The intellectual context of nineteenth-century Lagos life

If any community needed to understand its own character, its place in the world of men and ideas, that community was the Lagos of the nineteenth century. It was a community dominated by men who had grown up in foreign lands — in Sierra Leone, in Cuba or in Brazil; men who had now returned to their homeland with a sincere sense of attachment to its people and to its values. According to Rev. Mr Townsend of the Church Missionary Society, these early immigrants viewed their return to Lagos with immense patriotic enthusiasm. This is our country, they said, is Eko [Lagos]. But they were men, also, who from many points of view, especially from their own, were considered to be at some advantage over their own people because of the opportunity that slavery had indirectly offered them to acquire the characteristics of European civilization. These men were at the cross-roads, and knew it. One of them, John Craig, told Rev. Mr Townsend in October 1865, We have always considered ourselves as Middlemen between you and the Egbas. Their instinctive and deep-felt attachment to Yorubaland and to Yoruba life made them at times stern critics of those Europeans who believed that the African had no culture of his own. At the same time, their deep-felt appreciation of European life, and their belief that their return would bring similar benefits to Yorubaland made them equally stern defenders and apologists of European values. Any community suddenly thrown into the confusing and often confused thinking of the mid-nineteenth century would be expected to inherit many of the uncertainties of that age. Lagos was no exception. Its own uncertainties were, however, made even more disastrous by the ready platitudes of a section of the population, the self-righteousness of the 'civilized' elite and the general indecision of the vast majority. It is the pattern of these reactions that we will be considering in this paper

Ancient history · Archaeology · Context (archaeology · African cultural and philosophical studies · History

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