Lagos: Lagos Island & the Historic Core

Lagos is not Nigeria's political capital — that role passed to Abuja in nineteen ninety-one, when the federal government completed a long-planned relocation to the geographic centre of the country. But Lagos was the capital from independence through that transition, and it remains the economic engine of Africa's most populous nation. Twenty million people — and by some estimates considerably more — live in the greater Lagos metropolitan area. The population in nineteen sixty, at independence, was approximately three hundred thousand. That trajectory — from three hundred thousand to twenty million in less than seventy years — is one of the most dramatic urban growth stories in human history.

The humidity will have found you by now. Lagos sits at roughly six degrees north of the equator, on a coastal lagoon where the Atlantic Ocean meets the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta. The air is thick and warm and smells of salt and traffic and something else — the particular atmospheric signature of a city where millions of people are cooking, working, arguing, and living at maximum intensity. The Harmattan wind from the Sahara blows dust into the city between November and March, giving those months a dry, hazy quality. In the rainy season from April through October, the sky opens without warning and the streets flood fast.

This is where your walk begins. Nigeria's story — the Kingdom of Benin, the Yoruba civilization, the Portuguese traders, the British colonisers, the oil economy, Nollywood, Afrobeats, and twenty million souls all pressing forward at once — all of it converges here, on this square, where a country declared itself free on a warm October morning sixty-five years ago.

The Benin Bronzes are the fulcrum of that question. In eighteen ninety-seven, a British punitive expedition attacked and looted the Kingdom of Benin — a powerful Yoruba-adjacent state in what is now Edo State in southern Nigeria. The kingdom's royal compound in Benin City was burned and thousands of brass and bronze plaques, heads, and figurines — many of them centuries old, some dating to the thirteenth century, representing one of the great artistic traditions of the medieval world — were seized and distributed among British museums, private collections, and auction houses. The technical sophistication of the Benin Bronzes shocked European observers who had assumed that sub-Saharan Africa had no tradition of refined metalwork.

The National Museum Lagos holds a significant number of bronzes that remained in Nigeria, as well as other objects from the Nok culture — terracotta figures dated to between five hundred BC and two hundred AD, among the oldest known ceramic figurines in sub-Saharan Africa, found in the Jos Plateau region of central Nigeria. These are not provincial objects. They are artefacts of civilisations as complex and as old as anything in the Mediterranean world.

The museum also preserves the car in which Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was found dead in January nineteen sixty-six — a raw and specific kind of memorial, the physical object of a historical moment preserved behind glass. The permanence of the car, the specificity of it, makes the assassination real in a way that documents alone cannot.

Take time here. Walk slowly. The objects in these cases are the evidence that this part of the world has a deep history, a long and sophisticated civilisation, that existed long before any European ship arrived on this coast.

You will find almost anything here. The fabric section sells Dutch wax print cloth — the boldly patterned cotton that is now identified as distinctly African but was originally manufactured by Dutch and British companies for the West African market in the nineteenth century, adapting Indonesian batik patterns for a Yoruba and Akan clientele who rapidly made it their own. The electronics market sells Chinese-made phones and components. The food section sells crayfish and stockfish and dried peppers and the yellow granules of ground locust bean — dawa-dawa — that give Yoruba soups their deep, fermented savour. The tailors sit behind hand-cranked sewing machines making the same running repairs they have been making here for generations.

The Yoruba people, who have lived in this part of West Africa for at least a thousand years and who make up the majority of Lagos's indigenous population, have always been traders. The city of Ile-Ife, about two hundred and fifty kilometres northeast of Lagos, is considered the spiritual homeland of the Yoruba and one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in sub-Saharan Africa. The commercial culture of Balogun Market — the organised chaos, the specialisation, the creditworthiness established through personal relationship — is a Yoruba inheritance, and it runs deeper than any colonial or post-colonial overlay.

Push through slowly. Let the market carry you. Try the jollof rice from the woman cooking over a gas burner at the edge of the main alley — the smoky, tomato-red rice that is simultaneously the comfort food of West Africa and the subject of a fierce and ongoing culinary rivalry between Nigeria and Ghana that has produced more passionate online argument than almost any political question in either country.

Beginning in the eighteen twenties and continuing through the rest of the nineteenth century, freed enslaved people and their descendants began returning to West Africa, some voluntarily and some as a result of the Bahian Slave Revolt of eighteen thirty-five, after which Brazilian authorities expelled hundreds of Africans from the country. These returnees — known in Lagos as the Aguda, or the Brazilians — arrived back on a coast their grandparents or great-grandparents had been taken from, often speaking Portuguese, practicing Catholicism or Candomble, bringing with them the craft skills and architectural knowledge they had acquired in Brazil. They built.

The buildings you see are the physical legacy of that return — a Yoruba people who had been taken to Brazil, absorbed a colonial architectural tradition, brought it back across the Atlantic, and planted it on Lagos Island. The result is genuinely unique in the world: a Brazilian streetscape on the West African coast, built by people who had survived the Middle Passage and come home.

Many of these buildings are in various states of repair — some lovingly maintained, others crumbling at the edges, a few already lost to development pressure. The Brazilian Quarter has been recognised as a heritage area, but preservation is difficult in a city growing as fast as Lagos. Stand in Campos Square and try to hear the whole story in the plasterwork: Africa, the Atlantic, Brazil, and home again.

Christianity arrived in southern Nigeria through multiple channels. The Anglican Church Missionary Society was active in Lagos from the eighteen forties, and its most significant figure was Samuel Ajayi Crowther — a Yoruba man who had been enslaved as a child, rescued by the British Navy, educated in Sierra Leone and England, and ordained as the first African Anglican bishop in eighteen sixty-four. Crowther translated the Bible into Yoruba, created a written form of the language, and became one of the foundational figures of Nigerian Christianity. His work was not merely religious; it was the beginning of Yoruba written literature.

Holy Cross Cathedral itself is a large, confident building — twin towers, a broad nave, the architectural vocabulary of European ecclesiastical Gothic translated into the tropics. Inside, the heat is reduced by the height of the ceiling and the cross-ventilation of the side aisles. The congregation at Sunday Mass here fills the pews and spills onto the steps outside, because Lagos's Catholic community is enormous and because in a city of twenty million people even the largest church will be full.

Step inside if the doors are open. The stained glass panels in the nave cast coloured light across the pale stone floor. The smell of incense and candle wax and old wood is the same smell as a Catholic church anywhere in the world, which is the point — and also the beginning of a more complicated question about what it means that this universal institution arrived here the way it did.

The square today is a busy intersection — a Lagos traffic node of the kind that functions as much by improvisation and mutual accommodation as by any formal rule. The okadas — motorcycle taxis, ubiquitous in Lagos, their riders weaving through gaps that seem impossibly narrow — move in and out of the traffic flow. The yellow danfo minibuses that carry most of Lagos's working population stop and start without particular regard for marked bus stops. Traders line the edges of the square selling everything from phone accessories to newspapers to cold water in plastic sachets — a Lagos institution, the frozen sachet of pure water that you tear with your teeth and drink in the heat.

The political history of this square runs forward from Tinubu to the present in a continuous thread of public assembly, protest, and commercial activity. During the colonial period it was the site of demonstrations against British rule. In October twenty twenty, it was one of the focal points of the EndSARS protests — a nationwide movement demanding the abolition of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a police unit notorious for extrajudicial violence, that drew hundreds of thousands of young Nigerians into the streets and represented the most significant popular uprising Nigeria had seen in a generation.

Stand here and watch the square manage itself. It is Lagos at full volume.

It was through this harbour that Portuguese ships first arrived in the fifteen hundreds. The Portuguese explorers who sailed the West African coast beginning in the fourteen fifties were looking for a sea route to the gold and spice markets of Asia, but they discovered something more immediately profitable: access to the Yoruba kingdoms and the Kingdom of Benin, which traded in cloth, pepper, ivory, and — as the European demand developed — enslaved people. The Portuguese named the harbour and the island Lagos, after the port city of Lagos in southern Portugal, though the Yoruba had their own names for this place: Eko, and Isale-Eko, the lower settlement, the original village on the island.

The Portuguese built a trading post here. The Dutch contested it. The British eventually established dominance, signing a treaty with the Yoruba King Dosunmu in eighteen sixty-one — a treaty Dosunmu later claimed he had not understood the implications of — that formally made Lagos a British colony. From that point, the harbour became the primary export point for the products of British Nigeria: palm oil, groundnuts, rubber, and later, after independence, crude oil from the Niger Delta.

The oil economy that funded Nigeria's post-independence growth — and that also funded the corruption, the inequality, and the instability that have complicated that growth — flows through and around this harbour. The city you are looking at, with its towers and its twenty million people and its furious energy, is built on that history and on that harbour.

The First Bank of Nigeria — originally the Bank of British West Africa, founded in eighteen ninety-four — has its roots along this street, as does the long history of formal Nigerian banking. The financial history of colonial Lagos was the history of extracting value from West Africa through formally organised credit and exchange, and the banks that lined Broad Street were the instruments of that extraction. After independence, those same institutions became Nigerian, staffed and eventually owned by Nigerians, and the financial sector they represented is now one of the largest and most sophisticated in Africa.

Nollywood has its commercial roots here too, or at least in the streets immediately around this area. The Nigerian film industry — which by volume of annual output is the second-largest film industry in the world, behind only India's Bollywood and ahead of Hollywood — grew from the tradition of Yoruba travelling theatre companies, which performed morality tales and comedies in markets and public squares across Lagos and southwestern Nigeria from the nineteen fifties onward. When video technology became cheap in the nineteen eighties and nineties, those theatrical traditions moved onto screen. Lagos became the production centre, and the films — shot fast, cheap, and with enormous emotional directness — found audiences of hundreds of millions across Africa and in the African diaspora worldwide.

The traffic on Broad Street is always moving, always dense, always negotiating itself according to rules that are not written down but are understood by everyone who uses them.

The neighbourhood around the Eko Hotel is where Lagos's music industry has its nerve centre. Afrobeats — the genre that emerged from the fusion of Yoruba music, highlife, hip-hop, and electronic dance music in Lagos in the early two thousands and that has since become one of the most globally influential musical genres of the twenty-first century — was created in studios and at shows in this part of the city. Artists like Fela Kuti — whose Afrobeat (note the singular: Fela's Afrobeat was a specific political-musical project, different from the later Afrobeats of the streaming era) originated in Lagos in the nineteen seventies, combining jazz and funk and Yoruba music with a fierce anti-government politics — and his successors including Wizkid, Burna Boy, Davido, and Tiwa Savage have made Lagos a global music capital in a way that few cities in the world can claim.

When you hear Afrobeats in a London or New York or Johannesburg nightclub — the syncopated rhythms, the talking drum underneath the electronic percussion, the vocal melodies that curl around the beat — you are hearing Lagos exported across the world. The city's sonic signature has outrun its own borders.

Bar Beach was, for much of the twentieth century, Lagos's primary public beach — the place where the city came on weekends and on public holidays to do what people do at the edge of the sea: eat, talk, watch the water, let the children run. Public executions were also carried out here during the military era, when Nigeria was governed by a succession of military governments between nineteen sixty-six and nineteen seventy-nine and again between nineteen eighty-three and nineteen ninety-nine — a period of thirty-three years, interrupted only by the brief civilian interlude of the Second Republic. The beach carries that history alongside its ordinary human uses.

Lagos's relationship to democracy and military rule is inseparable from Nigeria's overall trajectory as a nation. The country that declared independence on this island in nineteen sixty has spent more years under military governance than under civilian rule. The Fourth Republic, which began in nineteen ninety-nine, has been Nigeria's longest continuous democratic period, and the consolidation of civilian rule is one of the most significant political achievements of the past twenty-five years in West Africa.

Look at the water and then turn around and look at the city — the towers of Victoria Island and, beyond them, the packed streets of Lagos Island where your walk began. Twenty million people are living and working and building and arguing and cooking jollof rice and making music and making films and making deals in the city behind you. The Yoruba have been on this coast for a thousand years. The Portuguese arrived five hundred years ago. The British colonised this island a hundred and sixty years ago. Nigeria has been independent for sixty-five years. The city has been growing from three hundred thousand to twenty million in the lifetime of a single generation. All of that is behind you. The Atlantic is in front. The walk is done.