Oko, Èkó, Maroko and the Coloniality of Language in Lagos, Nigeria

Before Lagos can be defended as a ‘global city’, both that term and ‘globalization’ must be defined. Mackninnon sufficiently defined globalization in What We Talk About When We Talk About Globalization: “A complex web of social processes that intensify and expand worldwide economic, cultural, political, and technological exchanges and connections,” with my contextual caveat being that it is always relevant to cite the historical foundation of modern globalization at the transatlantic slave trade, especially since it is commonly accepted that the hegemonic forces driving modern globalization emanate from the colonial powers (Mackinnon 4). Also sufficient is Charnock’s definition of a global city in Britannica: “an urban centre that enjoys significant competitive advantages and that serves as a hub within a globalized economic system… such cities are seen as the building blocks of globalization.” (Charnock 2013) Using these definitions, Lagos fits these descriptors as the largest metropolitan area in Africa as well as its economic, entertainment, and cultural capital; furthermore, its exposure to the Portuguese in the 15th century and later colonization by the British in the 19th were inextricably linked with the period of proto-globalization following the former and modern globalization driving the latter. By the 16th century, the Portuguese had been granted asientos de negros, establishing a slave trade port in Oko, which is the name given by the Awori (a subset of the Yoruba people), the aboriginal inhabitants of the area now known as Lagos Island. It was later recognized as Èkó both by the native Awori and the Yoruba Oyo empire that came to dominate the area.

Recognizing Lagos’ existence at and contribution to the dawn of the transatlantic slave trade, which birthed the conditions for global capitalism, further contextualizes its transhistorical legacy as a global city and highlights its function as a node in the international flow of goods, materials, information, and knowledge. What is interesting about the colonial scar left on the city is that tracing the languages and names given to the various bodies of water and landforms- from Lagos Lagoon to Lekki Peninsula- details the various transcultural interactions and colonial impressions embedded in the city’s history, as well as the dark side of globalization. 

Historical Foundation of Globalization in Èkó

The Portuguese wasted no time establishing a slave trade off the port of Èkó, renaming the area ‘Lagos,’ Portuguese for lakes. While most sources correctly identify the region’s extensive amount of bodies of water as the influence for this renaming, they ahistorically miss the connection that this is eponymous with Portugal’s own port which boasts their most extensive amount of trading links with Africa. This was to set a precedent. Under the lead of Oba Kosoko, the slave trade in Lagos was still flourishing, but in 1851, Britain intervened with the Bombardment of Lagos: the ousting of Kosoko and installation of Oba Akitoye, who signed a colonial treaty with Britain and abolished the slave trade in his kingdom. It is very important to note here the global-historical foundation of Western intervention in African and other nonWhite political regimes by leading coups for colonial control under the guise of humanitarian efforts: not only had Kosoko previously ousted Akitoye thanks to his resources gained from the slave trade that Britain participated in but also Akitoye had already previously beseeched British assistance for a coup yet only received it this time because he acquiesced to colonization and commercial trade. Britain’s efforts for anti-slavery conditioned on assuming control of non-British colonial ports/cities, exposing not only their fallacy of supposed antiracism but also their insatiable hunger for primitive accumulation and creating a globalized order under the British Commonwealth. Globalization indeed affected the city throughout the rest of the 19th century, not just because of the colonization of Èkó, but also the cosmopolitanism effected by migration from other areas of West Africa as well as ex-slaves from the West Indies, Sierra Leone, Freetown, and Brazil, which brought thousands of Black, Creole, and white migrants who introduced the Brazilian/Portuguese-style architecture seen on Lagos Island. 

While cosmopolitanism (and Westernization) reflected the historically foundational arm of colonization that dilutes the indigenous culture within the region, deterritorialization reflected another violently-historically foundational arm by not just separating the indigenous people from their land and water but also turning it against them. Like colonized peoples everywhere, Lagos’ indigenous inhabitants embodied the resistance of a people violently torn from the nature with which they had grown. Beginning at the turn of the 20th century, the earliest revolts in Lagos were induced by water insecurity and indigenous land alienation; later in 1933, the first nationalist movement in Nigeria was founded: The Nigerian Youth Movement. Although it only lasted two decades before the ethnic tensions between the Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa peoples caused its dissolution, its party was founded in protest against the “inherently inferior educational opportunities” within Lagos compared to the West (in 1934, the British colonial government erected the poorly funded, all-male Yaba Higher College right off the shores of Lagos Lagoon, but it suffered having no affiliations with a Western university and failing to offer public administration or economics courses, both of which were necessary to serve in the colonial government), and it later developed its Nigerian Youth Charter in 1938, calling for “the development of a united nation out of the conglomeration of peoples who [inhabit] Nigeria, and the promotion of complete understanding along with a sense of common nationalism among different elements in the country.” Never before had the three aforementioned ethnic tribes attempted to “unite” to “promote a sense of common nationalism,” but the forces of colonization necessitated the expansion of worldwide cultural and political connections and exchanges for self-government, because it forced warring tribes to cohabit the same “nation-state,” an unknown political concept to pre-colonial West Africa. However by 1960, they got their wishes for self-governance, but neocolonialism had other plans regarding self-determination.

Memorializing Maroko and Mapping Modern Èkó

In the air of white paternalism and backseat-driving neocolonialism, President Woodrow Wilson said of self-determination in 1918: 

Peoples are not to be handed about from [one] sovereignty to another by an international conference or an understanding between rivals and antagonists. National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. "Self-determination" is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of actions which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.

Except “self-determination” is just a mere phrase, and it carries a lot of sociopolitical assumptions with it, namely that a people’s self-determination and best interests always align with the formation of a nation-state. In the context of Lagos and Nigeria as a whole, this is clearly not the case as the majority of the population suffers violence at the hands of the State and its affiliates more so than the nonState actors they are supposedly protected from under democracy. However, mapping Èkó- starting from Commodore Channel and Lagos Harbour where the Portuguese traders and British colonizers first came upon the area and following along the coast to the city’s eastern boarder at Lekki Lagoon- exposes how the trail of globalizing colonization literally turns the land and water against the native inhabitants.

The very first thing one would see upon sailing into modern day Lagos via the Commodore Channel, an obviously British-imposed name, are beaches and rock moles. High rise apartment buildings, businesses, industrial yards, and hotels line the coastal areas that fall farther inland than the beaches, while the rock moles on either side of the channel allow for easy access to Lagos Harbour and Apapa Port via large commercial vessels. Going further inland, business (specifically industrial) sectors dominate the landscape bordering the harbour, while the water itself gets much visibly murkier and browner. What becomes interesting about the definition of a ‘global city’ here, is that the “significant competitive advantages” are clearly only enjoyed by certain people (emphasis on how this humanist-sociopolitical concept ignores the city’s animals).

In 1990, E. A. Ajao and S. O. Fagade- scholars of the University of Ibadan in Nigeria- published a study that detailed the ecological impacts of industrialization on Lagos Lagoon:

Recent increased human pressures on the environment have led to biological consequences in Lagos' coastal waters, notably in the Lagos lagoon and its drainage channel to sea. Two broad surveys were conducted in February and June 1985 and repeated in 1986 to obtain information on the distribution, habitats and communities in the Lagos lagoon in relation to environmental factors. 

The western industrialized areas contained high levels of selected heavy metals. Petroleum hydrocarbon contamination was present in most samples… The distribution of several species was influenced by the salinity regime and nature of bottom deposits… Species characteristic of stressed environments notably Capitella capitata, Nereis sp. and Polydora sp., were more abundant in the polluted western industrialized portions. 

The lagoon, according to WHO and Africa UN Environment, is the most polluted African ecosystem due to oil and textile waste, urban sewage, and excessive fishing, sand mining, and dredging. Finally, almost a century after Nigerian youth were protesting against the widespread water insecurity, Nigerian academics were scientifically combating against it. 

The only more heartbreaking story found by mapping Èkó than the resource violence imposed on the urban residents, is the totalizing violence the State imposed on the erased community of Maroko. Maroko was a low income, migrant-dominated community, lying farther eastward on the Lekki peninsula and made up of some 300,000 Ijaw, Ilaje, and other Yoruba people. However, following the construction of the rock moles along the Commodore Channel, the littoral drift that normally deposited sand and sediments along Victoria Island (also an obviously British imposition) and Lekki peninsula was interrupted, and those sediments remained trapped on the left side of the channel. Ceaseless erosion and heavy ocean surges battered the land for almost a century, so of course in 1990 the (now Nigerian) government violently evicted the 300,000 residents and bulldozed their 10,000 houses, all while looting, beating, raping, and killing them in the process. Many died in the 30+ years that have followed while seeking justice, but never found it. The purpose of Colonel Raji Rasaki’s Israeli-apartheid-esque act was three-fold: acting on xenophobic, anti-immigrant violence to erase the Maroko community that the government had wanted to for some time (on the later-explained Eko Atlantic City website, the history of how the interrupted littoral drift has eroded the coastal land completely ignores the Maroko community and only discusses the residents and businesses affected on Victoria Island and Lekki, Maroko’s replacement); constructing the new city of Lekki on the peninsula, erected with some of the most expensive housing developments in Nigeria, and named after a Portuguese slaveowner who used to live on the peninsula; and finally building the fabled Eko Atlantic City as the Great Wall of Lagos to protect the businesses and elites that line the coast. 

This complex matrix of globalized sociopolitical and economic interests as well as the effects of “natural disasters” provides the perfect allegory for the harrowing and inextricable linkage between colonization, globalization, and deterritorialization in Èkó. Portuguese slave trade established Lagos- within the globalized colonial world order- as a primary node within the flow of goods on the Atlantic and exacerbated ethnic tensions in the region through creating a competition for materials and resources by devaluing African life for slavery, thus allowing Europeans to intervene in African sociopolitical realms. Britain then could capitalize on an African political rivalry and colonize the port, turning it into a city and transforming the geological and geographical landscape to better serve the purposes of globalized, commercial, maritime trade. These mutations to African nature: poisons all the living creatures in the area- humans, animals, and plants- while the dictates of the globalized world order forced the locals to beseech the same Western nations that poisoned them in the first place for assistance (to no avail); disconnects the natives from performing their indigenous practices on and maintaining a mutually symbiotic relationship with their land and water; and continues to manifest themselves in both linguistic and physical forms: “Eko Atlantic City” and “The Great Wall of Lagos” are globalized terms, representing the trade of languages, folklore, and knowledge via maritime travel while the waves of the Atlantic ravaging the island coasts mimic the gratuitous, continuous violence brought upon the land by the European’s introduction to West Africa centuries ago.

The water still carries that violent history with it, but by looking further inland to the rural areas of the Ogun and Osun rivers, in a return to (even if just quasi-) precolonial living and indigeneity- as opposed to the Western, industrialized, and poisoned nature of urbanized Lagos and Lekki- we see that even when the violence wrought by the Portuguese Lecqui or Greek Atlantis threatens destruction, (the promise and memory of) indigenous ecology survives in the simple form of continued existence despite relegation to the realm of non(Western)thought: indigenous sciences, metaphysics, and epistemologies- an indigenous nature.

Works Cited

President Wilson's Address, February 11, 1918, 12 July 1997, http://www.gwpda.org/1918/wilpeace.html.  

Anacker, Caelen. “Lagos, Nigeria (ca. 1350- ) •.” Blackpast, 6 July 2010, https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/places-global-african-history/lagos-nigeria-c-1350/.  

E.A. Ajao, S.O. Fagade,  A study of the sediments and communities in Lagos Lagoon, Nigeria,  Oil and Chemical Pollution,  Volume 7, Issue 2,  1990,  Pages 85-117,  ISSN 0269-8579,  https://doi.org/10.1016/S0269-8579(05)80017-6.   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269857905800176   

Gann, Brian. “The Nigerian Youth Movement (1934-1951) •.” Blackpast, 3 May 2011, https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/nigerian-youth-movement-1934-1951/.  

“The History of The Great Wall of Lagos.” Eko Atlantic, https://www.ekoatlantic.com/education/sea-wall/.  

Mann, Kristin. “Lagos.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagos.  

Morka, Felix C. SERAC files Maroko Communication before the African Commission. Press Statement. SERAC, 19 December 2008, http://www.hlrn.org/img/cases/SERAC%20files%20Maroko%20Communication.doc.

Osho, Anago J. “HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT LEKKI TOWN-LAGOS BY ANAGO JAMES AKEEM OSHO.” Anago Adventures, 6 May 2017, https://anagoadventures.blogspot.com/2017/05/history-of-ancient-lekki-town-lagos-by.html.