E.H. Duckworth’s Clean-Up Lagos Campaigns
The political use of ex - centric colonial discourse on African dirt
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11413873 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Terri Ochiagha (0000-0003-2367-238X, Department of History, King’s College, London, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 21-37 |
| Publication date | 2018-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Dynamics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0253-3952 • E-ISSN: 1940-7874 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02533952.2018.1444128 |
| OpenAlex | W2795534149 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 12 |
On April 3 1952, former colonial Inspector of Education, Edward Harland Duckworth (1894–1972) – founding editor of the cultural magazine Nigeria – announced the birth of a sanitation venture he christened “The Clean-Up Lagos Campaign” in a Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation radio programme. The initiative declared war on “squalor and filth” in Nigeria’s colonial capital, Lagos. Duckworth urged Nigerian citizens to join his army of “volunteers” to wipe Lagos clean of literal dirt, and by extension, eliminate the moral stench exhaled by advertising bills plastered on buildings and monuments. The short-lived campaign was amply disseminated in the Nigerian press and (alongside its two encore performances of 1960 and 1967) featured in confidential Commonwealth Office papers of enormous political import at the height of the Nigerian Civil War. However, it was not Duckworth’s first intrusion into Lagos’ sanitary arena. This article examines Duckworth’s ex-centric discourse on dirt as a remarkable permutation of more generalised colonial standpoints. While Duckworth’s ambivalently enunciated views on dirt respond to his personal eccentricity and undisguised quest for power and recognition, his campaigns, rather than mere asides to an eccentric colonial life, shed light on one of the most understudied dimensions of Nigerian colonial history – the political use of deviance
Cartography · Colonialism · Dirt · Geography · Political science · Politics · African history and culture studies · Australian History and Society · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2025 (8) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |