impact on society was always deferred to their later lives when the girls would become adults and either expand or constrict the realm of modern womanhood. The dangers posed by hawking and underage prostitution were as much, if not more, of a threat to respectable and upwardly mobile women as they were to the girls themselves. Yet reformers differentiated between the two activities in terms of the quality of the danger that they presented. The dangers associated with hawking and underage prostitution were not of the same order. Hawking, the women argued, was particularly dangerous because although underage prostitution was roundly condemned by all respectable adults in the town, hawking retained support among the ordinary people of Lagos. Whereas an 116

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underage prostitute was an unequivocally deviant figure, girl hawkers, reformers argued, were more ambiguous. They were not always what they appeared to be. It required the morally discerning eye of a properly modern and urban woman to be able to see hawking and girl hawkers for what they truly were—holdovers from the past, from rural areas, and retardants on modern urban life. By the close of the “protest meeting,” the panel members had pledged to renew their demand that government institute a ban on hawking by all children below age fourteen.11 Lagos was a city of sellers—they were everywhere. The earliest impressions of their numbers come from Police Commissioner Richard Cavendish’s 1922 report where he characterized the “petty traders of Lagos” as “a considerable proportion of the population of the town.”12 In 1932, the secretary of the Lagos Town Council declared, “I think it is correct to say that there is hardly a street in Lagos where petty trading in one form or another is not carried on and large numbers of the side streets are practically impassable for this reason.”13 C. T. Lawrence, administrator of the colony during the early 1930s, echoed this observation, writing, “It can with truth be said that there is no street in Lagos or Ebute Metta where hawking or selling outside houses does not take place.”14 Lawrence opined that hawking was “a part of the life of the people and it will be extremely difficult to prevent it or even regulate it.”15 Despite Lawrence’s astute observation of the difficulty involved in regulating traders, colonial administrators were taking preliminary measures to do just that. Their preparations included counting the numbers of petty traders and pinpointing where they could be found. In 1932, the Lagos Town Council estimated 4,000 so-called squatters and itinerant petty traders or hawkers who gathered at specific points in Lagos.16 Approximately 1,000 of these individuals paid fees to the city for permits to conduct their trade. Petty trader permits typically cost 2 shillings and 6 pence per month. Use of Crown Land cost £1 per year, and meat market fees were set at varying rates, the highest being £6 per year for Idunmabgo Meat Market butchers.17 Lawrence considered 4,000 to be a conservative estimate and pegged the number of sellers in Lagos Township closer to 10,000.18 Estimates for other years are even more general and must be drawn from more indirect sources. Following a research trip to Lagos in 1948, the anthropologist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain estimated that there were 8,000 market women in the city “plus all their assistants and apprentices, both regular and occasional, four or five to one nominal The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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market woman.”19 The 1950 census, which provided a breakdown of occupational groups by age and sex, listed almost 32,000 “petty traders, hawkers, and shop assistants” ages five to over sixty-five in Lagos Township.20 Within the working population of Lagos, census takers recorded 3,835 “gainfully occupied” girls in the five- to fourteen-yearold category.21 The largest number of gainfully occupied girls, 2,127, worked as “porters and stewards.”22 The second largest group, which is more of interest to us here, were 1,451 “petty traders, hawkers, and shop assistants.”23 Inclusion of younger girls below nine years of age and teenagers older than fourteen but below seventeen, the age of majority, would have brought the number of petty traders, hawkers, and shop assistants, which are all interchangeable occupations, even higher. By contrast with girls, only 144 boys age five to fourteen also worked as petty traders, hawkers, or shop assistants.24 The contrast between fiveto fourteen-year-old girl hawkers and boy hawkers clearly demonstrates that girls were ten times more likely to work as hawkers than boys in their peer age groups. Further, the figures attest to the point that hawking in Lagos, like market trading in Yorubaland more broadly, was still a very female-gendered occupation by the late 1940s. For several reasons, including the political climate of the time and problems with census categories, the 1950 census cannot be understood to perfectly reflect the numbers of girl hawkers in Lagos when the census was taken. First, girl hawkers were surveyed during a period when their work was increasingly policed, and they may have been less likely to be forthcoming about being hawkers. Second, the census counted schoolgirls as a separate population from girl hawkers when other historical sources show that they were not necessarily a separate group. Additionally, the 1950 census cannot be used to gauge numbers of girl hawkers in Lagos during the early half of the 1940s when wartime budgetary restrictions precluded census taking and the publication of annual reports. Despite these problems, the 1950 census contributes to a demographic profile of girl hawkers in Lagos during the 1940s. Combining impressionistic evidence from the early 1930s and census data from 1950, it should be safe to say that the number of girl hawkers in Lagos was significant during the 1940s. Hawking was an apprenticeship in market trading and a component in the socialization of ordinary girls. This socialization function of hawking was apparent to discerning observers such as ComhaireSylvain, who wrote: 118

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Chez les Ijebu (sous-tribe Yoruba) habitant Lagos . . . les parents envoient souvent leurs fillettes colporter des cinq heures et demie du matin avant d’aller à l’école. Cette pratique est considérée comme un excellent apprentissage commercial malgré les inconvénients qui peuvent en résulter au point de vue moral.25 w

Ijebu (Yoruba subgroup ) parents in Lagos often send their girls out hawking from half past five in the morning before they go to school. Despite the moral disadvantages that might result, this practice is considered an excellent apprenticeship in business.

Hawking was practically a prerequisite to becoming a woman trader. As such, it was associated with youth. For some girls, the apprenticeship period could start quite early in life. In her autobiography, Sulia Adedeji, a former trader turned hospital nurse, wrote about her initial introduction to market life when she was three years old. Adedeji, born in Ibadan in 1944, recalled the circumstances that pushed her toward becoming a hawker. In 1947, there was a smallpox outbreak in her town. One day the health officers visited us at our kindergarten school at Alafara Oje. The reaction was quite predictable. We all escaped through the windows as none of us wanted to be vaccinated. As soon as I got back from school on this particular day, my grandmother said: ‘Don’t go back again because this Oyinbo (whiteman) will come and put injection into your head.’ So it came to be that I stopped going to school and started helping her early in life to hawk pounded yam in the afternoons. . . . So it was until 1954 when the government introduced the free primary education programme. I was almost ten years old then.26

Adedeji’s experience might have been an extreme case, but it was not unheard of for six- or seven-year-old girls to go hawking. One of my informants told of a young mother who took her seven-year-old daughter around hawking with her, the little hawker balancing a pyramid of oranges on her head. “There was a woman in my father’s house,” she said. “She used to sell fruits, seasonal fruits. . . . So when it’s time for pineapple, you will see her with her pineapple. She would have some cut, wrapped in a plastic bag, and then she would put it in a tray. She had a very big tray. And then you would see some stocked, that are not cut or anything and she puts it on her head. . . . Maybe oranges are in The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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season that time too. She will put a little tray of oranges on her child, on her daughter’s head. And this girl was like six, seven years old. . . . Then they hawk it around.”27 Asked if seven seemed like a young age to be hawking, or whether it was unremarkable, she said, “Well, you see a lot of them. . . . They even stop by when they see people in groups of two or three and tell you what they are selling and how much they are selling it for, and how juicy, or how sweet, how delicious it is.”28 Hawking was a physically demanding activity. Girls navigated Lagos’s streets carrying the weight of their wares on their heads. Hawking required a great deal of “crying,” or loudly advertising goods for sale. In a June 1946 issue of the Daily Service one Lagosian concerned about the sleep habits of the city’s residents pointed out in a letter to the editor that “during the Muslim Rahmadan season one is likely to be roused from his slumbers at so early an hour as 3 a.m.[,] while the streets are still deserted[,] by the shrill cries of young girl hawkers advertising their wares for the benefit of fasters who have to take an early breakfast.”29 Announcing goods and prices in a singsong voice was part of the cultural imagery of girl hawkers. In People of the City, a novel by Cyprian Ekwensi, one of the foremost chroniclers of working-class life in colonial Lagos, the author frequently depicted girl hawkers through references to sound. The novel’s first chapter introduces us to the protagonist, the city, and its residents through the ear: “There comes the dreaded city noise, Amusa. You live with it so you don’t notice it any more. Sounds of buses, hawkers, locomotives, the grinding of brakes, the clanging of church and school bells. . . . The city was awakening.” In the preceding quotation, Ekwensi crafts an impression of how girl hawkers figured into popular imaginings of mid-twentieth-century Lagos.30 His main character, Amusa Sango, is a young crime reporter who contemplates his acclimatization to Lagos’s daily wake-up call, “the dreaded city noise.” Mornings in Amusa’s working-class neighborhood were announced by the din of buses, trains, screeching brakes, and clanging church and school bells. When Ekwensi placed girl hawkers in the same category as these loud or mobile inanimate objects, he highlighted their two key attributes—their itinerancy and their noisiness. Later in the novel, Amusa Sango searches for his friend Aina among a crowd of evening hawkers. Trying unsuccessfully to reach her, he finds himself overwhelmed by the voices of her colleagues. “ ‘Penny bread! . . . Sugar bread! . . . ’ they cried from all sides of him . . . ‘Banjo’ (auction) ‘akowe’ (envelopes) ‘Banjo, akowe!’ . . . Sango wanted to escape.”31 120

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Although on one level, girl hawkers blended into the background color of the city, on another level, their bodies, their work, and their voices made them impossible to ignore. Despite their noisiness, girl hawkers contributed a great deal to the quality of life in their communities. They were part of Lagos’s casual labor class and the secondary economy that subsidized its officially tallied economy.32 They contributed to their communities in several ways. First, the girl hawkers were vital contributors to the incomes of their households. Second, as the example of girls who rose with Muslim fasters during Ramadan shows, the work of girl hawkers helped others perform their spiritual and secular obligations with greater ease. Third, girl hawkers and the local practice of hawking brought the market directly to the doorstep of the consumer. This provided consumers a savings in time and labor. Not only did girl hawkers extend the market’s geographical boundaries from the central marketplaces into neighborhoods and compounds, but they also extended the market’s hours beyond those legislated by the Lagos Town Council to the hours suited to the specific needs of Lagos inhabitants. Lagos girl hawkers were thus working within a long tradition from western Yorubaland, which dates to at least the eighteenth century, in which women routinely engaged in market trading and long-distance porterage between Yoruba towns.33 Finally, for many Lagosians, girl hawkers may have also represented valued aspects of local cultures: a strong work ethic, family cooperation, respect of youth for their elders, children as household assets, economic independence, and entrepreneurship.34 Although none of these ideals was gendered in any particular way, girl hawkers did personify them in a juvenile female form. E N T R Y- L E V E L W O R K : G I R L H AW K E R S A N D T H E SCHOOL OF MARKET LIFE

Girl hawkers benefited in various ways from their apprenticeships in trading. In order to understand how girls benefited from working as hawkers, we must first consider what market trading signified for women in Southern Nigerian culture, particularly Yoruba culture. Women traders were the figurative and literal mothers of girl hawkers. They took on hawkers as their apprentices and assistants. Market trading was an apprenticed profession that girls became familiar with fairly early in life. In her autobiography, Sulia Adedeji recalled that she began hawking cooked foods like amala for her grandmother at three years of age.35 There were important connections between girl hawkers The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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and women traders, which could include familial ties. At the same time, there were very important differences between the two. A significant body of scholarship has been produced on the market woman and woman trader phenomenon in West African cultures and economies. Scholars have examined the geography and economics of women’s trading networks, cultural and social factors that give rise to the sociological phenomena of markets dominated by women, the involvement of market women’s groups in nationalist politics in the colonial and postcolonial periods, and the noneconomic functions of the market in the social life of African communities.36 The scholarship has produced several maxims about women traders that stand out as significant. First, women traders are concentrated in urban centers. Second, trading was the single largest occupation of women in colonial and precolonial West Africa. Third, before the era of neoliberal structural adjustments, most women traders had very limited exposure to Western education. Finally, most women traders hold membership in hierarchical and democratically run trade associations. As the Yoruba studies field ramifies along geographical lines and scholars become ever more precise about which Yoruba subgroup is being discussed and in which period of time, challenges to the received wisdom on Yoruba women have also entered the discussion. The question of work and its relationship to gender constructions has been a fruitful one. It used to be the case that as historian Niara Sudarkasa put it, Yoruba women worked in the home and in the marketplace.37 Others like Comhaire-Sylvain took up the argument that Yoruba women were largely traders, but this argument might have been a function of the fact that her research was grounded in the agriculturally poor city of Lagos.38 Scholars such as Olatunji Ojo, studying women farmers in Eastern Yorubaland, and Judith Byfield, studying cloth dyers in Abeokuta, have exploded the easy correlation between Yoruba women and trading by providing detailed histories of women farmers and craftworkers that are attentive not only to the variety of forms of work that women took part in but also to the class-differentiated variety of women workers within the farming and fabric-making industries.39 From apprentices to masters, pawns and slaves to managers and owners, the women who worked were not of uniform skill level and certainly not of equal status. Lagos Island was not an area that could spatially or chemically sustain large-scale agricultural production. As a result, farming was done 122

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on the mainland where, since the nineteenth century, wealthy farmers had established slave colonies, and later tenant farmers, to tend to their crops. Women in Lagos Island did take part in a variety of forms of work, producing a variety of goods. Those goods were generally sold, belying any necessary distinction between producers and traders. Some women and girls also specialized in selling, so it would be reasonable to argue that within Lagos, trading was a central occupation of women and girls. Anyone could trade or hawk goods, and men and boys clearly did as well. The gender of this form of labor was not as clearly defined as tapping palm wine, for example, which was masculine-gendered labor. But it was still the case that a higher proportion of women than men were traders, and it was certainly the case for girls versus boys. For girls, trading served both socialization and employment functions. Women traders learned and became adept at the profession; they became successful, if lucky, after the years of training from women who came before them. What did market life grant the average woman? Primarily, the market granted women a space of financial independence from their marital household.40 In Yorubaland it was common practice for women to keep the profits from goods sold in the market. Women used these profits to diversify their businesses, provide education and contract marriages for their children, support relatives, pay membership dues to various associations, and certainly, women spent money on their own entertainment. Women derived other benefits from participating in market life. They became affiliated with traders’ associations, which could lobby on their behalf to local government; they entered an occupational sisterhood whose members supported each other through important but expensive life events: births, weddings, titling ceremonies, and funerals. Trading also served as a means of participating in information networks that spanned the region of West Africa. Finally, despite fluctuations in the profitability of trading, women also went to market to have some productive work to do. Urban colonial economies that combined the marginalization of individuals who had limited exposure to Western education with employment discrimination against African women held few avenues for absorbing potential women workers. Thus the physical market represented a parallel and more inclusive metaphorical market; it was one that permitted thousands of women to live and work in colonial cities outside Western occupational and financial paradigms. The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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Like women traders, girl hawkers dwelled in the entrepreneurial ethos of market life. The market was a social space where girls grew attuned to the fluctuating valuations of consumer goods and the impacts of market fluctuations on prices for consumers and profits for sellers. They were challenged to be responsible and self-reliant by carrying and hawking goods about the streets. They had to be personable sellers yet aggressive advertisers, two qualities needed to ensure successful sales. Yet in contrast to women traders, girl hawkers were not organized into mutual support associations. Although workers, girl hawkers were also social minors, dependent on relatives or employers for their wellbeing. Compounding things, in the mid-twentieth century, many girl hawkers in Lagos were said to be newcomers to the city. Consequently, this meant that their networks were closely limited to the individuals they worked for or worked with. Girl hawkers were part of the community of urban marketers. They worked in the market and participated in market life, but they were not at its center. They were not the normative trader; they were not social adults; and they were not organized for mutual benefit. Girl hawkers were apprentice women traders, but the paths they had to travel to full social and economic maturity were long and winding. Most girl hawkers had nothing to fear from being social minors or from being marginal figures in the market, but for a few, dependent and marginal status was fraught with dangerous possibilities. Mid-twentieth-century girls’ immediate subjective experiences and evaluations of hawking were not accessible to this project, but the recollections and opinions of elderly women traders who had been girl hawkers in the 1940s and 1950s were. Their contributions were a key, albeit not unproblematic, resource for trying to imagine girl hawkers and understand the experience of hawking in mid-twentieth-century Lagos from the perspective of girls themselves.41 Between November 2005 and February 2006, Mr. Wale Makanjuola, who was a student in the University of Ibadan history department, assisted me with carrying out surveys of women traders in their seventies who had been girl hawkers in midcentury Lagos. Finding women traders in our target age bracket who had worked as girl hawkers in mid-twentieth-century Lagos took Mr. Makanjuola to fifteen major markets spanning both Lagos Island and the mainland. Older women traders formed a distinct minority in most of the major markets in Lagos. The greatest density of women in our target age group was found in four markets, Idumota, Mushin, Oke-Arin, and Sandgrouse Markets.42 Idumota Market is one 124

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of the oldest and most popular markets on Lagos Island; Mushin Market and Oke Arin were on the mainland and, according to Makanjuola, “largely dominated by people who had traded on the Island and decided to retire” to the relative calm of these “suburban” markets.43 Sandgrouse Market, which was established on Lagos Island in the 1920s, yielded the largest number of women traders in our target age group. In all, we were able to get forty-six surveys completed. At the time of composing the survey, the issues I was most interested in were prompted by reformers’ depictions of the typical girl hawker as an unlettered and imperiled foreigner to the city. I was curious to know about the educational profiles and migration histories of hawkers, and about popular perceptions of the dangers of hawking in the mid-twentieth century. The survey solicited biographical data that might address reformers’ portraits of girl hawkers as exploited and imperiled young strangers to the city. We asked women traders to tell us about their religious backgrounds, their places of origin, their dates of migration to Lagos if their places of origin were indeed outside Lagos, their ages when they began selling goods in Lagos, their hawkingrelated security concerns when they were young, their educational and career profiles, their estimated earnings as hawkers, and their subjective impressions of hawking as an occupation. We also asked questions about family background and, to those who were migrants, about their domestic situations when they arrived in Lagos. An overwhelming number of women who responded to our questions appeared to have worked as traders for all of their working lives. According to their testimonies, those working lives began at much later ages than most archival sources reflect. The most commonly listed age for when the women began selling was eighteen. The respondent who reported the youngest starting age stated that she began selling when she was about fourteen years old. These ages are significantly higher than the ages listed in the census data, in autobiographies, and in oral interviews, which raises the question of whether our survey respondents were a more representative group, a particularly unrepresentative group, or if their stated initial ages had been intentionally raised in order to conform with contemporary child-hawking laws in Lagos. For most of our respondents, hawking was their entry point into lifelong careers. Of the forty-six respondents, twenty-five stated that as young sellers they sold nonedible goods. These included stationery supplies, fabric, medicinal drugs, kitchenware, apparel and accessories, The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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lanterns, books, soaps, and detergents. Two women reported that they sold bicycles and automobile spare parts, which one can assume were sold at shops and not by hawking through the streets. Eighteen respondents said they sold uncooked foods, whereas only two reported that they sold cooked foods. Only 16 percent, or eight women traders, reported having had other occupations at some point in their lives. The other professions that women listed—tailor, politician, nursing sister, child nanny, hairdresser, and schoolteacher—required and reflected a wide range of levels of literary education. But the majority had definitely not been schoolgirls. Only ten respondents reported that they had some primary education. The remaining thirty-six reported that they had never attended school. Reformers’ portrayals of the normative girl hawker routinely cast her as a newcomer to the city and implied that authentic Lagos girls did not perform this kind of work. A sizable proportion, or almost twothirds, of the women traders who took part in our survey confirmed this depiction. Only sixteen women claimed Lagos as their place of origin, particularly the neighborhoods of Obalende, Epetedo, Isale Eko, and Isolo. The other thirty moved to Lagos from Abeokuta, Ibadan, and Ilorin chiefly. To be sure, most young women hawkers were indeed newcomers to the city, just as reformers argued. But many were not, which suggests that the ascription of migrant status to hawkers functioned as much to create distinctions between proper and improper urban citizens as it did to identify actual differences in the migration histories of Lagosians. To get at the question of popular perceptions of the dangers of hawking, traders were asked if they typically went hawking by themselves when they were girls, and if not, why? Twenty-seven traders made a positive statement that they were hawkers in their early years. Of this group, only eleven declared that they never walked around Lagos by themselves to hawk goods. The top two reasons given for always hawking with a companion were fear of being robbed for money followed by fear of being robbed for goods. The surveys were fairly brief, and they were not followed by extensive interviews, so there are strong limitations on how the data can be analyzed. Yet it seems significant that the chief danger that women remembered was the danger of being robbed. Although this might suggest that the threat of sexual assault that reformers linked with hawking may not have been a linkage that was commonly made, it may also reflect a reluctance to bring up issues of sexuality or sexual 126

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violence more specifically with perfect strangers. On the other hand, being shortchanged by predatory customers was a form of robbery and one that reformers had identified as part of a strategy of entrapment that could lead to sexual assault of girls. Overall, however, it seems reasonable to assume that most girl hawkers escaped the extraordinary forms of predation that overwrote their image in reformers’ minds. Finally, I was very interested in gaining a sense of how young sellers experienced their work. Did they consider it to be pleasant or unpleasant? What would their responses suggest about young people’s subjectively defined relationship to work? The results showed that for the most part, the women traders enjoyed selling a great deal when they were young girls. Older women who had been girl hawkers in the 1940s and 1950s characterized hawking as generally pleasurable work, or at least not the sort of work that struck them in their youth as being unpleasant. Most women gave selling the highest available ranking, affirming that they liked it “Very much.” Nine women stated that they only enjoyed selling “A little bit” when they were younger. Significantly, none of the women selected “Not at all” as their response to how much they enjoyed selling. Part of the pleasure of selling may have been owing to the sociality of the work. It may also have been because of the sense of freedom from the scrutiny of parents or guardians that was inherent in the activity of itinerant trading. Girls were not the only hawkers. Some adult women also walked around hawking goods instead of staying at one market in one stall. The different practices of trading among women traders reveal class differences within the market space. Women with rented stalls were the wealthiest market women. Being at a consistent location was good for business. Their resources permitted them to lease permanent structures from Lagos Township and store large quantities of trade goods in their shops. This indicated that they had the means to obtain large quantities in the first place. Lower down the line were women who set up shop at illegal markets. They too generally had too many goods to carry around but not quite enough profit to make renting a space from the city, when spaces were available, cost-efficient. At Ebute Ero market, where investigators noted that “no payment whatever is made to the (Lagos Town) Council,” traders paid 3 pence per day to the market’s financial secretary for permission to trade. “No petty trader who had not paid will be tolerated by the other traders in that locality. This is one of the most overcrowded areas in Lagos on market days which occur The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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every fourth day.”44 J. Cauchi, medical officer for Lagos, condemned the informal markets, citing overcrowding and sanitation problems. “There are several objections, from a health point of view, against the prevalence of petty trading in Lagos,” he wrote. “Owing to petty trading scraps, wrapping leaves and other rubbish are scattered indiscriminately all over the streets of the town creating an excellent attraction to rodents.”45 Besides criticizing the refuse on the ground, Cauchi held reservations about the quality of food sold by petty traders. “It is a fact,” he wrote, “ that unsound foodstuffs can be more easily disposed of and sold for human consumption when offered for sale by petty traders on the roads or at house doors. . . . A large proportion of the fish sold in the town is exposed for sale on the edge of public gutters. The danger of contamination of food either directly or by flies can be understood when it is remembered that these streets carry the domestic effluent from most of the houses in their vicinity.”46 Storage of native medicines also constituted a public health hazard. “Certain articles such as native medicines,” Cauchi asserted, “are left in undisturbed heaps, sometimes for months on end, by the medicine-sellers on their pitches and form excellent attraction and shelter for rodents.”47 Owing to the low supply of market stalls relative to traders, some private homeowners found it profitable to rent space in front of their houses to women traders. In the early 1930s the Lagos Town Council and the town engineer conducted investigations of this practice. At 50/52 Palm Church Street they found that the property owner, Joseph Adeodu, charged women 30 shillings per year to sit in front of his house. One of his customers, Aina Iyalode, was already paying 2 shillings and six pence per month to the town council for a license to trade. If Iyalode did not pay her fees to Adeolu, a relative of the woman claimed, he threatened to complain to authorities that she was squatting in front of his home.48 In Broad and Victoria Streets, investigators discovered that “the women traders who sit on the pavement outside shops or houses pay a fee of from 2/6d [2 shillings 6 pence] to 5/- [5 shillings] a month to the owner or occupier of the premises.”49 Shopkeepers had slightly different reasons for charging traders than did homeowners. They feared that overcrowding in their markets or near their businesses would undercut their profits. For city officials, lost revenues because of market traders were an additional unstated concern. Licensed markets were proposed for the very sites where illegal markets stood, and township tariffs were calculated based on what women had been willing to pay homeowners.50 Lower 128

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still than the women who rented spaces in front of the properties of homeowners, were so-called squatters who had little to sell and little profit to make. For those women, renting space in Lagos from anyone was out of the question. Yet even the least well-off woman trader was wealthier, more socially mature, and more respectable than another: the girl hawker. The market was a hierarchical space of sellers, and marketing served a range of functions for different sellers from the social to the economic. At the top were those for whom marketing was largely directed toward building wealth. At the bottom of the hierarchy were those for whom marketing was part of what kept them embedded in the social networks from which they gathered their sense of identity. Iwofa sold for their masters, without whom they would be estranged from social networks. Children sold for parents and guardians, without whom they would join the truly destitute—the friendless, the homeless, the motherless child. Hawking was a youth-saturated occupation. It was considered a low-pay, low-skill, and lower-class occupation for young people. But these ideas about hawking do not explain why it became a criminalized activity in the 1940s. Hawking was regarded as a problem since at least the early 1920s when elites and police drew linkages between hawking and illicit sexuality. Later, in the early 1930s, township engineers and health officers conceptualized hawking and petty trading as urban planning and sanitation problems. By the 1940s, hawkers commanded the interest of elite women reformers and colonial social workers in ways that finally led to regulatory action. For women reformers, schoolgirls were the key peer group counterpoint to girl hawkers in Lagos. Although nowhere near universal quantities, girls in school were becoming more commonplace. Their growing numbers reflected changing cultural attitudes toward providing Western education for girls as well as the growing availability of schools. Parents throughout Southern Nigeria desired some schooling for their daughters. Growing numbers of schoolgirls and educational institutions for girls reflected a particularly mid-twentieth-century embrace of the notion that just like sons, daughters should have access to Western-style education. For reformers, schoolgirls and girl hawkers symbolized different practices of girlhood, yet the two identities could be combined in the same girl. The overlapping identities of schoolgirls and market girls were demonstrated in the findings of K. A. Busia, a social worker in The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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neighboring Ghana. From September 1947 to December 1948, Busia carried out a survey of housing, employment, married life, education, associational life, local government, and juvenile delinquency among other features of urban existence. Busia’s findings on the after-school activities of school-age children are most relevant to the current discussion. “It is a common feature,” he writes, “to see schoolboys, and more often schoolgirls, roaming the streets between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. selling various articles: fruit, cooked food, cake, bread, biscuits, confectionery, milk and sugar, tinned meat, or articles of clothing.”51 Busia used this observation as part of his explanation of sexual immorality among schoolchildren. What can be said with certainty is that it was not uncommon for Ghanaian children to take up marketing activities when they returned home from school. Lagosian schoolgirls similarly engaged in hawking petty goods, belying elite women’s understandings of schoolgirls and girl hawkers as completely antagonistic social figures. The cross-generational surveys of childhood in twentieth-century Lagos provide further evidence of the overlaps between schoolgirls and girl hawkers. They also suggest in a very preliminary way that the overlaps may have been more prevalent in the late 1940s and 1950s than they were at earlier points in time. In other words, there may have been some basis for the stark distinctions that elite women reformers made between schoolgirls and girl hawkers, but those distinctions lost validity over time. Starting with the oldest age-set of women that we talked to, who were women in their eighties, none of the six women in the admittedly small twelve-person 80 Group reported either attending school or hawking as children in 1930s Lagos. In the 70 Group, which included individuals who would have turned ten in the 1940s, four women in their seventies (one each age seventy and seventy-six, and two age seventy-eight) were the only ones out of a group of ten women who stated that they had attended Western-style schools in Lagos. The two youngest said they attended Aroloya Primary School in Aroloya. One of the seventy-eight-year-olds attended Anglican Cathedral Primary School in Ereko, and the other said that she attended Holy Mary Primary School in The Marina. The four women said that they began schooling at ages eight, nine, ten, and eleven.52 All but one, the seventy-eight-year-old who attended Anglican Cathedral Primary School, completed her full primary school education at Standard 6. The fourth woman stopped schooling at Primary 3. Once again, none of the respondents from this age-set identified hawking as one of the 130

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work activities that they engaged in. It was not until we began talking with women in their sixties that we began to encounter recollections of hawking as a childhood activity. The women in the 60 Group, meaning women who would have turned ten years old at some point in the 1950s, were the first ones in our cross-generational survey to feature both schooling and hawking as parts of their normal childhood routines. Out of the seventy-four sexagenarians in the survey, thirty-six were women. Twenty of the women reported receiving Western-style schooling when they were girls, and a quarter of the twenty schoolgirls reported also engaging in hawking. In the “Work” section of the survey we first asked participants if they did work around the house when they were about ten years old and what kind of work they did. To the question of working at home, women provided responses such as “cooking”; “minor work such as washing plates, sweeping ground”; “They sent me on errands, I cooked, I washed plates and also washed clothes”; “I cleaned environment and also washed plates”; “washed clothes, fetched water, cooked food, ran errands.” In the follow-up we asked participants if they worked for money when they were ten years old and what kind of work they did. The women’s responses reflected a tendency to experience their paid work, implying work outside of the home, as an extension of their domestic responsibilities. Answering the first question about housework, one woman characterized selling as one of her chores. “Yes, I washed plates. I also helped my mother to sell her goods.” Another woman, answering the second question about paid work, said that she sold kolanuts. Asked how much she was paid to do so, she replied that she was not paid: “It was for the family.” Other women reported the same experience. “I sell goods for my mother,” and “All payments were done to my mother,” or “Hawking” and “Payments were usually made to my mother.” It was not clear whether the kolanut hawker sold kolanuts for her parents or for some other party. But the system of organizing compensation for child hawkers was quite clear. Her payment, so to speak, was a token acknowledgment of her labor. “My parents can just gather some of the profit to buy me whatever they think was good for me.” Another woman said her job was to “fetch firewood for food sellers.” She not only collected the firewood, but she also sold it to the food sellers who made their payments directly to her mother. One woman said simply, “I hawked food.” She remembered that she was paid at the end of each week for her work even though she did not know exactly how much her The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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wages were. “Payment was not made directly. As a child they believed that I may spend the money on nonsense. They therefore used it to buy shoes and clothes for me in return. At times they kept my money until the festive period and they used it to buy clothes and shoes.” In effect she understood that her earnings were part of the household economy, but she also felt that because it was produced by her labor, some of it was earmarked for her own specific use. In extended interviews it was clear that Lagosian women maintained vivid memories of hawking and pursuing Western education at the same time. One such informant, Oredolapo, recalled selling bread after school in Lagos as part of her daily childhood chores. In late 1950s Lagos, eleven-year-old Oredolapo was an only child whose parents sent her away to live with an aunt, reportedly as a preventive strategy against spoiling her. Her aunt was a baker who had seven sons and gathered three additional nieces in her household, making eleven children under her care. The eleven children were part of a significantly larger family group that was built around Oredolapo’s uncle, his twenty-one wives, and their children. According to Oredolapo, her typical day started around 5:30 a.m. when all the school-age children woke up, washed, and went to greet the baker. By 6 a.m. they were at the local Anglican church, St. Jude’s in Ebute Metta, for the daily hour-long morning mass. After church, the siblings and cousins returned home to complete chores from the night before, typically dishwashing and sweeping, and then went back to St. Jude’s, this time for school. After school, the chores recommenced with the older children working in the bakery. Laughingly, she recalled, “The girls will be wrapping the bread and the boys will start loading it into the trucks, into the vans. And we could do that until two a.m. or one o’clock. During the schooldays, we do that until twelve o’clock to be honest—and then we go to bed because we’re going to wake up at 5:30 in the morning. But on weekends we could even do it until three o’clock. We would be dozing and we would be wrapping, with a small electric iron. So eventually we would get all of our knuckles burnt.”53 Oredolapo’s aunt supplied bread to other businesses, so loaves had to be of consistent shape and size. Irregular loaves were given to the children to sell at the nearby Oyingbo market. “In the evening like around eight o’clock or eight thirty after our dinner, the leftover bread from two days ago or the ones the truck returned unsold . . . we put them in baskets—we used to call them 132

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damages, damages bread. Let’s say for instance when they are freshly baked they cost one naira, then we bring them to fifty kobo, which is half of one naira. . . So we put them in the basket; then we go to the evening market at Oyingbo. . . . We put our baskets there like eight thirty and sell till around ten and then we go home.”54 Oredolapo reported that she and her female cousins were most often asked to go sell the “damages bread.” Sometimes she went with one cousin, another twelve-year-old girl. Other times, depending on how many loaves there were, the younger girls came along too. African girls in Lagos in the 1940s and 1950s circulated easily between the schoolroom and the market. They were intimately involved as contributors in household production systems and they were vital contributors to the maintenance of urban African families in the colonial period. In Oredolapo’s narrative we get an impression of the social aspect of child hawking. The baker’s wards and helpers worked collectively to help produce the bread, but it was the girls among them who worked, also collectively, to help her sell the discounted “damages” bread at the night markets. Although both boys and girls took part in producing the bread, Oredolapo clearly recalled that the girls were the ones who were sent to Oyingbo market with discounted loaves to sell. One gets the impression that for many girls, hawking was experienced as another household chore, comparable to sweeping or dishwashing; it was simply one that girls conducted beyond the domestic space, out of the immediate view of guardians, and in the company of age-mates. Additionally, one gets the impression that many girls had no sense of there being a necessary conflict between their identities as schoolgirls and their work as hawkers. There were other students who did believe that there was a tension between their identities as pupils and manual laborers. But as the reports on boy hawkers who put their earnings toward school fees shows, the different perspectives on the tensions between schooling and hawking, or the lack thereof, may have been more a function of class differences than sex.55 C R O S S - G E N E R AT I O N A L S E X A N D M U R D E R O U S VIOLENCE: DISCOURSES OF WORKING-CLASS D E V I A N C E I N G I R L H AW K E R S T O R I E S

Lagos’s chief social welfare officer, Donald Faulkner, and the Lagos Women’s League members believed hawking furnished opportunities for working-class girls with questionable moral training to pursue illicit The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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sexual transactions. The two demonstrated some ambivalence about whether girl hawkers sought out illicit transactions and, if so, why. Central to their analyses was a question about whether hawkers were really innocent victims of the sexual desires of adults around them or whether they were themselves desiring, and therefore corrupted, subjects. Both sides of the question regarded sexual behavior to be deviant, particularly nonprocreative sexual behavior and most especially sexual behavior with or among girls. Thus the question reflected a distinctly adult and Christianity-inflected sexual ideology. A third possibility, which was not articulated, was that girls could be simple participants56 in a sexual culture involving men and much younger girls that was a commonplace aspect of working-class life in Lagos.57 A 1938 story of a girl hawker who was suspected of having had illicit sexual relations with an adult man, and for money, exemplifies the salvationist view of what it meant to be a girl hawker in the city. On Friday, 14 January 1938, residents of the Anikantamo Square neighborhood witnessed an impromptu and spectacular procession. The parade began outside the doorstep of one Mr. Raimi Okusanya and ended, as far as bystanders could see, at the Central Police Station at Tinubu Square. The West African Pilot, which dispatched a staff writer to the scene, reported that the procession was led by three characters, “a small girl whose age was given as 9 years, a tall individual who was described as a laundryman and a well known police constable who was in mufti.”58 A raucous and expanding audience that was “composed mainly of children” escorted the trio on their journey from Anikantamo Square to Tinubu.59 The nine-year-old girl, Ms. Oyinlola C., was reported to be “a starch hawker,” and Okusanya, the laundryman, was one of her regular customers. That Friday morning, Oyinlola had been to Okusanya’s place and was seen entering his room. Okusanya’s landlord was said to have previously warned his tenant against inviting Oyinlola into the house and even threatened him with eviction if he persisted in having Oyinlola over. The West African Pilot reported that an “allegation of improper relationship” followed Oyinlola’s arrival, and the landlord summoned police constable Francis Lateju to intervene in some way.60 Lateju descended on the scene, and a crowd gathered to witness this new turn of events. In the end, both Oyinlola and Okusanya were placed under arrest. The crowd grew as Officer Lateju marched Oyinlola and Okusanya over to the police station at Tinubu Square. It only dissipated some time later 134

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after the laundryman and the girl hawker were taken to the African Hospital for medical examinations. The Pilot’s succinct report raises a number of questions, the most basic being: Had the small girl and the laundryman, in fact, had sexual relations as the landlord had claimed? Other interesting questions center on understandings of propriety and impropriety, divergent and competing ideas about children and sexuality, what were considered questionable behaviors as opposed to criminal acts, private as opposed to public secrets. What, in other words, would it have meant if the landlord’s claims had proven true? Was the landlord unique in suspecting impropriety in the relationship between Oyinlola and Okusanya, or was the sexual aspect of their interactions common knowledge? Were understandings of the proper, the improper, and what constituted evidence of either, shared among all the residents of Anikantamo Square? Were there general understandings that the landlord might expect to be shared between himself, Okusanya, and possibly even Oyinlola about nine-year-old girls and sexuality? What does it mean for understandings of propriety and impropriety, secrecy and publicness, if Okusanya was widely believed to be procuring more than simple starch from young Oyinlola C.? The only pieces of information that the Pilot journalist gathered were that Oyinlola was known to have visited Okusanya’s residence several times in the past, she had been seen entering Okusanya’s rented room on that day, and Okusanya’s landlord had expressed extreme disapproval of what he judged to be an improper relationship between his tenant and the girl hawker. What we are left with are the statements of a landlord against his tenant and the silence of a girl hawker. One imagines that in the Magistrate’s Court at Tinubu Central Police Station, the presiding judge would have tried to determine the true nature of the relationship between the small girl and the laundryman. He might have questioned the landlord about what he knew and didn’t know, what he had seen and not seen. One wonders what Oyinlola would have been asked and by whom. What would she have been able to say to a room full of strange adults? One wonders how Okusanya might have responded to the magistrate’s questions and his landlord’s claims. Would he have denied having had sexual relations with Oyinlola? Would he have denied having improper relations with her? Would the two forms of denial have amounted to the same thing? It is this last question, the question of what constituted the proper and The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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the improper when it came to young girls and sexuality that lies at the heart of the Oyinlola case and scores of others like it that came to light in the mid-twentieth century. Cases that turned on establishing what were proper and improper ways of thinking about girls and sexuality brought fundamentally opposed ideas about age and sexuality into direct confrontation with each other. In such cases, class and culture would be summoned to explain divergent understandings of girlhood and sexuality, whereas arguments about morality or modernity, and ultimately state power, would be mobilized to settle the debates. Stories such as Oyinlola’s would have reached the attention of reformers who used them to form their hypotheses about working-class girlhoods. Where Faulkner and elite women reformers hypothesized about the relationship between hawking and illicit juvenile sexuality, other salvationists took up the work of gathering evidence. In 1946, a woman named Alison Izzett joined the Colony Welfare Office as the first Woman Welfare Officer in Lagos.61 Her arrival signaled a stronger commitment to addressing welfare issues concerning women and girls. Izzett and her staff of female juvenile welfare workers conducted investigations with girls’ hostel inmates, venereal disease clinic patients, and others, in order to understand the girl hawker phenomenon, patterns of illicit juvenile sexuality in Lagos, and possible connections between the two. In a report on their investigations, Izzett stated that all of her female staff members were “unanimous in saying that girl hawkers are frequently used for prostitution.”62 As an example she offered the case of a girl, aged about ten years old, who was noticed “frequently visiting a man whose wife was away.”63 The girl was stopped and questioned after she emerged from the man’s home one evening, presumably by welfare officials, and “admitted that she had been going regularly for sexual intercourse to the man, and he gave her money.”64 Some girls, Izzett’s report declared, were “taken advantage of by unscrupulous men who take their goods and give the child money to only half their value,” thus rendering the child susceptible to accepting sexual advances in exchange for cash.65 Other girls were taken into the homes of men who expected to be “cured of venereal disease by sexual intercourse with a virgin.”66 Yet other girl hawkers were “often sent out late at night to solicit and lead men to adult prostitutes.”67 Finally, Izzett’s research uncovered that “elderly men especially call young hawkers into their homes, give them money to cover their goods, and then use them for intercourse.”68 Izzett and her team thus established at least four direct 136

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connections between hawking and illicit juvenile sexuality. Girl hawkers, their investigations revealed, could be exposed to illicit sexuality through their own initiative, through the deception of older male customers, through their fears of missing earning expectations established by their guardians, and through gruesome rapes. Izzett’s report largely confirmed the alleged linkages between hawking and illicit sexuality that were put forward years prior by members of the Lagos Women’s League. Between the opinions of league members, Faulkner, and Alison Izzett, girl hawkers came to span a moral spectrum from willful underage prostitutes, to coerced underage prostitutes, to unquestioned victims of sexual crimes. The idea of youth and sexuality, more particularly of youthful girls and sexuality, disturbed the moral sensibilities of welfare workers and women reformers. A significant aspect of the alarm about illicit sexuality and girl hawkers came down to the question of age. There are no records of boys being scrutinized by social reformers or social workers on the basis of sexuality. Sexual encounters featuring large age differences between girls and men were most alarming indeed. Coercion suffered at the hands of rapists or through the demands of greedy guardians was certainly a major issue. But clearly so was age, or rather youth. The fundamental problem for salvationists was that girls of a certain age should not be sexual because they were girls. But what was that age? And how was the age of sexual transformation related to ideas of childhood? Oral sources offered important insights into the question of the relationship between age and sexuality. Participants in the cross-generational survey of childhood in Lagos were asked to discuss the end of childhood generically and in their own personal lives. Where relevant, participants were consistently asked if their responses applied to both boys and girls and to explain how things might have differed between boys and girls. When asked the question, “What types of things signaled the end of childhood for girls?” survey respondents from the 80 Group down to the 20 Group uniformly made reference to issues of sexuality. Over several generations, sexual transformations like the onset of menstruation, the development of feelings of heterosexual desire, the growth of breasts, hips, or pubic hair, were commonly referenced as signposts of the end of childhood. The 80 Group was made up of twelve individuals, six women and six men between the ages of eighty and eighty-five. Members of the 80 Group, the youngest of whom would have been born in 1928, listed The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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marriage, bodily changes, breast and hip development as the key transformations that marked the end of girlhood in their day. In their longer responses, women said that the end of childhood for girls came “when they are ready for marriage. I mean when they get to the age of adolescence”; “When men began to ask them in marriage”; “marriage proposal, the appearance of hairs on the private parts, urge to have sex”; “the coming of suitors, the menstrual flow, seeing boys.” When asked about their own personal experiences, they listed much the same markers, with one woman saying the end of childhood came “when I was asked to stop bathing openly,” and another saying she knew her childhood was over when men began asking her parents for her hand in marriage. The oldest women in the survey looked mainly to the body for measures of maturation. Sexual transformations like the onset of menstruation or feelings of heterosexual desire, the growth of breasts, hips, and pubic hair were imprinted in their memories as the signposts of the end of childhood.69 Women in the 70 Group listed similar markers when asked generally about the end of girlhood. Again, “Attraction to boys,” “growth of breasts, hips,” “Growth of buttocks,” “selfconsciousness” were common responses. Only one woman offered a response that referred to skill sets rather than bodily features, when she said, “Possessing the qualities for starting a family; for example being able to cook.” When asked about their own particular experiences, the responses were much the same: growing body parts and starting to “feel conscious of my private parts.” Two women recalled the key physical change slightly differently when they associated the end of childhood with changing one’s hairstyle. One talked about beginning to grow her hair long as low cuts were a child’s hairstyle. The other talked about “doing nice hair to attract suitors,” emphasizing the sexual allure of styling hair and styling the body.70 Overall, respondents associated sexual transformation, awareness, or desire, with the end of childhood. But they did so in ambiguous ways that permitted sexual desire on the part of males or the sexualization of girls by males to mean the end of childhood for either one. Returning to the case of Oyinlola and the laundryman, a nine-yearold in mid-1940s Lagos was probably prepubescent and Oyinlola’s case might have been unusual. But the correlation that survey participants made between evidence of sexual maturity, like the appearance of breasts in girls or facial hair and voice changes in boys, or between the sexualization of girls by others and the notion that she was no longer a 138

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child, were not unusual correlations to make. They were widespread among youth thinking about their own bodies and identities. Young people may have held different understandings of youth sexuality than adults, reformers, and social workers held. There may also have been generational and class differences in understandings of what was a child. For survey participants reflecting on their early lives in Lagos, a child was a person who was prepubescent. There was no particular biological age or social rite that marked the culmination of childhood. Survey participants consistently listed both evident sexual transformation and evident sexualization, or the desiring attention of others, as the key indicators that one had moved beyond the life stage of childhood. For reformers, the ambivalence of girl hawkers rested on their simultaneous and indistinguishable potential for being desiring subjects and for being sexualized bodies. Reformers felt the least ambivalent about girl hawkers who were killed following illicit sexual encounters. The highly publicized murderous rapes of a number of girl hawkers provided critics of hawking with further evidence that hawking facilitated immorality and that parents who permitted their daughters to go out hawking, with knowledge of the temptations and threats that existed in the streets, were themselves the source of the girl hawker problem. For opponents of hawking, fatal crimes perpetrated against girl hawkers provided incontrovertible proof that hawking was a practice whose harmful side effects far outweighed the benefits it was expected to confer as a tool for the socialization of girls. One of the first reports of a girl hawker murder was published in the Daily Service. The 24 August 1944 issue told of the murder of girl hawker Saudatu A., whose young body was discovered in Oyingbo market.71 Less than a year later a Daily Times article supplied another story concerning the murder of “a small girl” while she was out hawking. On 13 March 1945, the report stated, the body of “a small girl” named Badiaran, “described as being 10 years old, height about 4 feet 6 inches, head completely shaved and dressed in a blue buba,”72 was found on the Lagos Race Course. Badiaran, who lived at 32 Alof Street in Lagos, left home around 5 p.m. on 12 March to hawk kerosene. She was believed to have been raped and killed between two and five hours after leaving home. The following summer, the Daily Service ran yet another story on the murder and probable rape of an eleven-year-old girl hawker named Olawunmi O.73 According to the article, Olawunmi was sent out to hawk foo-foo at about 8 p.m. on Tuesday, 18 June, but never The Street Walker and the Salvationist Gaze

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returned home for the night. After conducting an exhaustive search, her parents were said to have made a report to the police. Olawunmi was found dead the following morning by the gardener in charge of the “Dig for Victory Garden,” who reported his ghastly discovery to the police. Reports further alleged that the body of the deceased girl showed signs of assault.74 The murders of Saudatu, Badiaran, and Olawunmi were the stories that reached the press and ended up in the papers, not necessarily the only such cases that took place during the 1940s. The bodies of each of the murdered girls displayed evidence of some sexual activity either before or after their deaths. Specifically because of the violent endings of their young lives, the girls were placed firmly within the category of victims, and debate about their personal morality was silenced. Evaluations of girl hawkers as clear victims formed the exception, however, because girl hawkers were more commonly seen as crossing back and forth on the boundary between the respectable and unrespectable, sexual victim and sexual opportunist, the innocent and the morally corrupted. The cases that were brought to government attention were really just a tip of the iceberg. They appeared in a larger context that featured multiple, complex, divergent, and competing ideas about gender, age, social class, and sexuality. This ideological competition serves as a reminder of the unequal statuses and imbalanced power relationships among the central characters. Returning to the scene at Anikantamo Square, Okusanya was an adult who on the basis of superior age had socially legitimated authority over Oyinlola and could command her to certain actions. As a property owner, Okusanya’s landlord was of a superior class to his tenant and could thus expect a certain amount of deference from his tenant. Although Okusanya’s defiance of his landlord’s past warnings against bringing Oyinlola into the house suggest that superior class status did not automatically grant the kind of persuasive power over his tenant that the landlord might have wanted, it probably helped persuade Officer Lateju to give the summons direct and immediate attention. For his part, Officer Lateju’s status came from having the coercive power of the state behind him. In arresting Okusanya and Oyinlola, and guiding them on their tour of shame through the streets of Lagos, he also executed a punishment that Okusanya’s landlord wished to inflict on his tenant. At the end of the day, rumor, belief, and differential social statuses delivered Oyinlola and Okusanya into police custody. Okusanya’s 140

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landlord believed that certain improper activities were taking place within the walls of his household. Officer Lateju believed Okusanya’s landlord and hauled Oyinlola and the laundryman to the Central Police Station. The magistrate who would have made a final judgment in the case, perhaps after incorporating evidence from the medical examiner, would have produced a statement of belief about what had happened as well. Faith, belief, class, rumor, and complex ideas about girls and sexuality determined the way that the case unfolded, how it came to be public knowledge, and the record that it left behind. Before 1946, the connections between hawking and the sexual exploitation of young girls existed mainly in the realm of rumor. Women reformers, who by that time were closely identified with the Nigerian Women’s Party, theorized that hawking encouraged the proliferation of immorality among Lagos girls, but they had little hard evidence. Yet the force of their convictions, the few specific examples they did have, and, perhaps most important, their proximity to colonial state power were sufficient to push the hawking ban through. By getting the ban on hawking passed, women reformers enhanced their moral and political authority, and established themselves as protectors and saviors of all African girls in Lagos. The arguments for the hawking ban were made after the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943 had already been passed. Arguments were made to Lagos residents though public speeches and newspaper editorials. In 1946, the first full year of operations for the welfare department, the bulk of evidence concerning sexual exploitation of girls was generated through undercover investigations, interviews with girls in state custody, and through the anonymous reports of Lagos residents. The welfare office’s findings revealed that Lagos was just one node in child prostitution networks that spread throughout the coastal region of West Africa. They confirmed that hawking was implicated in girl exploitation, although perhaps not to the degree or in the ways that league members imagined. Most important, the welfare office’s findings highlighted the multiplicity of sexual cultures that could be found in Lagos.

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5 w Problem Girls, Private Vice, and Public Secrets in Lagos

Mr s. Ak it oye reports that she has observed young Yoruba hawkers (girls) aged 13–14, going about with “boma” boys on the Marina and she has seen them going into the compounds of European houses, presumably to meet the stewards. . . . Mrs. Akitoye says she has noticed lots of kola nuts and similar objects in Breadfruit St. Church . . . evidently tossed over the wall by girls who earn their money without walking round the street hawking. It is a pretty awful life too and a great inducement for them to earn more money more easily.1

Sexual vice and its control were preoccupations of mid-twentiethcentury social reformers all around the world. Women reformers and welfare officials in Lagos were no exception. According to the leading women reformers in 1940s Lagos, the city’s two greatest moral dangers were hawking by girls and underage prostitution. As the opening quotation shows, they understood the two activities to be different stages of the same social problem; hawking by girls was the prior issue that facilitated and led to underage prostitution. In Lagos, women reformers focused their attention on girl hawkers whom they saw as either victims of sexual assault or as amateur underage prostitutes in need of rescue from their own dangerous naïveté. It followed that reformers believed that preventing girls from hawking would also prevent girls from engaging in underage prostitution or from becoming the victims of sexual assault. Reformist discourse about girl hawkers, what they were or were not doing, and how they might be dealt with, was also a discourse about 142

backward sexual cultures and the place of girls within them. During and after the war, a broader picture of Lagos’s underage sex market emerged. In 1946, the Colony Welfare Office began to investigate its most systematized dimension—underage prostitution in private homes and brothels. Investigators discovered that commercial or coercive sex with girl hawkers existed on a spectrum of sexual practices involving girls that was shaped by far more complicated forces than the alleged immorality of the lower classes or the consumerism of the new generation, which some critics alleged inspired girls to engage in sexual trade. Investigations uncovered the geographic reach of the networks that fueled the underage sex trade in Lagos, the preponderance of girls from southern provinces in the trade, the cultural aids to regional trafficking, and the impacts of the Second World War on the trade. Investigators found that sex with underage girls was supplied by far more complex mechanisms than simple street walking. Customary practices like child fostering and proxy marriage were implicated in the regional sex trafficking business and became morally suspect for their utility in facilitating the circulation of girls. In their efforts to deal with the underage sex trade in Lagos, reformers focused on two things: redefining enabling customary practices, like child fostering and proxy marriage, as a deterrent to trafficking, and repatriating problem girls to their communities of origin. The exclusive focus that reformers directed toward underage prostitutes, their procurers, and pimps was coupled with a silence that enveloped consumers in the underage sex trade. Even as investigations uncovered the role that customers played in stimulating the market and maintaining its profitability, reformers continued to direct inquiries and punishments toward enabling customary practices, the girls who were prostituted, and their procurers and pimps. This was in part because of the forms of structural invisibility that patrons enjoyed under the colonial state. African patrons were shrouded behind expansive and elastic ideas of customary marriage. European patrons were cloaked beneath racial privileges that were extended to white male soldiers in an empire at war. Such privileges included an expectation of, and entitlement to, private sexual lives. Between disputed understandings of customary marriage procedures and colonial racial ideologies, prostitutes, procurers, and pimps were placed under far closer scrutiny than the patrons whose tastes and desires made the underage sex trade viable. Investigations that led reformers to brothels, barrooms, Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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and barracks on Lagos Island and the mainland altered what began as a campaign to save girls hawkers from illicit carnal knowledge into something more far-reaching, a critical examination of the workings of age, race, and class in the sexual subcultures of a wartime African city. LAGOS AND THE REGIONAL UNDERAGE SEX T R A D E I N WA R T I M E B R I T I S H W E S T A F R I C A

“War,” Donald Faulkner noted in 1943, “has brought to Lagos many strangers, African and European, soldiers, sailors, and civilians, and their spending power has caused the rapid development of facilities for drinking, dancing, and other less respectable social amenities. One of the most disquieting aspects of the situation thus created is the traffic in young girls for the purposes of prostitution.”2 Like other port cities throughout the British Empire, wartime Lagos had a lively prostitution industry.3 While it is not clear whether the business of exchanging money for sex acts preceded the encounter with Europe, contrary to Faulkner’s impressions, it certainly predated the Second World War. In the late 1920s, the American painter and travel writer May Mott-Smith was visiting Lagos in the course of her travels through West Africa when she observed a scene of streetwalking, cruising, and interracial prostitution. My eerie perch on the balcony of the Bonanza was made sleepless many a night by the Anne-Fanny motorcars, which would line up in front of the gin parlor. . . . I watched women in the shadow of these cars loitering, peeping, waiting, for some halfdrunk person to start on his way home. Once I saw two men go across the road to a motorcycle, which was parked across the way. A black girl had been waiting beside it. I heard the men quarrelling over her. Finally, one jumped into the side seat, pulled the girl down on his knees, and with arms locked, fervently kissing her, waited for the other man to start the engine. Finally the three disappeared down the street.4

From her vantage point on the balcony of the Bonanza Hotel, May Mott-Smith could count the number of individuals who were involved in the scene, and she could make a reasonably confident assertion about their racial identities. But she had nothing to say about an issue that would be seen as crucial a decade and a half later: age. In the view of women reformers and welfare officials, the Second World War had introduced a troubling new generational dimension to the local flesh 144

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trade. The war appeared to be accompanied by an increase in demand for sex with underage girls. The underage sex trade spanned British West Africa. Stories about the prostitution of underage girls were reported in the major cities of the region, Lagos, Accra, and Freetown. Girls were found in all the major cities and in all the port cities, being hawked for sex to men who could afford the prized commodity. The tender flesh market spanned the entire region of British West Africa from Cameroon to the Gold Coast.5 Lagos was simply one node in a larger regional commercial network. The underage sex trade and the critiques of it had both regional and transnational dimensions. Stories about prostitution networks that originated in communities in the middle and eastern parts of Nigeria to end in Lagos, or that featured the exportation of Nigerian women and girls to neighboring colonies such as the Gold Coast, were an endless source of anxiety, outrage, and embarrassment for reformers and colonial elites. Narratives of the regional underage sex trade relied on tropes of kidnapping and enslavement of innocents even as the procedures that fostered the trade presented a more complex picture. The state responded to such narratives by focusing on some of the mechanisms that facilitated the underground economy and by going after suppliers. As early as June 1939, Prince Eikineh, president of the Gold Coast Branch of the Nigerian Youth Movement, wrote a letter to the organization’s president in Lagos, demanding that the parent body of the Nigerian Youth Movement should “write to stop the emigration of the Nigerian harlots and hooligens [sic] forgging [sic] their way to the Colony and thus tarnish the good name of Nigeria.”6 Gold Coasters, Eikineh complained, “believe that all the Nigerian women are harlots, and that it is a recognized custom of Nigeria.”7 The matter had reached such appalling heights that “not only grown-up women from Nigeria are to be found here for this nefarious traffic of the flesh but also girls under age are kidnapped and brought here as a Training Ground.”8 Youth Movement members in the Gold Coast took it upon themselves to investigate stories of kidnapping and underage prostitution of Nigerian girls. In his correspondences, Eikineh described the case of a girl who was “forced by her adopted mother to be in with a sailor for certain sum of money received.”9 According to Eikineh, the girl resisted but she was “brutally beaten, manacled and forced to submit to the penial operation of the sailor.”10 Eikineh reported that the Gold Coast Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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police offered no assistance in the matter, as they seemed to be under the impression that “the Nigerian Government as well as the Nigerian Youth Movement favours it.”11 What use, he protested, was the Nigerian Youth Movement when “we are blind of the devastating state of our girls?”12 Through their vigilante police work, Eikineh and his Gold Coast–based colleagues in the Nigerian Youth Movement were asserting a prerogative to not only save girls but also to control embarrassing co-nationals. They may have been the compilers of an anonymously authored eighty-four-name list of “Nigerian Prostitutes in the Gold Coast.”13 As good nationalists, they grounded the value of maligned girls and wayward women in their reproductive capacities. After all, the politics of national reputation and the prestige of nationalists abroad was grounded in the wombs of these women. “Is it our desire,” Eikineh challenged the leadership in Lagos, “to see that Nigeria is increased in population or to be decreased when our girls, the future mothers of Nigeria are being brought here under the disguise of slavery and be made barren?”14 The NYM’s strategy for dealing with problem girls in the Gold Coast mirrored that of women reformers who were strategizing about girls in Lagos. Whereas NYM members in Sekondi sought to control the intercolony migrations of problematic women and girls, back in Lagos, the Lagos Women’s League was demanding that government should somehow restrict “women and girls of bad character” from entering the city, and “repatriate those already in town to their own homes.”15 The problem was thus constructed as one of supply, which might be helped by returning girls to the places of their figurative production. The underage prostitution market was stimulated by demand, but in their attack on it, critics went after the supply only. At its base, it required viable supplies of young girls and ways of shielding them from public view. In order to flourish, the commerce relied on a permissive attitude toward prostitution as well as discriminating clients with disposable incomes in a cash-poor wartime economy. “I AM NOT A SLAVE, SIR. I CANNOT GO HOME WITHOUT MY MONEY”: PARODIES OF PAWNSHIP AND FOSTERAGE IN THE UNDERAGE SEX TRADE TO LAGOS

The cloistering of underage prostitutes in private homes and brothels was easily conducted using the rubric of customary fosterage. On or about 21 November 1946, a young woman named Rose O. sent a 146

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letter to the welfare office. Rose, age unknown, had been working as a prostitute in Lagos for approximately three years. Although selling sex was not illegal in Lagos, it was prohibited among girls younger than age sixteen.16 The welfare office’s involvement in her case suggests that Rose either was or appeared to be under sixteen years of age. Once Rose’s activities came to the attention of the authorities, she received a summons from Donald Faulkner. The summons and the interview it announced were part of the standard procedure for dealing with underage prostitutes—a procedure that usually ended in expulsion from the city. As director of the Colony Welfare Office, Faulkner was responsible for dealing with juvenile delinquents and juveniles “in need of care and protection,” among other imperiled groups. Rose O. was a status offender, which meant that her activities were illegal only because of her age. As such, she did not fit neatly into either the category of juvenile delinquent or the category of juvenile “in need of care and protection.” She was nevertheless underage, and she had, in her own words, been “harloting.”17 Most underage prostitutes went quietly through the standard procedures, leaving no paper trail of resistance in their wake. First, a girl would receive a summons, followed by an interview, a vaginal exam to determine if she had “carnal knowledge,” and a short stay in government custody while officials tried to find her parents or guardians. From there she would either be released to the care of a relative, or she would be escorted out of Lagos by the police, presumably never to be seen again at the welfare office, or for that matter, in the historical record. As the letter below demonstrates, Rose O. was an exceptional girl. She stood up to the welfare office to assert control over her body, her earnings, and her mobility. The final resolution of Rose’s case remains unknown. But her uniquely detailed description of the events that brought her to the moment of sending the letter provides a rare first-person account of the experience of being an underage prostitute in 1940s Lagos. Sir, I have the honour to beg my good officer to listen and take pain to go through my following complaints which requires your assistant being the Welfare Officer. In the year 1944, been sick I was brought in person of my mother to Lagos for treatment where one Mad Alice Etoybodia Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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convinced her and take me from her that I shall be going from her house to the Hospital. Before my mother left Lagos she paid £1.1.0d to the Doctors and gave me £2.10.0 for my other expenses. I was from then with this woman who could not even allow me to visit the Hospital for treatment but daily doing hard works in the house which even made my sickness worse. In the year 1945 she asked me to follow her to Ikeja when I shall be better treated. We arrived Ikeja early in 1945 when I was given to a certain army man who took my virgin and he paid £3 three pounds to this woman, from there I was forced by her to become a harlot. Sir, all the money that I have been gathering from this harlot trade from 1945 is with this woman. Then last three months I beg her to send me to Hospital, she was forced before I could be allowed. During my time in the Hospital the Doctor warned me not to approach any man for sexual intercourse. When a certain set of overseas soldiers came she said that I should follow her to Ikeja, as I refused to do this she promised to send me home. I agreed to go home only she should give me my money with her. Sir, she refused and one day forced me inside a boat going home without any amount or even clothes. But I returned to meet her at Ikeja to get my money from her before I returned home. Since that time she has been hiding from me, but yesterday I called to her house to get my money from her but. She was absent. But left message for her. To my greatest surprise, this morning I saw a boy with your letter ordering me to report at your office on the 26th of this month. I asked him to go with the letter and that I shall come to see you in person. Now sir, I am prepared to go home only the woman should give me the following amount. I do not claim for all the pounds that I have foolishly worked for her. I want £10. only from her and the three pounds my virgin fee all £13.0.0d also she should give me my clothes. Please sir, ask me and I will tell you how I, a little girl like this will be force to keep three over-sea soldiers at a time. I am not a slave, sir. I cannot go home without my money Sgd. Rose O.18 148

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To summarize, Rose’s mother brought her to Lagos for medical treatment three years prior and left her in the care of Alice Etoybodia. After her mother left Lagos, Alice forced Rose to work as her housekeeper and later forced her into prostitution. All the while, Alice denied Rose access to the medical attention that had originally brought her to Lagos. After years of pleading, Rose was finally allowed to see a doctor who counseled her to avoid sexual intercourse. This led to a confrontation with Alice Etoybodia who desired to continue pimping Rose to “overseas soldiers.” Rose refused to continue “harloting,” so Alice tried to forcibly expel her from Lagos and send her back home. Rose refused to leave the city until she had been, in her view, fairly compensated for the loss of her virginity and for partial compensation for the times that she had been prostituted by Alice. Like Rose O., many underage prostitutes first entered the sex trade under the supervision of a personal acquaintance, someone who was known to their relatives, or even through a family member. Kidnapping and other overtly coercive approaches did not figure strongly in strategies of recruiting underage prostitutes during the 1940s. The more likely route that girls traveled was from living with adult prostitutes while performing nonsexual labor as a housegirl or an errand girl, and moving gradually into a fully sexual role as an underage prostitute.19 Rose stated in her letter that she was forced to work as Alice Etoybodia’s housemaid for months in Lagos before being taken to the Ikeja suburb for induction into the harlot trade. Although she intensely disliked prostitution, Rose felt compelled to remain with Etoybodia for almost three years before she gathered the determination to demand her wages and abandon the harlot trade. The exact nature of Rose’s personal relationship to Alice Etoybodia is unclear. But two factors suggest that Etoybodia was known to Rose’s family. The first factor is the selection of Alice to serve as Rose’s guardian in Lagos in the first place. Rose had other relatives in the city, one of whom was her brother-in-law Ben Esusu. Days after Rose sent her letter to the colony welfare officer, Ben Esusu also sent a letter indicating that he had intimate knowledge of Rose’s living conditions in Etoybodia’s home. Esusu echoed Rose’s claims that she was “not a slave” and consequently should not be forced to leave Lagos without her money.20 It is possible that Alice Etoybodia was given the responsibility of chaperoning Rose because she was a woman or because of the proximity of her home to the hospital. The point is that Alice Etoybodia was not the Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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only person that Rose knew in Lagos, nor was she necessarily Rose’s closest relative. Even so, Rose’s mother chose to leave her daughter in Alice’s custody. The second factor that suggests that Etoybodia might have been well known to Alice’s family is the contractual language used to discuss Rose and Alice’s relationship. The two understood each other to be in a relationship of mutual obligation or a type of contract, and there were others who stood witness to that contract. Ben Esusu’s analysis of the final confrontation between Alice and Rose rests on the presumption of some kind of sexual labor agreement. Esusu wrote, “The reason why she asked the girl to go home is because she complaining of why she should not be allowed to attend the Hospital. The reply was that the Over-Sea soldiers should finish first.”21 In other words Alice Etoybodia felt a sense of entitlement to Rose’s sexual labor and considered letting the “Over-Sea soldiers finish first” to be a valid precondition for allowing Rose to go to the hospital. As soon as Rose began protesting the arrangement, Alice Etoybodia sent her packing. To the casual observer Rose’s relationship to Alice Etoybodia would have appeared to be a straightforward relationship of foster child to guardian. Fosterage was a common practice in many West African cultures; it was used to create or fortify social, economic, or political ties. The most common forms of fosterage into the late twentieth century were kinship fostering, wherein children lived with extended relations such as grandparents; apprentice fostering and educational fostering, wherein children were sent to live with individuals who could train them in valued skills or provide them access to better schools than their parents could; and crisis fostering, wherein children were relocated due to dissolution of their families of origin.22 Several participants in the cross-generational surveys of childhood alluded to having had personal experiences with fosterage.23 Yet the circumstances of Rose’s life with Etoybodia, and particularly Rose’s experience of it, seem to demand a more nuanced explanation of their relationship. In their letters both Rose and Ben Esusu invoked common understandings of slave status in their arguments for Rose’s right to remain in Lagos. In the last line of her letter, Rose wrote, “I am not a slave, sir. I cannot go home without my money.”24 Only slaves, she implied, could be made to work without compensation. Rose’s brother-in-law closed his letter by writing similarly, “Rose is not a slave, as concerning law she must not be thus treated.”25 As concerning the law in fact, slavery had been declared illegal in Nigeria in the Slavery Ordinance of 1916.26 150

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Yet Rose’s and Ben Esusu’s references to slavery are suggestive. Rose may not have considered herself a slave, but her statement betrays a fear of the possibility that she might slip into the category of slave or a sense that her situation bore uncomfortable similarities to those of a slave. Although slavery was illegal, there is evidence that it was still being practiced in 1940s Lagos, and openly. A police informant who called himself “The Reporter” related a case of two girls being used for prostitution at the home of one Afiong Bassey of 9 Onibudu Lane in Lagos. On questioning, Ms. Bassey unflinchingly told the police that the girls were her slaves. It is impossible to know definitively whether or not Bassey was aware that slavery was illegal in Nigeria. But the fact that she told the police, by way of explaining the girls’ presence in her home, that they were simply her slaves, suggests that slavery was still part of the urban social fabric. The police ordered Bassey to return the girls to their hometowns, but as The Reporter observed, she never did. Instead, Bassey sent the girls to a house in Ebute Metta on the Lagos mainland. “She is a professional prostitute,” The Reporter wrote, “and she is training those girls by her profession, to meet the easy society of white sailors as she makes it a daily work.”27 Rose may not have been a slave, and Alice may not have been a slave owner, but she did exercise the authority to demand domestic and sexual labor from Rose, most likely with the knowledge of Rose’s mother. Slavery, the very institution that Rose sought to distance herself from, points us toward a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between Rose O. and her guardian/pimp, Alice Etoybodia. The arrangement for Rose’s sexual labor is reminiscent of pawnship arrangements, wherein debtors leave a junior member of their family with a creditor until their debts are repaid, in the sense that it involved a young girl, negotiations among adults, and continuing relationships between the alleged pawn and her family, one of the key points of differentiation between pawning and slavery. Historians Toyin Falola and Paul Lovejoy’s edited volume on pawnship seeks to clarify the distinctions between pawnship and slavery. In their introduction they characterize pawnship as a system in which “the terms of exchange in different markets (labor and credit) were contractually and simultaneously tied together.”28 Women were more frequently pawned than men; thus “the flow of credit and the control of labor were closely linked with the institution of marriage.”29 Roberts and Klein’s contribution on pawning in the Western Sudan found linkages between the Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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economic depression of the 1930s and a rise in pawning in that region.30 Falola’s contribution dated pawning into the 1950s in Nigeria and possibly even later.31 Falola and Lovejoy are careful to highlight the social meaning and function of pawning, which provides one of the key points of differentiation between pawnship and slavery. Pawnship was understood to be an arrangement of mutual benefit to all parties to the negotiation. As the sociologist N. A. Fadipe puts it, “The principal argument generally put forward in justification of pawning children is that the discipline affords excellent training.”32 Having others discipline one’s child was reportedly so valued by Yoruba parents that “well-to-do people sometimes availed themselves of loans in order to place children under discipline which they thought such children needed but could not get under their direct control.”33 In a further explanation of the distinctions between pawnship and slavery, Falola and Lovejoy write, “Creditors sometimes took in pawns for social reasons that involved costs that could not be fully recovered. Children of destitute relatives, for example, were not necessarily exploited in an economic sense, and a creditor might well spend considerable money on education and clothing without expecting to recover these costs. This noblesse oblige should not be forgotten in the discussion of the harsh side of pawning.”34 In the preceding quotation, Falola and Lovejoy first presume that debt is only created prior to the pawnship arrangement; but then they reverse themselves by characterizing the cost of education and clothing as a distinct form of debt, which is created and sustained during the term of the pawnship arrangement. This second debt is one that the noble creditor may readily forgive. Yet it is also one that the debtor cannot avoid accumulating. Thus what began as an explanation of the distinction between slavery and pawnship slips almost imperceptibly into a statement of the differences between pawnship and kinship fosterage. The question becomes: Is the child of destitute relatives a foster, a pawn, or something else altogether? Shifting emphasis to the second half of the idea of noblesse oblige begs a different but related question: Where does pawnship end and familial obligation to foster the children of poor relatives begin? In a discussion of the category iwofa, roughly translated as pawn, one of my informants said, “Now we call it fostering. . . . In those days, iwofa was something like a slave. Somebody can bring their children to you, one or two, and say, ‘take.’ Then the children stay with the person, the person feeds them, clothes them, 152

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trains them. They can even marry the girl off or marry the boy to somebody they like. The thing is that the parents can’t just come and take them like that. Not to say that they won’t know their parents. Maybe they can see them from time to time, but the children now belong to the oba who is in charge of them. . . . This is because the parents can’t take care of them themselves.”35 Just as the wealthy may have felt obligated to take in the children of poorer relatives, destitute parents may have felt obligated to rescind authority over their children to wealthier relatives. Even without expecting to recover the costs of a loan to the parents, the money creditors spent in maintaining a child could still constitute a debt, and it could still have the effect of transferring power over the child away from biological parents. Although a pawn was technically a guarantee of payment for the interest on a debt, there were situations in which the distinction between a slave, a pawn, or a fostered child could, in practice, become quite muddled or, indeed, just semantics.36 Thus the commonalities between slave, pawn, and fostered child are as important to consider as the differences. The most significant point of commonality is that all three categories described children who were not in the custody of their biological parents. In West African cultures, the experience of being under the control of guardians as opposed to parents or close relatives was strongly associated with living in a state of peril. When asked about the features of a poorly treated child, members of the 80 Group in the multigenerational survey of childhood in Lagos reported, as one might expect, that children who were frequently beaten, who generally wore torn or otherwise shabby clothes, and children who were overworked were considered to be poorly treated. Yet significantly, and without prompting, respondents specifically named absent birth parents, particularly mothers, as a characteristic of the poorly treated child. Poorly treated children were those who “did not feed well and were beaten almost every day by their step-mother” or those who were “made to work till late night and yet still wake up earlier than necessary because they were not with their parents.”37 Thus the condition of living apart from birth parents, particularly mothers, was fundamental to general understandings of imperiled childhood while the question of whether natal separation was a function of fosterage, pawnship, or slavery, was secondary. Rose’s insistence that she was not a slave may have been an acknowledgment of the persistence and proximity of slavery in her social world.38 It may have been important for her to mark what she was Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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not because just like slave children and pawns she was within the ranks of those children who lived under the control of distant guardians—in Rose’s case, a malevolent mistress. Yet her subordination to Alice Etoybodia had not left Rose completely powerless. By the moment of our encounter with her, Rose had escaped from a boat destined for her hometown that Alice put her on, and she had been hunting Mad Alice throughout Ikeja to demand her £10 for three years of harloting, her £3 virgin fee, and her clothes. Clearly, Alice Etoybodia had not maintained unchallenged control over Rose O. Another case in which child fosterage enabled underage prostitution was revealed by a man named Bernard E., who wrote in to report his “pretending wife” Office Udugba. Bernard E.’s so-called wife had a young girl named Tiro living in their house.39 To the casual observer, Tiro must have appeared to be a foster child or a domestic servant, which were in any case, often interchangeable categories. But as Bernard E. explained, Office had previously been arrested for putting a minor in moral danger. After Office’s last arrest, Faulkner had entrusted Bernard E. with the responsibility of returning Tiro to her home village and keeping his wife “very steady out of prostitution.”40 This charge proved difficult for Bernard E. to fulfill. “She was becoming worse day after day,” he wrote. “She was far behind my control hence I forward this petition.”41 Office Udugba’s disregard for Faulkner’s orders and for her husband’s wishes worsened so much that she sent for the return of young Tiro. “This is what causes our quarrel when I heard the rumour.” Bernard E. closed his letter with a request that officials rid him of Office Udugba. “And I wish,” he wrote, “that from henceforth this woman ‘Office’ can do out of my ways as she does not take any little advice that I gave her. Hoping you will assure me the most necessary step to be taken against this measure.”42 How Office first began her prostitution business is unknowable. Yet her ability to keep Tiro, and to even request the return of Tiro after the girl had been repatriated to her hometown, reinforces the claim that girls were introduced to prostitution by individuals who were well known to them or their families. The career of one Madam Ogoudi provides another example of how child fostering enabled the supply of girls into the underage sex trade. It also touches on the utility of customary marriage claims for sex traffickers. On 10 July 1943, an individual who identified himself or herself by the alias “Informant” sent a letter to the welfare department 154

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to report on Madam Ogoudi and her child brothel at 41 Taiwo Street. In the letter, Informant claimed that Madam Ogoudi was keeping three girls between the ages of nine and twelve in her home and that she was routinely “giving them to different a kind of men for sexual intercourse.”43 Two of the girls were apparently called Rebecca, and the third was called Elizabeth. One evening at around 7:30, Informant went to Madam Ogoudi’s place. There, he or she overheard someone crying in an inner room. Looking in the room, Informant “discovered a girl not up to age of haven [sic] to do with man is in room with a certain seaman,” and immediately determined to alert the authorities.44 “Now according to your occupation,” Informant wrote, “I have to appeal to your highly supervision as to inspect the place and have such action be seized by transporting these three girls away otherwise it will no longer caurse [sic] . . . their death.”45 By itself, Informant’s letter raises several questions regarding what happened to the three girls but yields no answers. Did welfare officials or police officers end up inspecting Madam Ogoudi’s residence on the prompting of Informant’s letter? Did the actions Informant complained about cease? Were Elizabeth and the two Rebeccas transported from the world of underage prostitution? Did the crying finally stop? The welfare office might have conducted a raid on Madam Ogoudi’s place, according to Informant’s pleadings. Alternatively, the welfare office might have pursued the path of cautious inquiry into the tales of a nameless informer. The records reveal nothing about what followed for the three girls. But they do reveal that Madam Ogoudi was able to continue her underage prostitution business and at the very same address. Almost exactly three years later on 12 July 1946, a person named Ogbo Atuyola wrote to the welfare office from Okitipupa Division in the Western Region to report that his “sister” Alice had gone missing. “I have the hounor [sic] most respectfully to ask,” Atuyola wrote, “if the order was gave [sic] to Madam Ogoudu 41 Taiwo Street Lagos to trade with girls. Because she used to come here and packes [sic] all the girls to Lagos. . . . She took Alice to Lagos and you sende [sic] her back here. I let you know that Alice and one small girl by named Esikimuemu. She must lie for you that the girl get husband. She took her from her parents at Iwereko Warri province. I have no more than to send my sister Alice.”46 To paraphrase, Atuyola was writing to alert the welfare office about the disappearance of a girl named Alice, who had previously been connected to Madam Ogoudu in Lagos and later Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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repatriated by the welfare office to Okitipupa. Alice had gone missing again, this time along with a “small girl” named Esikimuemu, and Atuyola suspected that Madam Ogoudu aka Madam Ogoudi was behind their disappearances. The welfare office’s investigations into the Alice and Esikimuemu cases uncovered that Alice was approximately fifteen years old and that Esikimuemu, who also went by the name Victoria Ejiyinmire, may have been about thirteen years old. There was some suggestion that the two girls may have been Madam Ogoudi’s daughters, but her parental relationship to them was as likely to have had a social or informal basis as a biological basis.47 When Atuyola wrote, “She must lie to you that the girl get husband,” he anticipated that when challenged, Madam Ogudi might claim to have brokered a marriage for one or both of the girls to explain why they were in her custody.48 Marriage brokers were routinely given responsibility for arranging the first meeting between bride and groom, and for “training” the bride if she was a young girl, until she was mature enough to live with her spouse. Sometimes, a female marriage broker could marry the young bride in the stead of the groom, delivering her over to him once she had come of age. Atuyola feared that Madam Ogoudi would convince investigators that Alice had been married and was traveling or living with her according to legitimate native marriage customs. A few days after sending his first letter, Atuyola sent the welfare office a follow-up message that was accompanied by what he claimed was a correspondence between Madam Ogoudi and one of her collaborators. In his words, “I beg to let you know that nothing hid again about Ogudi Oji who I wrote you that she used to trade with girls. I picked some paper in the evening. . . . I saw what she wrote to her brother hire [sic] about Esikimuemu whom she brother from Sabo. I have nothing to say than this letter she wrote is her brother James Oji.”49 In other words, Atuyola had discovered a letter from Madam Ogoudi aka Madam Ogoudu, aka Ogudi Oji that he believed was intended for her “brother” James Oji, concerning among other things, the missing girls. The two-page letter of Mrs. Ogodi, as it was signed, confirmed that she did have custody of Alice and Esikimuemu at one point, that the authorities had ordered her to repatriate Alice, whom she sent to Okitipupa, and that she was only newly aware that the girl had recently gone missing. In short, Alice’s departure from Okitipupa had been as much of a surprise to Madam Ogoudi as it was to Atuyola. 156

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The circumstances involving Madam Ogoudi’s losing Alice are fairly complicated. Alice was taken from Lagos to Okitipupa, but she didn’t stay there for long. Ogoudi wrote, “When I got here I received a telegram from the meeting that I should send Alice down. . . . I was greatly astonished for I left her at Okitipupa.”50 In other words, after taking Alice to Okitipupa, Madam Ogoudi received a notice ordering the girl’s return. She ignored what must have been the confusing notice and booked passage on a boat bound for Lagos. There she was shocked to see Alice once again. When the ship we entered got bad in condition, thereby I saw the D.O. (district officer) boat coming. In our ship a wife to the steward boy of the D.O. was in our ship. And the ship drew to our ship as to convey the steward wife. In the D.O’s boat, there I saw Alice, and I asked her where is she going. She endeavoured and told me that she is been married the A.D.O. steward. The matter has been said in the office, that what she said.51

To paraphrase, Madam Ogoudi was en route to Lagos by boat, when an official government boat met hers to transfer some passengers. Among the passengers she found on board was Alice, the girl who had just recently been left in Okitipupa. When Madam Ogoudi asked Alice what she was up to, Alice replied that she had been married in an office ceremony to the district officer’s steward, and she was accompanying him to Lagos as his wife. Although Madam Ogoudi did grasp the basic facts of Alice’s escape, she missed some key points. One, the man Madam Ogoudi referred to as the district officer’s steward, was in fact a clerk for the surveyor of antiquities who was traveling with the district officer.52 This distinction is important because the district officer in Okitipupa had been cooperating with the Colony Welfare Office in an investigation of the Alice and Esikimuemu cases but didn’t recognize the young bride in his party as the Alice of his investigations. Writing later to Faulkner, the district officer reported that Alice had been handed over to her “mother” Ogoudi and warned to be of good behavior on 22 May. “Nothing more was heard of her until . . . enquiry disclosed that she had cleverly secured a free passage to Atijere in my launch by posing as the wife or fiancée of a clerk to Mr. K.C. Murray, Surveyor of Antiquities, who traveled with me on 4th July.”53 The letter sent to Faulkner from the district officer of Okitipupa further complicates the largely passive characterization of Alice that one gets from Atuyola’s letters. Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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OF CUSTOMARY PRACTICES AND CUSTOMIZED MARRIAGES

Ogoudi’s discussion of the “small girl” Esikimuemu touches on a crucial aspect of the trade in girls throughout Southern Nigeria, which concerned exploitation of the confusion surrounding customary marriage practices for the sake of excusing cross-generational domestic or sexual arrangements between girls and men. Alerting James Oji to Esikimuemu’s whereabouts, Mrs. Ogoudi wrote, “Our in-law Samu who is coming to Okitipupa for some time, I send her to that man. . . . Because of Government I deed that. I send her to him because the Gov have said that him don’t was to see a small girl harloting.”54 If questioned by officials about Esikimuemu, Samu had been instructed to say that she was his new young wife and that his marriage to her had been brokered by James Oji. “I told the man that the girl father has died and you are brother to her, who trained her from youth. . . . I told the man that if any police ask him, he should say that she is her [sic] wife. . . . Because of Government I deed it so. We don’t know of tomorrow.”55 The use of marriage in Esikimuemu’s story illustrates how claims to customary marriage featured as an aid to the regional underage sex trade. Madam Ogoudi of Many Names instructed Samu to tell officials that Esikimuemu was his wife because she knew that colonial officials had no answer to claims of customary marriage. To European colonial officials, customary marriages in Southern Nigeria were endless in the variety of their formats and formality. More important, there was no government office that recorded customary marriage rites. This made customary marriage both unverifiable and undeniable outside of the immediate local contexts in which they occurred. Colonial fixations on the payment of bride-price and ideas of customary marriage as basically a financial transaction involving the buying and selling of brides had the effect of radically expanding what could be characterized as a marriage. Any monetary gift that resulted in the transfer of a woman or girl, for sexual and domestic uses, could in theory be portrayed as a customary marriage. Under the indirect rule system of colonial governance, customary marriage, like all other customary activities excepting slavery, cannibalism, and infanticide, were practically inviolable. Marriages could be formed or consummated between men and girls, both of any age, and they would be free from governmental scrutiny so long as their unions were not officiated under the Marriage Ordinance. Even under the Marriage Ordinance 158

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there was some allowance for child brides. In its only mention of age, the ordinance provided that “whoever, knowing that the written consent required by this Ordinance has not been obtained, shall marry or assist or procure any other person to marry a minor under the age of twenty-one years, not being a widow or widower, shall be liable to imprisonment for two years.”56 In short, the Marriage Ordinance recognized marriages to minors that had parental consent. Presumably, it also recognized the new marriages of widows or widowers younger than age twenty-one without requiring parental consent. In Esikimuemu’s case, marriage was used to excuse her questionable migration patterns and her older male traveling partner. Marriage was not only a useful cover because “the Gov have said that him don’t was to see a small girl harloting”57 but also because the government had no established system for invalidating customary marriages. As reformers gathered information about the mechanisms of the underage sex trade and the geographic extent of its networks, girls traveling from the provinces to Lagos became subject to the sort of scrutiny that followed girl hawkers plying their wares within the city streets. The mere fact of traveling was enough to raise alarms about underage prostitution with officials. Knowing this, some parents deployed accusations of underage prostitution and trafficking for their own ends. Parents brought complaints to welfare officials on behalf of their missing daughters, which significantly often involved some dispute over who was authorized to marry the daughter off. One father, P. Esien of Itu, brought a complaint against his brotherin-law Mr. Gregory E. Ekanem. He claimed that Mr. Ekanem had secretly planned to import his sixteen-year-old daughter Alice (a different Alice) to Lagos for “fornication purpose.”58 Alice had been engaged to a man her father had chosen until, her father claimed, her uncle’s correspondences had “corrupted her and diverted her attention and love from her fiancé.”59 Alison Izzett arrived at different conclusions after interviewing the accused uncle and reviewing correspondences between the three men vying for control of Alice’s life—the uncle, the father, and the would-be fiancé. Izzett wrote, “He [Gregory Ekanem] is the maternal uncle of the girl and when the girl’s mother was dying, he promised to educate the girl and has in fact paid for her schooling from her first going to school to the present time. In 1944, the father, who is illiterate, was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment for smuggling. He was released this year. When he came out, he was penniless and without Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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clothes and in order to obtain money, he affianced Alice to a teacher at the C.M.S. school, name [sic] Okan, who paid £10–£7 dowry and £3 expenses. The father has since admitted that he only affianced the girl to obtain money and has apologized for doing so without the uncle’s consent after the uncle spent so much in educating the girl. He has agreed that Mr. Epankem shall refund the money to Okan.”60 In Alice E.’s case, the conflict lay between her father and maternal uncle, each of whom had very different visions of their responsibility to Alice, and of their authority to control Alice’s behavior and her life. Acting from a position of weakness, P. Esien betrothed his daughter in order to rebuild his finances. When the betrothal fell apart, he risked the attention of government officials by asking the welfare office to restore Alice to his control. Presumably he expected that his status as a parent allowed him to exercise authority over Alice’s life and sexuality. G. Epankem, however, asserted his superior authority over her by referring to the fact that he had “spent so much in educating the girl.”61 The implication was that in educating Alice, Epankem was the only person who had authentically played the role of her father. He had spent far more than Esien could ever repay. The impossibility of Esien’s repaying the debt owed to Epankem effectively transferred parental authority over Alice from her father to her maternal uncle. This economic argument swayed the social welfare officer and ultimately Alice’s father as well, sealing Ekanem’s position as the primary male authority in Alice E.’s life. The story of another girl, thirteen-year-old Akuigbe I., also featured a father who had betrothed his daughter and who faced losing control over her. In this case, Akuigbe’s father charged his daughter with pursuing prostitution as a strategy for escaping a marriage he had contracted for her. Akuigbe’s father opened the case when he complained to the district officer of Owerri Division that one Elizabeth Nwannena of Ezihu Ezindo Ezinihitta village was coming from Lagos to “procure young girls for illicit purpose.”62 Investigators in Lagos and Owerri exchanged correspondences to determine who exactly Elizabeth Nwannena was, if she had a history of procuring and prostituting children, and if she was herself a prostitute. In the final analysis, investigations uncovered that Elizabeth Nwannena was Akuibge’s sister and may have been an older daughter of the complainant. Their father had betrothed Akuigbe and had already received the dowry. If Akuigbe left for Lagos with her sister Elizabeth, the betrothal would fall through, and he might have been asked to return the dowry. 160

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Elizabeth was characterized by the district officer of Owerri Province, as “a strumpet”63 and by A. I. Bankole-Wright, the acting colony welfare officer at the time, as a “reputed prostitute.”64 Although it is entirely possible that Elizabeth might have intended to introduce Akuigbe to the harlot trade, it is equally possible that Akuibge was another Alice E. under the sway of a father who had betrothed her for his own purposes. Like Alice’s uncle Gregory Ekanem, Elizabeth might have considered herself the younger girl’s rescuer. She presumably had not married at as early an age as Akuigbe would. Not only had she remained unmarried, but she had moved across the country from Owerri to Lagos, the infamous city of illicit purpose. In the case of the affianced Akuigbe Ibejianya, authorities sided with Akuigbe’s father and the district officer of Owerri ordered that Akuigbe could not leave her hometown for Lagos on the grounds of being too young. In both Alice’s and Akuigbe’s cases, the girls had already been betrothed. The problem was not that they were in imminent danger of engaging in sexual activity, but rather that these activities would take place outside the context of marriages that had been contracted by their fathers. The alleged prostitution and broken betrothal cases raise a number of questions about the relationship between girlhood status, marital status, and sexual experience. First, they suggest that marriage of young girls, and the sex with them that marriage implied, was considered relatively unremarkable. They also suggest that youthful age was not seen as inimical to sexual activity. Yet neither was sexual experience understood to confer adult status. The girls who were reported on were mostly teenagers who had likely undergone what their societies understood as puberty. Several of them had also gained sexual experience. Even so, neither their handlers nor welfare officials viewed them as full social adults. In a third case, an accusation of underage prostitution was leveled by a would-be groom against the brother of a girl he hoped to marry. “Blackie,” as the girl was called, had been placed under the legal custody of her brother William Ugborokefe when her mother was sent to prison for prostituting her. According to the complainant’s letter, Blackie’s brother had taken up exactly where their mother left off. First, he allegedly deceived the welfare office by reporting that he had married Blackie to a young man, Mr. Charles, who worked for the Nigerian Railway. “The girl attended the man only two months that is from Sept 10th to Oct 31st 1946.”65 Once the complainant realized that the Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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marriage between Blackie and Mr. Charles would not last, he applied to Blackie’s brother for her hand in marriage. William’s response was unexpected and disappointing. “He told me to keep her as a lover that is (Concubine) and to pay her £1.10/- every month I said no I want to marry her, he said he did not want her to marry me because I am doing my own work I got no money to feed her [his] sister.”66 It seems that the author was self-employed as a trader or some other such entrepreneur. He felt discriminated against by William, who claimed that because he did not have a wage-paying job, he could not marry Blackie. Pointing to the example of Mr. Charles, a wage-earning railwayman who failed to marry Blackie, the author challenged that explanation but to no avail. William Ugborokefe wouldn’t budge. Infuriated at the rejection, the author brought his complaint to the welfare office. “This man cannot keep this girl properly,” he wrote. “He is going the same way as her mother. . . . He want her to go here and there collecting money from people. . . . He will only come to tell you lie that the man refused to marry her [his] sister; you must tell him to bring the man, you want to see or hear from him yourself. . . . I beg you once again to save our young girls from prostitution or (Harlot).”67 Official anxieties regarding underage prostitution made all instances of girls traveling alone inherently suspect. Girls were subjected to exceptional travel restrictions in the hinterland, and traveling girls were subjected to invasive exams upon their arrival in Lagos. District officers in hinterland provinces began instituting travel restrictions on girls in their area. The district officer of Kukuruku Division, for example, enacted a prohibition on girls from his district traveling to Lagos for marriage. The case of a girl known as Ajala of Fugar particularly upset him. Both of Ajala’s parents were dead when she became betrothed to Ayekumeh Izebuno. According to the district officer, her marriage was transacted between a “distant uncle” and her would-be spouse’s representative, “a youth called Osheke.”68 Meanwhile, no one in Ajala’s village knew she was getting married. Invoking his own understanding of the requirements for customary marriage in order to block Ajala’s betrothal, the district officer determined that “customary marriage rites had not been performed” and therefore, Ajala was not legally married by any understanding of the phrase.69 District Officer Kukuruku displayed an unusual amount of thoroughness in his work when he went directly to the local village councils with his anti-trafficking plan. “For my part,” he wrote, “I am not sending down any young girls to 162

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Lagos and nor are the Village Councils (if I can help it). I am getting them to take the attitude that if the marriage is genuine the intending husband must come and marry the girl in her own native village in front of all. If she and her parents then consent for her to go to Lagos with him that is purely their affair.”70 Following the Ajala affair, girls leaving Kukuruku Division for Lagos would have been suspected of entering a life of prostitution. In order to curb the incidence of underage prostitution in Lagos, the district officer in Kukuruku tried altering the procedures of customary marriages by discouraging, if not outright prohibiting, the practice of proxy marriage, wherein a marriage broker or representative of the groom would perform the marriage rites on behalf of the absent groom and deliver the bride over to him at a later date. Informants told me that because of the expense of transportation between Lagos and the provinces, would-be grooms in the 1950s (and possibly earlier) sometimes requested that their brides be sent to meet them in Lagos, after they had been married through a proxy. Proxy marriages may have offered grooms a savings in the cost of traveling to the provinces themselves to get married.71 By requiring that “the intending husband must come and marry the girl in her own native village in front of all,” District Officer Kukuruku proscribed one of the methods of entering a customary marriage. Officials tried other measures to modify customary marriage in ways that made it more closely resemble ordinance marriage. For example, legislators raised the age of consent for girls from thirteen to seventeen on the presumption that in the absence of documentary evidence, seventeen-year-old girls would be relatively easy to recognize, whereas thirteen seemed for whatever reasons to be harder to know by sight.72 They also advanced proposals for registering customary marriages that were debated in the press. One commenter wrote, “The proposal for registration of native marriage has been well received throughout the Western Provinces of Nigeria. We welcome the idea and believe that if properly worked out, it will go a long way to regularize relations between husbands and wives who are joined together in accordance with the traditions of their fathers. There is, however, an aspect of the question, which has been completely left untouched even by the ardent supporters of the registration system. What particular form of marriage will be registered? What is now described with or without justification as native marriage expresses itself in a thousand and one various forms.”73 As time passed, the commenter lamented, the variety of unions that fell under the category of native Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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marriage was only proliferating. “There are native marriages consummated in many parts of the country today, which would not in purely indigenous community receive any legal or customary sanction. A man takes to a woman on a highway without the knowledge of any of her people and in most cases without going through the customary process and regards himself as her legitimate husband. No native custom recognizes the validity of such marriage.”74 District officials, highway grooms, and indignant commenters on the seeming crisis of native marriage—each held his or her own views on which unions should be counted as valid and why. Regardless of the efforts of reformers and colonial officials, girls continued to be taken to Lagos for marriage, concubinage, and prostitution. The profits to be made on fresh young girls in the cities were too enticing for entrepreneurs to ignore. The economic privations that families faced in certain parts of the country were correspondingly too onerous to bear. In an influential study of prostitution in the Cross River Basin of Nigeria between 1930 and 1950, the historian Ben Naanen explored the relationship between sexism, cash scarcity in rural areas, and urban prostitution. Naanen argued that women from the Cross River Basin turned to prostitution for income as a result of being forced out of the rural cash-crop economy. Most of the women in Naanen’s study left their home regions for Lagos, Calabar, and Port Harcourt. A good number also went to Accra, Secondi, and Kumasi in the Gold Coast, while another number went to Cameroon and Guinea. Improved transportation services facilitated interregional migration, and preexisting sociocultural features of some Cross River communities facilitated women’s entry into prostitution. Naanen identified high rates of separation, the practice of wife-swapping, and matrilineal descent systems, which weakened the controls fathers had over daughters, as enabling cultural features. Prostitution offered relatively quick and high returns compared to the agricultural labor that had previously been the preserve of women in Cross River Basin villages. With the growth of an export industry for Nigerian palm oil, men began to limit women’s access to palm products, including in some places to the palm kernels that were women’s customary entitlement. Naanen argued that locally available opportunities for women to earn cash shrunk at the same time as the economy was becoming rapidly monetized, leading increasing numbers of women to enter the regional sex trade. 164

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In her influential study of prostitution and the housing market in colonial Nairobi, Kenya, Luise White made a similar argument that enveloped women’s sex work within familial economic strategies. White argued that the subgroup of women for whom prostitution was family labor tended to come from families that had suffered dramatic and rapid losses in their cattle herds, which triggered spirals of familial impoverishment. “Such prostitution—the sale of tasks normally available only though marriage—returned to the woman’s family the exchange value of those tasks, often far in excess of the values that under normal or better circumstances her marriage would have transmitted to her father’s household.”75 Both Naanen and White displayed a certain reluctance to apply their analyses of women’s prostitution to girls. Girls enter Naanen’s study only in his discussion of the effects of prostitution-related emigration on small communities. As declining rates of reproduction and population loss triggered fears that vulnerable ethnic groups would cease to exist, child stealing, he argues, became one strategy for repopulating smaller communities.76 In Comforts of Home, White includes a short section on adolescent Kikuyu girls who practiced the wazi-wazi, or streetwalking form of prostitution, in Nairobi during the Second World War. But she couched this example of underage prostitution as little more than a ruse that colonial officials used for mobilizing disciplinary regimes against urban Africans and shoring up the power of rural patriarchs.77 Yet as the stories of girls in Lagos signal, girls’ sexuality could be incorporated into household survival strategies, and some parents and guardians of underage prostitutes did make calculations regarding the comparative market values of bridewealth, serial concubinage, or making their girls go with sailors. MORAL DANGERS IN THE EMPIRE: RACE, AGE, AND VENEREAL DISEASE IN THE BUSINESS OF UNDERAGE PROSTITUTION

Except for the passage of a series of acts such as the Unlicensed Guide Prohibition Ordinance of 1941 or the Venereal Disease Ordinance of 1943, the colonial government in Nigeria maintained a laissez-faire approach to prostitution. Prostitution itself was not made illegal even though related activities like procuring did become subject to legal controls. Prostitution became a problem only when it seemed to pose a challenge to imperial military strength. Thus the concerns of Lagosian moralists and modernists dovetailed with the interests of empire as the Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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Second World War gained steam and the sexual well-being of sailors and soldiers became a matter of imperial security. Within such a context, managing the health of patrons through the salvation of young girls in Lagos ascended to the rank of a serious colonial policy concern. The possibility that they were united in a customary marriage camouflaged prostitution between African men and girls. But race, and racial difference more precisely, rendered other forms of prostitution hypervisible. W. F. Kalley, who was one of a number of West African students sent to study social welfare at the London School of Economics in the 1940s, prepared an insightful analysis of race and prostitution in Freetown, Sierra Leone, which may also be applied to Lagos. Writing in 1945, he argues that prostitution was not “merely a war-time phenomenon.”78 The war had simply made certain forms of prostitution, specifically interracial liaisons, more common and more visible. “It is evident,” he writes, “that prostitution had been going on during the last 15 to 20 years in Freetown. It was only noticeable when differences in colour comes into the picture. For example, if a girl prostituted with a Syrian it was noticeable.”79 The war, as Faulkner had remarked, brought many strangers of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds to Lagos. In mid-1946 Alison Izzett organized undercover investigations of the interracial underage prostitution business. In one covert operation, her agents, “two Europeans,” spent several evenings visiting “houses of illrepute” to gather information on the girl inmates. At the first house they visited, they reported that an elderly woman was in charge. In the room they were shown, they saw two beds in cubicles and a number of young children sleeping on mats. There, “two girls were produced whose ages were between 11 and 15 years respectively.”80 The second site that the detectives visited was a place known as the Traveler’s Inn. Once again, an elderly woman was in charge and twelve young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four were brought forward for the Europeans’ perusal. Two of the youngest girls reportedly came forward to sit on the men’s knees. When Izzett’s agents specified that they wanted virgins, they were promised that virgins would be arranged for the following night. The scenario was repeated at several other houses in the area where young girls were presented to the European customers, and virgins were promised for the following evening.81 The market rate for sex with a virgin would have been high for the average African worker. In the late 1930s the average salary for a government clerical worker was about £4 per month. On the lowest 166

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end, the minimum wage for government laborers was £1.10 shillings per month.82 Rose O.’s letter noted £3 as the cost of her virginity.83 Sex with nonvirgins was a fraction of the cost at about 10 shillings.84 Girls provided evidence of their youth by undressing to show prospective European customers the small sizes of their breasts.85 Small breasts suggested youth, which implied virginity, submission, and sexual purity. In an empire and imperial military shot through with venereal disease, sexual purity became a valuable commodity. In the virgin sex niche economy, small girls, younger girls, and physically underdeveloped girls fetched a premium. As long as a girl appeared young and healthy she could assuredly be sold over and over again as a virgin. In a correspondence with the district officer of the Kukuruku Division, Faulkner stated that what particularly worried him about Ayekumeh Izebuno was that he had access to a young orphan girl and white soldiers at the same time. “What I don’t like is the fact that he is a steward in constant touch with European soldiers. In that position he could, were he of that mind, recover any money paid as dowry in a few weeks by prostituting the girl and then go on making money hand over fist until she gets V.D.”86 The case of a girl who had turned up at the welfare office confirmed the practice. “A well-known Boma boy,” Faulkner wrote, “heard of the death of his uncle and remembering that there was a young girl left fatherless, went to the home and persuaded that girl to come to Lagos on the promise that there was a husband awaiting her. She was brought to Lagos, kept in close confinement and prostituted to European sailors. Eventually she escaped from the man and reported to the Police. The girl was about 12 years of age and has, as yet, never menstruated.”87 Some sort of sexual delivery service that catered particularly to the sexual needs of transient sailors was operational in Lagos during World War II. The welfare investigator Mrs. Akitoye reported to Faulkner that she had seen “young Yoruba hawkers (girls) aged 13–14, going about with ‘boma’ boys on the Marina” and “going into the compounds of European houses, presumably to meet the stewards.”88 Faulkner gathered other evidence that “a similar service was at work supplying girls . . . the sailor just coming off the ship, meeting the girl and then going back to the ship.”89 In the preceding quotation Faulkner describes a business that connected girls to sailors through stewards or houseboys. Girls were said to go to private homes, presumably to sell petty goods. There they would be put in contact with European sailors, and sex Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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would take place. “I tried to get the police to catch them,” Faulkner wrote, “but I understand there was a leakage about our intention and so nothing was found.”90 This seeming throwaway remark hints at a fundamental tension between the empire’s sailors and its social reformers, between the sexual health of valued soldiers and the moral authority of officials in Lagos. Prostitution was legal in Lagos, but prostitution of girls under sixteen, who were ostensibly free of venereal diseases, was not. The desires of transient sailors for younger, purer, prostitutes stood in conflict with the aims of colonial social workers who sought to curb underage prostitution. Although Kalley remarks that prostitution was more visible when it occurred interracially between blacks and nonblacks, Nigerians did note and remark on intraracial differences within the underage sex trade. When the welfare officer Mrs. Akitoye noted that Yoruba girls had been spied engaging in illicit sexual behavior, she was making a distinction between Yoruba girls, glossed as hawkers and natives to the city, and underage girl prostitutes who were generally not further identified by ethnicity or occupation. This suggests that the underage prostitution business in Lagos was either dominated, or widely believed to be dominated, by non-Yorubas. In such a situation, spying Yoruba girls being escorted into European homes by African stewards was something that became particularly remarkable. Critics of underage prostitution frequently referred to the foreignness or the outsider status of those involved in the trade. This may reflect an ethnocentric bias against the other; the other was the one who commercialized his daughter’s sexuality. In a Yoruba-dominated area, non-Yorubas were the other. Yet evidence from the names of girls that appear in reports against prostitution and from the list compiled by the Nigerian Youth Movement members in the Gold Coast suggests that there might have been more than a grain of truth to the notion that most underage prostitutes came from other parts of the country, particularly the middle and eastern regions. The causes for this pattern were economic as much as anything else. Ultimately, the ethnic diversity of girls found participating in some capacity in the underage sex economy in Lagos testifies to the causal role of factors such as familial impoverishment and youthful age or youthful appearance in determining who might end up as an underage prostitute. The narratives of Rose, Tiro, the Rebeccas, the many Alices, Blackie, the unnamed girls at the Traveler’s Inn and in Afiong Bassey’s home 168

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were just a fraction of the many stories of girls younger than sixteen who found themselves in the underage sex trade in Lagos of the 1940s and 1950s. Their stories touch on an underground sexual economy in Lagos, which exploited customary practices like child fostering and to a lesser extent, child marriage, to supply underprivileged girls to the underage sex trade in Lagos during and following the Second World War. Did such cases exist before the welfare office’s investigations began? It is quite possible that they did. But they would have fallen into something like the realm of rumor because half of the participants in underage prostitution cases, namely the patrons, did not verifiably exist. Precisely because of the “invisibility” of the patrons—white sailors who combined the privileges of personal anonymity and sexual permission, or black men in a majority black space who were cloaked by the plausibility of their being husbands—underage prostitution was difficult to verify. Women reformers initially believed that the most observable girls, girl hawkers who walked the streets of Lagos with petty goods in hand, were the key purveyors of underage sexuality. Women reformers held and promoted a narrative of the world of underage prostitution in Lagos that featured girl hawkers, and to a lesser extent their mothers, at its heart. In the understanding of women reformers, the lines between girl hawker and underage prostitute, petty trading and sexual commerce, offender and victim, were blurred. They were blurred in a way that emphasized the visible girl hawkers who could be seen, heard, and arrested in the streets of Lagos over the invisible, the prostitutes, procurers, pimps, and patrons, who had to be ferreted out from behind the closed doors of disreputable bars and brothels and apparently respectable homes. Initially, the welfare office’s understanding of the landscape of sexual vice with girls was no different, and the department’s resources were directed toward controlling the population of visible girl hawkers in a way that conflated prosecution and protection. Only after the end of the Second World War and the arrival of Alison Izzett, whose full-time occupation in the welfare office was to address the problems of women and girls, did officialdom begin to gain a clearer picture of the broader landscape of sexual practices involving underage girls. The ad hoc and opportunistic encounters that took place between girl hawkers and men, under coercion or otherwise, were merely one corner of a more vast and complex world of sexual practices involving young girls in mid-twentieth-century Lagos. The evidence suggests that the underage prostitution market ramified Private Vice and Public Secrets in Lagos

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and became more complex in the 1940s. Sources suggest that in earlier decades, the 1920s and 1930s, underage prostitution might have been more ad hoc. It may have featured a greater degree of agency on the part of the girls who took part in it, and it may have featured a lower proportion of non-Lagosian girls. The lingering effects of the Depression, the expansion of railway lines, and kinship and trafficking networks that linked Lagos to communities across Southern Nigeria and other cities on the coast of West Africa, brought younger girls and new business practices into the prostitution business. World War II also brought new clients and noticeably expanded the interracial dimension of the underage sex trade in Lagos. By the late 1940s, welfare office investigators had confirmed that the underage sex trade in Lagos was a more vast and complex system than they had earlier imagined and that girl hawkers were marginal players within it. Yet more complex understanding of the challenges girls faced did not translate into more complex solutions. Girl hawkers continued to be the main target of reformers and welfare officials. Girls who came to the attention of the welfare office, runaway brides, underage prostitutes, and other problem girls were processed identically through the juvenile justice system. Repatriation and, a close second, domestication were the preferred strategies for dealing with problem girls. Reflecting the ambivalence of reformers and colonial social workers, problem girls who ended up in the juvenile justice system continued to be cast as ambiguous figures that were simultaneously imperiled victims of adult violence and offenders against urban civilization.

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6 w Delinquents to Breadwinners and Hawkers to Homemakers Gender, Juvenile Justice, and Reform in the Welfare City

Juv enil e welfa re and reform in Lagos was initially oriented toward containing and reforming individual delinquents. As the juvenile reform infrastructure became institutionalized and colonial development funds began to be released, the reform project was subtly reoriented toward shaping youth in general into appropriately gendered colonial citizens. Once natal homes or communities were marked as the originary site of behavioral disorder, problem children were to be removed to purifying homes where they might be exposed and restored to modern modes of childhood, masculinity, and femininity. When it came to reforming African children, reformers were more vexed by details, such as determining the ages of children, than they were by the larger question of determining what constituted a normal, well-adjusted child. The standard against which the child would be assigned the status of problem child was left to village heads, frustrated parents, and angry adults threatening rogue justice. But the standards used for conferring normality, normal adjustment, even normal maladjustment, were tied to supposed universal ideas of the child. These were in practice middle-class British cultural ideas of the child. The reformation of delinquent boys in state custody revolved around providing them with marketable skills training. The reformation of problem girls was heavily centered on placing girls in suitable homes, either as inmates or servants, in preparation for a lifetime of domesticity. Where delinquent boys were to be given something to do and a path toward the breadwinner form of masculinity, problem girls were to be given some place to be and training in the arts of becoming a European-style 171

homemaker. This chapter examines the evolution of the juvenile justice and reform system in Lagos from one that sought initially to contain a dangerous population to one that ultimately evolved into a project of producing the breadwinner boy and his homemaking counterpart.1 A S S E M B L I N G T H E J U V E N I L E W E L FA R E S Y S T E M

The juvenile justice system in Lagos combined three interdependent units: the juvenile court, the children’s bureau of the police force, and the state-run children’s homes. The most important new institution created through the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance was the juvenile court, which was supported by its auxiliaries—approved schools, hostels, a probation system, remand homes, and juvenile prisons. Some of these auxiliaries, most notably the juvenile prisons, had been in existence fully a decade before the first juvenile courts were even opened.2 These three units collectively reflected a reformist ideology that emphasized the critical role of the social environment as the primary determinant of delinquency in children and which also regarded children as a separate category. Finally, the juvenile justice system reflected a developmentalist political ideology, which viewed colonial state institutions as instruments of larger social transformation, and the juvenile justice and reform system in particular as catalyzing social change by challenging local principles for disciplining, correcting, and socializing problem youth. The first juvenile courts in Nigeria were opened in Lagos and Calabar in 1946 under the provisions of the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance. The courts were not opened until after the end of the Second World War due to wartime budgetary restrictions. When the juvenile court opened in Lagos, it completed what was known as the Juvenile Court Centre, an imposing three-story building that housed the court and its major auxiliary units in a single physical space. Located at 4 Military Street, the Juvenile Court Centre was made up of the juvenile court, the children’s probation office, the children’s branch of the police, and the Lagos Remand Home, a detention center for boys awaiting trial or sentencing. The first unit of the Juvenile Court Centre to be opened was the Remand Home, which had formerly been housed in an unoccupied police station near the corner of Oshodi and Tapa Streets.3 By April 1946, the juvenile police and probation forces had also begun working out of the 4 Military Street location. Within three months the officers found themselves overwhelmed by the volume of work required.4 By the end of July 1946, the juvenile court itself, 172

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F I G U R E 1 . Juvenile Court Centre, Lagos, Nigeria. Source: Annual Report of the Social Welfare Department, 1951.

the last and most important piece of the puzzle, was open and hearing cases. This last piece resolved the inconvenience of having juvenile cases heard at courts on the mainland while the detention and probation facilities for boys were located on Lagos Island. When the juvenile court first opened in 1946, it met on average three mornings per week and was staffed by a magistrate, volunteer assessors, police officers, and social welfare and education officers when these were available. Children appearing before the court were processed through a special section of the police force that dealt only with juvenile cases. The Children’s Branch of the police force was a unique experiment within the British colonial empire. It began as a small team of twelve, consisting of one inspector, two sergeants, a lance corporal, and eight constables. It included both men and women officers, whose numbers grew over time along with the volume of the court’s work.5 The physical design of the court reflected new ideas that were current among juvenile reformers about the negative impact of traditional courtroom architecture on the psychology of young offenders. The modern juvenile courtroom was devoid of features like the raised bench, the railed dock, or wooden boxes for lawyers. Guidelines presented to the Howard League for Penal Reform on the design of the courtroom advised that “these things have no place in the Juvenile Court, where simplicity should be the keynote. . . . Little is to be gained, and all to be lost, by the staging of a dramatic trial for young people.”6 A publicity photograph that was published in Nigeria Magazine (see fig. 9) gives some impression of what the juvenile courts might have looked like. The photo displays a spare and brightly lit room. The focal point of the room is a long wooden table at which a European “magistrate” who appears to be Donald Faulkner, and two African volunteer magistrates, Mrs. Agbaje, “well known as a Muslim leader and educationalist,” and Chief A. Kudeyinbu II, “a retired civil servant,” are seated in a row.7 What is significant about the layout of the courtroom is that the central table was kept low enough that the three judges might be about eye level with a child who appeared before them. That physical proximity between the judges and the judged was intended to enhance the child’s confidence in the sympathy of his or her audience and thus encourage him or her to give up more, and more truthful, information. The completion of the three-story Juvenile Court Centre provided a towering physical demonstration of the state as disciplinarian and of the power of the Colony Welfare Office. Some parents sought to discipline their children by threatening to send them to “The Welfare,” as the 174

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Juvenile Court Centre was colloquially called. In an article reflecting on her experience with juvenile welfare work in Lagos, Alison Izzett described the terror of children who were brought to welfare officials for being beyond control. “When first brought to us,” she writes, “they often show very strong fear, some crying hysterically and shrieking at the top of their voices. This is not surprising when one hears the dreadful tales which the parents have told the children about the treatment which will be meted out to them if they are taken to the Juvenile Court—they are told they will all be beaten every day, whether they have done wrong or not, that they will be starved and made to work all day and even not allowed to sleep!”8 The fear expressed by children like the ones Izzett encountered was likely a combination of a response to the imagined horrors they would find in welfare institutions and a response to being banished from home and the familiarity of kinship networks. One man I talked to who spent time at “Topo,” the alias of a Roman Catholic institution in faraway Badagry, which was variously characterized as a training camp, a remand home, or simply St. Joseph’s, recalled that in those days “people thought Topo was a punishment ground. Some boys were criminals. They steal. . . . They smoke. . . . They roll paw-paw leaves into the form of a cigar and smoke.”9 But, he insisted, “It was a training ground, not a punishment ground.”10 Topo was a coconut plantation founded in the mid-1870s to generate income for the Catholic missions. Along with the coconut farms, the mission established a refuge and a school for orphans and freed slaves who were undoubtedly also the core laborers on the plantation.11 Part of what made Topo a frightening place to mid-twentieth-century children was its distance from Lagos Island. Getting there in the 1950s meant riding a lorry for what felt like ten hours from Lagos to Badagry and then taking a boat to Topo Island where the mission station was located. The complex and expensive route from Lagos to Topo, and the difficulty of leaving Topo Island, meant that children who went there were rarely seen by their peers back home. Additionally, children who went to Topo were placed in the custody of strangers, and Europeans at that, who might be inclined to exact all forms of corrective torture on the wayward child. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Akeem Babatunde recalled that parents used to threaten their children by saying, “Ma kan bge e lo si Topo. O ma lo fi agbon mu gari,” meaning, I will simply take you to Topo where you will only drink gari (dried and ground cassava) with ordinary coconuts.12 This threat represented banishment to an uncivilized place where poor food, rough living, Gender, Juvenile Justice, and Reform in the Welfare City

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and pitilessness awaited naughty children. Although it is not clear what exactly Lagos children were told about the new welfare institutions that were springing up within the city itself, it seems that tales incorporating variations on threats of banishment, starvation, forced labor, beatings, and lack of sleep or sympathy were spun by parents for children who seemed to be beyond control. Yet other men who were boys in the 1940s recalled The Welfare and its head, Donald Faulkner, much more positively. One vividly recalled that “Faulkner had a swimming camp. Children used to go to swimming camp; he used to teach swimming and everything.”13 The juvenile welfare system called up conflicting associations when it was viewed as a place of both deliverance and exile. In her memoir about living in mid-twentieth-century Lagos, Isobel Ryan told a story about a “thin bright-faced” boy she called Joey. He “regularly appeared at our elbow at the shop entrance. . . . He was deaf and dumb.”14 At some point she decided to employ him to be her regular parcel carrier when she went shopping. One day the boy did not appear at the shop, which was his regular haunt. When Ryan asked the store security guard where “Joey” might be, she was told, “The Welfare took him. He will be better with the Welfare.”15 The juvenile welfare system, in short, was not an obscure and unseen wing of the city administration. Lagosians were aware of its existence even if they were not exactly clear on its functions. “The Welfare” occupied physical space in the city as well as symbolic space in the minds of both young and old Lagosians who viewed it as a place that problem children were spirited away to and through mysterious processes transformed. For young offenders, there were a number of possible outcomes to a court appearance depending on whether they had committed the offense or whether an offense had been perpetrated against them. In other words, causes for appearing before the court included both offenses against individuals or property, as well as victimization at the hand of others. Of all annual reports on social welfare for years between 1945 and 1950, the 1947 Social Welfare Annual Report provides the most comprehensive profile of juvenile welfare work in the Colony Welfare Office. This may be because 1947 was the first full year of operation of the juvenile court. Although the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance was drafted and passed in 1943, wartime budgetary constraints precluded its enactment until 1946. In its section on offenses, the 1947 report listed statistics for welfare work with girls in 1945 and 1946 but did not do the same for boys. The report grouped juvenile offenses into two categories: Criminal Statistics and Contraventions 176

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of Township Bye-Laws by persons under fourteen years of age. Three categories of criminal offenses for both male and female juveniles were listed: offenses against persons, offenses against property, and “other offences,” which included acts like vagabondage and illicit distillation of alcohol.16 The only offense against property was theft. Offenses against persons included theft, serious assault, and indecent assault. GENDERING OFFENSES AND GENDERING BODIES

As in other African cities in the same period, most juvenile criminal offenders were boys. The most common criminal offenses were petty theft of items valued at £5 and under, followed by theft of more valuable items, and at a distant third—serious assault. The offenses of boys and girls were strongly gendered with far more boys being apprehended for criminal offenses than girls. Three hundred twenty-five boys were apprehended for criminal offenses in 1947 compared with twenty-five girls. The fact that these figures were listed under criminal statistics indicates that the young offenders appeared before the juvenile court, which was the only institution in the juvenile welfare administration empowered to classify an action as criminal. The most common sentences for boys were probation, followed by commitment to an approved school, and a close third—caution and discharge.

“Boys gambling in the streets of Lagos.” Source: Alison Izzett, “Yoruba Young Delinquents in Lagos, Nigeria.” B.Litt thesis in anthropology, University of Oxford, 1955, 134b. Thesis shelfmark 723.12 s.22. Courtesy of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

FIGURE 2.

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TABLE 1

Juvenile criminal statistics, January–December 1947 Offense M F

Serious assault Child stealing (kidnapping) Indecent assault Other offense against person Armed robbery House breaking by day Receiving stolen property Suspicion of conveying Stealing £5 or more Stealing less than £5 Other offense against property Illicit distillation Rogues and vagabondage Other miscellaneous offenses Totals

30 3 0 1 3 0 22 2 1 0 5 0 3 0 16 0 50 4 167 12 8 3 2 0 12 0 6 0 325 25

Source: Nigeria, Social Welfare Annual Report, 1947, Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP), Center for Research Libaries: Social Welfare Annual Reports: microfilm reel 99, Appendix II.

By contrast, the most common offenses for girls were status offenses or activities that acquired their offensive quality from the identity of the person committing them rather than from the activity itself. Examples are running away from home, being “incorrigible,” being “beyond parental control,” and so on. The most common status offenses in Lagos were violations of the street trading regulations, a subsection of the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943. Street trading regulations prohibited all children under the age of fourteen from selling goods in the streets of Lagos, and also prohibited girls age fourteen through sixteen from selling as well unless they could prove that they were employed by their father or mother—in other words, working within a household economy framework. Fourteen- to sixteen-year-old girls were allowed to work as sellers, but only until 6:30 p.m. Street trading by children and young females was further specifically prohibited “at or in the vicinity of any barrack, dock or wharf or in, at or near any place or premises selling wines, spirits, beer or native liquors.”17 Welfare officers or policemen, in uniform or plainclothes, could make arrests for any infringement of the street trading regulations.18 Status 178

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offenses like street trading were not conventional antisocial crimes but assumed their offensive quality from the fact that they were acts committed by young people instead of adults. Violations of township bylaws displayed a completely different gender breakdown from criminal offenses. For “exposing articles for sale,” 741 girls were arrested compared to 320 boys. The greatest contrast between girls and boys was seen in the subcategory of street trading offenses, where 684 girls were arrested for breaking the street trading regulations contained in the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance as compared to 220 boys. In other words, three times as many girls were apprehended for street trading or hawking as boys. Although the ratio for street trading offenses is not as striking as the ratio for criminal offenses, it is still significant because of the substantial number of girls involved. TABLE 2

Juvenile contraventions of township bylaws, January–December 1947 Offense M F

Exposing articles for sale (under 14 years old) Exposing articles for sale (14–17 years old) Other contravention cases Street trading contraventions

33 35 32 220

34 23 1 684

Totals

320 742

Source: Nigeria, Social Welfare Annual Report, 1947, CAMP: Social Welfare Annual Reports: microfilm reel 99, Appendix III.

TA B L E 3

Offenses

Girls appearing before Juvenile Court, 1946–50 1946 1947 1948 1949/50 1951a

Thefts/assaults Hawking Beyond control

4 26b 30 52 34 100* 369c 362 276 152 15 10 33 unlisted 1

Total Girls’ Hostel admissions (where available)

n/a

629

716

340

n/a

Statistics for 1951 cover 30 December 1950 to 31 March 1951 only. 1947 Theft and assault figures are good for January to July only. c 1947 Hawking figures are good for July to December only. a

b

Source: Nigeria, Social Welfare Annual Report, 1947 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1948); Nigeria, Annual Report on the General Progress of Development and Welfare Schemes 1948–49 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1949); Nigeria, Development and Welfare Report (Lagos: Colony Welfare Service, 1950).

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The Children and Young Person’s Ordinance was largely gender neutral in its language, reflecting perhaps an awareness that girls were not the only hawkers in Lagos—boys hawked goods as well. But in its enforcement, girls were the primary targets. They were arrested at far higher rates than boys for infractions against the street trading regulations. The gender-differentiated enforcement patterns resulted in part from differences between the ways that the policy architects, women reformers and senior social workers, interpreted the ordinance, and the ways in which police officers and welfare officials on the street understood it. The latter proved to be more aggressive enforcers than the policy architects were comfortable with, and they were censured for their eagerness to question and arrest working-class girls and women. Oyinkan Abayomi in particular criticized arrests of workingclass women who, “deprived of the services of young ones, definitely had to do the hawking themselves.”19 Even though the street trading regulations they had championed enacted class-based discrimination, reformers projected responsibility for the criminalization of workingclass women and girls onto the officers who dealt with the public. The contrasts between high-level and low-level officials extended beyond the phase of interrogation and arrest to the phase of detention as well. As this chapter shows, officials within the juvenile welfare system held differing views on the function of the juvenile institutions, and what kinds of subjects the institutions were supposed to produce. Hawking was a profitable juvenile offense for the state. According to an article on the trial and sentencing of six girls named Moyinola O., Kanyinde N., Aliatu, Wura, Seliya Agbeke, and Wuraola, “all under 13 years of age,” the normal fine for street trading violations was in the neighborhood of 10 shillings. Yet this amount could be raised or lowered at the judge’s discretion.20 Less than one month later, another news article featuring J. T. Nelson-Cole, the same magistrate who fined Moyinola and company, reported that two other girls, Kokumo O. and Humu A., were fined £5 each for the same offense.21 Magistrates had broad discretion in determining penalties for street trading violations. All told, in one year, 1948, hawking fines generated over £1000 in revenues for the Colony Welfare Office.22 Hawking, offenses against property or persons, and the “beyond control” category were relatively clearly defined. Yet “moral danger,” another large category that a girl’s case could fall under, was not. Welfare office reports for different years listed different types of moral dangers, 180

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sometimes creating new categories for unusual situations. In 1949, for example, a category was created called “young girls forced into marriage distasteful to them.”23 What relationship this category bore to an earlier one for girls “absconding from husbands” is unclear.24 Other categories included “children of lepers,” “orphans,” “motherless babies,” “girls entering Lagos going to unsuitable homes,” “victims of rape,” “attempted suicides,” “destitutes,” and so on.25 The relatively constant moral danger categories that repeated in some form or other through the years were child wives, suspected or confirmed child prostitutes, girls found to be carrying venereal disease, and runaways or lost children. Moral danger cases often encompassed multiple moral danger categories. The case of Sariu A., a ten-year-old runaway infected with venereal disease, is a prime example. Sariu came to the attention of the welfare office when a woman trader who sold puff-puff (a fried sugar dough snack) brought her in. According to a report filed by Pauline Fairclough, one of the Lady Welfare Officers, after buying some puff-puff from the trader, Sariu had attempted to attach herself to the woman who was unable or unwilling to adopt her. Sariu claimed during an interview that she had come to Lagos on her own from Ibadan where she had been living with an aunt. Her aunt in Ibadan reportedly maltreated the girl, who was “flogged for every mistake she made and although given enough to eat, was not properly clothed.”26 Further investigation into her background found that both of Sariu’s parents were dead, and besides her aunt, she was left with two married uncles and a brother, all of whom lived in Ibadan. Medical examinations found that Sariu was infected with gonorrhea. Little else is known about the case of Sariu A. besides that she seemed to have become fixated on the puff-puff trader, and she pleaded to remain in Lagos as the woman’s maidservant. The welfare office was more inclined to send Sariu back to Ibadan to live with her own relatives. An application of the label “juvenile in moral danger” rested on two basic assumptions. The first was that the girl in question was below the age of seventeen, and the second was that the girl had been ageinappropriately exposed to a sexual situation. Juvenile girls who had sexually transmitted diseases and juvenile girls who lived with known prostitutes were easily fitted under this label. From time to time, however, the department faced cases of girls who had sex through more socially permitted interactions. The following Supreme Court case of Onyeama v. Be Gam stands as an example: Gender, Juvenile Justice, and Reform in the Welfare City

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Marriage Ordinance, Cap 68—Marriage of minor without consent of father under section 18— Effect of section 33 in such circumstances. The petitioner had contracted a Christian marriage with his wife. Subsequently he charged the respondent with having committed adultery with the wife and brought this action against him claiming damages therefore. It was submitted by the respondent that the wife’s marriage with the petitioner was invalid on the grounds that she was a minor at the time of the marriage and had been married without the consent of her father. As required by section 18 of the Marriage Ordinance, Cap 68. The respondent also alleged that the marriage was celebrated in fraud of the wife (that she was without knowledge and consent) and also he denied having committed adultery with the wife. Held, that notwithstanding absence of consent of the father under section 18 of the Ordinance the marriage was valid, within the meaning of the Marriage Ordinance, by the operation of sub-section (3) of section 33 thereof.27

This case was found in the Law Reports of the Supreme Court and may have been selected for publication due to its atypical nature. Further, the court’s point of concern was determining whether or not the marriage was valid under the marriage ordinance, given that the bride was a minor at the time of marriage and had wed without paternal consent. Nevertheless, the case of Onyeama v. Be Gam is useful for the current discussion because it highlights one of the major problems with the designation “juvenile in moral danger”—namely that for the sake of protecting young people from moral danger, the law could deny them agency to negotiate their own relationships with adults. In the context of the juvenile justice system, resolving such a case would have been practically impossible because it involved adults and juveniles in a way that made it impossible to separate and address them in distinct legal venues. The Children and Young Person’s Ordinance specifically mandated the segregation of juveniles from adult offenders throughout the judicial process. This case also involved multiple legal systems, in this case native and colonial law. Finally, it involved an individual who was a social adult due to her marital status. Yet colonial officials, applying the standard of biological age, considered her to be a legal minor. Although the Onyeama v. Be Gam case does not specify whether the litigants were from Lagos or elsewhere, it is nonetheless 182

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the case that migration into the city was one of the ways in which wives were turned into girls. More common scenarios involved girls aged twelve to fifteen who were newly arrived in Lagos and whose relationships with their “spouses” could not be decisively defined. One exchange between Donald Faulkner and a district officer in Auchi demonstrates the confusion over the legality of native marriages involving younger girls, particularly in a climate of heightened anxiety over sex trafficking and underage prostitution. The exchange began when the district officer from Auchi contacted Faulkner to notify him of the suspicious emigration of four girls from his district who had left to marry men in Lagos. In his first communiqué, the district officer stated, “It seems too much of a coincidence that four different husbands should all have the same idea of writing for wives on the same date and by coincidence meet at the same post office to register their letters in sequence, and to the same D.O. You may like to seek the aid of the Police in investigating this and the addresses to give a useful line on those trying to import young girls to Lagos.”28 The district officer’s investigations revealed that one of the girls, Ayekumeh Izebuno, had no living relatives and could not therefore have contracted any valid marriage under native law in his district. Her status as an orphan and a young woman seemed to make her an ideal prey for potential sex traffickers. Further investigations were carried out, but this case closed with an anticlimactic response from Faulkner, who wrote, “The Police think the whole affair is innocent. These young lads, all about the same age and of the same district, decided to enter into matrimony at the same time, probably on the principle that numbers give courage.”29 Interpretation and application of laws governing children and young people varied depending on the contemporary social and political climate. It also depended on the inclinations of individual colonial officers. In the case of Ayekumeh Izebuno and her three friends, the district officer’s pursuit of legal action against the four husbands was informed by government anxiety over high rates of sex trafficking of girls into Lagos. One imagines that the moral danger category, given its imprecision and flexibility, functioned for girls the way that the historian Laurent Fourchard has argued the concept of juvenile delinquency functioned for boys. It served to proliferate the quantities of offenders rather than to describe them.30 Being a rather broadly defined category, moral danger drew large numbers of girls into the juvenile justice system. But street trading Gender, Juvenile Justice, and Reform in the Welfare City

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contraventions drew in even more. Violators of the Street Trading Regulations were more likely to be fined and quickly released than to receive any other type of punishment. In 1948, 100 percent of the 362 girl hawkers taken to the Girls’ Hostel were released after a few days. In 1949, 33 of the 40 hawkers detained at the Girls’ Hostel, or over 82 percent, were released. Between 30 December 1950 and 31 March 1951, over 80 percent, or 124 of the 152 girl hawkers brought before the juvenile court, were fined and released. The remaining 24 were cautioned and discharged on the spot. Exceptions to this rule were made when girls were found to have venereal diseases.31 Infected girl hawkers were regarded as moral danger cases, subjected to medical examinations, and regularly detained for months at the Girls’ Hostel. Ultimately, juvenile criminals, status offenders, and moral danger cases all appeared for sentencing before the juvenile court. S TAG I N G T H E S C I E N C E O F J U V E N I L E R E F O R M

To get a clearer understanding of the larger social implications of juvenile reform in Lagos following enactment of the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943, we must look beyond the court to the continuing experiences of problem children in the city. In the first place, it must be understood that a large percentage of delinquents were new immigrants to the city. Those whose relatives could be located were fated for repatriation under the escort of a juvenile court police officer or a social welfare officer where these were available.32 For the remaining boys and girls who were not readily handed over to their relatives, the juvenile welfare system provided other solutions. Boy offenders could be sent to a variety of institutions like the Boys’ Remand Home, the Boys’ Hostel, a foster family, the Salvation Army Industrial School, or the Approved School at Isheri, a reformatory that was modeled on the Enugu Institution and opened after the war. Boys younger than nine years of age were sent to the Girls’ Hostel. Additionally there were proposals for the opening of a training center for “adolescents over 15 years of age of confirmed criminal habits.”33 Boys’ institutions were meant to follow tightly controlled routines. At the remand home, for example, inmates were locked in their dormitories from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. each day, and they were allowed out only to use the toilet and only one at a time. From 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., inmates bathed, ate a meal, cleaned their residence, did either gardening or “handwork,” and had fifteen minutes of “fairly stiff exercises.”34 From 184

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11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., they were locked into the dormitories again. From 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., they were made to perform “labour.” For one hour between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., the boys took part in organized sports or played games. They wrapped up the day by playing inside from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. and then returned to their locked dormitories. Staged photos of the remand home played up the beneficence of boys’ institutions. In a photo essay that appeared in Nigeria Magazine, the chronicle of a boy named Raufu was used to demonstrate the progressiveness of the juvenile justice system in Lagos and the Boys’ Remand Home in particular.35

Raufu’s run-in with the law. “The streets of Lagos abound in tempting possibilities.” Source: Nigeria Magazine, no. 29 (1948): 256.

FIGURE 3.

The streets of Lagos abound in tempting possibilities, unattended wayside stalls being particularly attractive. Nearly all boys go through a stage of development when they see themselves, in their own fancy, as hunters of robbers. Those with a strong spirit of adventure and daring are most likely to find such escapes satisfying to their basic instincts. If they can be helped to overcome these selfish and antisocial urges, such boys grow into the best citizens.

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“Articles left in unattended cars are quickly snapped up.” Source: Nigeria Magazine, no. 29 (1948): 256.

FIGURE 4.

Articles left in unattended cars are quickly snapped up. This is a particularly common crime because detection is rare. Some boys have never been to school. Since the boys only stay at the Remand Home for a few weeks, the aim is to occupy them and improve them as much as possible in the time. Their day is taken up with domestic duties, gardening, schooling, and leisure-time recreation.

“Arriving at the Remand Home.” Source: Nigeria Magazine, no. 29 (1948): 258.

FIGURE 5.

The Inspector who is in charge of the “Special Children’s Police Branch” hands over the remanded boy to the Warden of the Remand Home, together with the Remand Warrant signed by the Magistrate. During the time the boy resides in the Home the Warden will study his manner and will report on him to the Probation Officer who is preparing a comprehensive report for the Court. Social and economic conditions in Nigeria are responsible for the large numbers of unemployed boys who lounge in the streets through want of better occupation and steal when the opportunity occurs.

“Raufu has his leg treated.” Source: Nigeria Magazine, no. 29 (1948): 258.

FIGURE 6.

The Matron, who also teaches and looks after the clothing of the boys, is a skilled nurse. Nearly all the boys need treatment for scabies, ringworm, or ulcers. Every effort is made to make them physically fit before they go out and try to make a success of their lives.

“Cooking and grinding pepper.” Source: Nigeria Magazine, no. 29 (1948): 259.

FIGURE 7.

The boys carry out, under supervision, all the domestic duties of the Remand Home. The kitchen is a popular place to work in for obvious reasons.

FIGURE 8.

“Some boys have never been to school.” Source: Nigeria Magazine, no. 29 (1948): 260.

Since the boys only stay in the Remand Home for a few weeks, the aim is to occupy them and improve them as much as possible in the time. Their day is taken up with domestic duties, gardening, schooling and leisure-time recreation.

“The magistrates of the Juvenile Court.” Source: Nigeria Magazine, no. 29 (1948): 261.

FIGURE 9.

The Court sits in a large room which has in it little of the paraphernalia of an ordinary Court. The Magistrates sit at a table and the accused child stands in front of it. There is no dock or witness box. The Chairman always sits with two lay Magistrates, one man and one woman, and these are specially selected because of their knowledge of local conditions and interest in the welfare of children.

In the preceding photo essay, the reader is invited to tour the roadways of a modern juvenile reform system with the impish guide Raufu. First, we see Raufu give in to his “basic instinct” to steal whatever is not bolted down. Luckily for him, as things turn out, Raufu gets caught in the act and is rewarded with a number of firsts. For the first time, he gets responsible parents in the form of the strict but wise warden who will observe his character and later advise on the best course of training for Raufu, and the skilled and nurturing matron who dresses the boy and his wounds. “Some boys have never been to school,” readers are told, but for the first time, Raufu will have the opportunity to learn his Yoruba ABDs. At the Remand Home, boys are given the opportunity to engage in honest work that serves each one personally as well as the larger community of Remand Home inmates. Raufu gets a valued occupation working in the kitchen, a clear function that verified that he is a member of society, not a pariah preying on it. After some weeks of polishing at the Remand Home away from the corrupting influences of his preinstitutional life, the boy will appear before the patriarchs and matriarchs of the clan, the juvenile court magistrates, who decide his immediate destiny. For the detention, training, or housing of girls, by contrast, there was a nine-bed Girls’ Hostel and a small network of foster families, both of which took in girls and young boys. The few existing resources for problem girls were pressed to accommodate very diverse populations. The Girls’ Hostel held hawkers for two to three days while they waited to post fines, so-called beyond control girls who were brought to the hostel by their parents or guardians, lost children including boys below nine years of age, abandoned babies, and girls who reported having been forced into marriage.36 The Girls’ Hostel was the main institution for girls’ reform in Lagos. It was a small house that was burdened with a wide variety of functions. Whatever the varied paths that brought girls to the hostel, while they were there they were all subject to an institutional ideology that viewed European-style domestication as both the means and the aim of girls’ reform. The case of a girl named Raliatu A. illustrates the limits of the state’s resources for problem girls and how a domesticist ideology permeated reform strategies for girls. In late January 1951, fourteenyear-old Raliatu A. appeared before the Juvenile Court in Lagos to answer a charge of stealing £14 worth of clothing. Raliatu, who was a Gender, Juvenile Justice, and Reform in the Welfare City

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housegirl, acknowledged that the clothes had been in her possession, but she claimed that her employer and her employer’s daughter had freely given them to her. During a routine interview with a juvenile court official, Raliatu declared that she was a runaway from Ibadan and had come to Lagos on her own to find work as a “maidservant” after her former occupation as a petty trader in Ibadan became unprofitable.37 She claimed to have run away when her stepmother and her father, Salimonu Akande, a tailor in Ibadan, were away from home. About ten days after her first court appearance, investigators with the Colony Welfare Office were able to locate Raliatu’s father. They notified him of his daughter’s offense in Lagos and tried to determine whether he was willing and able to regain custody and, more important, control over the accused delinquent girl. Akande was anxious to have Raliatu returned to Ibadan. Raliatu, however, was “still desirous to work in Lagos.”38 The Juvenile Court Magistrate wrote a summons for Akande to appear before the court to participate in a discussion of his daughter’s future. At Raliatu’s 15 May hearing, when all concerned parties were assembled, the Juvenile Court Magistrate decided to place Raliatu on probation for three years on the condition that she live in a “good home” and work as a maidservant throughout the three-year period. Lady Social Welfare Officer A. I. Bob-Manuel took responsibility for placing Raliatu in her new home with a new domestic job. The case of Raliatu Aduke seemed to finally be closed after five uncertain months. During the intervening time period between her arrest and her sentencing, Raliatu was probably living at the Girls’ Hostel as per welfare office protocol. Ten weeks after Raliatu had been relocated to her new home with a new domestic job, she was on the move again. Her caseworker, Bob-Manuel, first reported her disappearance to the district officer in Ibadan in December, months after Raliatu had broken her probation order. On 22 January 1952, around the one-year anniversary of her initial court hearing for stealing £14 worth of clothes, a warrant for the arrest of Raliatu Aduke was issued by the Lagos Juvenile Court. According to Raliatu’s case file, neither her father nor her caseworker knew where she could be found. Raliatu Aduke had disappeared among the anonymous faces of Lagos’s juvenile street-dwelling population.39 Raliatu’s story shows that even until 1951, the best solution the welfare system could propose for a girl who had been employed as a domestic worker and accused of stealing from her employer was to 190

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reassign her to another job as a domestic worker. Keeping problem girls in a home context busied with preparation for a life of domesticity seemed to be not only a matter of necessity in the juvenile welfare system but also one of unwritten policy. The practices that constituted juvenile girl reform reflected and perpetuated a gender ideology that held men to be the normative household breadwinners and women to be homemakers.40 This was one of the areas of commonality between British and Yoruba cultural ideas of girlhood. Both viewed domestic training to be a desirable aspect of the education and socialization of girls.41 The point of difference was that in the state’s view, domestic training for girls was preferred over commercially oriented forms of training such as hawking. Within the girls’ institutions, not only was domesticity elevated to a technique of juvenile reform, but a regime of a particular kind of femininity was also imposed. When the state attempted to impose this ideology on girl hawkers in Lagos, it created a scenario in which girl hawkers were expected to relinquish their roles as urban workers in order to be considered productive and genderappropriate contributors to society. D O M E S T I C I T Y, D I S C I P L I N E , A N D T H E A E S T H E T I C S O F G I R L S AV I N G : I N S I D E T H E G I R L S ’ H O S T E L

“In the Girls’ Remand Home.” Source: Alison Izzett, “Yoruba Young Delinquents in Lagos, Nigeria.” B.Litt thesis in anthropology, University of Oxford, 1955, 85b. Thesis shelfmark 723.12 s.22. Courtesy of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

FIGURE 10.

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Unlike the boys’ institutions, which were profusely photographed and whose procedures were proudly advertised to local and imperial publics as demonstrations of the triumphs of the welfare city, girls’ institutions were much less documented and their inner workings were not highlighted. Thus little is known about what happened inside them. Some sources, like the records of the firing of the first Girls’ Hostel matron, Dorcas Doherty, do nonetheless provide us with some insights. In early November 1944, Mrs. Dorcas Doherty, matron of the Girls’ Hostel at 50 Broad Street, received a note from Donald Faulkner. Faulkner’s rather terse message informed Doherty that her appointment as hostel matron would be ending in approximately one month.42 A separate letter from the commissioner of the colony assured Doherty that her termination was not to be “taken as a stain on your character or in any way derogatory.”43 The problem was that she seemed for various reasons to be unable to “adjust . . . sufficiently to modern methods.”44 What, she must have wondered, did that mean? Mrs. Dorcas Doherty, a widow and the first matron of the Lagos Girls’ Hostel, held the position for almost two years from the end of January 1943 until December 1944.45 She was offered the job on the recommendation of the Women’s Welfare Council members, who after losing the battle over the location of the Girls’ Hostel, unanimously recommended Doherty as “a suitable matron.”46 Since the minutes of the actual conversation that brought the approximately sixteen council members to recommend Doherty are unavailable, it is difficult to know exactly what qualities made Doherty a suitable matron.47 The Lagosian and West Indian women in the Women’s Welfare Council were cultural nationalists who consistently favored Nigerians for government posts. Gender and Nigerian nationality were significant factors in the council members’ evaluation of job candidates. Gender and nationality played important roles in their recommendation of another individual for a social welfare position. Responding to an appeal by the Lady Education Secretary, Miss G. Plummer, for greater numbers of trained European Lady Social Workers to help address Lagos’s social welfare needs, the council countered that “there is an African young lady, a native of Nigeria, in the person of Miss Aduke Alakija, a daughter of Mr. Alakija, C.B.E., who is actually taking a course in Social Work in England.”48 She, instead of a European woman, they said, should be offered the social welfare appointment. Through such interventions Women’s Welfare Council members challenged European claims to superior expertise in addressing African social welfare issues or those of colonial subjects more generally. In the social welfare 192

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department, the police department, and other offices, women reformers consistently advocated for the placement of Africans, particularly African women, into government appointments.49 The recommendation of Alakija differed in density of detail from the recommendation for Doherty; it nevertheless indicates that gender, nationality, class background, and age were all factors that the council members considered when evaluating individuals for Lagos social welfare positions. If the grounds for Doherty’s appointment were somewhat mysterious, the bases of her termination were quite clear. Faulkner judged Doherty to be too old and too old-fashioned to adjust to modern methods. He repeatedly found fault with her management of the Girls’ Hostel, which housed girls of various ages, backgrounds, and legal status, as well as boys below nine years of age. On one occasion, Doherty was chastised for being unable to stop a girl from running away from the hostel. Doherty claimed the girl’s escape happened when she turned for “not quite a minute” to give a young boy a dose of quinine.50 On another occasion, Doherty was chastised for being old-fashioned. In an undated memo that was probably addressed to the commissioner of the colony, Faulkner faulted Doherty for allegedly “never” using the hostel telephone. Instead, he wrote, “she sends round notes on little bits of paper.”51 Her aging eyes, he added, prevented her from “examining and attending to the children properly.”52 To illustrate, Faulkner offered the example of a girl who had been admitted to the hostel with “virulent G.C.,” or gonorrhea chlamydia. “Although pus was coming from the urethra,” he wrote, “Matron did not notice and it was found out only by accident.”53 Because Doherty had been ordered to examine each child upon reception but had apparently not given the girl a vaginal exam, Faulkner insisted, “She must give way to a younger and better woman.”54 One of the last warnings Doherty received that her days as hostel matron were numbered came on 5 October 1944. A few days earlier, Faulkner had visited the Girls’ Hostel for what was probably an unscheduled inspection. What he found there prompted a biting letter in which he listed problems with the hostel, criticized Doherty’s administrative abilities, and even questioned her femininity. The cushions, furniture, and walls of the hostel, he said, were all dirty. Beauty was unknown at the hostel and seemed to be unknown to the matron herself. Older girls who, in Faulkner’s view, should have been instructed to plant grass and flowers around the hostel were instead “continually sweeping the ground bare.”55 “I see no attempt to make the place beautiful,” he wrote, “no flower vases, Gender, Juvenile Justice, and Reform in the Welfare City

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no flowers in the garden.”56 “Why,” he asked despairingly, “should there not be vases of beautiful flowers on the tables?”57 Hinting that the appearance of the hostel reflected a fundamental failure in Doherty, not as a hostel matron but as a woman, Faulkner wrote, “You as a woman ought to use your initiative and either make cushion covers yourself or get the older girls to do so. . . . I notice a complete absence of the pretty-pretty things people usually have in their houses.”58 Not only did Faulkner find the hostel ugly and dirty and Doherty lacking in feminine aesthetic sensibility, but he also found the children to be in poor condition. “I was shocked to see a small child who has resided in the Hostel for more than six months with considerable craw-craw [a parasitic disease known to cause skin itching; onchocerciasis] on her skin.”59 Other children, he claimed, were left with no games, handicrafts, or play materials. In an exasperated tone he asked, “Don’t Yoruba children play with toys?”60 Faulkner’s principal grievances with Doherty—her caution with telephone usage, the apparent lack of toys and games at the hostel, and Doherty’s seeming disregard for the aesthetic appeal of placing flowers in and around the hostel—raise a question about the aesthetics of childhood. Regardless of the material circumstances of children’s lives, modern childhood was viewed as a time of brightly colored surroundings, of speaking a distinct childlike language, and expressing a distinct childlike worldview. Modern children had separate spaces in the household and in society. Their worlds, which adults created for them to inhabit, were to be more beautiful, more green, more lush, and more infused with life; modern childhood was a distinct and desirable life stage, and this quality was to be demonstrated through the children’s surroundings. Faulkner expected that, as a woman, Doherty should instinctually appreciate these attributes of modern childhood and, at minimum, know how to beautify the hostel. Since statistics gathering was suspended during the war, the exact population of the hostel during Doherty’s term as matron is unknown, but it is difficult to imagine that a house full of children was completely devoid of play and games. Clearly, what was invisible to Faulkner were toys and games that he could recognize as such, which is not the same as there being no toys or games whatsoever. Welfare officials routinely misread the realities of African children’s worlds. A photo of a young girl with a homemade doll tied to her back was captioned “on the verge of womanhood,” which negated the possibility that the girl might have been at play. A photo of two girls at the government play center was read as a demonstration of the fact that African children in Lagos were discouraged from playing. 194

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F I G U R E 1 1 . “On the threshold of womanhood.” Source: Nigeria Magazine, no. 25 (1946): 282.

F I G U R E 1 2 . “Please let me play.” Source: Nigeria Magazine, no. 25 (1946): 285.

Where ambiguity existed or even despite clear evidence, European welfare officials routinely viewed and characterized girlhood in Lagos as short and sour. By contrast with what these officials saw, people who were interviewed about their childhoods in 1940s Lagos reported playing a number of games such as Ayo (a board game), ball, omo lewa, boro, boju-boju, egbon, and sa asala. Boju-boju was a game for many where one child covered her eyes for the length of a song while the other children went to hide, and then the first child uncovered her eyes and tried to find the other children. Egbon was a game for two whose object was to knock over the stacked belongings of the opponent. Sa asala was a game in which seeds of the asala fruit are thrown against each other, the object being to crack the opponent’s asala nut. Many of the games that children played were ephemeral in the sense that evidence of play disappeared once the game ended. The toys that children created games with were made of everyday objects. Fruit seeds, raffia, pebbles, and everyday objects that in the imaginative hands of young children could be translated into myriad forms of entertainment were profoundly invisible as children’s toys to the welfare officer. Closing his letter to Doherty, Faulkner presented an image of the hostel that camouflaged its genuine carceral functions. “In general, the Hostel should be a place of beauty and should be maintained as such. The children should be given healthy, interesting occupation and your staff should be supervised in such a way that they fit into this general scheme. Kindly give your explanation to the foregoing.”61 By the time Doherty received the letter, it was clearly too late for her to present any explanation that would have been sufficient to save her job. But she did nonetheless try. It was wartime, and there were few flower vases at the hostel, she explained, because “vases are scarce now in the shop.”62 The two vases that were in the house were her personal property, and these had been “damaged by the children.”63 On the issue of toys, games, and handicrafts, Doherty wrote, “We have ludo and cards for the children to play with. The two Sabo girls that are here do not know how to knit anything; I got crochet cotton but they do not know how to handle the pin.”64 In short, the children did have some games to play with, and she had tried to provide some handicrafts for the older girls, but since they did not know how to knit, they could not make much use of the materials she gave them. The rash on the skin of the girl who had been at the hostel for six months was, Doherty explained, “caused by the bed bugs brought in by the different girls 196

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from different places and when these bed bugs sting a child it becomes craw-craw.”65 The transient population of hostel dwellers was thus, in her opinion, the real culprit of children’s skin infections. In conclusion Doherty promised to direct some of the older girls to plant grass as part of a grounds beautification project and, from that time forward, abide by all of Faulkner’s orders. From Faulkner’s point of view, Doherty’s hostel was all too evidently a containment space rather than a therapeutic place where girls could be reformed through enlivening games and the surrounding beauty of flower gardens. Regardless of the varied circumstances that brought girls to the hostel and the fact that they were not free to leave, the modern Girls’ Hostel was supposed to project the illusion of being a home and not the jail that it actually was. As a nonprofessional whose primary qualifications may have been life experience and the fact that she was connected to elite Lagos families, Doherty was, in Faulkner’s view, eminently unqualified for the job. Taken together, the staged photos and the record of the firing of Dorcas Doherty provide several hints about the internal workings of the first Lagos Girls’ Hostel. First, it is clear that not only was the hostel overburdened with a wide array of problem girls and young boys, it was also likely to have been understaffed. Following the gender logic of the system, which saw boys as the normative delinquent, girls were expected to control and nurture each other into good behavior with minimal adult involvement. The older girls, employing their supposedly natural inclinations to be housekeepers and mothers were expected to care for the young children and to assist the matron in transforming the hostel into a home. Being an overtaxed and understaffed institution, the Girl’s Hostel was either a somewhat chaotic environment where untended children tried to fend for themselves, or it was a place of very strict discipline where the matron tried to maintain order by controlling or intimidating the inmates. Another issue to consider when one tries to understand the dynamics of the Girls’ Hostel is the issue of class. Girls who had transgressed some city ordinance or who were suspected of having objectionable sexual histories were more likely to be of working-class backgrounds than of upper-class backgrounds; thus the Girls’ Hostel also gathered problematic working-class girls under the control of a respectable upperclass matron. This interclass dynamic was shaped by the preponderance of working-class girls in state custody and the preponderance of women from upper-class backgrounds in government positions, including with Gender, Juvenile Justice, and Reform in the Welfare City

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the social welfare office. Class difference and generational difference may have combined to subvert the climate of familial intimacy that a modern institution was supposed to radiate. The Doherty files suggest that high-level administrators saw the Girls’ Hostel residents as Rousseauian children who had been distorted by the civilization they had been born into, yet who might be corrected and redeemed for modern childhood if they were placed in beautiful environments and addressed by patient, nurturing, maternal figures. One possible point of conflict between individuals like Dorcas Doherty who worked directly with the children and administrators like Faulkner had to do with strategies of correction. Doherty’s qualifications, as stated earlier, are a bit mysterious, but Faulkner was a trained social worker whose writings referenced contemporary ideas on child psychology, child guidance, juvenile justice, and reform. The scholarship emphasized the use of positive incentive to instill behavioral changes in problem children. The Girls’ Hostel was an institution for problem girls and girls in moral danger, meaning girls who had transgressed some city ordinance or who were suspected of having objectionable sexual histories. Outside of the juvenile welfare system, children who were judged to be presenting problems for adults were generally corrected using punishments to deter their behavior. According to respondents to our survey of childhood in Lagos, the most common punishment by far was flogging; fifty-three respondents from the 70 Group listed flogging as one of the common punishments for children when they were young. It is likely that flogging was so commonly used as a punishment because it could be so quickly applied. The second most common punishments involved food. Thirty-four respondents reported food being used in punishments. Children were either deprived of a particular meal as their punishment or deprived of meat in particular. Extra meat was reported as a reward for good behavior, and thirty-four individuals remembered being denied meat as a common punishment. Other punishments involved strenuous tests of endurance. Children under punishment were made to kneel and lift heavy objects, to squat, to kneel and raise their arms above their heads, or to kneel with their eyes closed. Seven members of the 70 Group recalled the use of shouting or verbal shaming as punishments. Respondents recalled other forms of denial as punishments. To discipline children, adults also withheld spending money, clothes, shoes, or permission to play. Finally, one person reported “pepper in your eyes” as a punishment; another reported 198

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ear pulling; and a third reported “tie your legs and leave you on the ground.”66 Being tied up like livestock or having irritants applied to one’s bodily organs seem to have been rare forms of punishment that were regarded as particularly humiliating or cruel. But whether it was an immediate punishment like flogging or one that grew more painful over time like squatting, correction of children primarily took the form of punishments. Underlying local ideologies of correction was the assumption that the child should know how to adhere to its society’s expectations, that the problem child had willfully deviated from those expectations, and would, with punitive incentive, will itself back onto the desired path of social development. But as the retired social worker Dr. Stephen Adeyinka told me in a conversation about juvenile welfare work in Lagos, it was only after the failure of punitive incentive methods and after trying to incorporate the extended family as a resource for child discipline that parents or guardians brought their children to the juvenile welfare system.67 In colonial legal discourse before the early 1930s, African children were first and foremost conceptualized as members of a household or members of family groups. Yet by the early 1940s, they had acquired a form of legal personhood, which is to say that they had obtained, or more aptly been assigned, specific rights and obligations as individual children and youth, vis-à-vis the colonial state. Africans, as a collectivity, indexed difference, particularity, and peculiarity. But the child, though part of a global generational collectivity, was individualized in ways that conflicted with the idea of the African. This is to say that distinctiveness of individual children and youth was counterposed against the peculiarity of the group. Similar transformations were occurring with wageworkers in the same period. As historian Fred Cooper has written, the colonial state was reenvisioning the African worker as an “industrial man, now living with a wife and family in a setting conducive to acculturating new generations into modern society.” Formerly, the same African worker had been thought of as a “temporary wage earner at risk of becoming ‘detribalized.’”68 If the developmentalist state’s growing realization that “work was work and a worker was a worker made it less evident why rulers had to be white,” the contemporaneous notion that a child was a child made it possible for colonizers to insert themselves into intimate spheres of African societies and envision themselves as the fittest parents for African children.69 Urbanization was believed to have caused cultural and social crisis among Africans. If detribalized Gender, Juvenile Justice, and Reform in the Welfare City

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men in the cities had to be retrained into new labor and disciplinary conventions, detribalized children were viewed as dangerous when released from traditional social constraints since hegemonic ideas of the modern child as innocent and irrational did not permit that he or she could be enticed to modern urban normativity through the promise of financial reward. In different parts of the continent, processes disaggregating the African child from the undifferentiated unit of family or household occurred in response to colonial anxieties about labor control, urban growth, and urban danger. To propose to reform or correct African children was to propose to reinstate some element that had been dislodged from its former proper and pristine place. The possibility of correcting, reforming, or restoring the wayward child required some prior assertion of how a “healthy” child ought to function. In her classic work on secular and missionary discourses and practices of colonial medicine in East and Central Africa, Megan Vaughn wrote that both approaches to medicine “relied heavily on social pathological models, but whereas secular medicine saw modernity and the disintegration of ‘traditional’ societies as fundamental causes of disease, missionary medicine took the view that disease would only be conquered through the advancement of Christian morality, a sanitized modernity and family life.’ Whilst secular medicine tended toward an ethnic model of collective pathology, mission medicine concentrated on individual African and individual responsibility for sin and disease.”70 Combining what Vaughn might see as a secular diagnosis of “collective pathology” and a missionary-style prescription of individual reform and individual responsibility, the early juvenile reform enterprise of the 1940s constructed modern children out of young Africans, individuals out of the collective, and the reformable out of the pathological. At the same time, reform work in Lagos involved a pathologization of African collectivities, the family, the household, and the culture, as wellsprings of psychic malady and maladjustment in otherwise normal children. In state custody, the reformation of delinquent boys revolved around providing them with marketable skills training. The reformation of problem girls was heavily centered on placing girls in suitable homes, either as inmates or domestic servants, in preparation for a lifetime of domesticity. To simplify, whereas delinquent boys were to be given something to do and a path toward the breadwinner form of masculinity, problem girls were to be given some place to be, where they could be trained in the arts of becoming a European-style homemaker. 200

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7 w For Women, Girls, and the Nation? The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

We h av e on several occasions in the past invited attention to the moral danger of permitting young girls under a certain age to go out on the streets to hawk goods unless they are placed under the immediate supervision of a responsible adult. . . . We have endeavored in previous articles to appeal to the sense of duty which a good parent should feel owing from him or her to a child for whose upbringing such parent is responsible, by calling up all concerned to refrain from permitting their children to be so wantonly exposed to the dangers to which reference is here made, by sending them out unprotected to hawk in the streets, but so far there is no indication that it has had any effect whatsoever. In view of the grave happenings which have resulted from disregard of the warning and appeals against this practice we think it is the duty of the Authorities to take the necessary steps to see that these young ones are protected against the perils, both moral and physical, to which their misguided parents and guardians persist in exposing them.1

The anonymous author of the preceding excerpt from the Daily Service of 20 June 1946 had just about given up on the Lagos public. Alerts about the moral dangers of hawking and appeals to the natural protective instincts of good parents, the author claimed, had failed to produce any positive change in the people or culture of Lagos. There were no good, dutiful, responsible parents to protect girl hawkers in Lagos, and the state was therefore obligated to step in and parent the 201

girls. For the writer, girl hawkers were first and foremost easy prey for sexual predators in Lagos, and they became prey through the apathy of their parents and guardians. Without colonial state intervention, young girls would continue to be raped and murdered in Lagos while their attackers went free. Two years prior in 1944, in a public appeal for government regulation of hawking, Mrs. Abayomi had said, “The youth of a nation . . . is the hope of a nation,” implying that corrupted youth would eventually corrupt the national body.2 Using similar language, the author connected the girlhood experiences of girl hawkers to the well-being of the nation as girls graduated to womanhood. “It is most essential in the interests of the future of the country’s womanhood that adequate safeguards should be provided for the protection of the innocent young ones against the well-known moral danger to which they may be exposed through hawking by themselves.”3 Closing the article, the author expressed the expectation that “reasonable measures to this end will have the whole-hearted support of every right thinking member of the community.”4 As it turned out, during the 1940s the community of Lagos—old and young, elite and working-class, British and Nigerian, male and female—never reached consensus on what could be considered “reasonable measures” to address the girl hawker problem or even on the question of whether there really was a girl hawker problem. The street trading regulations certainly contributed to the concretization of the problem and involved Lagosians in vigorous debates. Debate about the street trading regulations took place on multiple levels. On the surface level, it played out as a debate between proponents and opponents of hawking regulation. On another level, it was a struggle over the character of the developmentalist colonial state that played out between antiregulationists and proregulationists, as well as within the proregulationist camp. As the postwar juvenile welfare regime in Lagos grew more visible, discordant voices from within the salvationist alliance, as well as from the broader public, grew more stringent in their critique of street trading regulations and their defense of hawking as an authentic socialization practice. Parents and guardians resisted street trading regulations in passive or indirect ways. Antiregulationists writing in the press were more direct and voiced their critiques in cultural terms. Debates between proponents of regulation and their critics were often debates among familiars, members of the educated elite class. Thus they were 202

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about the issues at hand, girl hawkers and girlhood, and they were also about fissures among the elite that split along lines of gender, generation, and projections of the nation. The era of the developmentalist state overlapped with the nationalist period, bringing two opposing visions of the political and economic future of Nigeria into direct conflict. Postwar development funds, projects, and plans seemed to be directed not only at accelerating economic and human development but also at tying the colonies and colonial economies more specifically and more firmly to the imperial metropole. The late 1940s and early 1950s also saw a flourishing of nationalist ideas and organizations, which called, in various ways, for the severing of colonial relations. From mainstream political parties such as the Nigerian Youth Movement to radically nationalist organizations such as the Zikists, who espoused militarist opposition to colonial rule as well as socialist positions, public personalities intensified their anticolonial rhetoric while debating visions of a postcolonial Nigeria.5 As the anticolonial rhetoric intensified, ethnonationalists, revolutionary socialists, and Pan-Africanists pushed long-standing elites who sought to maintain their status in a shifting political landscape, to clarify their positions on the colonial system of rule and its future in Africa. As historian Philip Zachernuk succinctly phrases it, “The interwar period had been dominated by an intelligentsia connected to the Lagos elite. . . . In the postwar era voices left in the background earlier and groups just defining their interests in the context of decolonization complicated this simplicity.”6 Like others, elite women’s groups had to decide and declare where they came down on the nationalist question. Within this climate that combined an expanded and diversified educated elite class with an uncertain political future, elite women’s groups underwent their second phase of reinvention. They did so by reorganizing to be more legible as political interest groups rather than social reform groups, and they renewed their efforts to broaden their membership to include working-class women. Doing so put the women’s groups in a predicament that saw them allied in the cause of anticolonialism with the emerging national political parties, yet in competition with some of those same national parties that preferred to restrict the pool of competitors for control of the postcolonial state. By the mid-1950s, the leading elite women’s groups in Lagos had fragmented and their key members were absorbed into the national political parties. The social welfare department had been Africanized and Donald Faulkner, The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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Alison Izzett, and others left their posts and various welfare projects in Lagos to return to England. The salvationists, in short, were no more. In nationalist discourses, the significance of girlhood was decoupled from what it meant for the prospects for modern womanhood. Once seen as a conduit of vice, exploitation, and ignorance, and as an obstacle to modernizing Nigerian womanhood, hawking by girls was resignified as a practice of anticolonial authenticity. Paradoxically, the independence era that closed out the 1950s brought the crucial pillar of elite women’s activism—mass education for girls—to fruition in Lagos. But before all that happened there was resistance. EVERYDAY RESISTANCE TO THE STREET TRADING BAN

Resistance to hawking regulations and the critique of mainstream girlhood that they presented took subtle and indirect forms. Indirect forms of resistance, diffuse and thus less visible, came from parents and guardians who rejected the state’s attacks on their practices of socializing girls. Although it is easily imaginable that they would have been present, one searches in vain for evidence of outrage from parents and guardians of arrested girl hawkers. The fines that formed such a welcome subsidy to the welfare office’s budget were clearly not volunteered monies. One can easily imagine that parents and guardians would have had several reasons for resenting and protesting the hawking ban, not the least of which would have been pecuniary reasons. Yet the record of protest does not reflect such voices. One possible explanation for the silence of the guardians is that reformers were so successful in constructing the ban as a salvationist enterprise that it was difficult to articulate strong opposition to the ban without seeming to advocate sexual assaults against young girls. Indeed, reformers’ success with depicting themselves as the last girl savers is demonstrated when defenders of hawking by boys made the precise argument that although they could understand that girls needed to be protected from sexual assault, it seemed to them that boys ran no such risk and should therefore be permitted to hawk their wares through the city streets. Thus hawking and sexual assault were thoroughly conflated, even in the minds of critics of regulation, when it came to girl hawkers. Related to this explanation for the evident invisibility of parental outrage is the possibility that some guardians may have sought to avoid confrontation with, or further scrutiny from, the state because they did bear uncomfortable resemblances to reformers’ portrayals of the figure of the exploitative 204

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employer/guardian. The muted evidence of working-class protest also reflects the fact that even though the fines constituted an expense for individual traders or families, market associations and specialty trader’s groups, which formed the key outlet for articulating market traders’ grievances to the public, did not take on the cause of the hawking ban as one of their priorities. Without the amplification of collective voices, the protests of individual parents and guardians when they first received notices about detained girls or when they faced the juvenile court magistrates who would assess the fines remain metaphorically muffled in the archival record. Although by paying the fines they participated in the juvenile justice process laid out by the state, the mere fact that they permitted girls to go hawking in violation of street trading regulations and then bailed girls out of the juvenile justice system once they were caught suggests that parents and guardians considered street trading regulations, and the cultural ideas underlying them, to be fundamentally illegitimate. Certainly, one could argue that most parents and guardians did not have a real emotional or economic option of allowing daughters to languish in the girls’ hostel. Yet the possibility that hundreds of individuals sent their girls out hawking in knowing defiance of street trading regulations must be considered in any analysis of the Lagos public’s response to the project to eradicate hawking by girls. Hundreds of parents and guardians quietly bailed girls out of the juvenile justice and welfare system. Yet others used the debate over street trading regulations to critique the logics of the developmentalist colonial state. Remarking on the legal imprecision of the street trading regulations, one Akin Allen derisively asked how Lagosians could hope to avoid constant law-breaking given the “amazing stretch of vocabulary” that included within the definition of hawking, “playing, singing or performing for profit.”7 Others questioned the legal scope of the ordinance. Despite the fact that the street trading regulations disproportionately affected girl hawkers, critics of the state often focused on how regulation might affect other social groups, such as parents and boys. The new era of social development had brought the state so deeply into the private lives of ordinary Lagosians that it threatened to usurp the privileged position of the parent. In his or her critique of the enforcement practices surrounding the hawking ban, one city resident complained, “No proper consideration seems to have been given at all to the rights of parents.”8 “Young people are exposed to many public The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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dangers,” he or she wrote, “but it is inevitable that parents should be conceded enough of responsibility and good judgment to do nothing which clearly leads their children to harm’s way.”9 More stringent opposition coalesced around the notion that boy hawkers should also be subject to the street trading regulations. Lagosians argued for various reasons that boys, particularly boys who sold newspapers, should be altogether exempted from the street trading regulations. Newspaper hawkers were depicted as noble and determined young scholars who suffered from the simple misfortune of having been born into poor families. A boy who found in newspaper selling “an avenue of earning a humble income to enable him to further his education cannot, in fairness,” one person wrote, “be excluded from so doing unless free education is introduced in the country.”10 Praise for boy hawkers reached incredible heights. Some argued that boys who hawked newspapers had to be exempted from street trading regulations for the benefit of society at large. “There is a member of modern and civilized community,” one reader wrote, “unassuming, adventurous, irrepressible who has made himself absolutely indispensable. Neither the intense heat of the burning sun nor the heavy downpour of early morning rain has ever succeeded to drive him off the street. . . . On many a day his sweet, sonorous, and musical cry announces the dawn and makes the modern man who hears it anxious to attune his mind to the general trend of events outside. . . . This ubiquitous personality, this modern gospeller, this irrepressible character, this herald of the dawn is the Newsvendor.”11 The newsboy was, in the writer’s view, an essential link between readers and the outside world, between readers and modernity. The newsboy not only heralded the dawn of new knowledge for individuals, he personified a “modern and civilized community.”12 The newsboy was an indispensable part of the community because of the commodity he carried—information—as well as the means through which he marketed it; using his “sweet, sonorous, and musical cry” to announce new news at every door.13 Newsboys, and implicitly all boys, the author argued, should be excluded from the street trading regulations. “What is the purpose,” he or she asked, “of including newsboys below age 14 in it?”14 Zeroing in on the essentially moral function of the street trading regulations, the writer asked, “Is there any fear of their being raped?”15 As resourceful entrepreneurs and determined scholars, boy hawkers, many argued, were to be rewarded for and not restricted in their commercial activities. In such statements, the student and young trader was constructed as decidedly male. 206

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Where the cries of boy hawkers were characterized as “sweet, sonorous, and musical,” the cries of girl hawkers were characterized as “shrill”; where boy hawkers were regarded as struggling valiantly to lift themselves out of a state of ignorance, girl hawkers were variously constructed as rape victims and junior Jezebels by their critics, or as dutiful homemakers in training by their advocates. The most potent arguments presented by defenders of girl hawking referred to the ways in which hawking enabled girls to better provide domestic rather than public services. Girl hawkers were always either working to provide their families with a “bare subsistence,” or they were depicted as helping their kin in some other way.16 In October 1946, a committee of combined Lagos women’s groups published in the Daily Service the following list of problems with the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance as a way of alerting the government but, more important, the Lagos public, of their critical stance. Employing maternalist rhetoric, they declared, We the undersigned on behalf of ourselves and all mothers in the community, present this petition to you against certain sections of the new Ordinance, “the Children and Young Persons Ordinance of 1946.” While we appreciate and welcome the necessity of an Ordinance to prevent “Child-hawking” in the township, because of the moral danger to which our children are daily exposed, we fail to see the necessity for the passing of portions of the Ordinance which restrict the free movement of young females. . . . We hold that such restrictions are a direct interference with the economic home life of the average African home, as it is at the ages of 14 and 16 that our girls (i) By active participation, contribute to help their parents in preparing their trousseaux (ii) are entrusted in a greater measure with the trade of the parent or guardian; or in a sense become partners in for the general good and running of the home. . . . African children are . . . placed for necessary training to prepare them for life with suitable relations or guardians.17

Although the trousseau-building argument for the defense of hawking by girls may well have been grounded in truth, its persuasive power derived from the way that it capitalized on the convergence of “traditional” and emerging notions of youthful femininity and domesticity. The authors of the Daily Service article offered two arguments for The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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why adolescent girls should be permitted to work. The first, which was consistent with welfare officials’ ideas about the centrality of marriage to stabilizing problem girls, argued that girls had to work in order to contribute to the expense of their marital trousseaux. Here, girl’s labor was constructed as necessary for, rather than in competition with, their ability to form early marriages. The second argument held that girls had to work, alongside or for their trader parents and guardians, in order to learn how to run a home. Here girls’ work in public spaces was constructed as an extension of their domestic work in their natal and future marital households. On the surface of things, there appears to be an inconsistency between the women reformers’ arguments regarding marriage and their calls for increased access to education for girls and to the professions for women. But their shifting strategy must be read as a defense of parental privileges against the expanding superparent, the welfare city, in the context of trying to negotiate difficult tensions between nationalist and feminist politics. As local political power rested increasingly on the support of the Nigerian public and not just the British colonial state, the preservation of parents’ privileges to put their daughters to work, as per indigenous cultural practice, trumped the reformers’ initial goal of modernizing Nigerian girls and women in Western fashion. In order for the welfare office to perform its work of rescuing endangered Lagos children, it had to gain entry into private households. The state’s ability to enter the home in the best interest of the child was a twentieth-century innovation cemented in the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance. One effect of the ordinance was to blur the boundaries between private home space and public society space. Through the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance the state effectively assumed the role of the superparent to determine what forms of discipline and social, cultural, or economic education were appropriate for children and young people in Lagos. This new governmental privilege was coeval with a diminution of parental privilege, a side effect of street trading regulations and the salvationist logic of the juvenile welfare system that women reformers began to denounce. When the authors of the hawking ban made the specific stipulation that every girl aged fourteen through sixteen was prohibited from hawking unless she was “so engaged or employed by her parent or person appointed to be a guardian by the Court,” they were redefining kinship relations between parent and child, much as the 1884 Marriage 208

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Ordinance had done with relations between husbands and wives. When the street trading regulations asserted that only parents, or individuals appointed by the colonial state to play the role of parents, were lawfully permitted to send girls out hawking, they also delegitimized all other parent-child relationships, particularly those formed through informal adoptions and apprenticeships. Just as the marriage ordinance had established a hierarchy between ordinance and customary marriages, the 1943 street trading regulations established a hierarchy of kinship among biological, ordinance, and customary “parents.” It might have been called the parent ordinance. Through the street trading regulations, biology and decrees from the colonial magistrate’s court were given precedence over various other prevailing methods of creating parent-child relationships. In addition to the integrity of parental power, threats to the personhood of Nigerian girls were also politicized. Women reformers denounced the practice of arresting girls found traveling alone on Lagos-bound trains and sending them on trains bound for their points of origin.18 They also criticized the practice of arresting, detaining, and physically examining girls headed into Lagos without the prior consent of their parents. We protest against the system adopted by the Social Welfare Officer of meeting in-coming trains from the Provinces to the Capital and removing all young people (female) between the ages of 14 and 16 years, and detaining them in a Remand Home, and sending them for medical examinations. . . . The sending of such young persons taken from the trains for medical examination without the consent of their parents or guardians, or their having been brought before the Court, or proofs to show that they were from a brothel, or have association with it, is, we maintain, unjust, indecent, and violation of the ordinary rights of a citizen.19

The routinized practice of violating the “ordinary rights” and bodies of traveling girls carried with it the implication that welfare officials considered all girls en route to Lagos morally suspect. Moral suspicion rendered girls vulnerable to arrest followed by medical inspection even without parental notification. Thus the practice of intercepting girls en route to Lagos violated both the bodily integrity and respectability of Nigerian girls and norms of parental privilege, producing girls who weren’t children, parents who weren’t adults, and populations that were broadly The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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brushed as something other than citizens. By publicly declaring their critiques of state policy, women’s group members stood to capitalize on general antipathy toward the street trading regulations. Women reformers’ public condemnations of practical aspects of the girl hawker project allowed them to occupy a critical insider status as coarchitects of the children’s ordinance, and therefore salvationists, while gaining credibility as independent critics of the state. Maintaining a critical stance toward the colonial system of rule was essential to gaining credibility as public authorities in the impending postcolonial society. Yet despite their efforts at negotiating the changing political terrain, women’s group members often found themselves being targeted in critiques of the street trading regulations. In an editorial that was emblematic of the cultural nationalist position, the noted lawyer Olayemi Blaize argued: Street Hawking in Lagos or Nigeria is a hoary custom and any attempt at total prohibition is going to spell untold hardship to the mothers and aged grandmothers for whom these children hawk. There is no old age pension as yet provided by Government for aged people. It is the filial duty of these girls to hawk articles and thereby enable aged men and women to buy clothes, pay school fees and have a bare subsistence.20

In his defense of Lagos’s girl hawkers and the communities that encouraged them, Blaize argued that hawking was an ancient cultural practice, which served distinctly modern functions in the urban colonial economy. The urban colonial economy revolved around wage earners and marginalized all other workers. It was reluctant to provide education for young people or social security for the elderly. Girl hawkers, Blaize argued, served important social maintenance functions in such a context. They assumed the costs of their own education as well as those of their siblings and provided poor grandparents with some income, however meager. Limiting the earning capacity of girl hawkers, Blaize reasoned, would only add to the hardships of the indigent and the elderly. Persecuted hawkers would be unable to earn enough to feed, clothe, or educate themselves, and “aged men and women,” denied government pensions and other social security guarantees, could perish from poverty. Girl hawkers prohibited from earning money through their ancient occupation would be “left to their destruction to become victims of depraved houseboys and other vile men minus or 210

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plus the hawking badge.”21 Hawking, Blaize argued, was more than a simple occupation; it was a local cultural practice that formed part of a complex of social support practices evolved on local soil, from local historical experiences, and which signified and safeguarded the integrity of local cultures. Blaize’s reliance on cultural arguments to criticize hawking regulations has to be placed within historical context to be fully understood. By 1944, a partial welfare state in Nigeria, which was formerly limited to British colonial staff, had been expanded to supply social support resources to Nigerian civil servants and organized wage earners.22 Although these groups won concessions from the state only after bitter and prolonged strikes, their victories demonstrated that subject populations could eventually realize desired social policies by making demands on the colonial government. The victories of wage earners underscored the marginalization of the self-employed majority. As Nigerian political parties began coalescing to channel the grievances of the marginalized majority, the discourses of indigeneity, cultural nationalism. and authenticity became organizing tools for the consolidation of anticolonial politics. RENASCENT AFRICANS AND MODERN WOMEN: G E N D E R A N D V I S I O N S O F T H E E M E R G E N T N AT I O N

A self-described “renascent African,” a concept that connoted both indigeneity and modernity, Blaize was steeped in the Pan-Africanist anticolonial discourse of the nationalist period. The phrase “renascent Africa,” first coined by Nnamdi Azikiwe in 1937, was a rallying cry for radical Zikists. In his book, Renascent Africa, Azikiwe described the concept as a signifier for “a transitional stage between the Old and the New Africans.”23 In Azikiwe’s view, New Africans would be free of “political servitude” when they had cultivated within themselves five key transformations. At minimum, New Africans must have first achieved spiritual balance, which meant simply and profoundly respecting the views of others while limiting differences of opinion from spilling beyond the level of ideas such that they could be used to intensify social divisions.24 Second, the renascent African must undergo social regeneration, which meant that he [or she] would “take upon himself the burden of looking at his fellow African as a man, nothing more, nothing less.”25 This way of regarding one’s fellows was contrasted against “the ills of the present social order” in which “tribal appellations cause The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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tribal idiosyncrasies” and “lead ultimately to vanity, superciliousness and disharmony.”26 Renascent Africans were also to commit to a practice of economic determinism, which Azikiwe defined as a redistribution of wealth away from the hands of the few, de-emphasizing the profit motive in public life, and restoring dignity to wage earners. Having completed his book Renascent Africa in 1933 and the preface to the second edition in 1937, Azikiwe may have been inspired in his critique of capitalist colonial economies by the widely reported labor crises in the Caribbean. The fourth trial of the renascent African was to achieve “mental emancipation,” which involved gaining an African historical education that would rid the renascent African of an intellectual inferiority complex and “all the trappings of hat-in-hand Uncle Tom-ism.”27 Expanding on the question of mental emancipation, Azikiwe wrote that “The Renascent African will be better off with men and women who are trained to appreciate the facts of African history, than with those who spend a lifetime in Europe or America, for purposes of miseducation and devaluation of African culture and civilization.”28 When finally the renascent African had passed through the four stages and achieved spiritual balance, regenerated his society, planned a new system of economic relations, and experienced mental emancipation, the final stage, “national risorgimento,” would be attained, and the Africa that followed Renascent Africa, New Africa, would achieve political self-determination. In a volume that tacks between staking Africa’s claim to a global intellectual heritage and admonishing Old Africa and its survivals in the colonial period with being unduly imitative of the West, it is unclear what Azikiwe would have made of Blaize’s invocation of Renascent Africa in his critique of the Women’s Party’s anti-hawking campaign. Renascent Africans, in Blaize’s view, were those who believed that Africans could “properly advance and be raised only upon our own idiosyncrasies.”29 Blaize’s renascent Africans were convinced that advancement was compatible with maintaining cultural integrity. Here was a Pan-African theory of progress that simultaneously leaned on, and sought to bring forward, an idealized coherent African past. Criticizing elite women reformers with “indiscriminate apeing of foreign customs,” Blaize maintained that renascent Africans embraced advancement but questioned the assumption that advancement, social, political, intellectual, or otherwise, required relinquishing local cultural particularity for Western cultural norms.30 212

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Blaize’s specific target was the Nigerian Women’s Party, a newly formed and high-profile organization that was active in women’s issues and nationalist politics. The Nigerian Women’s Party first emerged in 1944 under the leadership of Oyinkan Abayomi. It absorbed much of the membership of the Lagos Women’s League and according to the historian Nina Mba, combined that organization with another group, the Ladies’ Progressive Club, to form the Nigerian Women’s Party.31 The stated objectives of the Abayomi-led Women’s Party included: Education of women and Politics, to become useful and loyal citizens, to know their rights and the right way to demand them, to love and admire the highest standard of moral, to keep women of less average literary ability busy on industrial or domestic science pursuits, to start mass education of women so that in a year or two there will be no more illiteracy among women for whom suitable employment should be given as teachers, midwives, and nurses, supervisors, lecturers, and in various other departments and capacities.32

During its first few years of operation, the Women’s Party would add equal pay and the franchise for women to its list of demands for women’s advancement.33 Full adult women’s literacy was a rather ambitious goal considering that until 1950 approximately two-thirds of women and girls under sixty-five in Lagos were completely illiterate, meaning they did not have “the ability to write a short letter and to read a letter, or newspaper, or other written or printed document” in any African or non-African language.34 Like other mass education advocates during the 1940s, women’s group members wanted greater educational access and modern curricula for Nigerian youth.35 But they were specifically interested in safeguarding access for girls. Women’s group members wanted girls to attend government schools, study modern subjects, and obtain the skills needed for professional jobs. Female teachers, social workers, nurses, and police officers were needed, they argued. Not only did the party seek full adult women’s literacy and increased numbers of professional women, but true to their predecessors from the Lagos Women’s League, they also wanted the state to underwrite the cost of mass education for women and girls in Lagos. In order to create new generations of Nigerian women professionals, women’s group members sought to ensure that girls in The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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particular got modern schooling—the central feature of their own experiences of girlhood—and that the state assumed responsibility for providing it. Between the renascent African discourse of authenticity and the Women’s Party’s discourse of improvement, there were two visions of the emergent nation-state and the place of women within it. The first, articulated by the Nigerian Women’s Party, presented a vision of the postcolonial nation in which women would achieve educational, economic, and political parity with men. Indeed, they were not the only ones who held such a vision. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, leader of the Abeokuta Women’s Union, which is the best-known women’s organization of the nationalist period, famously published an article in the London Daily Worker in which she claimed that gender relations in Nigerian societies were equitable in the precolonial period and, implicitly, that they could be restored to that condition only with the evacuation of the colonial state. Women owned property, traded and exercised considerable political and social influence in society. They were responsible for crowning the Kings on Coronation days. Whatever disabilities there were then were endured both by men and women alike. With the advent of British rule, slavery was abolished, and Christianity introduced into many parts of the country but instead of the women being educated and assisted to live like human beings their condition has deteriorated.36

Kuti’s article argued that British colonialism not only brought Nigerian women disease, ignorance, taxation, and poverty where these problems had not existed before, it also dispossessed them of their former political authority, which would be restored upon decolonization. By contrast, like much nationalist discourse, the discourse of renascent Africa that Blaize deployed, presumed a masculine citizen who would maintain a line of political continuity between precolonial and postcolonial Africa, and undefined roles for women in the politics and economics of the postcolonial nation. Even though well-known women activists such as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti articulated a comparably multidirectional yet feminist and nationalist vision of the precolonial past and the postcolonial nation, women like the members of the Nigerian Women’s Party, who were seen as challenging patriarchal power or privileging their other affiliations, gender, generational, imperial, or 214

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otherwise, before the nation, fit awkwardly into the theory of renascent Africa. For cultural nationalists, forms of socialization that would produce such women were therefore inauthentic disruptions in the chain of continuity between the precolonial and postcolonial order. PROBLEM GIRLS AND MODERN TIMES

In St. Anna Court, no less than half a dozen teenaged girls appeared before the Magistrate on a charge of loitering at odd hours of the night near nightclubs which are mostly used by sailors. . . . Recently, there has been an influx of jobless women into Lagos and suburbs, women who are not married and who have no visible means of income. . . . “Glamour girls” have increased very tremendously.37

As nationalist debates raged on in the press and within elite circles, the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance, its subsidiary street trading regulations, and panic about underage prostitution continued to yield increases in arrests of girls, which in turn fed perceptions of a growth in problem girls in the city. In the newspapers, commentators catalogued the various types of problem girls for a public that was presumed to be shocked at their allegedly sudden appearance. The characteristics of “teenaged girls,” “glamour girls,” “hotel girls,” “club addicts,” and even the elusive “boma girls,” rare but real female counterparts to the well-known boma boy menace, were detailed for an audience that needed little convincing about the perils of urban life in Lagos for African women and girls. In public commentaries, problem girls and bad women were sometimes separated and sometimes interchanged. The public was educated on the characteristics of these troubling new social figures, their appearances, their behaviors, and their natural habitats. Glamour girls, hotel girls, and club addicts were seen as phenomena of a particular space, the city, and products of a particular time, the modern period. For critics, the key feature that these problem girls shared was one that they also shared with men, women, and “the youths of Nigeria.”38 As one critic put it in a Daily Times editorial: It seems that the one and most impelling force driving the youths of Nigeria these days is the desire to get money by all means—fair or foul. There is a great general mad-rush on the part of youths to get rich quick. The wave has affected nearly The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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all sections of the country and almost all classes of people. Men are becoming dishonest, insincere and altogether untrustworthy, the boys are watching and emulating them. The women and girls have become most immorally low and spiritually bankrupt. Juvenile criminals have increased, the number of unwanted children and unmarried mothers rises very steeply, painted bleary-eyed harlots are invading our towns as never before, and venereal diseases have greatly increased—all in the mad desire to get rich quick without much labour.39

Problem girls were read as emblems of the deterioration of authentic Africa. Persons with “no visible means of income,” they were seen as runaways from Lagos hinterlands where African authenticity presumably reigned, where crime, particularly juvenile crime was unknown, where acquisitiveness was an alien sentiment, and where individuals delighted in manual labor. Leaving behind largely agricultural economies, in the city such women and girls were presumed to rely for their subsistence on the patronage of transient sailors. Yet even as they personified the bad modern and symbolized the defeat of idealized rural sovereignty, problem girls were also used to mark a turning point in the nationalist quest for African independence. Concluding the same Daily Times article, the author asked, “Is this a temporary phase in the growth and development of the country—an inevitable crossroad on our road to full nationhood and political freedom—let us hope so.”40 In the closing question we see a new articulation of the problem girl as a sign of inevitable growth, development, even modernity, albeit an ambiguous modernity. Problem girls were those who sought to get rich quick without performing much labor, a criticism that had long been applied to young aspiring clerks, another set of modern types. Problem girls had integrated new forms of consumption that would bring them glamour or physical beauty while leading them to clubs and hotels, key venues for showing off said forms of glamour. Through emphases on glamour, bodily improvement, acquisitiveness, and antipathy toward manual labor, schoolgirls were assimilated into ideas of the problem girl. Even though Lagos’s educated elite class was at least three generations old by the 1950s, the schoolgirl was still a remarkable social figure whose attributes were just beginning to be elaborated or even invented in popular culture. Contradictory stereotypes cast schoolgirls as virtuous, proud, acquisitive, and tragic. In popular 216

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literature, the schoolgirl was valorized for her determination to stand up to traditional cultural norms, yet she remained an ambiguous figure. She was heroic because she was abnormal, yet for abnormality she would be punished. A common trope was that of the schoolgirl—educated, aspirational, modern, and the pride of a father who has invested heavily in her education—who defies her family and devalues herself by falling in love with a young pauper. In his 1948 novel, When Love Whispers, Cyprian Ekwensi painted a portrait of just such a tragic schoolgirl. Ekwensi’s protagonist is a young woman named Ashoka who starts out as a student in a convent school and graduates to the position of a wage-earning teacher in another religious school. In the context of the school, Ashoka is virtuous, beautiful, proud, and faithfully pining away for her lover, who has taken a threeyear scholarship to study in England. A number of things happen, time passes, and she is gradually pushed out of the world of the school into the seamy underworld of the city. By the end of the book, we find Ashoka in a village setting married to a much older chief whose advances she had resisted for years. The love of her youth, lost after a long three-year period, returns from abroad to claim her but alas, too late! Ashoka is no longer a bright, innocent, optimistic maiden schoolgirl. She is a corrupted and fallen schoolgirl, who has aged out of the status that attended being educated and young, while having unsuccessfully navigated the status systems of traditional culture. She has aged tremendously in three years, and he finds her a woman governed by duty, haunted by shame, and dramatically intoning, “Love has no part in my life now.”41 Fallen schoolgirls, proliferating problem girls, and glamour girls, who presented beautiful masks to a public that had lost its powers of distinguishing the good life from the bad, indexed anxieties about the new norms that would attend the political transitions that were already on the horizon. Discourses of the problem girl as an emblem of a warped form of development sat alongside cultural nationalist discourses of modernity that coalesced around the defense of girl hawkers. OUR SOCIAL HABITS HAVE THEIR OWN TALES TO TELL

We read in a periodical a few weeks ago that girl hawkers ought to be in bed early in the morning when they are heard hawking in the streets. Our mode of thought should be influenced more by local circumstances than by foreign model. Why should all The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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our customs based on indigenous practices be condemned? Our social habits have their own tales to tell.42

Proregulationist arguments that rendered hawking a social ill, girl hawkers as imperiled, vulnerable, and dependent children in need of cloistering, and the prohibition of hawking to be an effective response to illicit sexualization of girl hawkers did not easily take root with the general Lagos public. Like the opening excerpt from Blaize’s letter suggests, some Lagos residents felt that the street trading regulations did far more than control the labor of young people; street trading regulations were viewed as a direct attack on “indigenous practices” and social categories, another battlefield in an ideational war between British colonial culture and local Yoruba culture. By 22 July 1946, even Abayomi was calling for a suspension of the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance.43 The Women’s Party’s request had no perceptible impact. Arrests of girl hawkers continued, as did the practice of hawking by girls into the independence period. In 1952, the Western Region of Nigeria, where Lagos was located, gained independence from British rule. With independence came a reorganization of the government bureaucracy and a Nigerianization policy that replaced British administrative personnel with Nigerians. Parts of mainland Lagos were administratively integrated with the Western Region and from 1953–54, the Colony Welfare Office, whose name had been changed to the Western Region Social Welfare Services Department, was headquartered in Ibadan. After 1 October 1954, the welfare office was relocated back to Lagos, now also known as the Federal Territory, and it was called the Federal Service for Social Welfare. The Western Region Social Welfare Services Department continued to operate and was jointly run along with the Federal Service for Social Welfare by Donald Faulkner. Staff members in the former Colony Welfare Office were promoted to new positions, including opening new welfare offices and juvenile courts in the western region of Nigeria. A new welfare office was opened in Abeokuta in 1953 and two other offices were opened in January 1954 in Sapele and Warri. The junior staff members were undertrained, and the sites of the new welfare offices were generally considered to be inadequate. For example, the Abeokuta welfare office was “remote from the population centre,” and the Warri office was located on the site of a “sports pavilion”—every time there was a sporting event, the welfare office staff had to relocate.44 218

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Ibadan and Abeokuta also began to operate juvenile courts. All of these new institutions needed and struggled to find trained staff that would keep the juvenile welfare system running. One might expect that all the regional and administrative reorganization would have had some impact on rates of girl hawker arrests, perhaps increasing them. But this was not the case. In Lagos or the Federal Territory, the rate of girl hawker arrests showed a dominant pattern of decline after 1946–47 when 684 girls were apprehended. In 1948, 716 girls were arrested for hawking, but the following year only 340 girls, less than half the number from the previous year, were arrested and fined. Girl hawker arrests reached a record low of 152 in 1950–51, but by 1954 the numbers had swung back up to 324. The following year numbers of arrested girl hawkers ballooned to 528; this was perilously close to levels from almost a decade before.45 A new trend was clearly in evidence. Fluctuations in numbers of girl hawker arrests could be read as a reflection of the shifting jurisdiction of the welfare office or as an indicator of the changing welfare service staff’s variable capacity to enforce street trading regulations. The unambiguous testimony of the resurgent numbers of girl hawker arrests is that the ideology of the girl hawker campaign that viewed hawking as a social ill; girl hawkers as imperiled, vulnerable, and dependent children in need of cloistering; and the prohibition of hawking to be an effective response to illicit sexualization of girls failed to take root with the general Lagos public. Significantly, it also failed to extend beyond Lagos. Juvenile court reports from the new Western Region Social Welfare Services Department mirrored the Lagos reports in every category of offense except for one—street trading. Going into the independence period, hawking by girls was never considered an offense outside of Lagos. The criminalization of hawking by girls would remain a peculiarity of life in the city. Lagos in the early 1950s was once again in a phase of political transition as the developmentalist phase of governance steadily gave way to one shaped by nationalist posturing and postcolonial jockeying. What did it mean in that period of flux to be a good nationalist, an indigenous leader, a public person? What did desirable urban citizens or Lagosians look like and how did they behave, particularly in a context where Lagos was being pulled more closely into what had formerly been the provinces, and it was entering Nigeria as a national capital. Where did the metaphorical gates of the city lie in such a context, who would man them, and with what justification? Going into the nationalist period, The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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wielding public authority in Lagos seemed to require engaging in both local and national political circuits and speaking to both local and national constituencies. Capturing public power or authority seemed also to rely more on formal affiliation with one of the three dominant national political parties. What function did old Lagosians like the women’s group members play in shaping the culture of such a shifting context? What function could they play? As Faulkner eyed the chaotic fragmentation of his welfare empire and imminent early retirement, and Izzett developed training programs for new members of the social welfare service while writing her applications to study at Oxford University, the welfare office’s onetime allies, elite women reformers in Lagos, were busily brokering new alliances within the national political parties and trying to negotiate the tension between their gender politics and nationalist politics. As the nationalists tried to answer European challenges to their claims to hegemonic forms of masculinity, women observed the public valorization by both nationalists and colonialists, of forms of masculinity that relied on the construction of women as dependents and helpmates. No sooner had the Women’s Party outlined their plan for bringing forth the era of modern womanhood than they had to table their plans and lend their energies to the ostensibly larger interests of the national political parties. Historian Anne McClintock’s remarks on gender power and the architecture of the postcolonial state can be applied to the nationalist period in Lagos. “Not only,” she argues, “have the needs of postcolonial nations been largely identified with male conflicts, male aspirations, and male interests, but the very representation of national power has rested on prior constructions of gender power.”46 From 1950, the Women’s Party was absorbed into the Action Group as its women’s wing, and its former members were charged with mobilizing support from women in the Western Region for their party’s local and national candidates.47 The ideologies of power that structured the assimilation of the Women’s Party into the Action Group rested on constructions of gender power that rendered women as junior status helpers. But they might have been more disabling if they had rested on prior constructions of generational power. Put differently, if the emergent nation was shaped in the image of the patriarchal family, one has to consider that the relationships between husbands and wives within such a formulation contained a fluidity that did not exist in the relationships between parents and children. Children, no matter how 220

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much they developed, could never catch up in generational status with their parents. Faced with the choice of being junior status helpmates to the nation-building project versus assuming the position of protected yet structurally disempowered fixtures in the postcolonial nation, the wife or the child, Women’s Party members opted for the former. It may be no coincidence that the Action Group was the party that introduced the revolutionary universal primary education program in Western Nigeria. According to education scholar Babatunde Fafunwa, from 1954 to 1955, the year universal primary education began, the number of children who were presented for primary schooling jumped from 457,000 to 811,000. By Nigeria’s independence in 1960, over 1 million children, or 90 percent of the school-age population, were enrolled in Western Region primary schools.48 These numbers are not broken down by sex, but it would be safe to say that women reformer’s mass education goals for working-class girls were more fully realized by nationalist-era and independence-era governments than they had been by the colonial state, even in its developmentalist phase. Further research will have to uncover the precise nature of women’s involvement in bringing universal primary education to fruition in Western Nigeria. By the mid-1950s, the girl hawkers of Lagos had once again receded into the background noise of urban life. As invested parties moved on to bigger political game or were booted out in a changing political climate, general interest in the elimination of hawking or the protection of girl hawkers quickly expired. For several decades in the first half of the twentieth century when problem girls were an issue of governmental concern, girls who hawked challenged elite and colonialist notions of the child as well as their attempts to impose girlhood, a distinctly gendered variation on childhood, onto their lives. In order to be rescued by elite women and the developmentalist state, the girl hawker had to be reconstructed as an innocent, dependent modern child. That identity had to be paired with a concept of femininity that privileged women’s domestic activities over their public activities, a form of female gender performance that was alien to Yoruba thought. The noted sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi has convincingly argued that Yoruba conceptions of anatomical sex difference are erroneously translated into Western derived concepts of gender difference. Besides her argument that the discourse of sex difference in Yoruba epistemology did not correlate with the “dichotomous discourse . . . about two binarily opposed and hierarchical The Politics of Girl Saving in the Era of Anticolonial Nationalism

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social categories” that obtained in Western epistemology, she argues that okunrin and obinrin, the Yoruba categories for “male” and “female” only apply to adult human beings and are not “normally used for omode [children].”49 Gender differences between the practice of childhood for girls and the practice of childhood for boys may have been less pronounced among the common people of Lagos than they were within British or elite Lagosian culture. In their efforts to save the common girls of Lagos, elite women and the developmentalist colonial state attempted to impose the modern model of Western childhood along with an alien gender ideology onto urban girl hawkers’ bodies. The criminalization of girl hawkers took place through the initiative of elite Nigerian women social reformers and colonial welfare officials. From the early 1920s to the mid 1950s, colonial officials and elite women were the most constant and vocal commentators on workingclass girls and girl hawkers in Lagos. They formed an alliance to build a welfare infrastructure for girls in Lagos that included group homes, detention centers, and girls’ clubs. During the 1940s, girl hawkers and girls in general were a high priority for the Nigerian Women’s Party. For the colonial state, girl hawkers were one subgroup within a larger, more diverse, and more dangerous population of problem youths. But girl hawkers received special attention within the juvenile welfare bureaucracy because of their youthfulness, their female gender, their sheer numbers, and the public nature of their work. Elite women and the state tried to support each other in making girl hawkers a thing of the past. Yet there were serious conflicts between the two, which were complicated by the hierarchies of colonial social orders. Alliances between elite women and the state were always strategic and tense. As the Nigerian Women’s Party tried to position itself for formal political power along with the various Nigerian political parties emerging in Lagos at that time, alliances between the women and the state became steadily unraveled. Even the postindependence state, though for reasons that had more to do with urban beautification than the regulation of girls’ labor or sexuality, regularly attempted and failed to clear the streets of Lagos of young hawkers. Further research will determine how the antihawking campaigns of the postindependence state compared to the antihawking campaign of the colonial developmentalist state. Certainly the colonial state’s campaign was the first and most ambitious of its kind. The girl hawker campaign of the 1940s sought to control the labor of a segment of the unregulated working population by 222

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restricting hawking by girls. Since opponents of regulation considered hawking to have pedagogical and economic value outweighing the domestic training the state sought to encourage, regulation advocates found themselves working at odds with both a distinctly Yoruba ideology of childhood, which viewed children as economic contributors, and Yoruba ideas of gender, which conceptualized men and women as comparable economic actors.

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conclusion

Banning Hawkers Sixty Years Later

Th is book has been about girls and girlhood in colonial Lagos, viewed in relationship to techniques and ideologies of girl saving and the political uses of the idea of the working-class girl as paradoxically modern, dangerous, and imperiled. As such, this book has also been a history of the girl savers, Lagosian women reformers and colonial social workers who shaped the conditions and created the structures that girls were compelled to navigate in order to be saved from real and imagined dangers in the city. Throughout the work I have explored some of the peculiarities of colonial girlhood in Lagos. It was during the colonial period that schooling became a mainstream practice of girl socialization despite having unproven economic value for working-class girls themselves. It was also during the colonial period that hawking, the most common occupation of working-class girls, was first questioned as a socialization practice. Along with that questioning, working-class girl hawkers became associated with complex and problematic sexualities, including juvenile sexuality, commercial sex, and sexual violence. The history of sexuality in Africa is a quickly growing field of study, but it has so far maintained a fixation on histories of marginalized sexualities such as interracial sexuality, homosexuality, and long-distance commercial sexualities. Certainly, this is linked to important intellectual and political questions regarding the history of sexual repression and control in Africa, within which we can more fully understand the various forms of repression, sexual and otherwise, that Africans continue to experience today. Yet one consequence of the focus on 224

marginalized sexualities is that we have less opportunity to historicize mainstream sexualities such as heterosexuality, intergenerational sexuality, and local sexual economies. In this book I have focused on the question of age and generational difference in the course of problematizing forms of sexuality that are taken for granted or normative, such as intergenerational sex between men and girls. By underlining both what we do and do not understand about these intergenerational interactions, I have hoped to raise new questions about the history of sexual desires, practices, and tastes that might allow us to more critically scrutinize the ongoing politics of sexuality in Africa today. In addition, this book has focused attention on the public and professional lives of African women. In so doing, I have tried to draw attention to counterintuitive orderings of power and status in the colonial world. Through the microstudy of the mixed-race and mixed-gender world of voluntary and colonial reformers in Lagos, I argue that colonial epistemologies did not necessarily overpower preexisting epistemologies wherever or whenever the two met. This project looked at African women who did not understand themselves to be marginal members of colonial society on the basis of their sex and race. When they interacted with Europeans whose elevated status was directly dependent on the colonial context, the respective status identifications of these two figures collided in ways that challenge twenty-first-century assumptions about the colonial order of things. Even as race and sex proved to be weak axes of social difference between Lagosian women and British colonial workers in Lagos, generation was a powerful axis of difference between girls, reformers, and other adults. Although working-class girls and elite girl savers inhabited the same world, they did not do so equally. The worlds of working-class girls and girl savers collided when the latter willed themselves into the lives of the common people of Lagos. The cross-class coercions of the earlier twentieth century remain with us in the twenty-first. In the early part of 2012 there were news reports that Lagos State government was renewing its commitment to the Child Rights Law by embarking on a campaign of “sensitization and awareness . . . on zero-tolerance against child abuse.”1 The current Child Rights Law, which was passed in 2007, was the state’s version of Nigeria’s 2003 Child Rights Act, which was in turn a domesticated version of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. According to Kaine Agary, a policy analyst for the Lagos newspaper Punch, the Child Rights Law endowed children Banning Hawkers Sixty Years Later

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with a long list of rights, some of which were very general, such as the right to “life, survival, and development,” and some of which were very specific to regional cultures, such as the right to freedom from “tattoos and skin marks.”2 Most important for our concerns, the 2007 Child Rights Law also guaranteed Lagos children the right to immunity from all forms of “exploitative labor,” which included “sale, hire or use for the purpose of hawking.”3 The 2007 ban on hawking triggered very old debates. On nairaland.com for example, when readers learned that Lagos State intended to arrest the parents of persistent child hawkers, some contributors applauded the government’s commitment to ending child abuse while others asked if the ban and the penalties that would be imposed on parents did not themselves constitute forms of abuse against the Lagos poor.4 The chief differences between 2007 and 1947 were that the debates now took place on the worldwide web as well as in the newspapers, and they centered on schoolchildren, now constructed as the normative child, as opposed to specifically girl hawkers who had been the focus in an earlier age. As this book demonstrates, 2007 was not the first time that Lagosians had been confronted with a ban on hawking by children. Given the century-long persistence of the phenomenon of child hawking, the socioeconomic and cultural conditions that inspire child hawking, and the similarities among the kinds of proposals that successive generations of reformers and officials have made to end child hawking in the city, we may choose to bypass the obvious move of asking why the hawking ban always fails, and instead ask how and for whom child hawking and its control might actually work. What work do child hawkers do for their advocates and their critics, for the cynics and the salvationists? In her 2011 article tracing the genealogy of gender and human rights regimes, Pamela Scully identified the figure of the “vulnerable African woman or woman of African descent” as a recurring trope in international human rights work from the abolitionist campaigns of eighteenth-century Britain to the transnational twenty-first-century campaigns against gender-based violence. In the early antislavery movement, Scully writes, abolitionists frequently called up “the figure of the black woman vulnerable to terrible depredation on the plantations of the Caribbean” in order to buttress moral arguments for the abolition of slavery.5 In the run-up to colonization and during the colonial period in Africa, missionaries working in various parts of the continent 226

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combined ethical and economic justification for their labors by portraying the African woman as “a beast of burden who had to be rescued from the patriarchal grip of her husband and family.”6 This even as colonial labor and governance policies paradoxically emphasized the importance of preserving patriarchal power.7 Into the twenty-first century, human rights campaigns against gender-based violence in Africa continue to “achieve their sense of purpose and ethics through the figure of the abject and violated woman who needs the intervention of non-governmental organizations.”8 In short, from the era of Atlantic slavery to the colonial period and beyond, human rights campaigns have made use of African women by placing emphasis on African women as bodies, as bodies that face peculiar forms of sexual violation, and as bodies whose best chances for salvation lie in the benevolent hands of distant humanitarian actors. If, for the past three centuries, the discursively constructed figure of the abject African woman has been a central tool in the mobilization of transnational human rights projects in Africa, what work has another discursively constructed figure, the abject African child, performed for rights activists? Scully’s genealogy underscores the paradoxical power of concepts of weakness, vulnerability, or endangerment for mobilizing and legitimizing liberal activist campaigns. Whereas the figure of the discursively constructed abject African woman served to mobilize transnational activists and morally legitimize British imperial authority, another figure, the figure of the abject African girl, served to mobilize indigenous feminist activists and legitimize their liberal campaigns for urban girlhood and modern womanhood in colonial Lagos. A perhaps more subtle concern of the book has been to reflect on the practice and politics of crafting urban citizenship in a twentiethcentury colonial African city. The book examines the question of urbanism and how the experience of being or becoming an urban subject is shaped. How, in other words, did the concept of the “Lagosian” acquire meaning? In recent urban studies scholarship, the city of Lagos has attracted a lot of attention, mainly for the dubious distinction of being sub-Saharan Africa’s first contribution to the short list of global megacities.9 Urban theorists from a variety of disciplinary positions have conceptualized the city as a manifestation of everything from an exceptional and liberatory alternative Afro-urbanism to a dystopic harbinger of global cities to come. Dominant narratives of the megacity often take Lagos’s late twentieth-century population explosion as their Banning Hawkers Sixty Years Later

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starting point and central problem. Among influential interpreters of contemporary urbanism, understandings of megacity Lagos have split roughly into two camps. A few, like the architect Rem Koolhaas, for example, have characterized the city as the manifestation of a dynamic liberatory new form of urbanism. In an interview with Glendora Review, he discussed this complex of associations with Lagos in the following way: “What is now fascinating is how with some level of self-organization, there is a strange combination of extreme under-development and development. And what particularly amazes me is how the kinds of infrastructures of modernity in the city yet trigger off all sorts of unpredictable improvised conditions so that there is a kind of mutual dependency.”10 It is precisely within this informality, Koolhaas suggests, that the future and “emancipatory machine” of African cities may lie.11 Others, such as the essayist George Packer, have critiqued this reading of the city and charged that the only way Lagos can be seen as the site of an unshackled new urbanism is from the bird’s-eye view of a rented presidential helicopter; which was how Koolhaas made his initial encounter with the city. In his Lagos narrative, which was published by the New Yorker in October 2006 and circulated around the Web immediately after, Packer opens with a detailed description of an unnamed water’s-edge neighborhood in the city. This neighborhood, he wrote, was a floating slum perched on stilts a few feet above its own bobbing refuse; it was capped with rusty iron roofs from which “plumes of smoke wafted up each morning to mingle with the white smoke of a nearby sawdust landfill.”12 The black smoke of cooking fires and the white smoke of the sawdust landfill blended into the diesel exhaust clouds produced by Lagos’s best-known cliché, go-slow traffic. Rusty tin roofs, cooking fires, diesel exhaust, lagoon water as “black and viscous as an oil slick,” and houses built on stilts as if to avoid contamination from the city itself—these were among the characteristics of Lagos that Packer saw in his investigations. Extending his perception of the neighborhood he called the floating slum to the city at large, he closed his introduction with the simple damning phrase, “All of Lagos seems to be burning.”13 Both of these compelling, and seemingly opposed, narratives of the city—Lagos as a manifestation of the liberatory potentialities of what Matthew Gandy calls anti-planning and Lagos as harbinger of the urban apocalypses of the future—share an underlying view of the city as a kind of spontaneous eruption.14 The imagined Lagoses of both narratives operate on the principles of a desperate improvisation that barely 228

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restrains one of the world’s largest metropolises from devolving into a state of unimagined chaos. These hegemonic narratives of megacity Lagos also share a view of the city’s population as a kind of problem. It is either one that is being miraculously managed through unintended underplanning, or it is a population whose expectations of the city have been betrayed and who, in the unsubtle image Packer provides, threatens to engulf the city in flames. The narrative of the excessive, undisciplined African city is informed by anxieties about population growth and population control. AbdouMaliq Simone employs the notion of ambivalence to encapsulate the quality of contemporary reflections on urban Africa, particularly on the urban African past. For Simone, a sense of ambivalence animated standard urban Africa questions like where the rural and the urban, the customary and the civil, the traditional and the modern, begin and end. As such, “the enormous growth of the African urban population,” which embodies this very ambivalence, is, he writes, “a growth of ambivalence.”15 What is useful about Simone’s formulation is that it draws the correlation between the ambivalence of African cities and the size of their African populations, suggesting that cities do not become more clearly city-like as a simple consequence of their population growth. The ambivalent outcomes of growth are tied to the ambivalence that allows new urban presences to always be subject to being labeled as grossly excessive surplus presences. Although narratives about population growth, population control, and excessive presences in Lagos became more prevalent, and circulated more quickly, after the invention of overpopulation theory and the internet, they had certainly been present in earlier periods. By all accounts, between 1930 and 1951 the population of the city literally doubled, provoking anxiety among the ruling British colonial administrators and more established Lagosians.16 As the city’s African population grew, urban space shed whatever associations it had formerly had with being a force for civilization and instead took on a corrupting cast. The most corruptible population and the focus of intense concern were young people. As the so-called excess people, including excess children and youth, planted themselves in public spaces, their very visibility heightened the anxiety of colonial observers and long-standing Lagosians about the fragile threads, routines, and manners that lent the city’s civilization some form of coherence. The excess people thus needed to be excluded from the urban space all together, either through techniques of enclosure or exile. Banning Hawkers Sixty Years Later

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During the course of the twentieth century, successive colonial and postcolonial governments tried various tactics to pare down what they saw as the excess population of Lagos. Schemes were devised for the arrest and repatriation of adults and children found sleeping out in the city streets. Slum clearances, designed to erase entire communities from the face of the map, were repeatedly effected.17 By erasing the excess population, slum clearances and their lesser forms were intended to reassert the pristine “citiness” of Lagos, or at least key areas within Lagos, as against what looked like the overgrown slum villages that were fabricated by newly arrived rural migrants in the city. When Mrs. Obasa asked the Resident of Lagos Colony to curtail the “influx of women and girls of bad character,” to repatriate those who had already arrived in Lagos back “to their own homes,” or to deal with the problem of children “hawking about the streets,”18 her comments betrayed subtle elite anxieties, not only about new, undesired, and therefore excessive presences, but also about the civilizational status of the city. Women and girls of bad character were urban infiltrators and the city was not their home. Obasa’s remarks on child hawkers underscored the problematic nature of the visibility of certain children who became marked as problems precisely because they traversed public spaces, which, if not for their contaminating excessive presences, could have been imagined as pristine modern urban spaces. For elites in early twentieth-century Lagos, practices of childhood were intertwined with practices of urbanism and with the condition of being either a good urban citizen or an outsider. Thus the debates and struggles over children and childhood that individuals such as Obasa participated in were as relevant to anxieties around consolidating and stabilizing modern urban spaces and modern urban identities as they were about the discipline and control of putative social subordinates. The concept of urban subjectivity, how it is produced, performed, and policed is a central one for thinking about the history of Lagos and African urban history more broadly. How was urbanism shaped in Lagos? And who policed the proper and improper performance of urbanism? In his study of de-modernization on the Zambian Copperbelt, anthropologist James Ferguson addresses these questions in his discussion of cosmopolitan cultural style. Cultural style could be thought of as a “signifying practice” or a “performative competence”; thus one did not become an urban person through a process of fundamental internal conversion.19 Rather, one actively cultivated and 230

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aspired to master the cultural style that signified urbanness or cosmopolitanism. Conversely, one could practice and try to master local style in order to more successfully inhabit rural society. In his study of media technologies in Northern Nigeria, anthropologist Brian Larkin offered a different perspective that emphasizes the role of infrastructural constraints in the production of urbanism. “Colonial urbanism,” he writes, “provided public buildings and streets that created the skeleton of colonial and postcolonial urban life.”20 Yet “along with these material objects come the immaterial urbanisms they provoke. These modes of affect suffuse the bricks and mortar of its streets and buildings; the tedium, fear, arousal, anger, awe, and excitement felt as one moves from one space to another or seeks out particular places at particular times.”21 The walls, in other words, lent the cities their distinctive shapes and textures, which in turn structured the ways in which city folk could interact with city space and with one another. Yet a different kind of infrastructure—a legal infrastructure—could also exert an important constraining force on the production of urban subjectivity. During the period under study, distinct African communities such as the “Brazilians,” the Saros, indigenous Yoruba, and others who had previously remained separate owing to perceived class, cultural, and religious barriers, began to gravitate toward one another and give form to a distinctly Lagosian identity.22 In the early half of the twentieth century, residents of Lagos were working out what it meant to be Lagosian. The question of Lagosian identity, which implicitly contrasted Lagos with other towns and cities, can be understood as a question of what it was to be an urbanite or to perform urban “style” in a particular period. Some of the cues for properly performing urban style in Lagos were found in social practices such as a distinctly accented way of speaking Yoruba and the observation of distinctive local customs such as Emancipation Day and the Eyo Festival. Stronger guidelines were encoded in laws that were relevant only to the city and enforced only there. Thus the criminalization of activities within Lagos that were not criminalized elsewhere, like hawking by girls, marked not just a bureaucratic difference but a cultural difference between Lagosians and their neighbors. The condition of being urban was shaped by imposing legal constraints that were particular to the city, that governed not just economic transactions but literally the way in which people within the city space would be compelled to behave with, around, and toward each other. Banning Hawkers Sixty Years Later

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In a 1979 essay Kunle Akinsemoyin, a Lagos architect and prince in one of the royal lineages of Lagos Island, asked and attempted to answer the question: “Who are Lagosians?”23 The answer he provided was a complex one. Lagosians, he maintained, included Awori indigenes of the Bight of Benin, nineteenth-century repatriated slaves from the Americas and early twentieth-century migrants from throughout the Atlantic World. Yet for Akinsemoyin, the category of Lagosian indicated more than place of residence; confirmed Lagosians were those determined “to settle in Lagos to be a Lagosian” as opposed to settling in Lagos to carry on as they were before. So what did “being a Lagosian” signify? By what means was membership in this peculiar community demonstrated? While Lagos residence and Yoruba language competence had been measures for the demonstration of urban citizenship since at least the eighteenth century, in the first half of the twentieth century, as Lagos underwent rapid and visible urbanization, performing modernity became a precondition for the attainment of Lagosian identity. Children, in fascinating ways, became both indices of, and mechanisms for, the modernization of Lagos residents. Since the child functions as a cultural artifact, subject to the projections and manipulations of adults, by examining the construction and consumption of certain forms of childhood, we may gain new insights into urbanity as a mode of being in Africa. Toward the end of his book as Akinsemoyin recapitulates his main points, the child is once again enlisted to testify to the modernity of twentieth-century Lagosians. Merchant princes in Lagos, we are told, who “built stately homes and adopted western modes of living,” were not satisfied with these indicators of modernity. They consolidated their identities as modern Lagosians when “they also demanded and got the missionaries to find a school where their daughters could get the rudiments of the best education provided by the western world.”24 Through some means that the work they performed and the structures they constructed alone could not accomplish, the conditions of being of their children, specifically their daughters, became the ultimate measure of modernity for the Lagosians. Through examination of the campaign to transform girlhood in Lagos by banning hawking by girls, I have argued that rather than being incidental to ideas of African modernity and urbanity, children were one of the platforms on which the ambivalent condition of being a modern urban subject in twentieth-century colonial Lagos was achieved and expressed. 232

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Notes ABBREVIATIONS

AdminCol CAD CO ComCol CSO NAC NAI PRO TNA

Administrator of the Colony Calabar District Colonial Office Commissioner of the Colony Chief Secretary’s Office Nigerian National Archives Calabar Nigerian National Archives Ibadan Public Record Office British National Archives, Kew Gardens INTRODUCTION

1. Abiodun Adepoju, “Ewi Poem,” African Immigrant Folklife Study Project, http://www.folklife.si.edu/africa/ewi.htm#abiodun, accessed 14 December 2010. 2. Interview with Mrs. Kudirat Oredolapo George, 2 November 2012. 3. “Alien Children Registration Ordinance (19th December),” Ordinances and Orders and Rules Thereunder in Force in the Colony of Lagos on April 30th, 1901, compiled by Edwin Arney Speed, M.A., L.I.B., vol. 1 (London: Stevens and Sons, 1902), 339. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 346. 6. Ibid., 342. 7. Ibid., 339. 8. Cited in Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 179. 9. For more on the complications and limitations of colonial legal systems in Africa, see Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Richard Roberts and Kristin Mann, eds., Law in Colonial Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991). 10. Mann, Slavery, 184. 11. Ibid., 183. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 185. 233

14. D. E. Faulkner, Colony Welfare Officer to The President, Lagos Town Council, “Hawking by Children in Lagos,” September 1942, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 15. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 is commonly understood to be a key part of the British response to the West Indian crises of the 1930s. There is still some debate about whether the uprisings in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados were centered on labor issues or on broader quality of life issues for the locals. See Richard Hart, “Labour Rebellions of the 1930s,” in Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present, ed. Hilary Beckles and Veren Shepherd (Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1996), 370–75; W. Arthur Lewis, “The 1930s Social Revolution,” also in Caribbean Freedom, 376–92. For two different discussions of the metropolitan politics behind the CDWA40—the first dealing with gender and changing politics and the second dealing with labor and changing politics, see Joanna Lewis, “‘Tropical East Ends’ and the Second World War: Some Contradictions in Colonial Office Welfare Initiatives,” in Administering Empire: The British Colonial Service in Retrospect, ed. John Smith (London: University of London Press, 1999), 61–91. See also Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 58, 110–24; Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3; Sir Frank Stockdale, Development and Welfare in the West Indies, 1940–1942 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1943); W. M. Macmillan, Warning from the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and the Empire (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). 16. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society; Monica M. van Beusekom and Dorothy L. Hodgson, “Lessons Learned? Development Experiences in the Late Colonial Period,” Journal of African History 41, no. 1 (2000): 29–33. 17. The split between economic development projects and social development projects may be overstated since changes in economic practice had implications for social behavior. Atkins’s study of the linkage between labor practices and the reconceptualization of African time in Natal illustrates the point. See Keletso E. Atkins, The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money!: The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993). 18. Nigeria Legislative Council, Ten-Year Plan for Development and Welfare for Nigeria, 1946 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1946), 122. 19. Cooper and Packard, International Development, 1–44. 20. Work on the theme of resistance in African history has shown that Africans were not trapped in an unending struggle against the colonial state during the colonial period. Sometimes there were other more immediate sources of oppression. Other times, the means or the will to struggle against the state were absent. Leroy Vail and Landeg White, “Forms of Resistance: Songs and Perceptions of Power in Colonial Mozambique,” American 234

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Historical Review 88, no. 4 (1983): 883–919; Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1516–45; Jonathan Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota, 1995). Scott’s work on indirect forms of resistance also challenged scholars to look beyond direct militaristic conflicts to identify moments of resistance against domination. See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 21. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society; Lisa A. Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003). 22. See Frederick Cooper, Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983); Cooper, Decolonization and African Society; Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Lisa Lindsay, “Domesticity and Difference: Male Breadwinners, Working Women, and Colonial Citizenship in the 1945 Nigerian General Strike,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 783–812; Carolyn A. Brown, “A ‘Man’ in the Village Is a ‘Boy’ in the Workplace: Colonial Racism, Worker Militance, and Igbo Notions of Masculinity in the Nigerian Coal Industry, 1930–1945,” in Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. Lisa Lindsay and Stephen Miescher (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 156–74; Lynn Schler, “Transnationalism and Nationalism in the Nigerian Seamen’s Union,” African Identities 7, no 2 (2009): 387–98. 23. Lisa Lindsay, “Money, Marriage, and Masculinity on the Colonial Nigerian Railway,” in Lindsay and Miescher, Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, 138–55. See in the same volume Brown, “A ‘Man’ in the Village Is a ‘Boy’ in the Workplace.” 24. The masculinist concerns of development history in Africa highlight a markedly gendered shift between past and contemporary development ideology, wherein contemporary developmentalists center on African women as the primary propagators of development and the most resource efficient targets of development projects. In an earlier period, women were considered either obstructions or incidental to development. 25. The same observation is made in Cooper, Africa since 1940, 43–44. 26. Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,” in Cooper and Packard, International Development, 64–92. 27. Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 121–23. 28. Some provocative studies are being done on mixed-race interactions and the ensuing production of mixed-race communities in colonial contexts. Notes to Pages 9–11

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These studies complicate received understandings of colonial encounters by exploring the realms of affect, desire, and intimacy and the ways in which these continually made and unmade colonial social boundaries. See Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 198–237. George Brooks is arguably the pioneer of mixed-race studies in Africa. See his early work “The Signares of Saint-Louis and Gorée: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Senegal,” in Women in Africa, ed. Nancy Hafkin and Edna Bay (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 19–44. Newer studies include Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014); Lisa A. Lindsay, “A Tragic Romance, A Nationalist Symbol: The Case of the Murdered White Lover in Colonial Nigeria,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 2 (2005): 118–41; Carina Ray, “The ‘White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race, and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa,” Gender and History 21, no. 3 (2009): 628–46; Rachel Jean-Baptiste, “‘A Black Girl Should Not Be with a White Man’: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 3 (2010): 56–82. 29. For more on the argument for de-centering the colonizer-colonized relationship as the key dynamic in African history during the colonial period, see Jacob Ade Ajayi, “Colonialism: An Episode in African History,” in Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960, vol. 1, ed. Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1516–45. 30. See contributions to Toyin Falola and Paul Lovejoy, eds., Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003). 31. See Mary Smith, Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa, 1877–1951 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Simon Ottenberg, Boyhood Rituals in an African Society: An Interpretation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989). An important exception may be Enid Schildkrout’s research on the crucial roles that child workers played for cloistered women in devout Muslim communities. Enid Schildkrout, “Recommended Readings: Age and Gender in Hausa Society Socio-economic Roles of Children in Urban Kano,” Childhood 9, no. 3 (2002): 342–68. 32. Krijn Peters and Paul Richards, “Why We Fight: Voices of Youth Combatants in Sierra Leone,” Africa: Journal of International African Institute 68, no. 2 (1998): 183–210; Clive Glaser, “Swines, Hazels, and the Dirty Dozen: Masculinity, Territoriality and the Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1960–1976,” Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (December 1989): 716–36; Alcinda 236

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Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Alcinda Honwana and Filip de Boeck, eds., Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa (Dakar, Senegal: Codesria, 2005). 33. The highest legitimation of African children and youth as foci of academic study was probably the 2003 meeting of the U.S. African Studies Association that was convened under the theme “Youthful Africa in the 21st Century.” 34. See, for example, Wiseman Chijere Chirwa, “Child and Youth Labour on the Nyasaland Plantations, 1890–1953,” Journal of Southern African Studies 19, no. 4 (1993): 662–80; Beverly Grier, “Invisible Hands: The Political Economy of Child Labour in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1930,” Journal of Southern African Studies 20, no. 1 (1994): 27–52; Andrew Burton, “Urchins, Loafers, and the Cult of the Cowboy: Urbanization and Delinquency in Dar es Salaam, 1919–1961,” Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (2001): 199–216; Laurent Fourchard, “Urban Poverty, Urban Crime, and Crime Control: The Lagos and Ibadan Cases, 1929–45,” in African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective, ed. Steven J. Salm and Toyin Falola (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 291–319; Laurent Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria, 1920–60,” Journal of African History 47, no. 1 (2006): 115–37; Richard Waller, “Rebellious Youth in Colonial Africa,” Journal of African History 47, no. 1 (2006): 77–92; Tim Parsons, Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004). Iliffe’s history of poverty in Africa includes a section on poor children and young people in urban areas. See John Iliffe, The African Poor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 164–92; Beverly Grier, Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006); Andrew Burton and Helene Charton-Bigot, eds., Generations Past: Youth in East African History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). Of course, generational difference has not always corresponded with generational conflict and social change. Some scholars have examined the ways in which apparent tensions between young people and adults have been motivated not by youthful desire for social transformation but by a desire to preserve the status quo in times of tremendous flux where young people faced uncertain paths to social adulthood. See, for example, Meredith McKittrick, “The ‘Burden’ of Young Men: Property and Generational Conflict in Namibia, 1880–1945,” African Economic History 24 (1996): 115–29. 35. Ranger discussed several dance troupes in Dance and Society, some of whom have been identified in other parts of Africa. These included the Kingi, the Scotchi, and the Cowboys, performance troupes whose names signaled a particular kind of cosmopolitanism and macho masculinity to rival troupes. See Terence Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa: The Beni Ngoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). P. E. H. Hair’s article on the Cowboys in Enugu featured a similar performance-oriented, free association of young men in the city of Enugu, Nigeria. P. E. H. Hair, “The Cowboys: A Nigerian Acculturative Institution (ca. 1950),” History in Africa 28 (2001): 83–93. Notes to Pages 13–14

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36. See, for example, Coplan’s discussion of the amalaita Pedi “penny whistlers” in South African cities. David B. Coplan, In Township Tonight!: South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (London: Longman, 1985), 62. See also Gary Kynoch, We Are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005); Fourchard, “Urban Poverty, Urban Crime, and Crime Control”; Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency.” See Iliffe, African Poor, 187. 37. Brett Shadle, Girl Cases: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890–1970 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006), xxvi–xxxi. 38. For studies of the policing of girls’ sexuality, see Sonya Rose, “Sex, Citizenship, and the Nation in World War II Britain,” American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (1998): 1147–76; Angela Woolacott, “Khaki Fever and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age, and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 2 (1994): 325–47; Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). For the impact of wage work on girls’ lives in the early twentieth century in the United States, see Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). For the modern girl in postwar Japan, seen simultaneously as a product of the imagination and as the product of a particular confluence of historical forces, see Miriam Silverberg, “The Modern Girl as Militant,” in Recreating Japanese Women, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). See also Alys Eve Weinbaum et al., eds., The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 39. Some exceptions include Shula Marks, ed., Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women: Correspondence of Lily Moya, Mabel Palmer, and Sibusisiwe Makhanya (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1987); Robertson, looking at the work of girl traders in Ghana; and White looking at the sexual labor of juvenile prostitutes in Nairobi. See Claire C. Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl? A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 134–35; Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 154–58; Meredith McKittrick, “Faithful Daughter, Murdering Mother: Transgression and Social Control in Colonial Namibia,” Journal of African History 40, no. 2 (1999): 265–83; Meredith McKittrick, To Dwell Secure (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002); Tabitha Kanogo, “Girls Are Frogs: Girls, Missions, and Education,” in African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–50 (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), 197–238; Corrie Decker, “Reading, Writing, and Respectability: How Schoolgirls Developed Modern Literacies in Colonial Zanzibar,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 43, no. 1 (2010): 89–114; Corrie Decker, “Fathers, Daughters, and Institutions: Coming of Age 238

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in Mombasa’s Colonial Schools,” in Girlhood: A Global History, ed. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen Vasconcellos (Rutgers University Press, 2010), 268–88; Abosede George, “Within Salvation: Girl Hawkers and the Colonial State in Development Era Lagos,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 3 (2011): 837–59. 40. The editors of an important collection of essays that focuses on generation as a central axis of difference in African societies and generational conflict as an engine for historical change argue controversially that the paucity of investigations into the history of female youth is due to the greater salience of gender identity over generational identity for females in comparison to males, and to the emphasis on violence, glossed as a male purview, in generational conflict studies. See Andrew Burton and Helene Charton-Bigot, eds., Generations Past, 6. 41. Ibid. 42. See Lynn Thomas, “ ‘Ngaitana (I Will Circumcise Myself)’: The Gender and Generational Politics of the 1958 Ban on Clitoridectomy in Meru, Kenya,” Gender & History 8, no. 3 (1996): 338–63; Lynn Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 79–134. 43. For an elaboration of this argument, see Chris Jenks, Alan Prout, and Allison James, eds., Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 2005). 44. Nara Milanich, Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 45. Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status, and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 46. Susan Pedersen, “Eleanor Rathbone, 1872–1946: The Victorian Family under the Daughter’s Eye,” in After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, ed. John Leonard Clive, Susan Pedersen, and Peter Mandler (London: Routledge, 1994), 108. 47. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Nina Mba, For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome Kuti of Nigeria (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). CHAPTER 1: WORKING WELL

1. Ayodeji Olukoju, The Liverpool of West Africa: The Dynamics and Impact of Maritime Trade in Lagos, 1900–1950 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004), 40. 2. For more on the rebellion, see João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 3. For more on migration practices between Brazil and West Africa within the nineteenth-century Yoruba religious community, see J. Lorand Matory, “The English Professors of Brazil,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 1 (1999): 72–103; Lisa Earl Castillo, “Between Memory, Myth, and History: Transatlantic Voyagers of the Casa Branca Temple,” in Paths of the Notes to Pages 14–24

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Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and Images, ed. Ana Lucia Araujo (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011), 203–38. 4. The most comprehensive visual survey of this style appears in Marianno Carneiro da Cunha, Da senzala ao sobrado: Arquitetura brasileira na Nigeria e na Republica Popular do Benim (São Paulo, SP: EDUSP, 1985). 5. Olukoju, Liverpool of West Africa, 41. 6. See Pierre Verger’s photographs and drawings in da Cunha, Da senzala ao sobrado. 7. Some of the postcards of Edmond Fortier, a French photographer who visited Lagos between 1905 and 1910, captured the mixture of building styles that marked the location of neighborhood borderlands. See Liora Bigon, A History of Urban Planning in Two West Africa Colonial Capitals: Residential Segregation in British Lagos and French Dakar (1850–1930) (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), 84. 8. See, for example, Robin Law and Kristin Mann, “West Africa in the Atlantic Community,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999), 308–9; Charles Piot, “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 1 (2001): 155–70. 9. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003). 10. For a work in the vein of Saharan world studies, see Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 11. G. O. Olusanya, “Charlotte Olajumoke Obasa,” in Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Bolanie Awe (Lagos: Sankore Publishers, 1992). 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. The name of the Lagos Ladies League was changed to the Lagos Women’s League in 1923. See Nina Emma Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Struggle in Nigeria, 1900–1965 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1982), 215. 14. Margery Perham, ed. Ten Africans (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 15. Gbemi Rosiji, Lady Ademola: Portrait of a Pioneer: Biography of Lady Kofoworola Aina Ademola MBE OFR (Lagos: EnClair Publishers, 1996), 22–23. 16. Perham, Ten Africans, 11, 13. 17. Although written in his later life, Chinua Achebe’s childhood memoir reflects a similarly early awareness of the complex positioning of colonial children. 240

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18. Moore noted that she had frequent bouts of malaria as a child, and her parents were advised to relocate her to the more temperate climes of England until she became stronger. At the writing of the essay, she had spent a bit more than half of her life in England. Perham, Ten Africans, 326. 19. Perham, Ten Africans, 323–24. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Tina Campt and Deborah Thomas, “Gendering Diaspora: Transnational Feminism, Diaspora and Its Hegemonies,” Feminist Review, no. 90, Gendering Diaspora (2008): 2. 24. Judith Byfield, LaRay Denzer, and Anthea Morrison, eds., Gendering the African Diaspora: Women, Culture, and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 4. 25. William Macgregor, “A Lecture on Malaria,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 2190 (1902): 1890. 26. Ibid. 27. William Macgregor, “A Discussion on Malaria and Its Prevention,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 2124 (1901): 682. 28. Spencer H. Brown, “Public Health in Lagos, 1850–1900: Perceptions, Patterns, and Perspectives,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (1992): 337–60. 29. Ibid., 350, 356. 30. Ibid., 343; Kunle Akinsemoyin and Alan Vaughn-Richards, Building Lagos (Lagos: F. & A. Services, 1976), 41. 31. Akinsemoyin and Vaughn-Richards, Building Lagos, 41. See also Bigon, History of Urban Planning, 151. 32. Macgregor, “Discussion on Malaria,” 682. 33. Ibid. 34. Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized, 214. 35. For a fuller elaboration of this reading of colonial power, see Sara Berry, “Hegemony on a Shoestring: Indirect Rule and Access to Agricultural Land,” Africa 62, no. 3 (1992): 327–55. 36. Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status, and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 37. Kristin Mann, “The Dangers of Dependence: Christian Marriage among Elite Women in Lagos Colony, 1880–1915,” Journal of African History 24, no. 1 (1983): 52. 38. For more on this see Oyeronke Oyewumi, “Abiyamo: Theorizing African Motherhood,” Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women’s Studies, no. 4 (2009), http://www.africaknowledgeproject.org/index.php/jenda/article /view/79, accessed 6 April 2014. See also Adewunmi Fajana, Education in Nigeria, 1842–1939: An Historical Analysis (Ikeja, Nigeria: Longman, 1978), 13. Notes to Pages 31–41

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39. The concept of the public mother has undergone a number of changes. Bolanle Awe’s explorations into the precolonial title of Iyalode first drew attention to this type of feminine gender ideal. Awe characterized the precolonial Iyalode as a woman who had “jurisdiction over all women. . . . Hers was an achieved rather than an inherited position. . . . Her most important qualifications were her proven ability as a leader able to articulate the feelings of the women, her control of vast economic resources to maintain her new status as chief, and her popularity.” See Bolanle Awe, “The Iyalode in the Traditional Yoruba Political System,” in Readings in Gender in Africa, ed. Andrea Cornwall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 197. Building on the scholarship of Awe, Oyewumi, and Ogunyemi, who emphasized the caretaking function of public mothers, Lorelle Semley argues that precisely because of their social and ritual power, public mothers can be simultaneously revered and feared. In Semley’s words, “Public mothers do not simply ‘nurture’ the broader society but also embody the complexities of power, its contradictions, and its limits.” See Lorelle Semley, Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 17. My tendency is to ask if this Janus-faced public mother, who may be seen simultaneously as iya and aje, mother and witch, is not always a woman who is in her post-childbearing years. Taking an intersectional gender and generational perspective, one would need to ask questions about the gender of different life stages for women and men. In other words, is an older woman a woman in the same ways as her counterparts of childbearing age or even younger premenstrual girls, or does she socially and biologically transition into something other, perhaps something excessive to woman? Might this transition, which combines the past experience of being woman with new freedoms and privileges that attend being a social elder be the locus of anxieties centered on the bodies of older women? 40. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (1990): 1079. 41. Bolanle Awe, ed., Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective (Lagos: Sankore Publishers, 1992), 110. 42. Titi Euba, “Dress and Status in Nineteenth-Century Lagos,” in History of the Peoples of Lagos State, ed. Ade Adefuye, Babatunde Agiri, and Jide Osuntokun (Ikeja, Lagos: Lantern Books, 1987). 43. Rita Okonkwo, Protest Movements in Lagos, 1908–1930 (Enugu: ABIC Publishers, 1998), 7–15. In an interview Nina Mba conducted with Oyinkan Abayomi, the latter recalled her childhood home being stoned by opponents of the water rate. See Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized, 220. 44. Awe, Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective, 111. 45. Bigon, History of Urban Planning in Two West Africa Colonial Capitals, 145–74. 46. On the nuances of patronage politics in Lagos see Sandra Barnes, Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 242

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Notes to Pages 41–46

47. Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized, 215. 48. Susan A. Williams, Eunice Savage, Louisa K. Byass, Marian Banjiro, A. E. Gilibou, M. A. Williams, Julia M. St John, H. T. Cole, J. M. Thomas, C. S. Ogunbiyi, M. Benjamin, L. Aarebi, C. L. Pearse, B. Pearce, Olajumoke Obasa, and co. to His Excellency Sir Hugh Clifford, G.C.M.G., Governor & Commander-in-Chief, Nigeria, date unknown, p. 5, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Henry Carr, “The Education of Women,” in Henry Carr: Lectures and Speeches, collected by L. C. Gwam and edited by C. O. Taiwo (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1969), 34. 58. Figures for numbers of independent schools in interwar Lagos are not available, but Fafunwa calculated that there were 2,413 for Nigeria as a whole in 1929. Lagos would have had one of the largest concentrations of schools. See Babatunde Fafunwa, History of Education in Nigeria (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), 131. 59. Henry Carr: Lectures and Speeches, 46–47. 60. C. Olajumoke Obasa to the Chief Secretary to Government, 26 February 1924, p. 6, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 95. 66. Ibid., 97. 67. C. Olajumoke Obasa to the Chief Secretary to Government, 26 February 1924, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 68. “The Story of Kofoworola Aina Moore,” in Ten Africans, ed. Perham, 323–24. 69. C. Olajumoke Obasa, letter to the Resident of the Colony, 6 August 1926, ComCol I 98, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Letter from Sylvia Leith-Ross to the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, 26 February 1922, Nigeria 1922–54, Box 118, File 3, AMS/D/33, Records of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene International Work: Other Countries, The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University. Notes to Pages 46–54

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73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. See Peter Stearns, Childhood in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006). CHAPTER 2: MAKING THE MODERN CHILD IN THE ERA OF IMPERIAL LIBERALISM

1. Florence Bernault, ed. A History of Prisons and Confinement in Africa. 1. Sylvia Leith-Ross, Stepping Stones: Memoirs of Colonial Nigeria, 1907– 1960 (London: P. Owen, 1983), 82. 2. Ibid. 3. Nikolas Rose, “Government, Authority, and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism,” Economy and Society 22, no. 3 (1993): 290–92. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 34–35. 7. Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Imperial Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 161. 8. Ibid., 162. 9. League of Nations, Covenant of League of Nations, 28 April 1919, available at http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3dd8b9854.html, accessed 10 April 2013. 10. Ibid. 11. Carolyn Brown, “Race and the Construction of Working Class Masculinity in the Nigerian Coal Industry: The Initial Phase, 1914–1930,” International Labor and Working-Class History 69 (Spring 2006): 35–56; Robert Morrell, “Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies,” Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 605–30. 12. This is with the understanding, of course, that there is no necessary incompatibility between liberalism and racism. 13. See Ibrahima Thioub, “Juvenile Marginality and Incarceration during the Colonial Period,” and David Killingray, “Punishment to Fit the Crime? Penal Policy and Practice in British Colonial Africa,” in A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, ed. Florence Bernault (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003). 14. Florence Bernault, ed., A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003). 244

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Notes to Pages 54–66

15. Annual Report of the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria 1934 (London: HMSO, 1935), 85; Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1938 (London: HMSO), 80. Inmates at the Tudun Maliki institution were taught Arabic, arithmetic, reading, writing, and crafts such as sewing, bricklaying, and metalwork. See Nigeria Prisons Department, Annual Report on the Treatment of Offenders for the Year 1949–50 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1951), 32; Nigeria Prisons Department, Annual Report on the Treatment of Offenders 1947 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1950), 25. 16. Colonial office advisory committees such as the Colonial Penal Administration Committee, the Social Welfare Advisory Committee, and the Committee on the Treatment of Offenders in the Colonies, carried out these inquiries into issues like the operations of penal institutions or the treatment of offenders in colonies. 17. Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 119–20. 18. Evelyn Sharp, a writer who was well known for her stories for and about children, acted as the secretary of the meeting. Evelyn Sharp, The African Child: An Account of the International Conference on African Children, Geneva (London: Longmans, Green, 1931), 4. 19. Ibid. 20. Given contemporary associations between ideas of child labor, exploitation, and underdevelopment, it seems remarkable that the conference secretary, Evelyn Sharp (the children’s book writer and urban ethnographer), noted that the conference discussions and debates seemed to be most intensely focused on the child’s right to material and spiritual development, to earning a livelihood, and to protection from exploitation. Sharp, The African Child, 97. 21. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990 (London: Longman, 1993), 223–26. 22. Moses Ochonu, “Conjoined to Empire: The Great Depression and Nigeria,” African Economic History 34 (2006): 131. 23. Juvenile delinquency subcommittee, draft report, n.d. (circa 1942), CO 859/73/13; Lord Passfield, “Circular,” 11 September 1930, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School. NAI. 24. Ibid. 25. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, eds., Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 284–85. 26. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 187. 27. Ian Brown, “A Commissioner Calls: Alexander Paterson and Colonial Burma’s Prisons,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (2007): 293–308; Laurent Fourchard, “The Making of the Juvenile Delinquent in Nigeria and South Africa, 1930–1970,” History Compass 8, no. 2 (2010): 129–42; Paterson Notes to Pages 66–69

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also produced a well-known report on his observations of East African penal institutions. See Alexander Paterson, Report on a Visit to the Prisons of Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Aden and Somaliland during 1939 (Morija: Morija Print Works, 1944). 28. Victor Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 171–226. See also Brown, “A Commissioner Calls”; Killingray, “Punishment to Fit the Crime? 29. Lord Passfield, “Circular,” 11 September 1930. 30. Great Britain Colonial Office, Colonial Office Conference 1930: Appendices to the Summary of Proceedings (Cmd. 3629, in continuation of Cmd. 3628) (London: H.M.S.O., 1930). 31. F. P. Lynch, Secretary Southern Provinces letter to Chief Secretary to the Government, Lagos, “Treatment of Juvenile Offenders,” date unknown, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, NAI. 32. Ibid. 33. Chris Jenks, Childhood, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge 2005), 5. 34. Resident, Benin Province memo to District Officer Asaba Division, Ogwashi-Uku, 30 December 1931, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, NAI; District Officer, Asaba Division, letter to Resident, Benin Province, “Treatment of Juvenile Offenders,” 8 January 1932, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, NAI. 35. Different sources referred to the Enugu juvenile prison by different names. In order to avoid confusing the Enugu juvenile prison with the Enugu Prison, I will mainly refer to it as the Enugu institution. 36. A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, A Biographical Dictionary of the British Colonial Service, 1939–1966 (London: Hans Zell Publishers, 1991), 117. 37. Victor Mabb, Acting Director of Prisons Southern Provinces, letter to Resident, Benin Province, “Establishment of Reformatories in the Southern Provinces,” 24 April 1934, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School. NAI; “Children and Young Person’s Ordinance,” Annual Volume of the Laws of Nigeria containing all legislation enacted during the year 1943 (Lagos, Nigeria: Government Printer, 1944). 38. Mabb, “Establishment of Reformatories.” 39. Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1934 (London: HMSO, 1935), 85. 40. Ibid. 41. See, for example, Laurent Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria, 1920–1960,” Journal of African History 47 no. 1 (2006): 115–37. 42. Report by Mr. Chinn, Social Welfare Adviser to the Secretary of State, February 1950, pp. 6–7, ComCol I 2862, Vol. II, Social Development and Welfare, NAI. 246

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Notes to Pages 69–74

43. Martin A. Klein, “Studying the History of Those Who Would Rather Forget: Oral History and the Experience of Slavery,” History in Africa 16 (1989): 209–17. 44. I reached these conclusions by analyzing data extracted from two sets of sources on Enugu ex-inmates. See various documents, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI; various documents, Provincial Administration, File No. A.D. 241, Reg. 9/11/50, Juvenile Offenders, Correspondence Relating To, 1930–57, NAI. 45. Several novelists have written about the houseboy as an indispensable aspect of colonial living. The classic work that tackles the issue is Ferdinand Oyono, Houseboy, trans. John Reed (London: Heinemann, 1966). 46. A similar practice was in place at other boys’ prisons on the continent. See, for example, Linda Chisolm, “Education, Punishment and the Contradictions of Penal Reform: Alan Paton and Diepkloof Reformatory, 1939–1948,” Journal of South African Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 23–42. 47. Donald Faulkner, “Instructions for Remand Home Officers,” 17 August 1943, ComCol I 2796, Remand Home, Lagos, NAI. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Victor Mabb, Director of Prisons, Southern Provinces, letter to Resident, Benin Province, “Okeleke of Uburuku, Juvenile Offender, Release of,” 3 June 1936, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 51. Ibid. District Officer, Asaba Division, letter to Director of Prisons, Enugu, “Juvenile Offender Okeleke of Uburuku, Discharge Of,” 21 July 1936, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 52. Victor Mabb, “Okeleke of Uburuku, Juvenile Offender, Release of,” 3 June 1936, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, NAI. 53. Ibid. 54. District Officer, Asaba Division, note to Resident, Benin Province, “Okeleke of Uburuku, Juvenile Offender, Release Of,” 23 October 1936, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 55. Michael Okeleke, handwritten letter, 4 November 1937, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 56. Ibid. Emphasis added. 57. District Officer, Asaba Division, “Okeleke of Uburuku, Juvenile Offender, Release Of,” 23 October 1936, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, NAI. 58. Victor Mabb, Director of Prisons, Southern Provinces Memo forwarding One Pair Boot Last size 8 to Michael Okeleke, c/o District Officer, Ogwashi-Uku, 28 October 1936, Provincial Administration, File No. Notes to Pages 75–78

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1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI; District Officer, Asaba Division, note to Director of Prisons acknowledging receipt of “one pair wooden shoe tree,” 2 November 1936, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 59. District Officer, Asaba Division, note to Director of Prisons, 2 November 1936. 60. Source consulted for Charles Nwanze’s biography is Superintendent i/c Schools, note to Resident, Benin Province, “Juvenile Offender, Charles Nwanze, Discharge Of,” 15 June 1943, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 61. Superintendent i/c Schools, “Juvenile Offender-Charles Nwanze, Discharge Of,” 15 June 1943, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, NAI. 62. Acting District Officer, Asaba Division, note to Mr. Akakpulu Nwanze, c/o The Native Court Clerk, Ibusa, 21 September 1943, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 63. Principal, the Industrial School, Enugu, letter to Resident, Ibadan Province, “Juvenile Offender Animashaun Sadiku: Discharge Of,” 16 November 1948, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI; Cameron, District Officer Ibadan, note to Principal, Industrial School Enugu, “Juvenile Offender Animashaun Sadiku: Discharge Of,” 2 February 1949, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 64. District Officer, Ibadan Division, note to The Town Engineer, Ibadan, “Animashaun Sadiku,” 11 August 1949, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 65. Town Engineer, Ibadan Native Administration, note to District Officer, Ibadan, “Animashaun Sadiku,” 20 February 1950, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 66. Longe’s file does not state the nature of his offense or the exact length of his sentence, but it is clear that he stayed at Enugu for at least sixteen months because letters documenting his discharge in January 1951 are preceded by a 1949 memo from the Superintendent of Prisons recommending that Emmanuel be granted “a short period of leave” provided his father could be located and made to take responsibility for him during that time. Acting Superintendent of Prisons, note to District Officer, Ibadan, “Juvenile Offender Emmanuel Olusegun Longe: Leave,” 21 October 1949, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI; Principal, H.M. Approved School, note to District Officer, Ibadan, “Inmate Emmanuel Olushegun Longe: Discharge 248

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Of,” 18 January 1951, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15 May 1934, NAI. 67. Principal, H.M. Approved School, note to District Officer, Ibadan “Inmate Emmanuel Olushegun Longe: Discharge Of,” 18 January 1951, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. 68. J. T. Longe, handwritten letter to District Officer, Ibadan, “Juvenile Offender Olusegun Longe,” 7 November 1951, NAI, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. 69. Principal, Engugu Industrial School, letter to Resident, Oyo Province, “Juvenile Offender Opetunde Ogunkanmi: Discharge Of,” 4 November 1950, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. 70. Gabriel M. Ogunkanmi, handwritten letter to District Officer Agodi Ibadan, 19 November 1951, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. 71. Ibid. 72. G. M. Ogunkanmi, handwritten letter, 15 December 1951, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. 73. Gabriel M. Ogunkanmi, handwritten letter to District Officer Agodi Ibadan, 19 November 1951, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. 74. Ades Dokubo, handwritten letter, 18 January 1952, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. 75. Ibid. 76. Gabriel M. Ogunkanmi, handwritten letter to District Officer Agodi Ibadan, 19 November 1951, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI; Ades Dokubo, handwritten letter, 18 January 1952, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. 77. Interview with B. A. George, New Jersey, August 2009. 78. Florence Bernault, A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 2–7. 79. Mr. Awudu Onyemodi, handwritten letter to Acting District Officer, Asaba Division, 27 July 1947, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. 80. Awudu Onyemodi, handwritten letter, 8 September 1947, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212 Vol II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. Notes to Pages 81–86

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81. District Officer, Asaba Division, note to Director of Prisons, “Christopher Awudu, Ex-Juvenile Offender,” 9 March 1948, Provincial Administration, File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders: Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, 15th May 1934, NAI. 82. See, for example, Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005). 83. Acting Resident Benin Province, letter to District Officer, Asaba Division, “Rex versus Alabi (m) and Dada (f ),” 7 June 1941, Provincial Administration, File No. A.D. 241, Reg. 9/11/50, Juvenile Offenders, Correspondence Relating To, NAI. 84. For more on medical missionary work in colonial Africa, see Shobana Shankar, “Children of the Mission in Kano Emirate: Conflicts of Conversion in Colonial Northern Nigeria, c. 1899–1953” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2003); see also Megan Vaughn, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 85. Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 210. 86. For more on the development of reform infrastructure as a response to the growth of colonial cities, see Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency,” Burton, African Underclass. CHAPTER 3: SETTING UP THE WELFARE CITY

1. Colonial Annual Reports were suspended between 1940 and 1946. For estimates of population growth between 1931 and 1950 see Ade Adefuye, B. Agiri, and J. Osuntokun, eds., History of the Peoples of Lagos State (Lagos: Lantern Books, 1987), 108; Nigeria Department of Statistics, Population Census of Lagos 1950 (Kaduna: Government Printer, 1951); Nigeria, Census of Nigeria, 1931 (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1932). 2. Peil’s data source calculated a leap from 126,108 in 1931 to 267,407 in 1952. Margaret Peil and David Lucas, Survey Research Methods for West Africa: A Students Handbook (Lagos: Human Resources Research Unit, Lagos University, 1972), 19. For the same period, Akintola-Arikawe’s sources recorded an even greater jump from 126,108 to 346,137. Adefuye, Agiri, and Osuntokun, eds., History of the Peoples of Lagos State, 107. 3. Nigeria, Department of Statistics, Population Census of Lagos 1950, 11. 4. These lines were repeated verbatim in a series of reports. Nigeria, Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1931 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1932), 42; Nigeria, Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1934 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1935), 64; Nigeria, Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1937 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1939), 61; Nigeria, Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1938 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1939), 63. 250

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Notes to Pages 86–91

5. Nigeria, Annual Report 1931, 42; Nigeria, Annual Report 1934, 64; Nigeria, Annual Report 1937, 61; Nigeria, Annual Report 1938, 63. 6. Nigeria, Census of Nigeria, 1931. The total population of Lagos was approximately 325,000, making it the second-least populated province in Southern Nigeria. Ijebu had fewer residents with approximately 306,000. Paradoxically, with 235 residents per square mile, Lagos was the second-most densely populated province in the South, and the entire country. Onitsha had the dubious honor of coming in first. There are two things to be aware of when imagining population dispersal within Lagos. First, Lagos province had variously three component parts—Lagos Township, also known as Lagos Island, which was the seat of government and commerce, and the Ikeja and Ebute Metta suburbs. As the most developed area with the longest resident African population, Lagos Township absorbed the greatest proportion of immigrants to Lagos. 7. Adefuye, Agiri, and Osuntokun, eds., History of the Peoples of Lagos State, 15. 8. A good discussion on the Pullen Scheme, along with the various protests against it by market women and elite women, is found in Nina Emma Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activity in Southern Nigeria, 1900–1965 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1982), 226–31. Arrests of market traders for allegedly violating Pullen Scheme regulations spurred a lot of anger within various classes of the Lagos population. “Young Profiteer Is Sent to Gaol for One Month,” Daily Service, 8 December 1942; “Popular Trader Is Gaoled One Month for Profiteering on Gari,” Daily Service, 10 May 1943; “Gari Situation in Lagos,” Daily Service, 1 March 1946; “Representatives of Women’s Party Interview Captain Pullen On the Subject of Price Control,” Daily Service, 22 August 1944; “Mass Conviction of Over 50 Patrons of the Pullen Markets Yesterday,” Daily Service, 10 August 1945. 9. Nigeria, Enquiry into the Cost of Living and the Control of the Cost of Living in the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1946), 200. 10. Nigeria, Enquiry into the Cost of Living. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 201. 13. Ibid. 14. Nigeria, Colonial Office Annual Report on Nigeria for the Year 1946 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1947), 97. 15. See results of Abosede George, Peace Nwachukwu, Shola Abioye, and Rasheed Hassan, “Childhood in Twentieth-Century Lagos” (Lagos, Nigeria, 2009)—80 Group and 70 Group. In possession of author. 16. Nigeria, Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1934, 13. 17. Ibid. 18. See Bonny Ibhawoh, “Second World-War Propaganda, Imperial Idealism, and Anti-Colonial Nationalism in British West Africa,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 16, no. 2 (2007): 221–43. Notes to Pages 91–95

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19. See Sir Frank Stockdale, Development and Welfare in the West Indies, 1940–1942 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1943); Joanna Lewis, “‘Tropical East Ends’ and the Second World War: Some Contradictions in Colonial Office Welfare Initiatives,” in Administering Empire: The British Colonial Service in Retrospect, ed. John Smith (London: University of London Press, 1999). 20. William Miller Macmillan, Warning from the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and the Empire (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). 21. Nigeria Legislative Council, Ten-Year Plan for Development and Welfare for Nigeria, 1946 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1946), 122. 22. Victor Mabb, Director of Prisons, letter to Chief Secretary to the Government, Lagos, “Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos,” 21 July 1941, ComCol I 2471, Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos (2) Juvenile Court, Lagos, NAI. 23. Report of D. Faulkner and H. J. Savory, “Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos,” date unknown, ComCol I 2471, Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos (2) Juvenile Court, Lagos, NAI. The protean boma boy concept, what it referred to, and the origins of the terminology have been examined by other scholars. See Laurent Fourchard and Isaac Olawale Albert, eds., Security, Crime and Segregation in West African Cities since the 19th Century (Paris: Institut français de recherche en Afrique, 2003). 24. Report of D. Faulkner and H. J. Savory, date unknown, ComCol I 2471, Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos (2) Juvenile Court, Lagos, NAI. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. Emmanuel Oke, Police Corporal, comp., “List of Criminals Who Employ Children into Their Service,” 15 December 1942, ComCol I 2851, Reg. 14/1/43, Criminals Working with Young Children, NAI. 28. Ibid. 29. Report of D. Faulkner and H. J. Savory, date unknown, ComCol I 2471, Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos (2) Juvenile Court, Lagos, NAI. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Victor Mabb, Director of Prisons, letter to Chief Secretary to the Government, Lagos, 21 July 1941, ComCol I 2471, Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos (2) Juvenile Court, Lagos, NAI. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. G. B. Williams, Commissioner of the Colony, letter to Chief Secretary to the Government, Lagos, 23 July 1941, 2, ComCol I 2471, Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos (2) Juvenile Court, Lagos, NAI. 37. Ibid. 38. Adeyemi Alakija was a successful newspaper entrepreneur in Lagos. 39. Williams was referring to the Green Triangle Hostel. Handwritten note, author unknown, n.d., ComCol I 2471, Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos (2) Juvenile Court, Lagos, NAI. 252

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Notes to Pages 95–100

40. Nigeria, Annual Report of the Department of Social Welfare Services, Western Region (including Lagos) for the Year 1953–1954 (Western Region: Government Printer, 1955), 1–2. 41. Report of D. Faulkner and H. J. Savory, “Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos.” 42. Donald Faulkner, “Social Welfare and Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos, Nigeria,” Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 6, no. 4 (1945): 192–96. 43. Ibid, 2. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid, 4. 46. C. Olajumoke Obasa, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 12 September 1942, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. The league’s demand that government supply economic and employment opportunities to women and girls was part of a longstanding campaign dating from the early 1920s. Henry Carr, Resident of the Colony, letter to The Secretary, Southern Provinces, 1 November 1923, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI; Susan A. Williams, Eunice Savage, Louisa K. Byass, Marian A. Banjiro, A. E. Gilusu (sp.), M. A. Williams, H. T. Cole, J. M. Thomas, C. S. Ogunbiyi, M. Benjamin, L. Agbebi, M. E. Agbebi, C. L. Pearse, C. M. Lakerio, B. Pearce, C. Olajumoke Obasa, letter to Sir Hugh Clifford, Governor & Commander in Chief, Nigeria, “On behalf of the women of Lagos,” 8 November 1923, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI; C. Olajumoke Obasa, letter to The Chief Secretary to Government, Lagos, 26 February 1924, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 50. Faulkner, report to Commissioner of the Colony, 17 September 1942, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 51. Faulkner, report to Commissioner of the Colony, 9 September 1942, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 52. Millicent H. Douglas, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 19 January 1943, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 53. Ibid. Akinwande Jones, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 11 August 1944, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI; Akinwande Jones, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 10 October 1944, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 54. Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee Progress Notes to the 31st of August 1945 C.S.W.A.C. 34/4, “Training of Colonial Social Workers,” p. 4, CO 997/2, Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee: Minutes of Meetings and Papers 1945, TNA. 55. ComCol I 2784, Juvenile Employment Advisory Committee, Lagos Juvenile Employment Exchange, 1942–53, NAI. 56. The Egba are reported to be the earliest Yoruba subgroup to embrace Western education, and like Sierra Leonean Krios, they became agents of the spread of Western education throughout Yorubaland. Notes to Pages 100–104

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57. Abayomi became a Lady when her husband Kofoworola Abayomi was knighted in 1951. 58. Folarin Coker, A Lady: A Biography of Lady Oyinkan Abayomi (Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 1987), 31. 59. Ibid., 78. 60. Ibid, 33–34. 61. ComCol I 27353, Lagos Ladies College Fund, NAI. 62. Judith Byfield, LaRay Denzer, and Anthea Morrison, eds., Gendering the African Diaspora: Women, Culture, and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 252. 63. A brief biography appeared in the West African Pilot. See “Miss H. Millicent Douglas Is a Prominent Social Worker,” West African Pilot, 5 August 1939, 1, 7. LaRay Denzer provided a fuller profile in LaRay Denzer, “Intersections: Nigerian Episodes in the Careers of Three West Indian Women,” in Byfield, Denzer, and Morrison, Gendering the African Diaspora, 245–84. 64. Denzer, “Intersections.” 65. There is some disagreement about whether the team saw four residences or seven. Douglas reported that they saw seven whereas Faulkner said they saw only four. Since Faulkner was actually part of the expeditionary team, I believe his number is closer to the truth, although one is still left with the question of why there is such a significant discrepancy between the two accounts. Faulkner, handwritten memo to Commissioner of the Colony, 22 December 1942, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI; H. Millicent Douglas, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 18 December 1942, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 66. H. Millicent Douglas, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 18 December 1942, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. H. Millicent Douglas, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 19 January 1943, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 69. H. Millicent Douglas, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, “Women’s Welfare Council Offer Re: Girl’s Hostel,” 18 December 1942, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 70. In a letter, Douglas refers to the 10 November 1942 meeting as the organization’s second meeting. The WWC appears to have met monthly, and its third meeting on 12 December was held at Faulkner’s house. Its inaugural meeting on 5 October 1942 was also convened by Faulkner, presumably at his house. See H. Millicent Douglas, Hon. Secretary Women’s Welfare Council, handwritten letter to Chief Secretary, Secretariat, Lagos, 3 November 1942, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 71. D. E. Faulkner, handwritten letter to Commissioner for the Colony, 22 December 1942, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 72. Faulkner, handwritten report to unknown, 25 February 1943, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 254

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73. Oyewumi discusses age as a salient marker of status in gerontocratic societies like those of the Yoruba. See Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 74. Faulkner, 22 December 1942, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 75. Faulkner, letter to Commissioner for the Colony, 22 December 1942, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 76. Ibid. 77. Faulkner, handwritten letter to Commissioner for the Colony, 25 February 1943, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 78. In 1946, a British woman named Alison Izzett was hired as the first Woman Welfare Officer charged with overseeing the welfare office’s work with women and girls. After 1946 when Izzett joined the welfare staff, it seems that she became the main Welfare Office representative on the WWC. Akinwande Jones, Hon. Secretary (WWC), letter to D. E. Faulkner, 13 October 1943, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 79. A. G. Grantham, “Children and Young Person’s Ordinance,” in Annual Volume of the Laws of Nigeria Containing All Legislation Enacted during the Year 1943 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1944). 80. J. B. Neville, The Laws of Nigeria, Containing the Ordinances of Nigeria (Lagos: Government Printer, 1948), 336. 81. See Bayo A. Lawal, “Markets and Street Trading in Lagos,” in Nigerian Cities, ed. Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004), 237–54. 82. Regulations to Prevent Children Trading in the Streets, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 83. “Regulations Made under the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance 1943,” in Annual Volume of the Laws of Nigeria, 1946 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1948), 154–55. 84. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, “Le travail des femmes à Lagos, Nigeria,” Zaire: Revue Congolaise 5, no. 2 (1951): 169–87, 475–502; B. W. Hodder and U. I. Ukwu, Markets in West Africa: Studies of Markets and Trade among the Yoruba and Ibo (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1969); Niara Sudarkasa and Gloria A. Marshall, Where Women Work: A Study of Yoruba Women in the Marketplace and in the Home (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1973); Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 85. For references to 1930s-era juvenile prisons in Northern Nigeria and the eastern provinces, see Nigeria, Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1934 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1935). 86. Donald Kingdon, “Native Children (Custody and Reformation) Ordinance,” in The Laws of Nigeria Containing the Ordinances of Nigeria in Force on the 1st Day of January, 1923 and the Orders, Proclamations, Orders in Notes to Pages 108–110

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Council, Letters Patent and Royal, and Royal Instructions Relating to Nigeria (Lagos: Government Printer, 1923). 87. Edwin Arney Speed, Ordinances, and Orders and Rules Thereunder, in Force in the Colony of Lagos on April 30th, 1901 (London: Stevens and Sons, 1902), 857. 88. Kingdon, Laws of Nigeria, 515. 89. Direct linkages between juvenile justice systems in England and Lagos could be seen in legislation and personnel. For example, later on in his career, Oliver Stanley was one of the architects of the CYP Act 1933 consulted on social policy in Nigeria through the Social Welfare Advisory Committee of the Colonial Office. Oliver Stanley, letter to the Officer Administering the Government of Nigeria, 22 May 1945, ComCol I 2862 I, Social Development and Welfare, 1944–48, NAI. 90. Victor Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8. 91. Ibid., 110. CHAPTER 4: THE STREET HAWKER, THE STREET WALKER, AND THE SALVATIONIST GAZE

1. A. I. Bankole-Wright, “Juvenile Delinquency Is Seen from a Scientific Standpoint,” West African Pilot, 29 July 1943; A. I. Bankole-Wright, “Effect of Sub-Conscious Mind on Delinquents is Explained,” West African Pilot, 30 July 1943; A. I. Bankole-Wright, “Environmental Conditions Also Affect Juvenile Delinquents,” West African Pilot, 31 July 1943; “Mistress Is Alleged to Murder Houseboy in Cold Blood,” Daily Service, 2 November 1942; “Brutality for Discipline,” Daily Service, 21 November 1942. 2. “Women’s Welfare League’s Protest Meeting against Moral Dangers Proves a Big Success: Govt. Will Be Asked to Forbid Hawking by Girls of Tender Age,” Daily Service, 10 August 1944. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. B. A. George, personal correspondence (n.d.). 7. S. Adeyinka, personal interview, 30 August 2003. 8. Some studies that approach the topic of the development of class consciousness using consumption patterns and popular-culture sources as their bases include Phyllis M. Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Steven J. Salm, “Rain or Shine ‘We Gonna Rock’: Dance Subcultures and Identity Construction in Accra, Ghana,” in Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed, ed. Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 361–75. But owing to the paucity of sources on girl hawkers’ recreational lives, I hesitate at this time to read the pooling of resources for Apala drummers as an indicator of group or class consciousness among girls. Future research may permit 256

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a deeper examination of the issue of development of class consciousness among girl hawkers. 9. “Women’s Welfare League’s Protest Meeting against Moral Dangers Proves a Big Success,” Daily Service, 10 August 1944. 10. Enid Schildkrout, “Age and Gender in Hausa Society: Socioeconomic Roles of Children in Urban Kano,” Childhood 9, no. 3 (2002): 342–68, http:// www.sagepub.com/content/9/3/342. 11. “Women’s Welfare League’s Protest Meeting against Moral Dangers Proves a Big Success,” Daily Service, 10 August 1944. 12. Sylvia Leith-Ross letter to Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, 26 February 1922, Records of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene International Work: Other Countries, Box 118, File 3, AMS/D/33, The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University. 13. Administrator of the Colony, memo to Secretary Lagos Town Council, 1 April 1932, AdminCol 1368, Vol. I, Market & Street Trading in Lagos, NAI. 14. C. T. Lawrence, Administrator of the Colony, letter to Chief Secretary to the Government, Lagos, “Idumagbo Markets,” 2 April 1932, AdminCol 1368, Vol. I, Market & Street Trading in Lagos, NAI. 15. Ibid. 16. They were said to gather particularly around Lewis Street, Araromi Market, Freemen Street, Moloney Bridge Street, Oshodi Street, Anikantamo Square, Idunmabgo Market Area, Oko-Awa, Palm Church Street, Faji Market, Alli Street, Agarawu Street, Ereko Market, Ereko Street, Egerton Square, Alakoro, Elegbata, Obun-Eko Street, Docemo Street, Great Bridge Street, Ebute-Ero, Iddo, Oyingbo Market, Obada Market, Apapa, Kano Street and Griffith Street. 17. Administrator of the Colony, memorandum to Secretary, Town Council, Lagos, 1 April 1932, AdminCol 1368, Vol. I, Market & Street Trading in Lagos, NAI. 18. Lawrence, “Idumagbo Markets,” 2 April 1932. 19. Cited in Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women: A Modern History, trans. Beth Gillian Raps (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 95–96. Original source of the statistic is Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, “Le travail des femmes à Lagos, Nigeria,” Zaire: Revue Congolaise 5, no. 2 (1951): 183. 20. Nigeria Department of Statistics, Population Census of Lagos, 1950 (Kaduna: Government Printer, 1951), 75. 21. Ibid., 74–76. Since 1943, girls below age fourteen were legally recognized as children, whereas girls ages fifteen and sixteen were considered young persons. The census age categories group female young persons within a larger population of fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds, making it difficult to include fifteenand sixteen-year-old girls within the present analysis. I estimate that their inclusion would increase the population of girl hawkers by 50 to 75 percent. For definitions of “child” and “young person” see A. G. Grantham, “Children and Young Person’s Ordinance, Annual Volume of the Laws of Nigeria Containing All Legislation Enacted during the Year 1943 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1944). Notes to Pages 116–118

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22. Nigeria Department of Statistics, Population Census of Lagos, 1950, 75. Children were found in many other occupational categories: tutors, clerks, salespersons, wood, metal, leather, and textile craft workers, in the farming and fishing industries, as cooks, gardeners, hairdressers, barbers, and clothes washers. See Nigeria Department of Statistics, Population Census of Lagos, 1950, 74–76. Fourchard’s study of organized crime gangs in Southern Nigeria during the colonial period demonstrates that children also worked as thieves’ aides. Laurent Fourchard, “Urban Poverty, Urban Crime, and Crime Control: The Lagos and Ibadan Cases, 1929–45,” in African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective, ed. Steven J. Salm and Toyin Falola (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 291–319. 23. Nigeria Department of Statistics, Population Census of Lagos, 1950, 75. 24. Ibid. 25. Comhaire-Sylvain, “Le travail des femmes,” 174. 26. Sulia Adedeji, Metamorphosis of a Kid Trader (Ibadan: General Services, 1995), 10–11. 27. Interview with K. Oredolapo George in New Jersey, 20 August 2003. 28. Ibid. 29. “Street Hawking by Young Girls,” Daily Service, 20 June 1946. 30. Cyprian Ekwensi, People of the City, rev. ed. (London: Heinemann, 1963), 9. 31. Ibid., 87. 32. For more on the interdependence of the formal and informal economies of African cities in the colonial period, see Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). In Comforts, White details the processes by which African women, in defiance of the colonial notion that they were strangers to the cities and thus legitimately excludable from urban space, yet managed to underwrite the social reproduction of African male labor in colonial Nairobi. Lisa Lindsay also writes about how women market traders financially supported striking male railway workers during their strike to raise wages and uphold the male breadwinner ideal. See Lisa Lindsay, “Domesticity and Difference: Male Breadwinners, Working Women, and Colonial Citizenship in the 1945 Nigerian General Strike,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 783–812. 33. Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 130. 34. For perspectives on ideas of monetary wealth in Yoruba histories, cultures, and thought, see Toyin Falola and Akanmu Adebayo, Culture, Politics, and Money among the Yoruba (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999), 51–72; see also Karin Barber, “Money, Self-Realization, and the Person in Yoruba Texts,” in Money Matters: Instability, Values and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities, ed. Jane Guyer (London: Heinemann, 1995), 205–24; Sara Berry, Fathers Work for Their Sons: Accumulation, 258

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Mobility, and Class Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 35. Adedeji, Metamorphosis of a Kid Trader. Three may be on the low end of the average starting age. Most likely, young Sulia was accompanying her grandmother on trading activities at age three, carrying what she could, providing company or entertainment, and otherwise acclimating herself to market life. 36. See Polly Hill, “Markets in Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 1, no. 4 (1963): 441–53; B. W. Hodder and U. I. Ukwu, Markets in West Africa: Studies of Markets and Trade among the Yoruba and Ibo (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1969), 441–53; Niara Sudarkasa and Gloria A. Marshall, Where Women Work: A Study of Yoruba Women in the Marketplace and in the Home (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1973). See also Claire Robertson’s groundbreaking work on Ga women traders in Accra, which not only detailed what women sold in the markets, what they did, and what they gained from the fellowship of market life, but also looked at how cultural and economic factors combined to institutionalize a female gendered underclass in many African cities. See Claire C. Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). See also Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Nina Emma Mba, For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Lindsay, “Domesticity and Difference”; Benjamin N. Lawrance, “La Révolte des Femmes: Economic Upheaval and the Gender of Political Authority in Lomé, Togo, 1931–33,” African Studies Review 46, no. 1 (2003): 43–67; Adedeji, Metamorphosis of a Kid Trader; Bolanle Awe, “Iyalode Efunsetan Aniwura,” in Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Bolanle Awe (Lagos: Sankore Publishers, 1992), 55–71; Robert Smith, ed., Memoirs of Giambattista Scala, Consul of His Italian Majesty in Lagos in Guinea (1862), trans. Brenda Packman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 27–38. New scholarship on African masculinity has located culturally derived gendered divisions of labor and profit in local African societies within the context of the neoliberal crisis in African economies. In desperation, men have entered the market, a formerly female-dominated economic sphere, potentially creating new forms of gender equity and exacerbating old forms of gender imbalance. See Victor Agadjanian, “Men Doing ‘Women’s Work’: Masculinity and Gender Relations among Street Vendors in Maputo, Mozambique,” in African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 257–70. 37. Sudarkasa and Marshall, Where Women Work. 38. Comhaire-Sylvaine, “Le travail des femmes,” 169–87. 39. Judith Byfield, The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Dyers in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1980–1940 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002). 40. Sudarkasa and Marshall, Where Women Work; Hodder and Ukwu, Markets in West Africa; Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl. Notes to Pages 121–123

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41. The testimonies of women traders, are, of course, the statements of women and not girls. Recollections from decades past filtered through the experiences of intervening years, they carry with them all the methodological challenges of using oral data for historical research. That said, individuals’ memories continue to be unmatched resources for accessing the experiences and analyses of archivally marginalized groups. 42. The four survey locations were selected based on a 2003 preliminary survey of fifty women traders from sixty-five to seventy-seven years of age in fifteen different Lagos markets. Sandgrouse, Oke Arin, Mushin, and Idumota seemed to contain the highest number of women in our target age range of over seventy. Wale Makanjuola, “Lagos Market Women, Survey 2 of 2” (Lagos, Nigeria, November 2005–February 2006). 43. Wale Makanjuola, “Report on the Markets Visited during the Market Survey” (ca. February 2006). Letter in possession of author. 44. Ibid. 45. J. Cauchi, Medical Officer of Health, Lagos, memo to Secretary, Town Council, “Petty Trading,” 31 March 1932, AdminCol 1368, Vol. I, Market & Street Trading in Lagos, NAI. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. D. H. Holley, Acting Town Engineer, memo to Secretary, Town Council, Lagos, 31 March 1932, AdminCol 1368, Vol. I, Market & Street Trading in Lagos, NAI. 49. Ibid. 50. Lagos Town Council, “Extracts of the Minutes of the Second Meeting of the Committee on Market and Street Trading,” (n.d.), AdminCol 1368, Vol. I, Market & Street Trading in Lagos, NAI. 51. K. A. Busia, Report on Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi (Accra, Gold Coast: Government Printing Department, 1950), 51–52. 52. It is interesting to note momentarily that the ages at which children entered school may actually be less important than they seem to be because into the 1960s, a child’s readiness for school was often not determined by biological age but by physical stature. Dozens of survey participants as well as individuals who sat for more long-form interviews explained that when they started school in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, children were required to pass what one might call the hand-to-ear test. Prospective students would arrive at the schoolhouse and be asked to pass their right arm over their head and touch their left ear. Those who could do so successfully were certified as being of school age. But if, like one of my informants, Retired Lt. Akeem Babatunde, a child had the misfortune of being short or short-limbed, regardless of biological age, the child could be denied admission. Over half a century after being denied school admission due to his size, Lt. Babatunde still bitterly remembered that even though he came to school with his birth certificate, “Nobody even asked for it. It was always the hand and ear test. It was another way of keeping the black people down.” 260

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53. Interview with K. Oredolapo George in New Jersey, 20 August 2003. 54. Ibid. 55. Sylvia Leith-Ross, letter to the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, 26 February 1922, Nigeria 1922–54, Box118, File 3, AMS/D/33, Records of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene International Work: Other Countries, The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University; “Street Trading Ordinance,” Daily Service, 6 July 1946. 56. By using the term participation, I am not suggesting that they were consenting participants, nor am I saying that they were not. But I do want to flag that we still face unresolved questions about what constituted consent in sexual relations in this period. 57. For example, in the 9 November 1944 edition of “The Moral of It,” a relationship-advice column that ran for years in the Lagos Daily Service, one S. Atedoghu, a self-identified astrology aficionado and “tutor in one of the secondary schools in Lagos,” criticized the “almost common habit of males advanced in age asking for the hands of much younger girls.” Atedoghu’s remarks reveal not only that there were readers of the Daily Service who looked askance at these cross-generational unions but also that there were many examples of such unions. See S. Atedoghu, “The Philosophy of Marriage (4): Should One Marry Early or Late,” Lagos Daily Service, 9 November 1944. 58. “Okunsanya Arrested for Alleged Improper Act,” West African Pilot, 19 January 1938. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Oliver Stanley, letter to the Officer Administering the Government of Nigeria, ComCol I 2862 I, Social Development and Welfare, 1944–48, NAI. 62. A. Izzett, Social Welfare Officer, “Child Prostitution in Lagos,” 15 May 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. In a 1947 circular on the same issues of hawking and underage prostitution, Izzett reported that investigations by her staff of female juvenilewelfare workers uncovered that the majority of male patients at the venereal disease clinic reported girl hawkers as their contact, saying that hawkers were “so cheap and content with a penny or sweetmeats.” Although it may have been a little hyperbolic to claim that the majority of male patients at the venereal disease clinic were having sex only with hawkers, Izzett’s main point, which seems valid, was that hawkers were at high risk of contracting and spreading venereal diseases. Nigeria, Social Welfare Annual Report, 1947, Social Welfare Annual Reports: microfilm reel 99, Appendix VI, CAMP. 67. Nigeria, Social Welfare Annual Report, 1947. 68. Izzett, “Child Prostitution in Lagos,” 15 May 1946. 69. Multigenerational Survey of Childhood in Twentieth-Century Lagos. With author. Notes to Pages 132–138

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70. Ibid. 71. “Accused in Oyingbo Market Murder Case Is Found Not Guilty and Discharged,” Daily Service, 24 August 1944. 72. “Young Girl Found Dead on Race Course,” Nigerian Daily Times, 15 March 1945. 73. “Corpse of 11-Year-Old Girl Is Found in Victory Garden,” Daily Service, 20 June 1946. 74. Ibid. CHAPTER 5: PROBLEM GIRLS, PRIVATE VICE, AND PUBLIC SECRETS IN LAGOS

1. Donald Faulkner, handwritten note, 7 July 1942, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 2. D. E. Faulkner, “Child Prostitution in Lagos,” 1 July 1943, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 3. Sonya Rose, “Sex, Citizenship, and the Nation in World War II Britain,” American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (1998): 1147–76. For the nineteenth century see Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 15–34; Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 4. Patricia Romero, ed., Women’s Voices on Africa: A Century of Travel Writings (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishing, 1992), 191. Excerpted from the travelog of May Mott-Smith, Africa from Port to Port (New York: D. Van Nostrand, ca. 1930). 5. Prince Eikineh, President, Nigerian Youth Movement, Gold Coast Branch to the President, Nigerian Youth Movement, Lagos, “Prostitution,” 28 June 1939, CAD, No. 249, NAC; “Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee Notes on Prostitution in Freetown,” PRO CO 9972b, Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee, TNA. 6. Prince Eikineh, President, Nigerian Youth Movement, Gold Coast Branch, to the President, Nigerian Youth Movement, Lagos, 28 June 1939, CAD, No. 249, “Prostitution,” NAC. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Anonymous author, “Prostitution,” date unknown, CAD, No. 249, NAC. 14. Prince Eikineh, “Prostitution,” 28 June 1939. 15. C. Olajumoke Obasa, letter to the Resident of the Colony, 6 August 1926, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 16. The first laws that even address prostitution are the Contagious Diseases laws, which do so in a roundabout way. Although sometimes conflating 262

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women, prostitutes, and disease, the flexibility of the law also permitted a delinking of the concepts—women, prostitutes, disease—such that physically healthy women could continue to be sexually available to men in exchange for money. See Saheed Aderinto, “Sexualized Nationalism: Lagos and the Politics of Sexuality in Colonial Nigeria, 1918–1958” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2010), 78–83. 17. Rose O., letter to the Welfare Officer, 21 November 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 18. Ibid. 19. This process was outlined by Mrs. Cadle at the Lagos Women’s League Women’s Protest Meeting and the social worker Miss W. Onipede in her report to the Social Welfare Advisory Committee in London. See “Today’s Big Protest Mass Meeting,” Daily Service, 8 August 1944; “Women’s Welfare League’s Protest Meeting against Moral Dangers Proves a Big Success,” Daily Service, 10 August 1944; “Minutes of the Meeting of the Sub-Committee on Prostitution in Freetown and Lagos, held on Monday the 16th April, 1945,” PRO CO 9972, Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee, TNA. 20. Ben Esusu P.C. 213, letter to the Welfare Officer, 23 October 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 21. Ibid. 22. Uche C. Isiugo-Abanihe, “Child Fosterage in West Africa,” Population and Development Review 11, no. 1 (1985): 56–57. 23. Interview with K. Oredolapo George, 7 December 2004; see results of Abosede George, Peace Nwachukwu, Shola Abioye, and Rasheed Hassan, “Childhood in Twentieth-Century Lagos” (Lagos, Nigeria, 2009)—80 Group and 70 Group. In possession of author. 24. Rose O., letter to the Welfare Officer, 21 November 1946. 25. Ben Esusu P.C. 213, letter to the Welfare Officer, 23 October 1946. 26. Neville John Brooke, “Slavery Ordinance,” in The Laws of Nigeria, Containing the Ordinances of Nigeria and Subsidiary Legislation Made Thereunder (Lagos: Government Printer, 1948), no. 35 of 1916. As scholars such as Roberts, Ohadike, and Falola have argued, the legal end of slavery did not end practices of unfree labor. In some places, it led to drastic increases in particular forms of unfree labor. See particularly Don Ohadike, “The Decline of Slavery among the Igbo People,” in The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 437–61; Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy, “Pawnship in Historical Perspective,” in Falola and Lovejoy, Pawnship in Africa, 1–26. 27. The Reporter, letter to Commissioner of Colony Lagos, 2 October 1943, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 28. Falola and Lovejoy, “Pawnship in Historical Perspective,” 2. Notes to Pages 147–151

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29. Ibid., 7. 30. Martin A. Klein and Richard Roberts, “The Resurgence of Pawning in French West Africa during the Depression of the 1930s,” in Falola and Lovejoy, Pawnship in Africa, 303–20. 31. Toyin Falola, “Pawnship in Colonial Southwestern Nigeria,” in Falola and Lovejoy, Pawnship in Africa, 245–66. 32. N. A. Fadipe, Sociology of the Yoruba (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1970), 192. 33. Ibid. See also Elisha Renne, “Childhood Memories and Contemporary Parenting in Ekiti, Nigeria,” Africa 75. no. 1 (2005): 71. 34. Falola and Lovejoy, “Pawnship in Historical Perspective,” 7. 35. Interview with K. Oredolapo George, 7 December 2004. 36. For more examples of the slippages between ideas of iwofas (or child pawns) and ideas of foster children, see Renne, “Childhood Memories,” which is a study of memories of pawnship in early twentieth-century Ekiti and includes critical new ideas of the practice that came in by the end of the century. 37. See results of George et al., “Childhood in Twentieth-Century Lagos”—80 Group and 70 Group. In possession of author. 38. There is another case, told to investigators by a girl who had run away from her oga/madam/spouse, which speaks to the slippage between ideas of fosterage, pawnship, and slavery. It comes from the early 1950s and involves a pair of girls who were married to a trafficker in Uyo Division. She took them to Jos and gradually coerced them into prostitution. The girls had been led to believe, based on the transfer of various bridewealth gifts to their parents, that they had been married by proxy and were to meet their new husbands. When one of the girls protested the reality of their situation by running away to her parents, her parents compelled her to return to the oga/madam/spouse, citing their inability to repay the transferred funds. At one point the madam reportedly justified her authority over the girls by telling them explicitly that she had bought them and that they were her slaves. Margaret L. Belcher, Reports and Case Notes, West Africa, 1952–58, MSS. Afr. S. 1343, Rhodes House Library, Oxford. 39. Bernard E., letter to unknown, 24 June 1944, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Informant, letter to Welfare Office, 10 July 1943, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ogbo Atuyola, letter to Welfare Office, 12 July 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 47. Colony Welfare Officer, Lagos, to the District Officer, Okitipupa, 30 July 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 264

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Notes to Pages 151–156

48. Ogbo Atuyola, letter, 12 July 1946. 49. Ibid. 50. Mrs. Ogodi, letter, 13 July 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 51. Ibid. 52. District Officer, Okitipupa Division, memo to Colony Welfare Officer, Lagos, “Girls in Moral Danger,” 20 November 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 53. Ibid. 54. Mrs. Ogodi, letter to James Oji, 13 July 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 55. Ibid. 56. Neville John Brooke, “The Marriage Ordinance,” in The Laws of Nigeria, Containing the Ordinances of Nigeria and Subsidiary Legislation Made Thereunder (Lagos: Government Printer, 1948), 295. 57. Mrs. Ogodi, letter to James Oji, 13 July 1946. 58. P. Essien, letter to Welfare Officer, 20 August 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 59. Ibid. 60. Alison Izzett, Social Welfare Officer, to the Welfare Officer, Calabar, “Re: Alice Esien, F.R. 283,” 30 August 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 61. Ibid. 62. Memo to Executive Owerri, 8 January 1944, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 63. District Officer, Owerri Division, memo to Welfare Officer, Lagos, “Elizabeth Nwannena of Ezzihu Eziudo,” 3 February 1944, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 64. A. I. Bankole-Wright, Acting Colony Welfare Officer, memo to District Officer, Owerri, “Elizabeth Nwannena of Ezzihu Eziudo,” 26 February 1944, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 65. “A Report against Prostitutions,” 4 November 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. District Officer Kukuruku Division, memo to Colony Welfare Officer, “Prostitution,” 13 October 1943, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 69. Ibid. 70. District Officer Kukuruku Division, memo to Colony Welfare Officer, “Prostitution,” 6 October 1943, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. The Calabar Council proposed a similar ban on emigration of women from Calabar region, citing “barrenness amongst the women and the decrease in population as a concomitant result.” See L. A. Esien Offiong, Secretary Calabar Council, memo to District Officer Calabar, “Child Notes to Pages 156–163

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Prostitution in Lagos,” 17 January 1944, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 71. Interview with K. Oredolapo George, 7 December 2004; Looking at an earlier period, the 1930s, in Igboland, Nwokeji argues that proxy marriages may also have been used to enable Christian men to take on new wives (through the assistance of their ordinance wives) while still maintaining their Christian status. See Ugo Nwokeji, Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158. 72. A. G. Grantham, “Children and Young Person’s Ordinance,” in Annual Volume of the Laws of Nigeria Containing All Legislation Enacted during the Year 1943 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1944). 73. “What Is Native Marriage?” Daily Service, 15 September 1944. 74. Ibid. 75. Luise White, The Comforts of Home, 49. 76. Benjamin Naanen, “ ‘Itinerant Gold Mines’: Prostitution in the Cross River Basin of Nigeria, 1930–1950,” African Studies Review 34, no. 2 (1991): 71. 77. White, Comforts of Home, 94. 78. “Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee Notes on Prostitution in Freetown,” 13 April 1943, p. 2, CO 997/2b, Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee, National Archives. 79. Ibid. 80. A. I. Izzett, “Child Prostitution in Lagos,” 15 May 1946, pp. 2–3, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 81. Ibid. 82. Nigeria, Annual Report on Social and Economic Progress, 1938 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1939), 60–61. 83. Rose O., letter to the Welfare Officer, 21 November 1946, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 84. Izzett, “Child Prostitution in Lagos,” 2–3. 85. Ibid. 86. Colony Welfare Officer, Lagos, to District Officer, Kukuruku Division, Auchi, “Prostitution,” 23 October 1943, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 87. Donald Faulkner, “Child Welfare—Prostitution & Child-Marriage,” 31 May ca. 1943, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 88. Faulkner, memo to Commissioner of the Colony, 9 July ca. 1942, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. CHAPTER 6: DELINQUENTS TO BREADWINNERS AND HAWKERS TO HOMEMAKERS

1. See Lisa Lindsay, “Domesticity and Difference: Male Breadwinners, Working Women, and Colonial Citizenship in the 1945 Nigerian General Strike,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999), 783–812. 266

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2. For references to juvenile prisons in Northern Nigeria and Eastern Nigeria, see Nigeria, Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1934 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1935). 3. Boys were kept on remand at the Salvation Army Home until the colony administration was able to convert the old Tapa Police Station at 42 Oshodi Street into a remand home. Tapa House was the official boys’ remand home from August 1943 until August 1945, when the remand home was moved to 4 Military Street under the Prisons Ordinance. Donald Faulkner, letter to Senior Executive Engineer, Public Works Department, Lagos, “Old Tapa St. Police Station,” 1 November 1945, ComCol I 2796, Remand Home, Lagos, NAI. 4. Commissioner of the Colony to Superintendent of Police, Colony, Lagos, “Juvenile Court Police Force,” 3 July 1946, ComCol I 2796, Remand Home, Lagos, NAI. 5. E. Hillier, letter to C.W.O., “Juvenile Court Police Force,” 25 June 1946, ComCol I 2796, Remand Home, Lagos, NAI; Commissioner of the Colony, letter to Superintendent of Police, “Juvenile Court Police Force,” 3 July 1946, ComCol I 2796, Remand Home, Lagos, NAI. 6. John A. F. Watson, The Child and the Magistrate (1942), quoted by Hermann Manheim, “The Juvenile Court: Its Procedure,” in Lawless Youth: A Challenge to the New Europe: A Policy for the Juvenile Courts Prepared by the International Committee of the Howard League for Penal Reform, 1942–1945, ed. Margery Fry et al. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1947), 66. 7. Donald Faulkner, “A Juvenile Court,” Nigeria Magazine, no. 34 (1949– 50): 261–62. 8. Alison Izzett, “The Fears and Anxieties of Delinquent Yoruba Children,” Odu, no. 1 (January 1955): 32. 9. Interview with Retired Lt. Col. Akeem Babatunde, Badagry, 8 July 2008. 10. Ibid. 11. Society of African Missions, “Topo Island Revisited,” http://www.sma .ie/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=564&Itemid=85, accessed 26 April 2012. 12. Interview with Retired Lt. Col. Akeem Babatunde, Badagry, 8 July 2008. 13. Interview with Barrister Tunji Gomez, Lagos Island, 11 July 2008. 14. Isobel Ryan, Black Man’s Palaver (Oxford: Allen Press, 1958). 15. Ibid., 52. 16. Simon Heap, “ ‘Their Days Are Spent in Gambling and Loafing, Pimping for Prostitutes, and Picking Pockets’: Male Juvenile Delinquents on Lagos Island, 1920–1960,” Journal of Family History 35, no. 1 (2010): 48–70. 17. Nigeria, “Children and Young Persons Street Trading Regulations, 1946 Made under the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance, 1943,” Annual Volume of the Laws of Nigeria Containing All Legislation Enacted during the Year 1946 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1948). Notes to Pages 172–178

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18. Ibid. 19. “Women’s Party Condemns Aso Ebi at Mass Meeting,” West African Pilot, 22 July 1946. 20. “Magistrate Issues Warning against Hawking by Girls,” Daily Service, 22 June 1946. 21. “Two Female Hawkers Fined £5 Each for Street Trading,” Daily Service, 12 July 1946; Police Superintendent A. T. Trumble was said to have expressed surprise when Women’s Party members informed him that girls were being fined up to £5 for violating hawking regulations. Trumble reportedly commented that although the law provided a maximum fine of 10/- for an offender, he “could not stop the magistrate from doing his work.” See “Women’s Party Meets on Hawking Law & Aso Ebi,” Daily Service, 22 July 1946. 22. Nigeria, Annual Report on the Colony Welfare Service, 1949 (Lagos: Government Printer, ca. 1950), microfilm, 16. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid 26. Pauline A. Fairclough, Lady Social Welfare Officer, letter to District Officer, Ibadan, “Sariu Aduni Y. (aged 10 years),” 8 February 1949, Provincial Administration File No. 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders—Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School, NAI. 27. Nigeria, Law Reports: A Selection of Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Nigeria in the Years 1945, 1946 and 1947 Together with a Digesting Index of the Cases (Lagos: Government Printer, 1951). 28. District Officer Kukuruku Division to Colony Welfare Officer, Lagos, Auchi, “Prostitution,” 6 October 1943, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 29. Colony Welfare Officer, Lagos to Kukuruku Division District Officer, Auchi, “Prostitution,” 30 October 1943, ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46, NAI. 30. Laurent Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria, 1926–60,” Journal of African History 47, no. 1 (2006): 115–37. 31. Nigeria, Annual Report on the General Progress of Development and Welfare Schemes 1948–49 (Lagos: Government Printer), microfilm. 32. Nigeria, Annual Report on the General Progress of Development and Welfare Schemes, 1946–47 and 1947–48 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1948), microfilm; Nigeria, Annual Report on the General Progress of Development and Welfare Schemes, 1948–49 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1949), microfilm. 33. Nigeria, Development and Welfare Report (Lagos: Colony Welfare Service, 1950). Faulkner seems to have been lobbying for some time for a Borstal institution to be opened for recidivists and male youth over fifteen years of age. See Nigeria, Annual Report on the Colony Welfare Service, 1949 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1950), 12. 34. Colony Welfare Officer, “Instructions for Remand Home Officers,” 17 August 1943, pp. 1–2, ComCol I 2796, Remand Home, Lagos, NAI. 268

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35. Donald Faulkner, “A Juvenile Court,” Nigeria Magazine, no. 34 (1949–50): 257–61. 36. Nigeria, Annual Report on the General Progress of Development and Welfare Schemes, 1948–49 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1949). 37. “Raliatu Aduke case,” File No. A.D. 241, Juvenile Offenders, Correspondence Relating To, 1930–57, NAI. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. For a nuanced discussion of the complex politics of gender ideology in colonial Nigeria see Lindsay, “Domesticity and Difference.” 41. LaRay Denzer, “Domestic Training in Colonial Yorubaland, Nigeria,” in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen T. Hansen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 116–39. 42. D. E. Faulkner, note to Mrs. D. Doherty, 8 November 1944, ComCol I 2782, Mrs. Dorcas Doherty (Matron-Girls’ Hostel), Personal Papers, NAI. 43. Commissioner of the Colony, note to Mrs. D. Doherty, November 1944, ComCol I 2782, Mrs. Dorcas Doherty (Matron-Girls’ Hostel), Personal Papers, NAI. 44. Ibid. The commissioner’s comments can be understood to reflect Faulkner’s opinions as well since Faulkner held primary responsibility for evaluating Doherty’s work, and quite often the commissioner’s comments on welfare work simply repeated, sometimes verbatim, private memos he had received from Faulkner. 45. “Letter of Consideration for a Non-Pensionable Appointment or for Temporary Employment” sent to Mrs. Doherty, 26 January 1943, ComCol I 2782, Mrs. Dorcas Doherty (Matron-Girls’ Hostel), Personal Papers, NAI; Doherty was later replaced by Miss Janet Coker. Miss Coker’s assistant matron was Mrs. C. Amenyah. Coker and Amenyah were on a list of seven African women who held civil service jobs in 1944. The others were Mrs. C. K. Hollist, assistant to the inspector of prices (presumably food prices); Mrs. L. S. Y. Savage, lady food control officer; Mrs. V. R. Sogeke, a typist; Mrs. M. Akitoye, lady social worker; and Mrs. Felicia Silva, matron at the Isheri Reformatory for Boys. Commissioner of the Colony, to Chief Secretary to the Government, “Employment of Women in the Clerical and Technical Services,” 20 December 1944, ComCol I 3007, Employment of African Ladies in the Government Service, NAI. 46. Millicent H. Douglas, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 19 January 1943, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 47. Douglas mentioned that the WWC had a membership of sixteen. Using various WWC records, I have compiled the following partial list of WWC members and affiliates, circa 1942–1944. In alphabetical order, they were Mrs. O. Abayomi, Mrs. B. Ajose, Mrs. A. Alakija, Mr. Bankole-Wright, Mrs. Brucknor, Mrs. M. Butler, Mrs. C. E. M. Cadle, Ms. M. Douglas, Mrs. H. M. Ekemode, Mrs. H. V. Johnson, Mrs. C. O. Jones, Mrs. C. Obasa, Mrs. G. Shackleford, Mrs. R. Timson. Millicent H. Douglas, letter to Commissioner Notes to Pages 185–192

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of the Colony, 19 January 1943, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI; Akinwande Jones, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 11 August 1944, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI; Akinwande Jones, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 10 October 1944, ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 48. Millicent H. Douglas, letter to Commissioner of the Colony, 19 January 1943, ComCol I 284/107, Women’s Welfare Council, NAI. 49. A deputation of Women’s Party members visited the acting chief secretary to the government, S. Ade Ojo, to push for the hiring of middle-aged women between forty and fifty years of age as policewomen. Members of the group—which included the president, Mrs. Abayomi; Mrs. A. Coker; Mrs. B. Oyediran; Mrs. L. Timson; Mrs. E. Kuti-Okoya; the treasurer, Mrs. Ekemode; and the joint honorary secretaries, Mrs. T. Dedeke and Mrs. A. Manuwa— argued that women police officers could “prevent prostitution by going into nooks and corners to ferret out . . . girls.” They could also replace male officers in the duty of searching female criminals. They met strong resistance from the police commissioner, W. C. C. King, who argued that even in England, hiring women police officers was “by no means an unqualified success,” and therefore could hardly be considered in Nigeria. Commissioner of Police, letter to Chief Secretary of the Government, Lagos, “Employment of Women in the Police Force,” 1 December 1944, CSO 26 43399, Employment of Women in the Police Force, NAI. See also “The Women’s Party,” Daily Service, 17 November 1944; “Policewomen for Nigeria,” Daily Service, August 10 1944. 50. D. Doherty, handwritten note to Welfare Officer, 21 October 1943, ComCol I 2782, Mrs. Dorcas Doherty (Matron-Girls’ Hostel), Personal Papers, NAI. 51. Untitled memo, n.d., ComCol I 2782, Mrs. Dorcas Doherty (MatronGirls’ Hostel), Personal Papers, NAI. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Colony Welfare Officer, letter to Mrs. D. Doherty, “Girls’ Hostel,” 5 October 1944, ComCol I 2782, Mrs. Dorcas Doherty (Matron-Girls’ Hostel), Personal Papers, NAI. 58. Ibid., emphasis added. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. D. Doherty, handwritten letter to Colony Welfare Officer, “Girls’ Hostel,” 7 October 1944, ComCol I 2782, Mrs. Dorcas Doherty (Matron-Girls’ Hostel), Personal Papers, NAI. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 270

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65. Ibid. 66. See results of Abosede George, Peace Nwachukwu, Shola Abioye, and Rasheed Hassan, “Childhood in Twentieth-Century Lagos” (Lagos, Nigeria, 2009)—70 Group. In possession of author. 67. Interview with S. Adeyinka, New York City, August 2003. 68. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. 69. Ibid., 4. 70. Megan Vaughn, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 57. C H A P T E R 7 : F O R W O M E N , G I R L S , A N D T H E N AT I O N ?

1. “Street Hawking by Young Girls,” Daily Service, 20 June 1946. 2. Mrs. Abayomi quoted in Daily Service article, “Women’s Welfare League’s Protest Meeting against Moral Dangers Proves a Big Success,” Daily Service, 10 August 1944. 3. “Street Hawking by Young Girls,” Daily Service, 20 June 1946. 4. Ibid. 5. Philip S. Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 145–55; Hakeem Tijani, Britain, Leftist Nationalists and the Transfer of Power in Nigeria, 1945–1965 (New York: Routledge, 2005). 6. Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, 145. 7. H. Akin Allen, “Law-Breakers!” Nigeria Daily Times, 15 June 1948. 8. “The C. & Y.P. Ordinance,” Daily Service, 14 October 1964. 9. Ibid. 10. “Children and Young Person’s Ordinance,” West African Pilot, 6 July 1946; “Street Trading Ordinance,” Daily Service, 6 July 1946; “Women’s Party Meets on Hawking Law & Aso Ebi,” Daily Service, 12 July 1946. 11. “Street Trading Ordinance,” Daily Service, 6 July 1946. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. C. Olayemi Blaize, “Moral Dangers in the Community,” Daily Times, 24 November 1944; “Lagos Women’s Petition Govt on Young Person’s Ord,” Daily Service, 14 October 1946. 17. “Lagos Women Petition Govt on Young Person’s Ord.,” Daily Service, 14 October 1946; “The C. &Y.P. Ordinance,” Daily Service, 14 October 1946. Gender and age came together in the women’s group’s maternalist discourses. Scholars have begun theorizing maternalism as an Africanist critique of Western feminist theories of the female social body. See special issues on the theme of motherhood in Nkiri Nzegwu, Mojubaolu Okome, and Oyeronke Oyewumi, eds., “Motherhood Part 1,” JENDA: A Journal of Culture and Notes to Pages 197–207

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African Women’s Studies, no. 4, http://www.jendajournal.com/issue4/toc4.htm (Africa Resource Center, 2000); Nzegwu et al., “Motherhood Part 2,” JENDA, no. 5, http://www.jendajournal.com/issue5/toc5.htm (Africa Resource Center, 2004). 18. According to juvenile court statistics for 1946, 1947, and 1948 combined, 127 girls were arrested while allegedly entering Lagos under suspicious conditions. See Nigeria, Social Welfare Annual Report, 1947 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1948); Nigeria, Annual Report on the General Progress of Development and Welfare Schemes 1948–49 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1949). On one occasion, Women’s Party members referred to the practice of stopping girls on trains as “a subtle way of introducing the pass system which obtains in East and South Africa.” Quoted in Nina Emma Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activity in Southern Nigeria, 1900–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 223. 19. “Lagos Women Petition Govt on Young Person’s Ord.,” Daily Service, 14 October 1946. 20. Blaize, “Moral Dangers in the Community.” 21. Ibid. 22. These concessions were won following fierce battles between Nigerian trade unions and the colonial state during what Ehiedu Iweriebor has called the pinnacle of radical politics in Nigeria. See Iweriebor, “Radicalism and the National Liberation Struggles, 1930–1950,” in The Foundations of Nigeria, ed. Adebayo Oyebade (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003), 79–105. Lindsay’s work on the railway workers’ strike focuses on the key unionized industry of the period. See Lisa Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003). For example, workers’ complaints of inadequate compensation and racist family allowance practices were buttressed by the findings of the Tudor Davies Commission, which investigated worker grievances and the cost of living in Lagos and ultimately recommended an increase in the cost-of-living allowances for African workers. See Nigeria, Enquiry into the Cost of Living and the Control of the Cost of Living in the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1946). 23. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Renascent Africa (1937; repr., London: Cass, 1968), 7. 24. Ibid., 8. 25. Ibid., 9. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 10, emphasis added. 29. Blaize, “Moral Dangers in the Community.” 30. Ibid. 31. Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized, 220. 32. “Women’s Party Hold Grand Meeting,” Daily Service, 24 August 1944. 33. “The Women’s Party,” Daily Service, 17 November 1944; “Parliamentary Delegation Interviews Members of Women’s Party,” Daily Service, 8 272

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Notes to Pages 209–213

January 1947; “Free Trade, Higher Education and Industrialisation Discussed at Interview with Parliamentary Delegation,” Daily Service, 8 January 1947. 34. Nigeria Department of Statistics, Population Census of Lagos, 1950 (Kaduna: Government Printer, 1951), 14. Given that there is no census data for 1944, I have used the 1950 census to suggest what conditions might have been. Although the census book does list ability to write a short letter as a minimum literacy standard, it appears that census takers were not required to actually test the literacy of those polled but were instead encouraged to make “careful inquiry” before counting individuals as literate or illiterate. Thus 1950 census statistics may inflate the number of illiterate individuals. 35. See, for example, E. E. Esua, “Mass Education for Nigeria,” Daily Service, 10 November 1942; S. O. Nwangoro, “Mass Education,” Daily Service, 12 November 1942. 36. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, “We Had Equality till Britain Came,” London Daily Worker, 8 August 1947. 37. “Jobless Women,” Daily Times, 14 July 1952, 5. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. C. O. D. Ekwensi, When Love Whispers (Yaba, Nigeria: Chuks Services, 1948), microform. 42. Blaize, “Moral Dangers.” 43. “Women’s Party Meets on Hawking Law & Aso Ebi,” Daily Service, 22 July 1946. 44. Nigeria, Annual Report of the Social Welfare Department of the Western Region of Nigeria for the Year 1955–56 (Lagos: Government Printer), 2. 45. Nigeria, Annual Report on the Colony Welfare Service, 1949 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1949); Nigeria, Annual Report of the Federal Department of Social Welfare for the Year 1949–50 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1950); Nigeria, Annual Report of the Department of Social Welfare Services, Western Region (including Lagos) for the Year 1953–54 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1954); Federation of Nigeria, Annual Report of the Federal Department of Social Welfare for the Year 1954–55 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1955); Western Region of Nigeria, Annual Report of the Social Welfare Department of the Western Region of Nigeria for the Year 1954–55 (Western Region: Government Printer, 1955); Federation of Nigeria, Annual Report of the Federal Department of Social Welfare for the Year 1955–56 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1956); Western Region of Nigeria, Annual Report of the Social Welfare Department of the Western Region of Nigeria for the Year 1955–56 (Western Region: Government Printer, 1956). 46. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 14. 47. Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized, 233. 48. Babatunde Fafunwa, History of Education in Nigeria (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), 168. Notes to Pages 213–221

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49. Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discources (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 33. CONCLUSION: BANNING HAWKERS SIXTY YEARS LATER

1. Kaine Agary, “Rights of the Child (2),” Punch (Lagos), 13 May 2012, http://www.punchng.com/columnists/pocket-lawyer/rights-of-the-child-2/, accessed 17 November 2012. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. “Lagos Bans Hawking by Children during School Hours,” 21 November 2008, http://www.nairaland.com/198652/lagos-bans-hawking-children-during, accessed 11 March 2013. 5. Pamela Scully, “Gender, History, and Human Rights,” in Gender and Culture at the Limits of Rights, ed. Dorothy Hodgson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 21. 6. Ibid., 24. 7. Ibid., 24–25. 8. Ibid., 31. 9. See, for example, Matthew Gandy, “Planning, Anti-planning, and the Infrastructure Crisis Facing Metropolitan Lagos,” Urban Studies 43, no. 2 (2006): 371–96; George Packer, “The Megacity: Decoding the Chaos of Lagos,” New Yorker, 13 November 2006, www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/13/061113fa_ fact_packer, accessed 9 April 2014; Will Connors, “Opulence and Chaos Meet in an African Boomtown,” New York Times, 12 August 2008, A13. 10. Olakunle Tejuoso, Weyinmi Atigbi, Ololade Bamidele, and Demola Ogunajo, eds., Lagos: A City at Work (Lagos: Glendora Books, 2007), 361. 11. Ibid. 12. Packer, “Megacity.” 13. Ibid. 14. See Gandy, “Planning.” 15. AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 137. 16. Ade Adefuye, B. Agiri, and J. Osuntokun, eds., History of the Peoples of Lagos State (Lagos: Lantern Books, 1987), 107; Nigeria Department of Statistics, Population Census of Lagos 1950 (Kaduna: Government Printer, 1951); Nigeria, Census of Nigeria, 1931 (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1932). 17. Olu Sule, “Recent Slum Clearance Exercise in Lagos (Nigeria): Victims or Beneficiaries?” GeoJournal 22, no. 1 (1990): 81–91; Liora Bigon, “Between Local and Colonial Perceptions: The History of Slum Clearances in Lagos (Nigeria), 1924–1960,” Journal of African and Asian Studies 7, no. 1 (2008): 49–76. 18. C. Olajumoke Obasa, letter to the Resident of the Colony, 6 August 1926, ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50, NAI. 274

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Notes to Pages 222–230

19. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 96–101. 20. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 148. 21. Ibid. 22. See Philip Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), for discussion of this culturally based integrationist moment. One pioneering activist in the integrationist tradition that immediately comes to mind is Herbert Macaulay, famed for, among other things, representing Lagos market women’s unions to the press, city council, and legislature. 23. ‘Kunle Akinsemoyin, Who Are Lagosians? (Lagos: Kard Press, 1979). 24. Ibid., 21.

Notes to Pages 230–232

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Selected Bibliography A R C H I VA L S O U R C E S NIGERIAN NATIONAL ARCHIVES IBADAN (NAI)

(Listed alphabetically by file name)

ComCol 242/1, Boy’s Industrial Home & Old People’s Refuge. ComCol I 2947, Vol. I/II, Boys Reformatory, Isheri. ComCol I 2844, Child Prostitution in Lagos, 1943–46. CSO 43602, Colonial Development and Welfare Act Committee, Notes of Meetings, 1944–48. CSO 43781, Colonial Development and Welfare Act Schemes, 1945–52. Provincial Administration 2851, Reg. 14/1/43, Criminals Working with Young Children, 1942–43. ComCol I 12/5 s.31, Destitute Paupers in Lagos, 1934–37. ComCol I 3007, Employment of African Ladies in the Government Service. ComCol I 2202, Employment of Children, Legislation Dealing With, 1938–46. CSO 26 43399, Employment of Women in the Police Force. ComCol I 248/61, Farina Women Sellers Union; New Market Food Vendors Union, Lagos. CSO 33659, Female Juvenile Offenders. CSO 28345, Female Prisoners. ComCol I 3995, Girls’ Approved School Idi-Oro. ComCol I 2065, Girls’ Industrial Home, 1937–39. ComCol I 397, Infant Welfare Lagos; Appointment of Dr. Dahlia Withbourne, Health Office, Town Council. ComCol I 2471, Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos (2) Juvenile Court, Lagos. Administration Department 51/s.46, Juvenile Delinquents Repatriation from the French Cameroons. ComCol 2784, Juvenile Employment Advisory Committee; Lagos Juvenile Employment Exchange, 1942–53. Provincial Administration A.D. 241, Juvenile Offenders, Correspondences Relating to. Provincial Administration 1212, Vol. II, Juvenile Offenders, Matters Affecting Enugu Approved School. ComCol I 2453, J. T. Nelson-Cole. 277

ComCol I 27353, Lagos Ladies College Fund. ComCol 46, XVI, Lagos Town Council—General Meetings, 1949–50. ComCo I, l T.C. 012, Lagos Town Council Housing Scheme. ComCol I 498, Lagos Women’s League, 1924–50. ComCol 3080, Lagos Women’s Party: Girl’s Industrial Home. ComCol I 2046, League of Nations—Status of Women. AdminCol 1368, Vol. I, Market & Street Trading in Lagos, 1932–36. ComCol I 387, Vol. II, Markets in Lagos Township Area. ComCol I 2709, Miss H. Millicent Douglas Personal Papers. ComCol I 1375/s.21, Mr. Anderson, Social Worker—Visit to Nigeria. ComCol I 2453, Mr. J. T. Nelson-Cole. ComCol I 3035, Mrs. A. L. S. Davies, Lady Welfare Officer. ComCol I 2782, Mrs. Dorcas Doherty Personal Papers (Matron-Girls’ Hostel). CSO 2378/s.76, Mrs. Potts-Johnson—Petition for Free Pardon. ComCol I 3295/c.52, Nigeria Women’s Party—Application for Permission to Make Public Collection, 1950–52. ComCol I 2796, Remand Home, Lagos. ComCol I 2247/12, The Salvation Army A.R.P. Social Service Unit. ComCol I 2862, Vol. I, Social Development and Welfare, 1944–48. ComCol I 2862, Vol. II, Social Development and Welfare, 1946–49. ComCol I 2862, Vol. III, Social Department and Welfare, 1949–51. CSO 393/S3, Social Welfare Youth Organizations. ComCol I 06494/Vol. I, Street Improvements, Lagos Township. ComCol I 12401, Taxation of Women in Lagos, 1940–41. ComCol I AC253, Women’s Health Visitors in Lagos. ComCol I 248/107, Women’s Welfare Council.

NIGERIAN NATIONAL ARCHIVES CALABAR (NAC)

CAD 249, “Prostitution.”

BRITISH NATIONAL ARCHIVES, KEW GARDENS (TNA)

CO 859/42/7, Report of a Sub-Committee on the Education and Welfare of Women and Girls in Africa 1943–44. CO 997/2, Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee: Minutes of Meetings and Papers, 1945. CO 997/2, C.S.W.A.C. 34/45, Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee Progress Notes. CO 997/2, C.S.W.A.C. 28/45, Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee, Summary of Activities, 1943–45. 278

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R H O D E S H O U S E L I B R A R Y, OX F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y

732.12 s. 22, Alison Izzett, “The Yoruba Young Delinquent in Lagos.” B. Litt. thesis, Oxford University, 1955. MSS. Afr. s. 1343, Margaret L. Belcher, Reports and Case Notes, West Africa, 1952–58. MSS Afr. s. 1872/2, Barbara Akinyemi, “The Closing Years of Colonialism: A Thirty-Five-Year Backward Glance.”

T H E W O M E N ’ S L I B R A R Y, L O N D O N M E T RO P O L I TA N U N I V E R S I T Y

Box 118, File 3, AMS/D/33, Records of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene International Work: Other Countries.

LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

Audrey Richard Papers. G O V E R N M E N T P U B L I C AT I O N S Busia, K. A. Report on Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi. Accra, Gold Coast: Government Printing Department, 1950. Great Britain Colonial Office. Colonial Office Conference 1930: Appendices to the Summary of Proceedings (Cmd. 3629, in continuation of Cmd. 3628). London: H.M.S.O., 1930. ———. Annual Report of the Department of Social Welfare Services, Western Region including Lagos for the Year 1953–54. Lagos: Government Printer, 1954. ———. Annual Report of the Federal Department of Social Welfare for the Year 1949–50. Lagos: Government Printer, 1950. ———. Annual Report of the Federal Department of Social Welfare for the Year 1954–55. Lagos: Government Printer, 1955. ———. Annual Report of the Federal Department of Social Welfare for the Year 1955–56. Lagos: Government Printer, 1956. ———. Annual Report of the Prisons Department for the Year 1946. Lagos: Government Printer, 1947. ———. Annual Report of the Social Welfare Department of the Western Region of Nigeria for the Year 1955–56. Lagos: Government Printer, 1956. ———. Annual Report on the Colony Welfare Service, 1949. Lagos: Government Printer, 1950. ———. Annual Report on the General Progress of Development and Welfare Schemes, 1945–46. Lagos, Nigeria: Government Printer, 1947.

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———. Annual Report on the General Progress of Development and Welfare Schemes, 1946–48. Lagos, Nigeria: Government Printer, 1948. ———. Annual Report on the General Progress of Development and Welfare Schemes, 1946–47 and 1947–48. Lagos: Government Printer, 1948. ———. Annual Report on the General Progress of Development and Welfare Schemes, 1948–49. Lagos: Government Printer, 1949. ———. Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1931. London: HM Stationery Office, 1932. ———. Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1934. London: HM Stationery Office, 1935. ———. Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1937. London: HM Stationery Office, 1939. ———. Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nigeria, 1938. London: HM Stationery Office, 1939. ———. Development and Welfare Report. Lagos: Colony Welfare Service, 1950. ———. Enquiry into the Cost of Living and the Control of the Cost of Living in the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1946. ———. Legislative Council, Select Committee. A Ten-Year Plan of Development and Welfare for Nigeria, 1946. Lagos: Government Printer, 1946. ———. Social Welfare Annual Report, 1947. Lagos: Government Printer, 1948. Nigeria. Census of Nigeria, 1931. London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1932. Nigeria, Department of Statistics. Population Census of Lagos, 1950. Kaduna: Government Printer, 1951. Nigeria, Prisons Department. Annual Report on the Treatment of Offenders for the Year 1940. Publication date unclear. ———. Annual Report on the Treatment of Offenders for the Year 1943. Lagos: Government Printer, 1944. ———. Annual Report on the Treatment of Offenders for the Year 1945. Lagos: Government Printer, 1946. ———. Annual Report on the Treatment of Offenders, 1947. Lagos: Government Printer, 1950. ———. Annual Report on the Treatment of Offenders for the Year 1949–50. Lagos: Government Printer, 51. Western Region of Nigeria. Annual Report of the Social Welfare Department of the Western Region of Nigeria for the Year 1954–55, Western Region. Lagos: Government Printer, 1955. ———. Annual Report of the Social Welfare Department of the Western Region of Nigeria for the Year 1955–56, Western Region. Lagos: Government Printer, 1956. ORAL SOURCES CITED Ms. Funmi Adekola Dr. Stephen Adeyinka Mrs. Olabisi Agbaje 280

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Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present, edited by Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell, 257–70. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Ajayi, Jacob Ade. “Colonialism: An Episode in African History.” In Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J. F. Ade Ajayi, edited by J. F. Ade Ajayi and Toyin Falola, 165–74. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999. Akinsemoyin, ‘Kunle. Who Are Lagosians? Lagos: Kard Press, 1979. Akinsemoyin, ‘Kunle, and Alan Vaughn-Richards. Building Lagos. Lagos: F. & A. Services, 1976. Araujo, Ana Lucia. Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and Images. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011. Atkins, Keletso E. The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money!: The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993. Awe, Bolanle. “Iyalode Efunsetan Aniwura.” In Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective, edited by Bolanle Awe, 55–71. Lagos: Sankore Publishers, 1992. ———. “The Iyalode in the Traditional Yoruba Political System.” In Readings in Gender in Africa, edited by Andrea Cornwall, 196–200. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. ———. Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective. Lagos: Sankore Publishers, 1992. Azikiwe, Nnamdi. Renascent Africa. 1937; repr., London: Cass, 1968. Bailey, Victor. Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Barber, Karin. “Money, Self-Realization, and the Person in Yoruba Texts.” In Money Matters: Instability, Values and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities, edited by Jane Guyer, 205–24. London: Heinemann, 1995. Barnes, Sandra. Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Bernault, Florence, ed. A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Berry, Sara. Fathers Work for Their Sons: Accumulation, Mobility, and Class Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Hegemony on a Shoestring: Indirect Rule and Access to Agricultural Land.” Africa 62, no. 3 (1992): 327–55. Bigon, Liora. “Between Local and Colonial Perceptions: The History of Slum Clearances in Lagos (Nigeria), 1924–1960.” Journal of African and Asian Studies 7, no. 1 (2008): 49–76. ———. A History of Urban Planning in Two West Africa Colonial Capitals: Residential Segregation in British Lagos and French Dakar, 1850–1930. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009. Brooke, Neville John. The Laws of Nigeria, Containing the Ordinances of Nigeria and Subsidiary Legislation Made Thereunder. Lagos: Government Printer, 1948. 282

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Brooks, George. “The Signares of Saint-Louis and Gorée: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Senegal.” In Women in Africa, edited by Nancy Hafkin and Edna Bay, 19–44. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976. Brown, Carolyn A. “A ‘Man’ in the Village is a ‘Boy’ in the Workplace: Colonial Racism, Worker Militance, and Igbo Notions of Masculinity in the Nigerian Coal Industry, 1930–1945.” In Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, edited by Lisa Lindsay and Stephen Miescher, 156–74. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. ———. “Race and the Construction of Working-Class Masculinity in the Nigerian Coal Industry: The Initial Phase, 1914–1930.” International Labor and Working-Class History 69 (Spring 2006): 35–56. Brown, Ian. “A Commissioner Calls: Alexander Paterson and Colonial Burma’s Prisons.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, no 2 (2007): 293–308. Brown, Spencer H. “Public Health in Lagos, 1850–1900: Perceptions, Patterns, and Perspectives.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (1992): 337–60. Burton, Andrew. African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam, 1919–1961. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. ———. “Urchins, Loafers, and the Cult of the Cowboy: Urbanization and Delinquency in Dar Es Salaam, 1919–1961.” Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (2001): 199–216. Burton, Andrew, and Helene Charton-Bigot, eds. Generations Past: Youth in East African History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. Busia, K. A. Report on Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi. Accra, Gold Coast: Government Printing Department, 1950. Byfield, Judith. The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Dyers in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1890–1940. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002. Byfield, Judith, LaRay Denzer, and Anthea Morrison, eds. Gendering the African Diaspora: Women, Culture, and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Cain, P. J., and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990. London: Longman, 1993. Campt, Tina, and Deborah Thomas. “Gendering Diaspora: Transnational Feminism, Diaspora and Its Hegemonies.” Feminist Review, no. 90, Gendering Diaspora (2008): 1–8. Carr, Henry. “The Education of Women.” In Henry Carr: Lectures and Speeches, collected by L. C. Gwam and edited by C. O. Taiwo. Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1969. Castillo, Lisa Earl. “Between Memory, Myth, and History: Transatlantic Voyagers of the Casa Branca Temple.” In Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and Images, edited by Ana Lucia Araujo, 203–38. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011. Chanock, Martin. Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Books, Articles, and Dissertations

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Judith Byfield, LaRay Denzer, and Anthea Morrison, 245–84. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Ekwensi, Cyprian. People of the City. London: Heinemann, 1963. ———. When Love Whispers. Yaba, Nigeria: Chuks Services, 1948. Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Euba, Titi. “Dress and Status in Nineteenth-Century Lagos.” In History of the Peoples of Lagos State, edited by Ade Adefuye, Babatunde Agiri, and Jide Osuntokun, 142–65. Ikeja, Nigeria: Lantern Books, 1987. Fadipe, N. A. Sociology of the Yoruba. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1970. Fafunwa, Babatunde. History of Education in Nigeria. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974. Fajana, Adewunmi. Education in Nigeria, 1842–1939: An Historical Analysis. Ikeja, Nigeria: Longman, 1978. Falola, Toyin. “Pawnship in Colonial Southwestern Nigeria.” In Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective, edited by Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy, 245–66. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. Falola, Toyin, and Akanmu Adebayo, eds. Culture, Politics, and Money among the Yoruba. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999. Falola, Toyin, and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds. Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. ———. “Pawnship in Historical Perspective.” In Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective, edited by Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy, 1–26. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. ———, eds. Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. Faulkner, Donald. “A Juvenile Court.” Nigeria Magazine, no. 34 (1949–50): 257–61. ———. “Social Welfare and Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos, Nigeria.” Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 6, no. 4 (1945): 192–96. Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Fourchard, Laurent. “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria, 1920–60.” Journal of African History 47, no. 1 (2006): 115–37. ———. “The Making of the Juvenile Delinquent in Nigeria and South Africa, 1930–1970.” History Compass 8, no. 2 (2010): 129–42. ———. “Urban Poverty, Urban Crime, and Crime Control: The Lagos and Ibadan Cases, 1929–45.” In African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective, edited by Steven J. Salm and Toyin Falola, 291–319. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005. Fourchard, Laurent, and Isaac Olawale Albert, eds. Security, Crime, and Segregation in West African Cities since the 19th Century. Paris: Institut français de recherche en Afrique, 2003. Books, Articles, and Dissertations

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Fry, Margery, et al., eds. Lawless Youth: A Challenge to the New Europe: A Policy for the Juvenile Courts Prepared by the International Committee of the Howard League for Penal Reform 1942–1945. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1947. Gandy, Matthew. “Planning, Anti-planning, and the Infrastructure Crisis Facing Metropolitan Lagos.” Urban Studies 43, no. 2 (2006): 371–96. George, Abosede. “Within Salvation: Girl Hawkers and the Colonial State in Development Era Lagos.” Journal of Social History 44, no. 3 (2011): 837–59. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. Glaser, Clive. “Swines, Hazels and the Dirty Dozen: Masculinity, Territoriality and the Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1960–1976.” Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (December 1989): 719–36. Glassman, Jonathan. Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888. Dar Es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota, 1995. Grantham, A. G. Annual Volume of the Laws of Nigeria Containing All Legislation Enacted during the Year 1943. Lagos: Government Printer, 1944. Grier, Beverly. Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006. ———. “Invisible Hands: The Political Economy of Child Labour in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1930.” Journal of Southern African Studies 20, no. 1 (1994): 27–52. Hair, P. E. H. “The Cowboys: A Nigerian Acculturative Institution (ca. 1950).” History in Africa 28 (2001): 83–93. Hansen, Karen T., ed. African Encounters with Domesticity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Hart, Richard. “Labour Rebellions of the 1930s.” In Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present, edited by Hilary Beckles and Veren Shepherd, 370–75. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Weiner Publishers, 1996. Hawthorne, Walter. Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Hay, Douglas, and Paul Craven, eds. Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Heap, Simon. “‘Their Days Are Spent in Gambling and Loafing, Pimping for Prostitutes and Picking Pockets’: Male Juvenile Delinquents on Lagos Island, 1920–1960.” Journal of Family History 35, no. 1 (2010): 48–70. Hill, Polly. “Markets in Africa.” Journal of Modern African Studies 1, no. 4 (1963): 441–53. Hodder, B. W., and U. I. Ukwu. Markets in West Africa: Studies of Markets and Trade among the Yoruba and Ibo. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1969. 286

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Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Lauren, Paul Gordon. The Evolution of International Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Law, Robin, and Kristin Mann. “West Africa in the Atlantic Community.” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 308–9. Lawal, Bayo A. “Markets and Street Trading in Lagos.” In Nigerian Cities, edited by Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm, 237–54. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004. Lawrance, Benjamin N. “La Révolte des Femmes: Economic Upheaval and the Gender of Political Authority in Lomé, Togo, 1931–33.” African Studies Review 46, no. 1 (2003): 43–67. Leith-Ross, Sylvia. Stepping Stones: Memoirs of Colonial Nigeria, 1907–1960. London: P. Owen, 1983. Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. New York: Routledge, 2003. Lewis, Joanna. “ ‘Tropical East Ends’ and the Second World War: Some Contradictions in Colonial Office Welfare Initiatives.” In Administering Empire: The British Colonial Service in Retrospect, edited by John Smith, 61–91. London: University of London Press, 1999. Lewis, W. Arthur. “The 1930s Social Revolution.” In Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present, edited by Hilary Beckles and Veren Shepherd, 376–92. Princeton: Marcus Weiner Publishers, 1996. Lindsay, Lisa. “Domesticity and Difference: Male Breadwinners, Working Women, and Colonial Citizenship in the 1945 Nigerian General Strike.” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 783–812. ———. “Money, Marriage, and Masculinity on the Colonial Nigerian Railway.” In Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, edited by Lisa Lindsay and Stephen Miescher, 138–55. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. ———. “A Tragic Romance, A Nationalist Symbol: The Case of the Murdered White Lover in Colonial Nigeria.” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 2 (2005): 118–41. ———. Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Lydon, Ghislaine. On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Macgregor, William. “A Discussion on Malaria and Its Prevention.” British Medical Journal 2, no. 2124 (1901): 682. ———. “A Lecture on Malaria.” British Medical Journal 2, no. 2190 (1902): 1890. Macmillan, W. M. Warning from the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and the Empire. London: Faber and Faber, 1936. 288

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Mann, Kristin. “The Dangers of Dependence: Christian Marriage among Elite Women in Lagos Colony, 1880–1915.” Journal of African History 24, no. 1 (1983): 37–56. ———. Marrying Well: Marriage, Status, and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ———. Slavery and the Birth of an African City. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Mantena, Karuna. Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Imperial Liberalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Marks, Shula, ed. Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women: Correspondence of Lily Moya, Mabel Palmer, and Sibusisiwe Makhanya. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1987. Martin, Phyllis M. Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Matory, J. Lorand. “The English Professors of Brazil.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 1 (1999): 72–103. Mba, Nina Emma. Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activity in Southern Nigeria, 1900–1965. Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1982. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston. Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. McKittrick, Meredith. “The ‘Burden’ of Young Men: Property and Generational Conflict in Namibia, 1880–1945.” African Economic History 24 (1996): 115–29. ———. “Faithful Daughter, Murdering Mother: Transgression and Social Control in Colonial Namibia.” Journal of African History 40, no. 2 (1999): 265–83. ———. To Dwell Secure: Generation, Christianity, and Colonialism in Ovamboland. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002. Miers, Suzanne, and Richard Roberts, eds. The End of Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Milanich, Nara. Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Morrell, Robert. “Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies.” Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 605–30. Mott-Smith, May. Africa from Port to Port. New York: D. Van Nostrand, ca. 1930. Naanen, Benjamin. “‘Itinerant Gold Mines’: Prostitution in the Cross River Basin of Nigeria, 1930–1950.” African Studies Review 34, no. 2 (1991): 71. Neville, J. B. The Laws of Nigeria, Containing the Ordinances of Nigeria. Lagos: Government Printer, 1948. Books, Articles, and Dissertations

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Nwokeji, Ugo. Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Ochonu, Moses. “Conjoined to Empire: The Great Depression and Nigeria.” African Economic History 34 (2006): 103–45. Ohadike, Don. “The Decline of Slavery among the Igbo People.” In The End of Slavery in Africa, edited by Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, 437– 61. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Okonkwo, Rina. Protest Movements in Lagos, 1908–1930. Enugu: ABIC Publishers, 1998. Olukoju, Ayodeji. The Liverpool of West Africa: The Dynamics and Impact of Maritime Trade in Lagos, 1900–1950. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004. Olusanya, G. O. “Charlotte Olajumoke Obasa.” In Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective, edited by Bolanle Awe. Lagos: Sankore Publishers, 1992. Ottenberg, Simon. Boyhood Rituals in an African Society: An Interpretation. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989. Oyewumi, Oyeronke. “Abiyamo: Theorizing African Motherhood.” Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women’s Studies, no. 4 (2003), http://www .jendajournal.com/. ———. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Oyono, Ferdinand. Houseboy. Translated by John Reed. London: Heinemann, 1966. Packard, Randall, and Frederick Cooper, eds. International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Parsons, Tim. Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Paterson, Alexander. Report on a Visit to the Prisons of Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Aden, and Somaliland during 1939. Morija: Morija Print Works, 1944. Perham, Margery, ed. Ten Africans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Peters, Krijn, and Paul Richards. “Why We Fight: Voices of Youth Combatants in Sierra Leone.” Africa: Journal of International African Institute 68, no. 2 (1998): 183–210. Piot, Charles. “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.” South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 1 (2001): 155–70. Ranger, Terence. Dance and Society in Eastern Africa: The Beni Ngoma. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Ray, Carina. “The ‘White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race, and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa.” Gender and History 21, no. 3 (2009): 628–46. 290

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Reis, João José. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Renne, Elisha. “Childhood Memories and Contemporary Parenting in Ekiti, Nigeria.” Africa 75, no. 1 (2005): 71. Roberts, Richard, and Kristin Mann, eds. Law in Colonial Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991. Robertson, Claire C. Sharing the Same Bowl? A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Robertson, Claire C., and Martin A. Klein, eds. Women and Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Romero, Patricia, ed. Women’s Voices on Africa: A Century of Travel Writings. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishing, 1992. Rose, Nikolas. “Government, Authority, and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism.” Economy and Society 22, no. 3 (1993): 290–92. Rose, Sonya. “Sex, Citizenship, and the Nation in World War II Britain.” American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (1998): 1147–76. Rosiji, Gbemi. Lady Ademola: Portrait of a Pioneer: Biography of Lady Kofoworola Aina Ademola MBE OFR. Lagos: EnClair Publishers, 1996. Ryan, Isobel. Black Man’s Palaver. Oxford: Allen Press, 1958. Salm, Steven J. “Rain or Shine ‘We Gonna Rock’: Dance Subcultures and Identity Construction in Accra, Ghana.” In Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed, edited by Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, 361–75. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003. Schildkrout, Enid. “Age and Gender in Hausa Society: Socioeconomic Roles of Children in Urban Kano.” Childhood 9, no. 3 (2002): 342–68. Schler, Lynn. “Transnationalism and Nationalism in the Nigerian Seamen’s Union.” African Identities 7, no. 2 (2009): 387–98. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. ———. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Scully, Pamela. “Gender, History, and Human Rights.” In Gender and Culture at the Limits of Rights, edited by Dorothy Hodgson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Semley, Lorelle. Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Shadle, Brett. Girl Cases: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890–1970. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006. Shankar, Shobana. “Children of the Mission in Kano Emirate: Conflicts of Conversion in Colonial Northern Nigeria, c. 1899–1953.” PhD diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 2003. Sharp, Evelyn. The African Child: An Account of the International Conference on African Children, Geneva. London: Longmans, Green, 1931. Books, Articles, and Dissertations

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Silverberg, Miriam. “The Modern Girl as Militant.” In Recreating Japanese Women, edited by Gail Lee Bernstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Simone, AbdouMaliq. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Smith, Mary. Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa, 1877–1951. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Smith, Robert, ed. Memoirs of Giambattista Scala, Consul of His Italian Majesty in Lagos in Guinea (1862). Translated by Brenda Packman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Speed, Edwin Arney, M.A., L.T.B., comp. Ordinances and Orders and Rules Thereunder in Force in the Colony of Lagos on April 30th, 1901. London: Stevens and Sons, 1902. Stearns, Peter. Childhood in World History. New York: Routledge, 2006. Stockdale, Sir Frank. Development and Welfare in the West Indies, 1940–1942. London: HM Stationery Office, 1943. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ———. “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, 198–237. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Sudarkasa, Niara, and Gloria A. Marshall. Where Women Work: A Study of Yoruba Women in the Marketplace and in the Home. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973. Sule, Olu. “Recent Slum Clearance Exercise in Lagos (Nigeria): Victims or Beneficiaries?” GeoJournal 22, no. 1 (1990): 81–91. Taiwo, C. O., ed. Henry Carr: Lectures and Speeches. Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1969. Tejuoso, Olakunle, Weyinmi Atigbi, Ololade Bamidele, and Demola Ogunajo, eds. Lagos: A City at Work. Lagos: Glendora Books, 2007. Thioub, Ibrahima. “Juvenile Marginality and Incarceration during the Colonial Period.” In A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, edited by Florence Bernault, 79–95. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Thomas, Lynn. “ ‘Ngaitana (I Will Circumcise Myself)’: The Gender and Generational Politics of the 1958 Ban on Clitoridectomy in Meru, Kenya.” Gender & History 8, no. 3 (1996): 338–63. ———. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Tijani, Hakeem. Britain, Leftist Nationalists, and the Transfer of Power in Nigeria, 1945–1965. New York: Routledge, 2005.

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Vail, Leroy, and Landeg White. “Forms of Resistance: Songs and Perceptions of Power in Colonial Mozambique.” American Historical Review 88, no. 4 (1983): 883–919. Van Beusekom, Monica M., and Dorothy L. Hodgson. “Lessons Learned? Development Experiences in the Late Colonial Period.” Journal of African History 41, no. 1 (2000): 29–33. Vaughn, Megan. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Walkowitz, Judith R. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Waller, Richard. “Rebellious Youth in Colonial Africa.” Journal of African History 47, no. 1 (2006): 77–92. Weinbaum, Alys Eve, Lynn Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeline Yue-Dong, and Tani E. Barlow, eds. The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. White, Luise. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. White, Owen. Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Woolacott, Angela. “Khaki Fever and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age, and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War.” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 2 (1994): 325–47. Zachernuk, Philip. Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

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Index

Abayomi, Oyinkan, 104–5, 107, 115, 180, 202, 213, 218, 242n43 Abeokuta Women’s Union, 214; critique of colonialism, 214; critique of patriarchy, 214; and decolonization discourse, 214 Abioye, Shola, 17 abolition: and child domestic labor, 13 abolitionists: and Alien Children Registration Ordinance, 5; and Colonial Penal Administration Committee, 68; and Lagos slave trade, 4; antislavery campaign, 226 Action Group party, 220; and education, 221 Adedeji, Sulia, 119, 121 Ademola, Kofoworola (Moore), 30–31; memoir, 18, 30–33, 52, 241n18 Adepoju, Abiodun, 1 Alien Children Registration Ordinance, 3–6, 233nn3–7; and anti–slave trade ordinances, 4; and birth registration, 3 Apala music and dance, 115–16, 256n8 Atlantic, Black, 27; and class, 32; diasporic relations, 52 (see also Ademola, Kofoworola: memoir); hegemonic discourses of, 32; women travelers in, 33 Atlantic African diaspora, 32–33 Atlantic Studies, 27 AWU (Abeokuta Women’s Union), 214 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 211–12. See also renascent African discourse boys: delinquent, 17, 171, 185; education of, 54, 260n52; hawkers, 54, 118, 133, 204, 206–7 (see also hawking, boys); hostels, 71, 97– 98; and masculinity, 200; problem, 17, 59; reformation of, 17, 72, 98, 171, 184–87, 200 (see also Enugu Industrial School); and street trading regulations, 202, 204, 206 Busia, K. A., 129–30 Cavendish report, 1922, 54–59, 117 ceremonies, naming, 1–2, 16 childhood, 1; and class, 2; colonial model of Western, 222; the end of, 137–38; and family, 2, 19, 28–33, 35, 77, 81–82, 91, 121, 131–32, 151, 165, 199–200, 217; and

inequality, 141; and memoir, 18, 176; and militarism, 79–80 (see also Enugu Industrial School); and responsibility, 2, 19, 28, 34–36, 41, 61, 66, 75, 101, 186, 201, 206; and slavery, 5, 111, 146, 150, 152–53 (see also Children and Young Person’s Ordinance); social function of, 2; studies on, 13; symbolism of, 2, 65, 129, 216; and universalism, 6, 19, 65, 70–71, 101, 171; and urban citizenship, 232; and violence, 134–36, 139–40; Yoruba, understanding of, 223; and Young Person’s Ordinance, 20, 141. See also youth children: as abject, 227; and Christian missionary groups, 3; class difference of, 2, 35–36, 133–34, 197; colonial, 71–72, 88; as colonized subjects, 4, 110, 171 (see also Alien Children Registration Ordinance); Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 67–68; definition in relation to juvenile delinquency, 69, 101, 110; definition in relation to sexuality, 14–15, 139; detribalized, 199–200; developmentalist political ideology and, 11, 172, 205; education of, 54, 67, 188, 204; family and, 2, 19, 88, 101; and formation of modern urban subjects, 12, 61, 171–72, 189; fostering of, 143, 146, 148,150, 152–54, 169, 184; and freedom, 3, 5; games and toys, 196; as a global class, 19; hawking, 17, 20, 53–59, 62, 94, 102, 106, 110, 114–21, 189, 202, 256n8 (see also hawking, girls); and health, 200 (see also disease); history of, 13; ideal, 2, 61, 101; and imperial liberalism, 63, 72; inequality of, 15; and labor, 34–36, 61, 93–94; legal personhood of, 199; leisure activities, 115–16, 196; and local forms of discipline, 198–99; modern, 61, 71–72, 89, 101, 194, 199–201, 221; mortality, 42 (see also infant mortality); naming ceremonies, 1–2, 16; native, 6, 64, 110; normative school, 226; and prostitution, 55–57, 134, 141 (see also prostitution: female underage); and reform institutions, 65–66, 70, 75, 77, 88, 99–111, 172; and the reformist ideology, 172;

295

children (cont.) and regulations against hawking, 204–7, 190, 216 (see also hawking, girls); salvationist views of, 4–6, 113–14, 135–37, 221 (see also colonial state: salvationist project); and slavery, 3, 111, 146, 150–54, 264n38; slaves, 5 (see also prostitution: female underage); social history, 11, 15–16, 36; and social difference, 15, 35–36, 166, 168; and social notions of progress, 16, 60, 199; and social organization, 15, 36, 101; society, 2; and the State, 4, 101; studies on, 13–15; surveys, 97–98, 130, 137–39, 260n52 (see also reports: Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos); training, 3, 184–89; as a universal generational group, 6, 71, 101, 171; as a universal subject in Africa, 6, 19, 70; and urban space, 59–60, 87, 97, 101, 114, 199; and violence, 13 (see also prostitution: female underage); as young Africans, 65–66, 200 Children and Young Person’s Ordinance, 20, 90, 109–12, 114, 141, 172, 176, 178–82, 184, 207–8; nationalist debates, 215 Children’s Police Force, 172, 174 Child Rights Act, 225 Child Rights Law, 225–26 Colonial Development and Welfare Act, 1940, 8–9, 95, 234n15, 234n19 colonial state: Abeokuta Women’s Union critique of, 214; and carceral institutions, 66, 70; child, universal, and, 65, 70; and child labor, 76, 86, 94–95, 118, 258n22 (see also hawking, street); children, modern, and, 71–72, 89, 199; and the colonizedcolonizer dichotomy, 11–12, 15, 70, 236n29; developmentalist ideology of, 8–9, 20, 63, 69, 172, 185, 199, 202–3, 205, 219; developmentalist ideas of girl hawkers and the, 221–22; and exploitation, 47; girlhood, transformation of, 6–8; and girls’ education, 7, 48–49, 204; and hawking regulation, 202; and imperial liberalism, 62–63; and industrial man, 199; and infant mortality campaign, 37; during interwar period, 68; and juvenile institutions, 65–66, 70, 77, 172 (see also Enugu Industrial School); and Lagos Ladies League, 39; and modern colonial subject, 86, 171–72; and modernizing ideology, 9; and nationalism, 203; salvationist project, 7–8, 12, 17, 19–21, 113–14, 137, 166, 202, 204, 208, 210, 226–27; and social categories, 11; and social development projects, 8–11,46, 88, 95–96, 172, 199, 205; and subject formation, 47, 65–66, 88; and trade unions, 272n22; and women reformers, 141, 208, 220; Yoruba culture and, 12, 25, 121, 218, 222–23

296

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Index

Colony Welfare Office, 20, 175, 180, 190; transformation into Western Regional Social Welfare Services Department, 218; and underage prostitution, 155, 157, 169. See also Juvenile Court Centre Cooper, Frederick, 8–9, 11 court, juvenile, 111, 172–76, 218. See also Juvenile Court Centre Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 67–68 delinquency: and the Boy’s Remand Home, 185–88; and class-based discrimination, 180; classification of offences and, 177–78; colonial narrative about, 190; and the justice system, 171–72; and migration, 53, 184; public opinion about, 115; statistics, 178–79. See also Children and Young Person’s Ordinance; hawking, girls; juvenile delinquency delinquency, juvenile. See juvenile delinquency developmentalist ideology, 9, 235n24; and children’s reform, 72, 199–200; and colonial subjects, 95; and masculinity, 9–11; and urban workforce, 10; and women reformers, 8, 10–11, 20, 114, 203, 221–22 development work, 202–3, 205; history in Africa, 8–10, 235n24 diaspora, African: diasporic background, 25; diasporic relations, 52 (see also Ademola, Kofoworola) disease: Christian morality and, 200; as collective pathology, 200; craw craw, 194, 197; gonorrhea, 181, 193; infant mortality and, 37–39; malaria, 37–38, 44, 48; modernity and, 200; Venereal Disease Ordinance, 165; and virginity, 136 Doherty, Dorcas, 192, 197–98 Douglas, H. Millicent: biography, 105–6; and Children’s Own Newspaper, 106; conflict with Colony Welfare League, 107–8, 254n65; and West African Pilot, 105; and Women’s Welfare Council, 104, 106–9, 254n70 Enugu Industrial School, 16, 19–20, 66, 72–75, 77, 79–82, 84–85, 88, 90, 98, 184, 246n35; other names for, 72–73 ewi, 2; poems, 1; naming ceremonies, 1; and weddings, 1. See also children: naming ceremonies family: and children’s discipline, 198–99; colonial, 88; and nationalism, 220; patriarchal, 19 Faulkner, Donald, 96, 104, 106, 109, 133, 147, 154, 176, 183, 218; and the Colony Welfare Office, 147; and the Girls Hostel, 192–98; and the Enugu Industrial School, 20, 73,

89; and H. J. Savory, 96–101; and Howard League, 174; and Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos report, 96–101; and Second World War, 144, 166–68; and social work, 71, 136; strategies of correction, 198; training background, 198; and the Women’s Welfare Council (WWC), 103–4, 106–9 feminism: Africanist critique of, 271n17; and history of girls, 14–15; indigenous activists, 227; and nationalism, 21, 208, 214; and social category of girlhood, 15; and women reformers, 21 Freetown, 23, 145 Funmilayo, Ransome-Kuti, 21, 214 gender: and age, 87–88, 207, 242n39, 271n17; and agency, 14, 41; ascriptions within the Lagos Women’s League, 44, 51; and Black Atlantic, 32–33; and colonial femininity, 44; and colonial subjects, 171–72; and contemporary developmentalist ideology, 11, 235n24; contrast between delinquent boys and problem girls, 171–72, 178–80; contrast between Yoruba and Christian gender identifications, 41–42, 116; developmentalist gender constructions of the modern child, 221; and development history in Africa, 9–11, 235n24; and development work, 10; distinction between boy and girl hawkers, 59, 118, 180, 207; and economic independence, 41; generational conflict, 13–14, 239n40; generational difference, 239n40, 242n39; glamour girls, 215–17 (see also girls, problem); and hawking, 110, 114, 118, 121, 180, 207; and history of sexuality, 15; and juvenile criminal offenses, 177–78; and juvenile delinquency, 14, 87, 97, 100–101, 102, 171–72, 177–80, 189–91; and juvenile institutional salvation, 19, 171, 204; and juvenile reform institutions, 88, 100, 171, 184, 200; and labor, 122–23; and legislation, 110, 177–78; and marriage, 40–41 (see also hawking, girls); masculinity, 10, 80, 200, 220; nationalism and the construction of womanhood, 220; and pawnship, 151; popular culture, 14; and national power, 220; and renascent African discourse, 214; and representation, 227; and sexual exploitation, 141 (see also children; hawking, girls; marriage: customary); and study of youth, 14; and techniques of juvenile reform, 180, 207; — for boys, 184–88; — for girls, 189–97; tensions between nationalist politics and gender politics, 220; and trade unions, 9; universal worker in Africa, 19; and Victorian ideals, 41; violence, 139–40, 207; Yoruba understanding of, 34, 41, 221–23, 242n39

generational difference: childhood and youth studies on, 13–15; and class, 108, 197–98; male conflict and, 14, 239n40; and violence, 134–37, 239n40; women, first generation Western-educated, 40; in Yoruba society, 255n73; youth and, 15 girlhood: and education Western-style, 7, 32, 33, 48, 49, 59, 122–23, 129–30, 132, 212, 232; elite model of, 30, 35–37; end of, 137–38; and femininity, 7, 171–72, 189–97, 200; as gendered variation of childhood, 221; as modern ideal, 7, 12, 14, 36, 53, 56–57, 60, 129, 171–72, 197, 200, 208, 221–22, 224; and modern womanhood, 7, 114, 116, 193–94, 200, 204; as a normative idea, 11, 16; in public space, 16, 113–14, 133 (see also hawking, street); sexuality and, 14–15, 129, 136, 224; transformation of, 7; urban, 227; and urban colonial economy, 7, 133. See also girls; girls, problem girls: of bad character, 19, 53, 60, 140, 143, 146, 230; bodily integrity, 209; and class difference, 21, 36–37, 56; and customary marriage (see marriage); and developmentalist ideology, 10, 221; and education, 12, 48–51, 53, 129, 204, 208; elite, 18, 36–37, 60; hawkers (see hawking, girls); hostels, 71, 97, 103, 106, 136, 179, 184, 189– 94, 196–98, 205; ideal, 36, 53, 57, 140; illicit behavior, 7, 53, 102, 129, 134, 140 (see also hawking, street; prostitution); incarceration, 215; and Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos report, 97–98; and labor, 12, 20–21, 36, 53, 119, 122, 207–8; labor, household, 133, 207 (see also hawking, girls); market, 103, 129 (see also hawking, girls); ordinary rights of citizenship, 209; and parental rights, 205–6, 208–9; prostitution, 55–57, 102, 115, 117, 136, 140, 141–43 (see also girls, problem; hawking, girls; prostitution: female underage); and rape, 137, 139; schoolgirls, stereotypes of, 216; schoolgirls, tragic, 217; sex trade, 143–50, 154, 164, 169; sexual contact, 7, 56, 110, 134, 136–37, 261n56; sexual exploitation, 141; sexuality, 12, 15, 53, 114–15, 135–41, 181; smuggling of, 4; socialization of, 214; —, and domestic training, 191; —, and hawking, 118–19, 123, 139, 202, 224; studies on, 14, 15; violence against, 134–37, 142; and virginity, 136, 148–49, 154, 166–67; working-class, 113–14, 134–36, 221. See also girlhood; girls, problem; hawking, girls girls, problem, 17, 19, 57, 59, 71, 91, 102–3, 113, 114, 140, 142; and cultural nationalism, 217; and marriage, 208; and new forms of consumption, 215–16; and public space, 230; reformation of, 171, 184, 189–98, 200 (see also girls: hostels); repatriation of, 146, 154, 170

Index

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297

hawking, boys, 54; and masculinity, 206; and modernity, 206 hawking, girls, 17, 20, 53–54, 102, 106, 110, 114–21, 189, 202, 256n8; arrest of, 215, 218–19; campaigns against, 110, 115, 222, 232; contrast between women traders and, 124, 129; criminalization of, 129, 180, 219, 222, 231; defense of, 207, 217–18; and developmentalist constructions of the modern child, 221; and domesticity, 207, 221; and femininity, 207, 221; as homemakers, 207; and household labor, 133, 210; as indigenous practice, 121, 218; and Lagos public opinion, 219; leisure practices (see Apala music and dance); and market trading, 54, 121, 123; and modern womanhood, 116, 202; and moral danger,115, 207; and parental power, 204–5, 209; proregulation arguments of, 218–19; and public space, 208, 215; and rape, 139, 140, 202, 204, 207; and sexual exploitation, 141, 159; and sexuality, 131–41; as sexualized bodies, 139, 218–19; as social ill, 218–19; and social maintenance, 210; as socialization practice, 118–19, 123, 139, 202, 224; and street trading regulations, 114, 205, 207, 209; and underage prostitution, 116, 159, 169, 181; and urban colonial economy, 210; and violence, 139, 202; and well-being of the nation, 202, 230; and Yoruba gender discourse, 221 hawking, street: ban against, 115, 141, 204, 208, 219, 226; and cultural nationalism, 210; dangers of, 126, 127, 201–2; description of 115–25, 127, 140; definition of, 205; and illicit sexuality, 129, 134–37 (see also prostitution: female underage); as indigenous practice, 217–18; and interracial sexual contact, 110; as a local cultural practice, 211, 218; memoirs, 244; and migration, 54, 124; organized compensation of, 131; and parental power, 201, 204–6, 209, 226; regulation of, 204, 206, 208, 210, 226; and schoolgirls,129–32; social function of, 118–19, 210; socioeconomic conditions of, 205–6, 210; and street trading regulations, 109–10, 180, 205–6, 209; and venereal disease, 136, 181, 184, 261n66 humanitarianism, 4 ideal child, 1–2. See also girlhood: as modern ideal; girls: ideal imperial liberalism, 62–63 indigeneity: and modernity, 211; and nationalism, 211 infant mortality: reduction campaign, 37–39, 42–44, 47, 60 (see also Lagos Ladies League) Izzett, Alison, 136–37

298

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James, Allison, 15 Jenks, Chris, 15 Johnson-Odim, Cheryl, 21 Juvenile Court Centre: courtroom layout of, 174, 188; “The Welfare,” 172–76 juvenile delinquency, 68–70, 72–74, 77, 86, 96–100, 102, 114, 147; and gender, 14, 87, 97, 100–101, 102, 171–72, 177, 189–91 (see also gender); Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos report, 96–98. See also court, juvenile; delinquency; Juvenile Court Centre juvenile welfare system, 99–100, 170, 172, 176, 180, 185, 189–90, 198–99, 205, 208, 219 juvenile welfare work, 91, 99–100, 102, 199; and the Women’s Welfare Council, 103–4 labor: child, 93; and child exploitation, 226; and the colonial prison system, 65; and family, 165; and female socialization, 123; and gender, 122; girl, 12, 34–35, 119; and girls’ education, 50; law, 21; and marriage, 41; and migration, 53, 92–94, 102–4, 131–32, 146, 149, 164–65, 167, 199, 210–12, 217; and reformation, 75, 77, 81, 86 (see also Enugu Industrial School); wage, 8–10, 55, 92, 94, 103, 132, 149, 167, 212, 258n32; Washingtonian approach to, 50; Yoruba women, 122–23. See also hawking, girls; prostitution; slavery; women: traders Lagos: contemporary ideas of, 231; as Federal Territory after independence from British rule, 218–19; as a free state, 24; population narratives, 229; and rural migrants, 230; and urban identity, 230; urbanism, 228. See also Lagos Colony Lagos Colony: and African women’s authority, 40; agricultural production, 122; annexation and, 3, 23, 40; architecture, 25–26, 240n7; and children, 3, 101, 103; and Christianity, 40; and class differences, 28–30; delinquency, 97, 99, 181 (see also juvenile delinquency); economic disparity, 26; education, 93, 204, 260n52; elite class, 28, 31–32, 40, 60, 216; identity, 231–32; immigrants, 90, 92–94, 125–26, 146, 164, 251n6 (see also labor); infant mortality, 37–39; nineteenth-century demographic differences, 25; publichealth measures, 38; sanitation, 38; sex trade, 143–45, 149, 154–56, 158–59, 164, 168–70, 265n69 (see also prostitution); survey, 97; survey, intergenerational, 33–37, 130–33, 137; urban citizenship, 232; Victorian households, 60; working-class, 33, 120; and Yoruba language, 232 Lagos Ladies League, 30, 37, 240n13; and black political rights, 44; and Christianity, 134; and colonial public

policy, 39, 102–3; decline of, 44–45; and diasporic background, 43; difference between Lagos Women’s League and, 60; as an elite social club, 39; gender ascriptions, 44; as home visitors, 40; and ideal girlhood, 40; and infant mortality campaign, 42–44, 47, 60; and racial affiliation, 52; and Saro descendants, 43; social obligations, 42–43; social vision, 42; and social welfare, 44, 46; and Western education, 39 Lagos Women’s League, 19, 46, 102–3, 133, 240n13; and child hawkers 53, 59, 134, 137; difference between Lagos Ladies League and, 60; and girls’ universal education, 48–49, 50–51; and the Ladies Progressive Club, 213; and literacy, 213; and repatriation of girls, 146; and separation of church and school, 49; and Victorian era, 48; and Western education, 52 law: Alien Children Registration Ordinance, 3–6, 233nn3–7; Children and Young Person’s Ordinance, 20, 90, 109–12, 114, 141, 172, 176, 178–82, 184, 207–8, 215; children’s labor, regulating, 3; Child Rights Act, 225; Child Rights Law, 225–26; Colonial Development and Welfare Act, 8–9, 95, 234n15, 234n19; and custody, 3; Marriage Ordinance, 158–59, 182, 208–9; moral danger category, 181–82, 184; and moral protection for children (see also hawking, girls); Pullen Scheme, 92, 251n8; as a salvationist enterprise, 4, 204, 208; and slave children’s transit, 5; Slavery Ordinance, 150, 263n26; Street Trading Regulations, 109–10, 114, 184, 202, 204–5, 208–10; Unlicensed Guide Prohibition Ordinance, 165; Venereal Disease Ordinance, 165 Makanjuola, Wale, 17, 124 male breadwinner ideal, 21, 258n32; and masculinity, 9, 191, 171–72, 200 Mann, Kristin, 4, 18, 27, 40 marriage: brokers, 156, 161, 163; and Christianity, 40; and class status, 41, 153, 168; customary, 158–59, 162–63, 166, 169, 209; and economic independence, 40–41; and elite families, 40–41; and hawkers, 207–8; and masculinity, 41; and migration, 183; native customs of, 156, 163–64, 169, 183; and pawnship, 151, 154, 160, 264n38 (see also prostitution; Lagos Colony: sex trade); and problem girls, 208; and prostitution, 155–56, 161, 164, 166, 169; proxy, 20, 143, 163, 264n38; and women reformers, 208; and Yoruba cultural norms, 41 Marriage Ordinance, 158–59, 182, 208–9

masculinity: boys and, 80, 200, 206; and citizenship, 214; colonial forms of, 220; and developmentalist ideology, 9–11; and development work, 10; within Enugu Institution, 80; ideal, 9; as an identity, 10; marriage and, 41; nationalism and, 220; performance and, 14, 237n34; reform and, 200; youth and, 14 materialism, 41, 48 Mba, Nina Emma, 21 memoirs, 74, 244n1, 259; Adedeji, Sulia, 119, 121; Ademola, Kofoworola, 18, 32–33, 52; Leith-Ross, Sylvia, 62; Ryan, Isobel, 176 methodology, 16–17, 33–34, 36, 42, 74–75, 121, 124–27, 130–31 Milanich, Nara, 239n44 missionaries: children and, 88, 98; and colonial medicine, 200 modernity: children as a measure of, 232; cultural nationalism and defense of girl hawkers, 217; disease and, 200; indigeneity and, 211; and Lagosian identity, 232; renascent African discourse and, 211; street hawking and, 206; Western education and, 232 Moore, Kofoworola. See Ademola, Kofoworola motherhood: public, 41–42, 44, 242n39; Victorian ideal of, 41; Yoruba, 41–42, 242n39 music, and working class: Apala drum, 114; Apala music, 115–16, 256n8. See also children: leisure activities nationalism: and Abeokuta Women’s Union, 214; and colonial forms of masculinity, 220; cultural, 21, 210–11, 214–16, 218; cultural, and anticolonial politics, 211; and gender politics, 214, 220; and Nigerian Women’s Party, 213–14; and Nigerian Youth Movement, 146, 203; and the patriarchal family, 220; and politics, 203; against underage prostitution, 146; womanhood under, 220; and women groups, 21, 122, 203, 220 Nigerian independence, 221 Nigerian Women’s Party, 141, 221, 268n21; and Action Group party, 220–21; and adult literacy program, 213; and discourse of improvement, 214; and equal pay for females, 213; nationalist politics, 213; objectives, 213 Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM), 146–46 Nwachukwu, Peace, 251n15, 263n23, 271n66 Olajumoke Obasa, Charlotte, 18, 29, 53, 103; and the Lagos Ladies League, 30, 39 oriki, 2 Oyewumi, Oyeronke, 11, 221

Index

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299

Pan-Africanism, 212; anticolonial movement, 203; postcolonial Nigeria and, 203; and subjectivity, 105–6 problem girls. See girls, problem prostitution, 47; and customary marriage, 156–59, 162–63 (see also marriage: native customs of); economy of, 20, 145, 169; as family labor, 165; female underage, 20, 53–59, 136, 142–69, 181, 261n66 (see also hawking, street); interracial, 144, 166, 168; investigations of, 56, 136–37, 141, 166, 169, 183, 261n66 (see also Cavendish report, 1922); legislation of, 147, 168, 181, 262n16; and migration, 145, 164 (see also Lagos Colony: sex trade); narratives of, 20, 117; and the nationalist response, 146; and pawnship, 151–54; regional and transnational dimension, 145; and Second World War, 102, 143–44, 165–70, 172; and sex trade, 143–50, 154, 164, 169, 183; and urbanism, 20, 164; and venereal disease, 167; violence against, 142, 144–45; and virginity, 147–48, 167; wazi-wazi, 165. See also children: fostering; hawking, girls; Second World War; slavery Ranger, Terence, 14 reform: delinquent boys and, 200; domesticity as technique of, 191, 194; and gender: femininity 191, 193; and gender: masculinity, 200; gendered techniques of juvenile, 180, 207; — , for boys, 184–88; — , for girls, 189–97; humanitarian, 19; Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos report, 97; “juvenile in moral danger” category of, 181, 198, 207; of juvenile offenders, 21, 69, 75–86, 91, 98–100, 111, 171–72, 184–86, 188; and missionaries, 88; modern conceptions of, 200; modern methods of, 192–93, 200; and pathology, 200; problem girls and, 200; Raufu’s salvationist narrative of, 189–91; social, tradition of, 10, 19, 98; social, women’s participation in, 41, 91, 97, 100, 203–4; state resources for girls, 189–90. See also Children and Young Person’s Ordinance reform institutions: Boy’s remand home, 76, 85, 88, 172, 184–86, 189; Catholic convent, 87; Enugu Industrial School, 16, 19–20, 66, 72–77, 80–82, 84–85, 88, 90, 98, 184, 246n35; Green Triangle Hostel, 97; Salvation Army Home, 91, 96–97, 99, 103–4, 184 renascent African discourse: Azikiwe, Nnamdi and, 211; definition, 211–12; indigeneity and, 211–12; and masculine citizenship, 214; modernity and, 211; nationalism and, 212, 214–15; as a Pan-African theory, 212

300

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reports: Cavendish, 1922, 54–59, 117; childhood in Lagos, 137–38, 261n67, 261n69; Doherty files, 198; on girl hawkers, 118, 136–37; Juvenile Delinquency in Lagos, 96–98; Lagos women traders, 117; police, 53–55, 57, 79, 117, 119; print media, 120–21, 139, 151; on prostitution, 162, 265n64 salvationist enterprise: gaze, 113; hawking ban, 204; narrative, 21, 134, 141; politics, 113–14 Saro: definition of, 23; migrants, 23; and Protestant Christianity, 23; and public health measures, 38 Save the Children Fund, 67–69, 89; and Victorian morality, 23 Second World War, 6, 20; and juvenile delinquency, 73, 79–80, 88–89; and prostitution, 102, 143–44, 165–70, 172; and Pullen Scheme, 92 sexuality, 224–25; girls, 12, 15, 53, 114–15, 135–41, 181; interracial, 53, 88, 236n28; and women reformers, 135, 137, 141–42 Shadle, Brett, 14 slavery, 151, 264n38; and the Black Atlantic, 26–27; children and, 111, 146, 150–53; and the Middle Passage, 27; moral arguments against, 226; pawnship and, 151; Portuguese Town merchants, 24; Slavery Ordinance, 150, 263n26; squadrons, anti-, 23; trade, 22–23. See also prostitution: female underage; children: fostering social clubs: social vision, 42; women, 42. See also Lagos Ladies League social work, 10, 94, 99; colonial, 8, 12, 98, 129; and reformers, 12, 71, 107–8, 168–69, 180, 198, 204 sources, oral: about childhood in Lagos, 137–38, 198–99; oral testimonies, 119–20, 125, 131–33, 152–53; from police reports, 53–54, 119 space: class and public, 26, 114, 229; cultural practice and urban, 114; domestic, 88, 208 (see also hawking, girls); interracial, 88, 110 surveys, 66; cross-generational childhood, 130, 137–39, 150, 153, 198, 260n52, 261n69; girl hawkers, 118; Lagos women traders, 124–27, 130–33, 281, 260nn41–43, 260n51; population growth, 90, 250n2; problem girls/boys and public, 215, 230; schoolgirls and girl hawkers, 130–33, 260nn42–43; underage children, 240n4 Ten Year Plan for Social and Economic Progress in Nigeria, 9, 95 Thomas, Lynn, 15 trade unions, 9; and gender categories, 9; and labor practices, 9

urbanism: and citizenship, 227–30; and contemporary Lagos, 228; and cultural style, 231; and hawkers as a sanitation problem, 129; and identity, 230–31; and immigrants’ experience, 90–94, 126; and juvenile delinquents, 101; and labor, 93–95; and marketing of goods, 128; and prostitution, 20, 164, 215 (see also girls, problem); and subjectivity, 227, 230; and women traders, 117, 122–25 Victorians, Black: as advocates for native women, 60; daughters of, 18, 60; households, 60; ideals, 41, 140; morality, 23; motherhood, 41; public sector, 18 violence: African woman as trope of genderbased, 226; girls’ history and, 15; and a history of sexuality, 15; as male-centered purview, 239n40 welfare city, 20–21, 73, 101 womanhood, modern, 7, 19, 114, 116, 193–94, 204, 220, 227; European-style homemaker, 200 women: Abeokuta Women’s Union, 214; black clubwomen activists in the United States, 51; and Christianity, 40; and class, 41–42, 123; elite activists, 33, 204; elite activists, and girl hawkers, 221; elite social clubs (see Lagos Ladies League); in Lagos, 51–52, 59, 108, 113–15, 136, 142–44; and market life, 121–23, 126–27, 129 (see hawking, girls); memoirs, 52; modernizing Nigerian womanhood, 204; National Association of Colored Women in the United States, 51; and nationalism, 203, 210, 221; Nigerian Women’s Party, 141, 221, 268n21 (see also Nigerian Women’s Party); participation in nonpolitical organizations, 39; patriarchal

power and African, 227; and social reform, 203; as social workers, 129; traders, 17, 121–24, 128, 260n41 (see also hawking, girls); travelers, 33; trope of gender-based violence of African, 226; and Victorian patriarchal households, 41–42; and Yoruba culture, 41, 221 Women’s Welfare Council (WWC), 16, 103–9, 255n78; critical stand toward colonial system, 210; and cultural nationalism, 210; gender and nationality, 192; and hawking regulations, 103; and Lagos Girls’ Hostel, 106; and public opinion, 108; and reformist movement, 107–8, 193; and resistance to Children and Young Person’s Ordinance, 210; and Salvationist project, 21. See also Faulkner, Donald WWC. See Women’s Welfare Council youth, 13; in African history, 14; and childhood, 14–17; criminality, 14; and dance societies, 14; delinquency, 19, 73–74, 96–100, 112, 114, 147, 171 (see also juvenile delinquency); and education, 213; as excess population, 229–30; and gender, 14, 207; and generational conflict, 14–15, 239n40; and hawking, 54, 119, 127, 129, 202, 222; labor, 77, 93; legal personhood of, 199 (see also Children and Young Person’s Act); legitimation of, 199, 237n33; and masculinity, 14; and migration, 93, 94; as modern children, 200; and money, 215–16; and popular culture, 14; reformation, 68–71, 85, 171–72; and sexuality, 58, 136–37, 139, 161 (see also prostitution: female underage); social transformation of, 237n33; studies on, 13–17; as threat to colonial order, 19. See also childhood; children; hawking, boys; hawking, girls

Index

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301