chapter 12 Sexualizing the City: Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres in a Historical Perspective
Mfon Umoren Ekpootu
The work of prostitutes cannot be understood separate from the particular his- torical and socio-cultural context in which it is carried out, all of which shape the sexual agency of the women involved. In studying commercial sexual rela- tions in urban Nigeria, this paper problematizes prostitution, examining shifts in meanings, perceptions, and the organization of prostitution. How was a prostitute defined in different epochs in Nigeria’s history? How did society or- ganize sex and sexuality and how did these shape commercial sex relations? The discourses on prostitution in Nigeria have focused mainly on human traf- ficking and migrant prostitution. On the other hand, attempts to document domestic prostitution, as well as its development and mutations over time, in addition to operational and regulatory mechanisms have so far been the pre- occupation of but a few scholars.1 In this literature, the colonial antecedent of commercial sex trade is underscored. Lagos presents a viable site for an overview of prostitution because of its cos- mopolitan landscape and socio-economic and cultural heterogeneity which allow for a mapping of the forms and patterns of prostitution that emerged over time. In the fifteenth century it grew from a fishing settlement engaged in local trading with neighbouring communities2 into a locale of commercial importance trading with Europe thanks to its strategic location. As a port city, Lagos attracted people of diverse origins, from European traders to freed slaves
1 Benedict B.B. Naanen, “‘Itinerant Gold Mines’: Prostitution in the Cross River Basin of Nigeria, 1930–1950”, African Studies Review, 34 (1991), pp. 57–79; Saheed Aderinto, “‘The Girls in Moral Danger’: Child Prostitution and Sexuality in Colonial Lagos, Nigeria 1930 to 1950”, Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 1 (2007), pp. 1–22; Mfon Ekpootu, “Interrogating Policies on Human Trafficking in Nigeria”, in Toyin Falola and Bridget Teboh (eds), The Power of Gender, the Gender of Power: Women’s Labor, Rights and Responsibility in Africa (Trenton, 2013), pp. 551–566. 2 Quoted in Oluwole Ajala Alagbe, “Combating the Challenges of the Rise of Urban Slums in Cities of the Developing World: A Case Study of Lagos” (Unpublished Paper, International Conference on the Built Environment: Innovation Policy and Sustainable Development, Covent University, Otta, Ogun State, 2003), p. 3.
© Mfon Umoren Ekpootu, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_013 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND Mfon4.0 license. Umoren Ekpootu - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 12:47:19AM via free access Female Prostitution in Nigeria’s Urban Centres 307 from Brazil as well as migrants from the interior. In 1861 Lagos was annexed by the British, and with the amalgamation of the northern and southern Nigerian protectorates with the Colony of Lagos in 1914, Lagos became the headquar- ters of the Federation of Nigeria.3 Colonial capitalist development stimulated more migratory flows in response to perceived opportunities in Lagos. It has grown to become the most populous city in modern Nigeria and is its com- mercial capital. In 1967, Lagos became a state with an area of 3,577 square ki- lometres. As a wetland on the coastal plains of the Atlantic, much of the state is covered with water. For this study, colonial records were used, including police records and ad- ministrative correspondences. The private letters of prostitutes and petitions written by ethnic associations as well as the letters of abandoned husbands found in the colonial archives were utilized to allow a glimpse into the ways the prostitutes and family members made sense of the sexual spaces of the city. Interviews with sex workers were also conducted to bring to light the de- tails of contemporary forms of prostitution.
Defining Prostitution
Previous studies have pointed to the definitional problems implicit in attempts to neatly categorize prostitution.4 As Forster has rightly argued, in western so- cieties the definitional space of prostitution is muddled but this becomes even more complicated when attempting to draw up a cross-cultural perspective. The sexual terrain of precolonial Nigeria has been subjected to varied read- ings in local and colonial imaginaries. Prostitution as the commoditization of sexual services didn’t exist in the local lexicon but there existed several sexual activities that fell outside conjugal relations. For instance, the engagement of women in extra-marital sexual liaisons was permissible and conducted within culturally sanctioned parameters. In Lagos and other Yoruba communities wives could take a lover, who secured her husband’s approval through payment of a fine for encroaching on “his property” and the performance of culturally
3 See Robin Law, “Trade and Politics behind the Slave Coast: The Lagoon Traffic and the Rise of Lagos”, The Journal of African History, 24 (1983), pp. 321–348. 4 Peter G. Forster, “Prostitution in Malawi and the hiv/aids Risk”, Nordic Journal of African Studies, 9 (2000), pp. 1–9; Marjolein van der Veen, “Rethinking Commodification and Pros- titution: An Effort at Peacemaking in the Battles over Prostitution” Rethinking Marxism, 13 (Summer 2001), pp. 30–51.
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5 Olatunji Ojo, “Reviewed Beyond Diversity: Women, Scarification, and Yoruba Identity”, His- tory in Africa, 35 (2008), pp. 347–374. 6 Ibid.; Claire Robertson and Martin Klein (eds), Women and Slavery in Africa (Portsmouth, 1997). 7 For a detailed analysis of the rise of Lagos and its commerce in slaves, see Robin Law, “Trade and Politics behind the Slave Coast”, pp. 321–348. 8 Ojo, “Reviewed Beyond Diversity”, p. 354.
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approach to achieving a neat form of categorization for administrative pur- poses in this regard as well as controlling those who were colonized through knowledge and possession. It would be erroneous to equate the sexual practices of married women in precolonial Lagos with some form of prostitution. Rather it should stimulate questions about the meanings of such behaviour for the people who engaged in such practices. An important factor here is the dynamics through which such acts occurred and this is related to the traditional Nigerian context, not western notions. In their study of polygamy in South Africa, Delius and Glaser9 argue that marriage in precolonial Africa was less about control of sexuality and more about fertility and labour productivity, and historical accounts of Yo- ruba society in Nigeria attest to this.10 The practice of women marrying other women into the family was one avenue for those who were infertile or had few children. In this way, they could secure a place in the family by having their husbands get married and acquiring the children that were subsequently born. In their negative readings of the sexual intimacy of the local population, European writers and the colonial state eroticized what was non-erotic and represented as socially deviant what was culturally legitimate. A good example of this can be seen in the way the colonial imaginary saw the baring of wom- en’s breasts as sexual vulgarity and evidence of female lasciviousness. This inappropriate reading and labelling of non-conjugal sexual liaisons in Africa as prostitution has drawn criticism.11 It has been argued that the agrarian set- ting in precolonial Africa precluded the independent capital accumulation of women. More importantly, certain salient features of prostitution such as the indiscriminate sale of sexual services were lacking in the precolonial environ- ment. The relevance of these factors should not be overlooked in the creation of definitions of prostitution for that era, and the origins of prostitution in Nigeria are still unclear. Also, data for the precolonial era is lacking and hence historical explorations of the issue of prostitution remain highly problematic. What is clear is that it was in the colonial period that the prostitute became imprinted in the social imaginary and was subjected to codes of control.12
9 Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, “The Myths of Polygamy: A History of Extra-marital and Multi-Partnership Sex in South Africa”, South African History Journal, 50 (2004), pp. 84–114. 10 Ojo, “Reviewed Beyond Diversity”, pp. 347–374. 11 See for example Suzette Heald, “The Power of Sex: Some Reflections on the Caldwells ‘African Sexuality’ Thesis”, Africa, 65 (1995), pp. 489–505; Hilary Standing “aids: Concep- tual and Methodological Issues in Researching Sexual Behaviour in Sub-Saharan Africa”, Social Science and Medicine, 34 (1992), pp. 475–483. 12 Naanen, “‘Itinerant Gold Mines’”, pp. 57–79; Aderinto, “The Girls in Moral Danger”, pp. 1–22; Ekpootu, “Interrogating Policies”, pp. 551–566.
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Prostitution became criminalized and the women who earned their livelihood by selling sex were identified and made visible. Colonial narratives discursively produced the prostitute as the female “other” through a motif of degeneracy and a threat to moral order.
State Regulation/Prohibition/Tolerance
With the sustained presence of Europeans in the colonies, sexual prescriptions based on class, race, and gender became increasingly central to the politics of the empire and they were subject to varying degrees of scrutiny by colo- nial powers. Media publications directed the public’s attention to the rising criminality in Lagos, and this included the “dangers” brought about by young women who engaged in hawking because it was argued that this not only led to prostitution but resulted in them being harassed; in turn, this was linked to prostitution and the spread of venereal diseases amongst European and Afri- can military personnel in Nigeria and the Gold Coast,13 which led the colonial government to criminalize prostitution. The policing of illicit sexuality was subsumed under the Undesirable Ad- vertisement Ordinance of 1932, the Unlicensed Guide (Prohibition) Ordinance of 1941, and the Venereal Disease Ordinance of 1943.14 These interjections into female sexual spaces were narratively produced as a state concern for pub- lic health and morality by eliminating the sources of such “moral decay” and physical disease. Underlying these concerns were more complex issues con- cerning modernity and the British role in how that unfolded. The relevant legal documents for stamping out prostitution were mainly enshrined in the Crimi- nal Code of Nigeria of 1916, later amended in 1944, and the Child and Young Person’s Ordinance (cypo) of 1943. The cypo criminalized child prostitution and after being reviewed in 1958, it remained the legal framework relating to child prostitution and other forms of child labour until the promulgation of the Child Rights Acts in 2003. Sections 222A–222B of the Criminal Code dealt with the procurement, abduction, or encouragement of girls under the age of 16 for the purposes of sold sex; Sections 225 focused on young persons under 18 while Sections 225A
13 Carina Ray, “The Sex Trade in Colonial West Africa” (Part 2), New African, 458 (2007), pp. 66–68. 14 Saheed Aderinto, “Sexualized Nationalism: Lagos and the Politics of Illicit Sexuality in Colonial Nigeria, 1918–1958” (Unpublished Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 2010), p. 61.
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Push and Pull Factors
Determining factors for prostitution cannot realistically be said to constitute either/or factors but in most cases involve a complex mix of diverse factors. For many young women in rural areas, prostitution has represented more than a means of livelihood or a survival strategy. As commonly depicted in the lit- erature, it has been seen as a viable means of participating in global consumer culture, in other words “modern urban culture”. This plays an important, albeit unrecognized, part in the mix of push/pull factors. Lagos for female rural mi- grants has been perceived as a haven of opportunities not just in terms of wage employment (which has been difficult because of inadequate schooling) or marital aspirations but with regards to a loosening of sexual constraints im- posed by traditional censors. The multi-cultural landscape of Lagos has led to an increase in the sense of freedom. The only entry requirement into the sex market has been the female body, and this has facilitated the ease of entry for a heterogeneous mix of women. While lived experiences in the city reflect depri- vation, social dispossession, and disillusionment with the romanticized image of city life, shame of failure prevents a return home.
15 Richard Roberts and Kristen Mann, “Introduction”, in Kristen Mann and Richard Roberts (eds), Law in Colonial Africa (London, 1991), pp. 15–23.
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In the urban landscape of Lagos in the early twentieth century, reflections of colonial power were visible in colonialist capitalist structures. As the most industrialized city in the area and the biggest employer of wage labour, Lagos attracted many migrants from rural areas and processes of urbanization in- tensified; the population grew from 38,387 in 1901 to 73,766 in 1911. By 1921, it had increased to 99,700 and ten years later it was 126,000. From 1951 to 1953, there was significant growth and the population surged to 230,250 and when Nigeria proclaimed independence the population of Lagos was 665,246.16 The phenomenon of male immigration has been widely noted in the literature as contributing to the growth of prostitution.17 The urban landscapes of Lagos have shared the characteristics of mining camps, military settlements, and port cities, common sites of commercial sex. Aderinto has demonstrated how the influx of soldiers and sailors into Lagos spurred on the trade in sex. It was noted that a flourishing sex market existed in those parts of the city that had military encampments such as Ikoyi, Ijora, Surulere, Cumberland, and Yaba.18 Prostitutes who catered to the military were known as “ammunition wives”. World War ii accelerated the selling of sex, particularly among young wom- en in Lagos. The influx of soldiers and European sailors into Lagos during this period sexualized the city, creating a demand for sex that was filled by pros- titutes. The incidence of venereal diseases recorded among the troops of the West African Frontier Force (waff) in 1942 was 43.2%, which was higher than cases of malaria.19 The war and soldiers’ sexual proclivities caused concerns about the impact of venereal diseases on colonial security forces and the im- plications that could have for Britain’s racial and moral superiority. This has been explored by Levine in her examination of how colonial policing of prosti- tution in British colonies, ostensibly to protect the Empire’s troops, was impli- cated in European imperial designs.20 From 1967 to 1970, Nigeria was engulfed in a civil war that plunged the country into poverty. For many women, their bodies became weapons of survival, a tool that could be used to negate the effects of war. Women took up the selling of sex for diverse reasons, including access to food and security.
16 Laurent Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria 1920–60”, Journal of African History, 47 (2006), pp. 115–137, 117. 17 See for example Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990); Philippa Levine, “A Multitude of Unchaste Women: Prostitution in the British Empire”, Journal of Women’s History, 15 (2004), pp. 159–163. 18 Aderinto, “The Girls in Moral Danger”, pp. 18–19. 19 Ibid., p. 19. 20 Philipa Levine, Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003).
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Entry into the sex industry in Lagos was not always voluntary but involved forms of coercion and trafficking, especially in cases of underage girls. Evi- dence from the 1920s shows that a large number of young girls from rural areas engaged in prostitution in Lagos.21 The sex trade was in many cases mediated by third parties, sometimes with kinship affiliation, and they exploited tradi- tional fostering practices of placing children in the homes of extended fam- ily members or reputable households for a moral upbringing. The practice of child marriage meant that child trafficking could be disguised as such. As a resident of Ogoja Providence acknowledged, “the traffic in girls is most popu- lar and more generally admitted to than the traffic in boys for which no legal colour can be found.”22 The romanticization of Lagos as a haven of opportunity and the desire to escape the drudgery of agricultural life made girls vulnerable to “traffickers”, but I use the term “traffickers” with caution. While it is true that trafficking did exist, the need for an ordered sexual landscape in the enhancement of European control and the erasure of “tainted femininity” to facilitate the ac- ceptance of local elite women into European spaces likely brought about an overgeneralization of the term. Colonial data does address the coercive nature of child prostitution, which appeared frequently in administrative correspon- dences, especially from the 1930s onwards. The public imaginary, reflected in newspaper reports and the statements of women’s organizations, condemned the effects of trafficking on children and society’s morality. There were large numbers of migrant Nigerian prostitutes across the border in the Gold Coast and Equatorial Guinea. The increased visibility of migrant sex workers from Nigeria in the 1930s led Nigerians living in the Gold Coast to feel that their national identity was under threat, and the Nigerian Youth Movement sent a petition to the colonial government protesting the “shame” brought to the country by Nigerian sex workers. Under Gold Coast law, West African prostitutes were allowed to operate in the country and this facilitated the Nigeria-Gold Coast sex trade (Gold Coast Criminal Code Section 435 ap- plied only to non-West African prostitutes).23 Attempts made by the colonial state to control prostitutes and their mobili- ty included medical regulation, strengthening immigration controls, and repa- triation. Criminalization as a state policy was deployed as a means of tackling
21 Aderinto, “Girls in Moral Danger”; Mfon Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labor in the Cross River Region of Southern Nigeria from 1900” (Unpublished Ph.D., University of Port Harcourt, 2008). 22 Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labour”, p. 133. 23 Carina Ray, “The Sex Trade in Colonial West Africa”, pp. 66–68.
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Prostitution in Relation to the Labour Market
The sale of sex is not necessarily an exclusive activity and over the years in different parts of the world it has often been engaged in alongside other income-generating activities. In colonial Lagos, these alternate forms of earn- ing an income mostly existed in the informal sector. Studies have shown that most runaway wives, divorcees, and widows combined sex peddling with al- ternate forms of economic activities, mostly petty trading and hawking.24 By 1932, the colonial authorities were agitating against the widespread practice of street trading, and it was noted, “There is no street in Lagos or Ebute Metta where hawking or selling outside the houses does not take place.”25 For young- er women, prostitution was a supplement to employment in both the formal and informal sectors. Little reports that there were young women who worked during the day as “seamstresses and in shops and offices […] and dress smartly in European clothes” but they also engaged in prostitution at night by solicit- ing for clients in bars, clubs, and restaurants visited by members of the upper class, in the process acquiring Europeans and wealthy Africans as patrons.26 As was the case in other colonial cities,27 prostitution was closely linked to beer brewing and bar girls traversed the fluid space between catering to male customers in bars and prostitution. As mentioned above, a major concern in colonial times that surfaced in colonial narratives and the popular imaginary was the close link between street hawking by girls and prostitution. The former
24 Kenneth Little, “West African Urbanization as a Social Process”, Cahiers D’Etudes Afric- aines, 1 (1960), pp. 90–102, 96. 25 Laurent Fourchard, “Lagos”, in Simon Bekker and Göran Therborn (eds), Capital Cities in Africa: Power and Powerlessness (Dakar [etc.], 2011), pp. 66–82, 69. 26 Little, “West African Urbanization”, p. 96. 27 Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990).
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28 Ekpootu “Prostitution and Child Labour in the Cross River Region”, pp. 149–150; George Abosede “Within Salvation: Girl Hawkers and the Colonial State in Development Era Lagos”, Journal of Social History, 44 (2011), pp. 837–859. 29 Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta, “Challenging Patriarchy: Trade, Outward Migration and the Internationalization of Commercial Sex among Bayang and Ejagham Women in South- west Cameroon”, Health, Culture and Society, 1 (2011), pp. 167–192. 30 Margaret Niger-Thomas, “Women and the Arts of Smuggling” African Studies Review, 44 (2001), pp. 43–70. 31 Tim S. Braimah, “Sex Trafficking in Edo State Nigeria: Causes and Solutions”, Global Jour- nal of Human Social Science Research, 13 (2013), pp. 17–29; Rasheed Olaniyi, “Global Sex Trade and Women Trafficking in Nigeria”, Journal of Global Initiatives, 6 (2011), pp. 111–131. 32 U.G. Oleru, “Prostitution in Lagos: A Sociomedical Study”, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 34 (1980), pp. 312–315.
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Prostitutes’ Social Profiles
In the colonial period, Lagos had an eclectic mix of prostitutes from differ- ent parts of the country. Colonial accounts, however, stated that the majority of women involved were from southern Nigeria, primarily the Cross River re- gion (present day Akwa Ibom Cross River, and some parts of Ebonyi, and Abia
33 Maddy Coy, Joseph Wakeling, and Maria Garner, “Selling Sex Sells: Representations of Prostitution and the Sex Industry in Sexualised Popular Culture as Symbolic Violence”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 34 (2011), pp. 441–448.
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States), as well as Owerri Province.34 Hausa prostitutes were also prominent in the field of commercial sex, but as Aderinto has rightly argued, their geograph- ical confinement to Hausa enclaves in the Sabon Gari and foreigners’ areas such as Agege gave them an invisibility that was not the case with other prosti- tutes and barred the policing of Hausa prostitutes by the colonial state.35 Aside from Nigerian prostitutes, there is evidence to suggest that West African pros- titutes from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) and Dahomey (present-day Republic of Benin) were present in Lagos, but it does not seem that European women were involved in prostitution.36 By the 1990s, there were prostitutes from other African countries and Asia. The large numbers of wealthy Nigerians and foreigners in the city have created a niche for non-Nigerian prostitutes, mostly from China and African countries. A perusal of the services offered by escort services in Lagos such as Valentine Creamy Escorts shows that there is a diverse mix of women including some from other parts of Africa like South Africa, Ghana, and Benin, as well as Asian and European countries. The ages of prostitutes constituted a problem for the colonial adminis- tration. Undoubtedly the problem of underage girls selling sex had become a social issue by the 1940s and a broad categorization of “child prostitutes” as codified by the colonial government was deemed to be problematic.37 As Isuigo-Abanike has noted,38 girls of similar ages were getting married; within the socio-cultural milieu, girls from the age group labelled “underage” were ac- tually of marriageable age and indeed a 15-year-old, according to the Children and Young Person Ordinance, was not a child. The incidence of “child prostitu- tion” was nonetheless fuelled by the demand for young prostitutes by soldiers and sailors, and several brothels on Lagos Island and other places were noted for having young prostitutes, and they were frequented by European sailors.39 In contemporary Nigeria, there is a discernible trend in the sex industry that demonstrates that there is a higher percentage of sex workers in their twenties;
34 Aderinto, “The Girls in Moral Danger”, pp. 9–11; Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labour”, p. 152; Ekpootu “Interrogating Policies”, p. 545. 35 Aderinto, “The Girls in Moral Danger”, p. 22. 36 Ibid., p. 21. 37 In 1943, via the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance an attempt was made to distin- guish between a child and a young person. A child thus came to be a person under 14 years old and a young person was anyone between the ages of 14 and 17. These policies provided the means by which the sexual activities of persons labelled as children came to be criminalized by the colonial government. 38 Uche Isiugo-Agbanike, “Nuptiality and Fertility Patterns among Adolescent and Young Adults”, in CHESTRAD Status of Adolescents and Young Adults in Nigeria (1997), pp. 17–36. 39 Laurent Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency”, p. 126.
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40 John Lekan Oyefara, “Food Insecurity, hiv/aids Pandemic and Sexual Behaviour of Fe- male Commercial Sex Workers in Lagos Metropolis, Nigeria”, Journal of Social Aspects of hiv/aids, 4 (2007), pp. 626–635, 630; Oleru, “Prostitution in Lagos”, pp. 312–335. 41 Oyefara, “Food Insecurity, hiv/aids Pandemic”, p. 630. 42 Available at: www.naptip.org; last accessed 15 April 2012. 43 Kenneth Little, “Voluntary Associations and Social Mobility among West African Women”, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 6 (1972), pp. 275–288.
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associations for the welfare of prostitutes were also formed. As migrants, pros- titutes usually stayed with family members or people of the same ethnic group in Lagos. There is a paucity of data for the colonial period on the children of sex workers in Lagos and whether or not they stayed with their mothers. However, evidence from the Calabar and Ogoja provinces of the Cross River region in southern Nigeria suggests that migrant prostitutes from these communities left their children behind with their families and remittances were sent for their maintenance.44 This trend continued in post-independent Lagos and seemed to be a preferred way for sex migrants at least in the initial stages of migration. It is possible that after obtaining stability in Lagos, children and other dependants may have emigrated as well. From the late 1980s onwards, the hiv/aids scare has brought the attention of the commercial sex trade to the scholarly community and studies have pro- vided a glimpse into the household strategies of sex workers. Oleru’s study of 150 hotel prostitutes in Lagos shows that 40.7 per cent were married in the 1990s, 70 per cent had previously been married, and 57.8 per cent had their children staying with them.45 In Caldwell’s work, which was premised on a field study conducted in 1990, more than half of the prostitute population un- der study had children who were being looked after by the sex workers’ moth- ers in rural areas.46 While about 60 per cent were determined to be single, she points out the likelihood of previously married women self-identifying as sin- gle. About a decade later, Oyefara’s research in the Ikeja and Surulere areas of Lagos showed a higher percentage: 73.1 per cent of the women in the sex trade were single while 20.3 per cent were either divorced or separated.47 As regards education, the colonial state and popular narratives suggested that migrant prostitutes were from rural areas, particularly the endemic south- ern region, and that they were uneducated runaway wives who added to the population of “undesirables” in Lagos. By the 1970s, few prostitutes had sec- ondary educations because such an education would have ensured that they obtained some form of employment. Structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and the exacerbated economic situation increased unemployment rates and pushed many women, some with secondary school educations, into the sex market. By the late 1980s, migration for prostitution had become a growing
44 Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labour”, p. 145. 45 Oleru, “Prostitution in Lagos”, p. 313. 46 Pat Caldwell, “Prostitution and the Risk of stds and aids in Nigeria and Thailand”, Health Transition Review, supplement to vol 5 (1995), pp. 167–172, 170. 47 Oyefara “Food Insecurity”, p. 630.
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Changes in Working Conditions throughout Time and Space
Outdoor prostitution is usually equated with street soliciting and is usually tar- geted for criminalization because of its high visibility.50 Though a large num- ber of practitioners of outdoor soliciting are either very young or old and have low levels of education, it would be wrong to imagine that there are clear-cut categorizations. University students engage in street soliciting at places that are geographically distant from their places of residence; for example, young women from Port Harcourt engage in street prostitution on the street corners
48 Oleru “Prostitution in Lagos”, p. 312. 49 Oyefara, “Food Insecurity”, p. 630. 50 See Ronald Weitzer (ed.), Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry (New York, 2009).
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51 Chimaraoke O. Izugbara, “Constituting the Unsafe: Nigerian Sex Workers’ Notions of Un- safe Sexual Conduct”, African Studies Review, 50 (2007), pp. 29–49, 33.
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52 Newsnigeria, “Ayilara Still Mother of Lagos Sex Trade”, available at: http://www.nigeria70 .com/nigerian_news_paper/ayilara_still_mother_street_of_lagos_sex_trade/106474; last accessed 11 July 2017. 53 pm News, “Varsity Students Besiege Lagos for Prostitution”, available at: http://news1 .onlinenigeria.com/templates/?a=1708&t=Varsity%20Students%20Besiege%20 Lagos%20For%20Prostitution; last accessed 11 July 2017.
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At the lowest end of the hierarchy are brothels located in slums, and they are usually ramshackle structures with poor ventilation; sold sex at such places is mostly for survival. Examples include dingy brothels located on Empire, a side street near Ojuelegba, an area known for its drug users and miscreants otherwise called “area boys”. Sexual services can be bought for N200, less than $2. Sexual services vary and this impacts the form of remuneration. In one of the strip clubs in Ikeja, formerly known as Ocean Blue, a session of lap dancing (three sound tracks) cost N1000 ($6) and the girls could make up to N20,000 ($122) on a good night. In the vip section which is privately enclosed, the prices are higher, and a session costs N3000 ($18). In most cases sex is sold for monetary payment but in other cases where the woman is engaged in part- time sex work, payment may also include sexual bartering for material goods. From its inscription in Lagos’ urban spaces, prostitution has from the 1990s onwards come to incorporate women and girls who engage in sex work pe- riodically for diverse reasons that extend beyond poverty. There has been a proliferation of new sites of leisure and entertainment imbued with a sense of romance frequented by clandestine prostitutes who, though not subjected to discriminatory laws and policies, exemplify the discourses of prostitution even while not specifically labelled as such. These women offer variegated sexual services that encompass inter-personal elements lacking in brothel and street prostitution. By extending the interactive space beyond the narrow confines of the “sale of sex” to include companionship and hostess activities, it allows for a broadening of the form of payment. In spite of the media outcry about the moral degeneration of college students in Nigeria, there remains a tacit tolerance of such forms of commercial sex, mostly because of its social invis- ibility and its pervasiveness in society; it extends to the political class on the one hand and on the other derivable income benefitting and thus silencing family and kinsmen. The social imaginary of prostitutes’ bodies as carriers of disease that was propagated by colonial narratives still resonates in postcolonial Nigeria. The health of prostitutes and the wider implications of health on the politics of the empire have been discussed in various scholarly works.54 In Nigeria the high incidence of venereal diseases among members of the colonial army at the turn of the twentieth century resulted in the criminalization of prostitutes for being carriers of disease. Interestingly, Aderinto’s study indicates that colonial efforts to tackle the menace of venereal diseases were exclusive of prostitutes
54 Levine “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire”, pp. 579–602; Ray, “The Sex Trade in Colonial West Africa”, pp. 66–68; Aderinto “Sexualized Nationalism”.
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Prostitute/Employer/Client Relationships
Prostitutes in Lagos in the early twentieth century worked independently for the most part. There was, however, a blurring of the operational spaces of
55 Aderinto, “Sexualized Nationalism”, p. 32. 56 Ibid., pp. 33–37. 57 Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labour”, pp. 99–100.
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58 Aderinto, “Girls in Moral Danger” (2007); Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juve- nile Delinquency” (2006); Simon Heap “Their Days are Spent in Gambling and Loafing, Pimping for Prostitutes, and Picking Pockets: Male Juvenile Delinquents on Lagos Island, 1920s–1960s”, Journal of Family History, 35 (2010), pp. 48–70. 59 Fourchard, “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency”, p. 124. 60 Ekpootu, “Prostitution and Child Labour”, pp. 99–100. 61 Coy, Wakeling, and Garner, “Selling Sex Sells”, p. 442.
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Conditions of Compliance and Traces of Defiance
Prostitution is a heterogeneous space involving a diversity of forms, working conditions, status, and self-perceptions. The question of choice is closely in- terwoven with this and forms part of the dynamics of the trade. The extent to which coercion or choice determines a prostitute’s sexual activities is de- pendent on the position she occupies in the hierarchy in sex work. It is easy to discern coercion in cases of trafficked girls and women. Forced prostitution is more commonly experienced in such cases, as earlier noted among under- age rural girls trafficked into prostitution in Lagos. For other women such as runaway wives, working girls, and other young women, entry into the sex trade occurred without coercion. Indeed commercialized sex has been utilized in many cases as a way for women to circumvent male control. Ssewakriyanga63 posits that in the sale of sexual services, the prostitute could be said to be resist- ing patriarchy and one-man control, thus defying stereotypical ideas of power. Prostitution can be seen as an act of defiance and resistance directed against the social spaces to which women are traditionally confined, a countering of prescribed notions of womanhood and thus a threat to patriarchy. Relegated
62 Available at: www.cityoflove.com. 63 Richard Ssewakriyanga, “Interrogating Sexual Identities and Sex Work: A Study on Con- structed Identities among Female Sex Workers in Kampala”, in Gender, Economies and Entitlements in Africa: CODESRIA Gender Series (Dakar [etc.], 2004), p. 115.
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Conclusion
With the expanded field of permissible sexual expression and the loosening of societal constraints, young Nigerian women are increasingly employing their bodies as economic tools to gain access to societal resources. This choice has been further enhanced by increased knowledge about reproduction and the use of contraceptives. The Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey (ndhs) carried out in 2008 showed that over 50 per cent of women aged 25 to 49 had their first sexual encounters by the age of 18, and about 20 per cent by the age of 15. Knowledge about family planning methods has increased and 70 per cent of women are knowledgeable about family planning. The female body has become demystified and female agency has been high- lighted. However, as I have argued elsewhere,64 a woman’s choice to trade her body as a marketable product cannot be analysed outside the value society places on female sexuality. It could be argued therefore that prostitution among
64 Mfon Ekpootu, “The Body as a Tool: Negotiating the New Global Order by Female Youths in Nigeria”, National Development Studies, 5 (2012), pp. 1–17.
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65 Ekpootu, “The Body as a Tool”, p. 1.
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