Archiving Lagos
By Bukola Aluko-Kpotie
In 2011, fifty secondary school students, between the ages of 11 and 17, from ten public schools (not to be mistaken for the British public school system) across the city of Lagos were selected to participate in the first phase of a social photography project titled ‘Archiving Lagos’. This phase of the Archiving Lagos project is designed to collect and document images of Lagos, and the lived experiences of young people living in less affluent suburbs of the city.
Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria has an estimated population of 17 million and is rapidly changing. The massive regeneration work taking place in the city, that will come to define the democratic government of the current governor, Babatunde Fashola, is being well documented. This narrative of progress, however, exempts the voices of a significant portion of the population of Lagos, particularly, the voices of those living on the margins of our society. Postcolonial scholars, and those interested in the theories they espouse, will agree that the danger of a single-sided collective narrative of progress is that the narrative of the dominant group will come to stand for the whole. Archiving Lagos was designed to provide the multiple perspectives required for a more wholesome historical narrative in years to come. The project was entirely funded by donations from private individuals and small businesses in the city. Authorization to work with students across the city was granted by the relevant Lagos State Education District Offices.
The challenges of creating a photo diary of life at the margins of Lagos were diverse. Many of the fifty students I worked with had neither owned nor used a camera prior to the start of the project. Decisions had to be made on the types of cameras to use and how to ensure their safe return; which ten public schools would qualify for the program and, which five students from each school would qualify. In the end, logistics determined the five schools on mainland Lagos and the five schools on Lagos Island would represent the whole. The irony that logistical ease was the determining factor in the selection process is not lost on me, as I am sure nationalist historiographers, who privilege elite narratives and culture would note.
An orientation and photography training session was scheduled for the morning of the 6th of October 2011 and the students were picked up from their schools in a bus from the fleet of the Lagos Bus Rapid Transportation system (BRT), and driven around Lagos for about two hours. Many had never travelled on the BRT, so this was a way to introduce them to the new urban regeneration efforts taking place in their city. It was also a way to set the scene for the orientation and training that was to follow at Freedom Park in Lagos.
Freedom Park is in itself a project of the city’s urban rejuvenation. Sited on the old colonial Broad Street prison grounds, which only three years prior was a derelict squatters haven in the heart of Lagos, the beautifully transformed space now includes a garden, a museum, an art gallery, two outdoor performances spaces, and a food court. None of the participating students knew of or had visited the park before and this provided them with an opportunity to experience something of the ‘new Lagos’. At the training session, the students were taught basic photography techniques and were subsequently handed individual disposable cameras, pens and notepads. They were given the following instructions: take pictures that capture your everyday experiences of life as lived in Lagos, and document your reasons for capturing different images.
As scheduled, four days later, forty-eight of the fifty cameras and forty-seven notepads were returned to the museum. Over five hundred images were recovered from the returned cameras. Whilst all of these images have now been archived, thirty-five of them were chosen for an exhibition to showcase the students’ pictures a month later. The pictures for the exhibition were selected based on two selection criteria: the depictions of clearly discernible messages in the photos taken, and the strength of students’ corresponding support statements.
In my opinion, the most striking of the thirty-five exhibited pictures is a photograph of high school students in their classroom taken by a Michael Solomon. Solomon captures the smiley faces and cheery countenance of his colleagues in the ways they posed for his camera, and in their playful attempts to hide their faces from the snapshot. Behind the student, a large concrete wall with graffiti draws the eyes in. I make out the words ‘give’, ‘home’ and a sketch of a bunny’s head. I see ‘JSS3d’ long before I figure out that this was, or might have been the classroom for third year students of the Junior Secondary School program at the high school. The students’ tightly arranged chairs and tables look newer in contrast to the classroom walls. Boldly inscribed on the furniture were the words, ‘LASG FURNITURE’.
I had heard that two years ago, the Lagos State government had commissioned local carpenters to build classroom chairs and tables to replace the existing old and damaged furniture in public schools across the city. These students were obvious beneficiaries, but what was the point of updating the furniture, I wondered, if the walls were left in their old unkempt state? Or, should my question be, if the furniture were the property of the State government, whose property were the school walls? Solomon’s picture was by no means the best picture in the exhibition, but it provides an insight into the state of uneven spatial development fast characterizing the urban regeneration of Lagos. In his simply, but apt caption for his picture Solomon writes: ‘Even here, we learn’.
Photograph by Michael Solomon – State Senior High School, Lagos
Solomon’s caption resonates with a personal experience of gaining knowledge in the most awkward of spaces. When I initially designed the Archiving Lagos project, I conceived of it as a way to build up content for the museum at Freedom Park. I had proposed that the museum be registered also as a research centre, a little detail, which justifies a museum funding and/or hosting projects like Archiving Lagos. This was so important as I had learnt, combing through archives in London, on behalf of the Freedom Park project, in the summer of 2010, that the only way to give a near accurate account of a peoples’ histories is to have the people tell their own stories.
I am not unaware of the pitfalls of the phrase ‘accurate account of histories’, and its connections to the discourse of power, but that is a discussion for another day. So, as I sat in the basement of the British National Archive, at Kew in Richmond, starring at the treaty that was supposed to have ceded Lagos to the British colonial government in 1861, I could not help but notice the neat row of Xs that signified the consent of Oba Dosumu, the then King of Lagos, and his trusted chiefs. I know from very well documented colonial history of Lagos, that the king and his chiefs were unable to read or write in English. Who, then, consented to the treaty on their behalf? Sitting in that dark basement at Kew, on a rather beautiful summer afternoon, I came to the realization that I may never have the answer to my question. For as long as museums and archives in the West continue to house more historical data on Lagos than we can find in the city, Lagosians will always have a single-sided narration of their past. Even here, in a basement, at Kew, in Richmond, I learn.
Back in Lagos, the Archiving Lagos photo exhibition received some media coverage in the city. It was covered by a national newspaper, and aired for two consecutive weekends on the main news channel in Lagos. The students’ photographs were hailed as inspiring, and attention was called to the ways these pictures contribute to the idea of the Lagos megacity dream. For me, the works of these young photographers extend a long tradition of social photography. Their pictures reflect the ever-growing divide between the rich and the poor in the city of Lagos, and they advocate for change both in the images they capture with their cameras and in their supporting statements. But, crucially, they have successfully documented an aspect of life in Lagos in 2011. My hope is that some lucky museum curator, perhaps a hundred years from now, in the basement of a national archive in Lagos, will access these pictures and learn something of the city’s past from a socio-economic group whose stories are often obscured from historical narratives of growth and modernization.
Bukola Aluko-Kpotie, a Doctoral candidate at the University of Texas in Austin, is the curator of the Archiving Lagos Project.
