Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos

By Abosede A. George

In Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria. It draws from gender studies, generational studies, labor history, and urban history to shed new light on the complex workings of African cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the nationalist era of the 1950s.

The two major schemes at the center of this study were the modernization project of elite Lagosian women and the salvationist project of British social workers. By approaching children and youth, specifically girl hawkers, as social actors and examining the ways in which local and colonial reformers worked upon young people, the book offers a critical new perspective on the uses of African children for the production and legitimization of national and international social development initiatives.

Making Modern Girls demonstrates how oral sources can be used to uncover the social history of informal or undocumented urban workers and to track transformations in practices of childhood over the course of decades. George revises conventional accounts of the history of development work in Africa by drawing close attention to the social welfare initiatives of late colonialism and by highlighting the roles that African women reformers played in promoting sociocultural changes within their own societies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780821445013

Abosede A. George

Abosede A. George is an assistant professor of history and Africana studies at Barnard College in New York City. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, and her articles have appeared in such venues as the Journal of Social History and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is the founder of the Ekopolitan Project, a digital archive of family history resources on migrant communities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Lagos.

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new african histories

Series editors: Jean Allman, Allen Isaacman, and derek R. peterson

Books in this series are published with support from the Ohio University National Resource Center for African Studies.

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Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku

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Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times

Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948

Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, editors, Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa

Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression

Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry, editors, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977

Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule

Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa

James R. Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania

Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, editors, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children

David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History

Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007

Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa

Gibril R. Cole, The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century

Matthew M. Heaton, Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry

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Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa

Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos

Alicia C. Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda

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Making Modern Girls

A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos

Abosede A. George

Ohio University Press Athens, Ohio

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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Cover image: NIGERIA 17. Album, entitled ‘Nigeria Snaps’, containing 129 uncaptioned photographs by H S Freeman, 1900-1920. The album contains a frontispiece stating ‘This album was made by Mr Thomas Henshaw, the Chief Native Bookbinder of the Government Press, Lagos, and his assistants. The photographs were supplied by Mr H S Freeman, Photographer-In-Chief to His Excellency the Governor’ and is divided into nine subject categories. The category the cover photograph is 4) ‘In Lagos.’ Courtesy National Archives, KEW; Reference CO 1069/71

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

George, Abosede A., author.

Making modern girls : a history of girlhood, labor, and social development in colonial Lagos / Abosede A. George.

pages cm — (New African histories)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-2115-4 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-2116-1 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4501-3 (pdf)

1. Girls—Nigeria—Lagos—History—20th century. 2. Child labor—Nigeria—Lagos—History—20th century. 3. Peddlers—Nigeria—Lagos—History—20th century. 4. Public welfare—Nigeria—Lagos—History—20th century. 5. Lagos (Nigeria)—Social conditions—20th century. 6. Social change—Nigeria—Lagos. 7. Great Britain—Colonies—Social policy. I. Title.

HQ792.N5G46 2014

305.2308209669’1—dc23

2014020141

Acknowledgments

This project has been supported by a great many individuals and several institutions. The earliest incarnation of this book benefited from the comments and advice of Richard Roberts, Estelle Freedman, the late Kennell Jackson of Stanford University, and Tabitha Kanogo of the University of California, Berkeley. My research was generously supported by the Department of History and the Office of Graduate Diversity Recruitment and Retention at Stanford. Research fellowships from the Institute for International Studies and the Weter Foundation provided funding for a research strategy that addressed challenging travel restrictions. Judith Byfield, Olutayo Adesina, and Wale Makanjuola enabled me to craft an archival research plan that cut through the global apartheid system. The Clayman Institute for Research on Gender provided me with funds to complete the research and a community of feminist scholars with whom to think through some key aspects of the early project.

The final iteration as a book was mainly supported by my home institution, Barnard College, which offered me travel and research funding, and by the History Department and Africana Studies Department at Barnard, which granted me much-needed time for additional archival and oral research once I became able to migrate freely. Donna Murch, Deborah Gray White, and the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University also provided financial support and a crucial intellectual community that facilitated my writing during my year as a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers. Outside of, or alongside, the colleagues I met at the Center for Historical Analysis, I have also benefited greatly from the brilliance of less formally structured yet no less inspiring writing groups. These have consistently included, although in varying combinations and at different points in time, Carolyn Brown, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Toja Okoh, Carina Ray, and Benjamin Talton. I thank my Barnard colleagues Betsy Esch, Maja Horn, and Molly Tambor, who read drafts of chapters in the book, and Emily Burrill, Corrie Decker, Simon Heap, Dorothy Ko, Brian Larkin, Benjamin Lawrance, Hlonipha Mokoena, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Steven Pierce, Lorelle Semley, Rhiannon Stephens, and Liz Thornberry, who all patiently endured and generously commented on my efforts to communicate ideas in development. The years of completing my first book were also the years of starting my academic career, and in that larger venture I have benefited tremendously from the support and wise counsel of Carolyn Brown and Kim F. Hall. At the hour when it most counted, crucial material support was rendered by the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University, which helped with publication completion support. The ideas presented in this work have benefited from discussions that took place in the context of the Columbia University Seminar in Contemporary Africa. Many thanks go to the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford for granting me permission to reproduce Alison Izzett’s photos, Boys Gambling and In the Girls’ Remand Home. Thanks also to Berta Jottar, who created the index for this book.

To my old and new friends, too many to list here, thanks for the laughs, the drinks, the sympathy, and solidarity. To the George family in North America, the Ogbeides in Ibadan, the Reis family and the Winyemis in Lagos, mo ki yin. Thank you all for your faith and support through this long process of working on the book. To God be the glory.

Introduction: Girling the Subject

Olomo lo l’aiye

Edumare wa fun wa l’omo amuseye

Omo tii toju ara

Tii toju ile

Tii toju baba

Fun wa l’omo atata

Tii mu’nu iya dun

***

To have a child, is to have joy in life

Edumare give us a child who will fill us with pride

A child who takes care of the family,

Who takes care of the home,

Who takes care of the father,

Give us a precious child

Who makes the mother happy

To have a child is to have joy when the child is one you can be proud of. So state the opening lines of Abiodun Adepoju’s naming ceremony ewi.[1] The first stanza of the poem traces a portrait of an ideal child and expresses desire for this ideal child to come forth. In the poem, Omo tii toju ara, tii toju ile, tii toju baba . . . tii mu’nu iya dun is a child who embodies principles of reciprocity and community. Just as the family, the community, the father, and the mother ought to care for the child who comes to them, so ideally should any omo atata delight in taking care of his or her kinfolk in return.

Ewi poems are typically performed on occasions of growth in a family’s history, such as weddings and naming ceremonies. Yoruba naming ceremonies, like the occasion that inspired Adepoju’s ewi, ideally take place on the eighth day after a child has been born. They pool together spiritual leaders like a family’s pastor, imam, or oldest members, with the parents of the new baby, and members of the extended family, household, or local community. Key members of the assemblage bestow names and blessings upon the child, while an onijala, if present, recites ewi. An elegant ewi might recount the oriki of both maternal and paternal lineages, thereby linking the new arrival with his or her ancestors, and either exhort the child to follow in their honored footsteps or caution the child to learn from their tarnished legacies.[2]The poem is simultaneously a prayer and a command: a wish for the child as much as for the parents.

Typically performed in the presence of the new child, such poems enjoin him or her to recognize and manifest himself or herself as the ideal. In the naming ceremony ewi, we see an outline of an ideal child and an idea of childhood. Childhood involved joy and affection as much as utility, responsibility, reciprocity, and collaboration. The poem’s emphasis on the child’s contributions to others as the mark of his or her value suggests that childhood is to be thought of as a constructive, rather than an extractive phase of an individual’s life, when as much emphasis is placed on what the child brings to the family as on what the child derives from the group. The audience for an ewi recital typically includes the infant. Barely able to turn his or her head in order to track the source of the sound, the infant is nonetheless addressed as one who is already active in the construction of the family and the larger social world.

Such notions of childhood, the social function of the child, or the idea of an ideal child are neither universal nor timeless; both the literal and symbolic work that children do are as open to critique and as amenable to historical change as any other social phenomena. Colonial Lagos of the twentieth century featured multiple and contested notions of the ideal child and views on how he or she might be brought into being. In literal and symbolic ways, children functioned as subjects of contestation between working-class Lagosians and elites, and between the colonial state and its subjects. Interclass and interracial struggles over children and childhood that linked Lagos Colony to the larger imperial world presented new frameworks for understanding relationships between African children and families, between the African child and the native, and crucially, between African children and the state. Through the introduction of novel legal and governmental instruments along with their underlying ethical principles, the twentieth-century colonial period saw the emergence of new legal and political distinctions between African children and adults and a concomitant reorganization of the relative social, moral, and developmental valences of the African, unmarked, and the African child.

The earliest category of children to be made a specific target of colonial governance activity was that of slave or newly freed slave children. For the first half of the nineteenth century to the annexation of Lagos Colony in 1861, the salvation and training of African children who had become estranged from their natal families and communities was principally a concern for Christian missionary groups in Lagos and its satellite towns such as Badagry and Abeokuta. One of the first instances when African children became a specific target of governmental activity was in 1877 through passage of an ordinance that combined ideas of labor regulation and moral protection. In December 1877, the young British colonial government of the Colony of Lagos passed the Alien Children Registration Ordinance, a law that called for the registration and protection in certain other respects of alien children now residing in or who may hereafter be brought into Lagos.[3]Beginning in 1863, births, deaths, and ordinance marriages that took place in Lagos had been recorded by the colony government registrar. Into those existing rolls of enumerated persons, the Alien Children Registration Ordinance sought to also capture any person under the age of seventeen years whose parents were natives of Africa but who had not for whatever reason been registered in accordance with the law of the Colony relating to the registration of births.[4]

Under the ordinance, guardians of children who were new arrivals in Lagos were required to present their children before the registrar within forty-eight hours of entering the jurisdictional boundaries of the colony government. The ordinance explicitly prohibited Lagos residents from transferring the custody of unregistered children back and forth among themselves. In order to transfer custody of a registered child, the existing custodian, the prospective custodian, and the child in question all had to appear before the registrar, who would oversee any needed modifications to the child’s certificate of registration. If registered children changed residence, the ordinance required that this change be reported to the registrar. If they passed away, their deaths were to be reported to the registrar. If children were traveling beyond the jurisdictional boundaries of Lagos Colony, their travel plans were to be reported to the registrar or the governor who would grant (or withhold) permission for the child to be taken out of Lagos. Violation of any of the one dozen rules listed in the ordinance could result in a fine of up to fifty pounds or six months imprisonment with hard labor.[5]Irregularities in fulfilling the ordinance’s requirements, such as either failing to register a child within the required time frame or failing to produce a child or the child’s certificate of registration when ordered to do so, could trigger investigations by the registrar general, a district commissioner, a justice of the peace, or any person acting under the authority of the governor. These presumably European persons, accompanied by their interpreters, were empowered to enter any house . . . at any time between the hours of sunrise and sunset, and require production of all children resident therein, whether registered or not, and make all such enquiries respecting such children as he shall think fit.[6]

The Alien Children Registration Ordinance was the first colonial regulation to particularize the experiences of children as colonized subjects. It was both a show of force and a show of humanitarianism in the sense that it imposed a relationship between the state and subjects that was grounded in an ideology of benevolence. The ordinance posited a form of governance in which the state acted on behalf of subjects and positioned itself as a source of salvation for the most vulnerable subjects, children. Through the ordinance, children and their conditions of being were enlisted to legitimize interventionist colonial projects and the power of the state. The ordinance was important for the way that it brokered a relationship between the child and the state and the way that it rewrote space. Spatially, the ordinance opened the domestic threshold to being traversed by the state; it was the first colonial directive to take the state into a domestic arena of the lives of African subjects. The ordinance’s geographic reach encompassed Lagos Island, both its inhabited areas and yet unclaimed swamps; adjoining Iddo Island; and adjacent parts of Ebute Metta, Badagry, and the mainland.[7]In precisely specifying the spatial limits of its application, the ordinance also marked the local boundaries of colonial civilization.

The Alien Children Registration Ordinance was an extension of antislavery and anti-slave-trading ordinances that had been passed in 1874 and 1875. As Kristin Mann noted in her study of slavery in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Lagos, enslaved people, particularly enslaved children, continued to be brought into Lagos Colony even after passage of the first antislavery ordinance. When a letter to the editor of the African Times brought this state of affairs to abolitionist audiences in London, embarrassed colonial authorities in Lagos intensified their surveillance of canoes entering the colony.[8]In short order they confirmed the persistence of slave trading and the high percentage of children, particularly girls, who were being smuggled into the colony. The Alien Children Registration Ordinance was thus an initial attempt to close a gap in Lagos Colony’s antislavery infrastructure as well as an attempt to formulate a response to a serious public relations problem for the new colonial government.

As the scholarship on law and colonialism has amply demonstrated, the law on paper, though enticingly concrete for historians, often bore the most tenuous relationship to actual social practice.[9]On paper, the Alien Children Registration Ordinance and the antislavery laws that preceded it posited a radical interruption of the socioeconomic system that existed in slave-trading Lagos; as such, they were fundamental tests of the authority of the new colonial government. But as Mann astutely notes, The Alien Children’s Registration Ordinance in no way prohibited bringing children, even slave children, into Lagos and putting them to work there; it merely required that such children be registered and stipulated that they could not be removed from British territory without the governor’s permission.[10]Even as the ordinance intensified governmental surveillance of elite Lagosians, their dependents, servants, and existing slaves, it did not impose a moratorium on enslavement of children. Indeed, a delegation of chiefs, elders, and traders who opposed the ordinance successfully argued to the governor that its enforcement would make it harder for them to buy victims of slavery in the hinterland and deliver them to freedom in Lagos.[11]By 1876, Mann shows, Lagosians had already begun to represent the purchase of slaves beyond the frontier for use in the colony as a benevolent act of redemption.[12]

Despite its shortcomings as a legal implement for abolitionists in Lagos, in its particular focus on children, the registration ordinance introduced an important innovation to the idea of the child. In enacting the ordinance, the state marked children off from adults and constructed the child and the enslaved child as ontologically distinct from the adult or the enslaved adult. It asserted a hierarchy of suffering and exploitation, of sympathy and humanity, between enslaved children and enslaved adults. In bowing to antiordinance pressures from the delegation of influential slave owners, one government official reportedly stated, I suppose it is all very wrong, but it seems to me to be ‘much ado about nothing.’ The children were apparently very well treated and contented.[13]In his assertion that the condition of enslavement for children was not accompanied by maltreatment or discontent, the official placed a higher moral value on the welfare of the enslaved child as a child over the freedom of the enslaved child as slave.

Enforcement of the Alien Children Registration Ordinance faltered and then faded away over the two decades after the ordinance was passed. Yet it was not forgotten. Half a century later, the law was exhumed by a new kind of government in Lagos—this time, the developmentalist colonial state.[14]In the mid-twentieth century, as in the last decades of the nineteenth, the colonial state was once again trying to articulate a form of governance based on saving Africans from each other and from their own repugnant practices. More specifically, the state focused resources on saving children, viewed as members of a universal generational group, from Africans, viewed as members of a particular racial group. Thus, at key moments in the history of Lagos, at the late nineteenth-century moment of the imposition and attempted consolidation of colonial power on the island, and later during the mid-twentieth-century crisis of authority that accompanied the Second World War and prompted a reorganization of colonial power, the child was called forth as a vulnerable and imperiled universal subject, whose very existence demanded and legitimized the appearance of a salvationist colonial regime.

This book is a history of girls and those who set out to save them in twentieth-century colonial Lagos. It examines contested ideas of girls and girlhood in relation to constructions and deployments of vulnerability and techniques and ideologies of salvation as political discourses. Through a particular focus on working-class girls and girl savers in Lagos, this book explores the history of the emergence of the African child as a universal subject during the colonial period. The book argues that before the trade unionist, the wageworker, or the nationalist politician, the child was the first category of native to emerge as a universal subject in Africa. The universal subjecthood of African children contrasted in significant ways with that of their successors—the industrial workers who demanded recognition of their membership in the global working class or the nationalists who demanded recognition of their sovereign right to political freedom. In contrast with these other groups, the universal subjecthood of the African child was an imparted and not a claimed status, which was bestowed upon the child by would-be salvationists. As such, the contested ideas of girls and girlhood that this book examines uniquely illuminate the implication of hierarchical distinctions of race, class, gender, and generation within programs of universal subject making in the colonial era and beyond.

Summary and Goals

The book centers on a period in the history of the city when Western-educated elite Lagosian women, later in collaboration with the British colonial state in Nigeria, tried to reshape the idea and experience of girlhood among the Lagosian working class. As a project of elite women, the transformation of girlhood in Lagos was conceptualized as an indigenous modernization effort that would play a crucial role in the preservation and popularization of modern womanhood in the nation. For elite women reformers, expanding the realm of modern womanhood in Lagos required normalizing Western-style education in the socialization of working-class girls and educating all girls to participate as wageworkers in the urban colonial economy. Such a vision of girlhood, which centered on the school as the primary institution of training and socialization, entailed delaying the ages at which girls entered both the institution of marriage and the urban work force. For elite women, working-class girlhood in Lagos prematurely introduced girls to the Lagos markets where they toiled at traditional occupations and engaged in illicit encounters with boys and men. These activities and the conventional practices of girlhood that they seemed to emanate from were read as inhibiting the expansion of women’s education, their participation across diverse sectors of the formal economy, and their ability to command moral or political power. In order to garner support for their revisioning of Yoruba girlhood, educated elite women petitioned colonial administrators and religious leaders, and along with other educational entrepreneurs, began opening private schools where girls would be taught modern subjects and trained in new modes of feminine comportment. Yet for decades they were denied state support. Things appeared to change in the early 1940s, at which point the colonial government also began undertaking projects for the apparent welfare of children: boys first and, later, under pressure from the women, girls as well. Colonial officials came to regard working-class girlhood with a similarly jaundiced eye to their counterparts among elite Lagos women, yet they entertained a crucially different vision of what improvement or progress would look like with Lagos girls. They too sought to delay and standardize the ages at which girls began going to market and trading, thereby inhibiting sexual contact between girls and men in the city. However, unlike the women’s modernization plan, the state’s salvationist project failed to include a plan for mass education of girls and mass incorporation of girls and women into the formal colonial wage labor economy. As a project of the colonial state, the transformation of girlhood was conceptualized as a social development scheme that was vital for the salvation of Yoruba girls while being potentially redemptive of a crumbling colonial enterprise. In looking at the interconnected women reformers’ modernization project and the colonial social workers’ development project, I am interested in exploring two related questions: how girls worked and what work they did. On one level, I mean to investigate the actual labor activities that girls performed and the constitutive relationships between gender, class, generation, and labor practices. On another level, I seek to discuss the various ways in which girls were ideationally constructed and the function of particular ideas of the girl for elites, colonists, politicians, and the state.

Gender, Labor, and Development Work

There are any number of ways that one can approach girls’ history or the history of ideas of girlhood. This book approaches the history of girls and girlhood via the lens of girls’ labor practices primarily. Through examination of the constitutive relationship between gender, class, generation, and labor, this book builds on scholarship that sits at the intersection of the history of gender, labor, and development work in urban Africa.

Scholarship on the history of development work in Africa dates what Frederick Cooper called that knowledge-power practice to the years following the West Indian labor crises of the 1930s and Britain’s passage of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940.[15]Although development, generally understood as the idea of planned economic transformation, had long been a feature of colonial rule in Africa, the development era that began in the 1940s was different from preceding periods in two important ways. One innovation in colonial development thinking, which other scholars have already remarked on, was that development in British and French colonies was financed at unprecedented levels directly from the treasuries of colonizing nations.[16]This marked a radical break with previous practice, which had required African colonial governments to be financially self-sufficient and to not impose any financial burden on European taxpayers. The second innovation was that the significance of colonial development after 1940 extended beyond narrow economic concerns to include an amorphous new idea of welfare. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 supplied metropolitan funds for a range of development projects, including social welfare, throughout the British Empire. Social development projects were intended to contain growing unrest in the colonies while demonstrating to critics of colonialism that subjects did indeed gain tangible benefits from British rule.[17]Nigerian development projects were detailed in the Ten Year Plan for Social and Economic Progress in Nigeria, and included health, education, rural development, police, prisons, and other more detailed concerns. Social welfare, one of the most underfunded yet broadly defined development projects, was a catchall category for all activities auxiliary to the work of specialist departments.[18]The new social welfare imperative, which bridged psychological and sociological theories of social change, brought the social development of African subjects, including children and young people, within the colonial state’s sphere of interest.

Historians Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard have argued that early development work had as much an ideological as a practical dimension.[19] Development projects attempted to transform norms and values by transforming practices, rewarding certain behaviors and punishing others. Studies of the impact of development projects and ideology reveal that subjects did not passively receive these, nor did they obstinately resist colonial government initiatives.[20]Rather, colonial subjects actively embraced certain aspects of development work, particularly its underlying modernizing ideology.[21]

A recurring research interest of leading scholars in the development history field is the question of how development ideology intersected with labor management and mobilization in the colonial period.[22]The types of workers that have received the most attention—railway workers, dockworkers, and other kinds of organized wageworkers—were a largely if not wholly male population. Part of the developmentalist ideology that enabled the growth of trade unions in twentieth-century Africa was the idea that men as heads of households could be used to control their extended personal networks and could be most efficiently engaged with through organized trade unions. Lisa Lindsay’s work on the construction of the male breadwinner as a masculine ideal among organized railway workers and Carolyn Brown’s work on miners both look at intersections between labor reform, collective organizing, and the emergence of new ideologies of masculinity.[23]As their research demonstrates, the emergence of trade unions and new labor practices was not only about carving out new forms of organization for wageworkers but also about bringing forth new subjectivities and new gender categories—a new kind of African man who would subscribe to, uphold, and try to manage novel expressions of masculine identity.[24]Since wageworkers and unionized workers constituted a small percentage of the working population of most colonial African cities, we have the opportunity to explore how development ideologies dedicated to stabilizing the urban work force engaged with workers who were not wageworkers. Building on the historiographical concern with the relationship between labor, development projects, and masculinity, this book draws attention to the interplay between labor control, development projects, and ideas of girlhood in twentieth-century colonial Lagos. This book examines how girls who straddled the divide between workers and small-scale entrepreneurs interacted with development ideology. I focus on the experiences of nonindustrial female workers in the informal economy who appeared to have been excluded from the developmentalist labor programs of the state.[25]

In addition to examining the impact of development work on the production of new gender categories and subjectivities, this book draws attention to elite Lagosian women’s efforts to direct social transformation. It raises questions about the practical difference between development work and social reform work, why the two topics have developed along separate historiographical lines, and what the distinct concerns of both topics communicate about different programs for social change. Starting during the 1940s, British social workers were deployed to Lagos to carry out the daily work of social development while colonial students were encouraged to pursue study in the science of social work. In Lagos, British social workers encountered elite women’s social reform groups that had been working on urban social problems, particularly those affecting women and girls, since the turn of the century. One could argue that the activities of elite Lagosian women fell within a social reform tradition, whereas colonial officials and the Colony Welfare Office were aligned with development history. But what does that linguistic difference signify when there were overlaps between the development work of the state and the social reform work of the women’s groups? The relationship between development and social reform in the context of girl-saving projects in Lagos sheds light on the gender assumptions and nuances in the historiography of the two themes of study. Scholarship that assumes a clear distinction between colonial state development projects and indigenously inspired reform projects can miss important overlaps between the two. In Lagos, state and community forces led by indigenous and foreign initiative came together to organize social change. The limits of cooperation were reached when the masculinist machinery of social development work could not yield to women social reformers. In an essay critiquing the ideology of development work, Cooper characterized development as something that was designed to be done to and for Africa, not with it.[26]In twentieth-century colonial Lagos, women reformers made development work something to be done by Africa(ns). In so doing, Lagosian women challenged the knowledge-power hierarchies that underlay the colonial social order.

In exploring these movements and convergences, this book sits at the intersection of several underexplored areas in colonial African history. One of these is the history of Western-educated African women. The history of European-African encounters during the colonial period has been fixated on the conflicts, compromises, and collaborations that structured relations between African and European men. Social categories and dynamics that emerged from these interactions—most obviously, the colonizer/colonized dichotomy—have been extended to all European-African encounters, flattening the gendered distinctions that emerge by looking comparatively at interactions between African women and European men. These underexamined interactions featured conflicting worldviews regarding the impact of gender on social experience and social status, and on the place of women in society. In this book, I examine what happened when contrasting worldviews of African women and European men regarding gender norms came into direct contact in the larger context of unequal colonial power relationships.

Sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi has argued that the colonial encounter in Africa created a four-part hierarchy of social categories featuring European men at the top, followed by European women, African men, and, last, African women.[27]Historical scholarship on the colonial period in Africa has generally reflected this hierarchical configuration and presented European men as the normative rulers, at least in colonial cities, and African men as the normative subjects, with African women somewhere in the backdrop and largely beside the point for understandings of colonial governance. New studies that examine interactions between African women and European men are being written with a focus on intimate interactions in the realms of marriage, concubinage, and related domestic arrangements.[28]The new scholarship demonstrates that even within the wider context of racialized colonial societies, intimate interactions multiplied the possible subject positions Europeans and Africans could occupy, challenging the centrality of a hierarchical colonizer/colonized dichotomy as the key locus of conflict in European-African encounters during the colonial period.[29]This book adds to scholarship that reexamines the gender and class dimensions of colonial racial orders through a micropolitical and intersectional lens, by considering public, professional, and activist engagements between elite African women and European colonial workers in Lagos. I focus on African women who did not automatically experience disempowerment and did not, for various reasons, understand themselves to be lower-status members of society on the basis of their sex. When they interacted with Europeans whose elevated status was tied to their location in the colonial context, the respective status identifications of these two figures collided in ways that challenged the colonial order of things. By focusing attention on the public and professional lives of African women, the book also draws attention to points of conflict in colonial societies that derived less from received understandings of the hierarchical configurations of colonial societies and more from the subjective identities of individuals who lived in Lagos during the colonial period and who had to negotiate with each other in order to get work done.

Elite women reformers and colonial social workers initially formed an alliance to regulate activities that the larger Lagos public considered conventional practices of girlhood. Through regulating girls’ labor and, by extension, girls’ education and sexuality, reformers and social workers hoped to transform local practices and ideas of girlhood and usher novel forms of girlhood into Lagosian Yoruba culture. The alliance between voluntary women reformers and colonial social workers was fraught with thorny gender, race, and class tensions and ultimately fell apart. But before their alliance fractured, the salvationists succeeded in introducing hundreds of Lagosian girls and their families to the interiors of colonial institutions and previously unknown levels of governmental surveillance. At its heart, Making Modern Girls is concerned with examining the centrality