Making the Urban Coast a Geosocial Reading of Land, Sand, and Water in Lagos, Nigeria

The IMAGINATIVE CAPITAL of LAGOS

Making the Urban Coast A Geosocial Reading of Land, Sand, and Water in Lagos, Nigeria

Ben Mendelsohn

n February 2013, then president of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan hosted former US president Bill Clinton for a celebration on the Lagos waterfront: sand filling at Eko Atlantic City, a land reclamation scheme referred to as “the Dubai of Africa” and “Nigerian International Commerce City,” was halfway com- I 1 plete. At the dedication event, speakers hailed Eko Atlantic as a boon to Nigeria’s economy and a solution to a range of local challenges: land and housing shortages; erosion along the city’s valuable Atlantic coastline; and the risks from climate change, sea level rise, and tropical rainstorms. President Jonathan boasted that Eko Atlantic “is bringing us happiness, and this happiness is here to stay.” About “The Great Wall of Lagos,” the project’s storm surge and erosion control barrier, President Clinton marveled that Lagos is now “living in harmony with a new natural reality.”2 Yet buried in this promotional rhetoric is an urgent set of questions: what exactly is this “new natural reality” along the city’s coast? Is it new? And how harmonious is the human relationship to it? Land reclamation has long been a pervasive “language of life” practiced by Lagosians across all levels of the economic spectrum.3 In recent decades, as Lagos’s population has grown, so too has its landform, often through the sorts of private initiative and informal community collaboration that urban anthropologist Teresa Caldeira terms “auto-construction.”4 Eko Atlantic, the highest-profile land reclamation project in Lagos, renders spectacular the widespread creation of land from water throughout the city, even as water periodically repossesses this land. Further, as unregulated land making combines forces with Lagos’s long rainy season, expansive freshwater lagoon, swampy vegetation, high water table, and low elevation, dramatic flood events are now a fact of urban life.5 The anthropogenic conversion of coastal forest and mangrove swamp into solid ground reduces the region’s capacity to absorb, filter, and drain water when it rains. For communities near the ocean, coastal erosion exacerbates the threat. As the journalist Tolu Ogunlesi observed, Eko Atlantic is simply “part of Lagos’s centuries-long fight with the ocean,” but one that has not yet proven to be successful in its aims.6 In late 2012, just months before the February 2013 dedication ceremony, local housing and environmental activists convened a symposium with Eko Atlantic’s developers as well as coastal research-

1. “Nigeria Inaugurates ‘African Dubai,’ ” Agence France-Presse, March 3. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 15. 15, 2013. 4. Caldeira, “Peripheral Urbanization.” 2. “Eko Atlantic 5,000,000 Square Metres Dedication Ceremony,” You- 5. Alo et al., “Studies and Transactions on Pollution Assessment,” 66. Tube video, 2:55, posted by Eko Atlantic, February 27, 2013, youtu.be /ULccxM3JaqA. 6. Ogunlesi, “Eko Atlantic City.”

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 455 Vol. 38, No. 3, 2018 • doi 10.1215/1089201x-7208801 • © 2018 by Duke University Press 456 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:3 • 2018

ers, urban planners, and representatives from the While a small body of scholarly literature Lagos state and Nigerian federal governments.7 about Eko Atlantic has emerged since the project’s The attendees bemoaned the developers’ lack of launch in 2009, it generally emphasizes the de- transparency; their exclusion of Nigerian coastal velopment’s veneer of utopian urban fantasy and researchers, architects, and planners; and the its links to other cases of “speculative urbanism” ways the project was simply another example of throughout the developing world. In this article, antipoor, elitist urban development in Lagos. I contextualize Eko Atlantic City within a broader The activists also linked Eko Atlantic to acceler- political and aesthetic ecology of the Lagos coastal ated coastal erosion at sites down the coast. The zone and argue that it is far from a straightforward widely revered architect David Aradeon argued local iteration of urban developments seen else- that Eko Atlantic typifies the endurance of colo- where, as some have argued. Rather, Eko Atlantic nial development and infrastructural paradigms, is a vivid entry point into understanding Lagos’s materialized through sand and stone: “We keep present situation of precarious coastal urban- falling back on the combination of the strategies ism within the deep time of the city’s socionatu- employed and deployed with ruthless efficiency by ral evolution. In the following pages, I develop a the colonial government 100 years ago. These in- geosocial11 reading drawing on an interdisciplin- clude dispossessing the indigenous poor people of ary approach to urban and environmental media their land for public good; drainage of swamps to studies,12 centering Lagos’s unique sedimentary create channels through the swamps for control- conditions within narratives of its past, present, ling mosquito breeding environment; using land and future. fill and hydraulic sand fill to create buildable land Central to this story is sand — the sedimen- and erecting stone walls in the sea/beach to pro- tary medium that forms the most intimate link tect ships through the Lagos Harbor.”8 Broadly, between humans and the urban geologies that we these criticisms have defined much local and for- create. A geosocial reading of Eko Atlantic and eign news coverage about the development. It has the Lagos coast looks to sand and the many ways been repeatedly criticized as a form of “climate that this substance is imagined, manipulated, and apartheid,” where construction began after 80,000 negotiated by urban populations. Lagos consumes residents were violently evicted from the site.9 As “forty million cubic meters of sand per annum for annual flooding has become increasingly severe, building and construction projects,” according to suspicions about the impacts of Eko Atlantic are journalist Bukola Adebayo, who has performed ex- constantly raised in op-eds. In one example, the tensive research on dredging in Lagos state.13 The former chair of the Nigerian Ports Authority, Bode Lagos sand economy has cascading consequences, George, wrote of widespread flooding in July 2017, as Adebayo also notes: “While the business gener- exclaiming the “madness” of indiscriminate sand ates great profits for urban property developers, mining and land reclamation and observing that its impact has brought despair upon residents who “mother nature is angry with us.”10 have to deal with the polluted waters, collapsed

7. Kolawole, “Eko Atlantic City.” 11. My use of the term geosocial refers to the “the three largest sand extraction sites in the meeting of human and geologic forces, draw- United States combined represent sixteen 8. Ako Amadi, “Brief Description of the Com- ing primarily on geographers Nigel Clark and million cubic metres a year” (United Nations munities Threatened by Coastal Erosion and Kathryn Yusoff’s “idea of geosocial formations Environment Programme, “Sand: Rarer Than Displacement,” Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung web- as a kind of minimal staging ground for earth One Thinks,” March 2014, accessed October site, accessed September 22, 2017, ng.boell.org science-social science encounters” (Clark and 4, 2017, wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle /sites/default/files/uploads/2012/12/eko_atlantic Yusoff, “Geosocial Formations,” 6). /20.500.11822/8665/GEAS_Mar2014_Sand _project_-_opinion_papers.pdf. _Mining.pdf). This figure is dwarfed, however, 12. See, for example, Mattern, Deep Mapping 9. On climate apartheid see Goodell, The Water by the amount researchers believe is dredged the Media City; Mattern, Code and Clay, Data Will Come; Lukacs, “New, Privatized African annually from China’s Poyang Lake — 236 mil- and Dirt; Parikka, A Geology of Media; and Pe- City”; Okeowo, “A Safer Waterfront in Lagos”; lion cubic meters — to fuel construction in ters, The Marvelous Clouds. and Wamser et al., “Drowning Megacities.” nearby cities, including Shanghai. See Beiser, 13. Adebayo, “Shifting Sands.” For compari- “Sand Mining.” 10. George, “Mother Nature Angry.” son, a United Nations fact sheet reports that Ben Mendelsohn • Making the Urban Coast • The Imaginative Capital of Lagos 457

houses, depleted lands and flooding incidents tions of sand, sawdust, solid waste, and ash, only to these activities leave in their wake.” But sand has have this ground forcefully seized for upmarket de- long been integral to the fabric of the city. As envi- velopments.20 In other situations, coastal dwellers ronmental anthropologist Ashley Carse observes, have merely shifted and rebuilt their homes in re- “Cities are made of sand — all the constitutive ma- sponse to ongoing commercial dredging activities terials of our rapidly growing urban centers are in that dump fresh sand at their doorsteps.21 These some way based on aggregates of sand.”14 Architect anthropogenic circulations of sediment come to Joshua Comaroff adds, “The malleability of sand collaborate with the intrinsic geomorphological makes it a uniquely volatile substance.”15 Its capac- properties of the region’s barrier island-lagoon ity to take countless shapes also means that “in ecology. large quantities, it can be engineered into the most Lagos’s sogginess and its frequent topo- fundamental of all infrastructures: land itself.”16 graphical transformations also resonate within the In Lagos, sand and related coastal geomor- imaginative, visual, and narrative life of the city. phological processes interact with the city’s politi- Images of turning water into land occupy a central cal and imaginative trajectories as well as its his- position in Yoruba cosmology, in which the earth torical legacies. Yet a conceptual vocabulary for originates when a minor deity is commanded by interpreting these entanglements in Lagos has yet the creator, Olódùmarè, to convert the primordial to emerge. A geosocial reading demonstrates that sea into solid, inhabitable ground. As religious his- the circulations that often characterize this post- torian Jacob Olupona narrates the story, land is colonial megacity — as a hub of maritime trade and made by spreading dirt over water. The dirt is car- colonial arrival, of the export and in some cases ried down from the heavens in a snail shell, poured the return of human slaves, of Pan African aspira- over the sea, and formed into the earth by the giant tion, and of visual-cultural and literary production claws of a five-toed chicken. In some versions of the and hybridity — should be thought alongside an- story, a chameleon then descends from the heavens other set of circulations and flows: of the ground to walk atop the new ground and test its firmness.22 itself. This story of conversion — from water into ground, Lagos’s future, like most of the world’s coastal assessed by a shape-shifting animal, achieved by cities, is deeply uncertain and poised to be deeply distributing dirt with an earth-spreading chicken unequal. Scholars estimate as many as 79 percent claw — has obvious echoes in twenty-first-century of Lagos’s residents live within five hundred me- Lagos, where the conversion of water into land is ters of the coastline.17 Additionally, as 70 percent of rampant. The snail shell and the chicken claw are the population live in informal settlements, urban described like the digging and earthmoving ma- and environmental researchers repeatedly illus- chines that permeate Lagos’s landscape and, as a trate how flooding “greatly aggravates poverty”18 result, are routinely depicted in works by Nigerian and often causes more adverse impacts for women documentary photographers — dredging vessels than for men.19 In this context, dredging and sand and hand shovels, excavators and hydraulic shov- filling are deeply imbricated in class conflicts over els, and the new land forms that these tools sculpt forceful evictions, land and housing rights, and the (see fig. 1). Lagos’s watery landscapes also form a unequal distribution of environmental hazards. In frequent narrative backdrop in contemporary lit- many situations, communities of urban poor have erature. When Olódùmarè sends a chameleon to settled in marshy or shallow water environments by test the stability of the newly created landform, at producing their own land using various combina- first finding it too pliable and thus in need of more

14. Carse, quoted in Dominic Boyer and Cy- 16. Ibid. 20. Sawyer, “Natures Remade,” 3. mene Howe, “Episode 84: Ashley Carse,” Cul- 17. Olajide and Lawanson, “Climate Change and 21. Adebayo, “Shifting Sands.” tures of Energy: The Energy Humanities Pod- Livelihood Vulnerabilities.” cast, August 10, 2017, culturesofenergy.com 22. Olupona, City of 201 Gods. /ep- 84-ashley-carse/. 18. Ibid., 43.

15. Comaroff, “Built on Sand.” 19. See Ajibade et al., “Urban Flooding in Lagos.” 458 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:3 • 2018

Figure 1. An aerial image of Eko Atlantic City during construction by George Osodi, displayed in a series of sixteen photographs documenting the site over several decades. Exhibited at the RELE Gallery in 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist

work, one might be reminded of the soggy swamp- (1) Eko Atlantic’s position within a genealogy of lands of Maroko, the informal settlement in which efforts to implement hygienic urban modernity Chris Abani’s 2004 novel, Graceland, takes place. in Lagos, (2) legacies of earthmoving and coastal Understanding how and why sedimentary migra- engineering for maritime trade within Lagos’s tions interact with migrations of urban forms, in- unique ecology, and (3) the literary echoes of the frastructural techniques, and visual and narrative city’s late twentieth-century and early twenty-first imaginaries can provide new energy and new clar- century terrestrial transformations. ity for thinking Lagos’s contested and emergent In section, I historicize the existing literature urban futures. on Eko Atlantic City. While Lagos’s long history In the following sections, I demonstrate how of uneven development is well known, spanning sedimentary circulations and migrations intersect both the British colonial period and postindepen- with ideological, sociotechnical, aesthetic, and dence, perhaps less understood is the central role discursive flows. Each section excavates a single that land reclamation activities play in this history. aspect of this geosocial texture by demonstrating Antipoor urban development has been entangled Ben Mendelsohn • Making the Urban Coast • The Imaginative Capital of Lagos 459 with Lagos’s unique coastal ecology since the late experience. These literatures help reveal and re- nineteenth century, and thus sediment should be cover the pasts and futures that are effaced by he- at the center of Lagos’s story. gemonic development scripts and their narrative Whereas the first section demonstrates that tropes.24 Eko Atlantic is embedded in historical legacies of Eko Atlantic presents itself as both an urban exclusionary planning and land creation, the sec- planning and an analytical ready-made — a self- ond, “The Lagos Dredge Cycle,”23 emphasizes the enclosed city built from scratch, paving over sited concurrent history of coastal engineering interven- histories and the possible alternatives that could tions that have defined the city’s waterfront over emerge in its place. This ideal is realized through the last century. Eko Atlantic makes new land to the adoption of globally circulating images of finance the coastal protection measures needed to urban modernity, which, in turn, lead to repeated resolve a growing erosion crisis along the Victoria forceful evictions of the urban poor. Scholarly Island waterfront. Yet this erosion was itself caused analyses of Eko Atlantic risk a third level of era- by a previous episode of coastal engineering: the sure, however, in linking Eko Atlantic primarily British construction of stone breakwaters to shape to its transnational precedents or copies and as a the entrance channel into Lagos Lagoon from the result decentering Lagos. In my interdisciplinary Atlantic Ocean in 1908 – 20. In the century since, approach to urban and environmental media stud- many attempts to halt or slow this erosion have ies, I follow the insights of urban political ecolo- failed. Ultimately, I argue that Eko Atlantic and its gists such as Henrik Ernstson et al. who argue that “Great Wall of Lagos” should not be viewed as a “to take African cities seriously means to provide conclusive solution, but as another episode in this texture to the barrage of statistical portraits or ongoing negotiation between humans and coastal structural explanations.”25 Reliance on totalizing geomorphology. categories such as capitalism, modernity, and/ While parts one and two tell stories of so- or neoliberalism risks inattention to cultural and cial and ecological control fantasies that, upon ecological difference and often leads to the pro- inspection, appear all but certain to fail, part duction of wholly predictable conclusions. Some three explores how these same paradigms work methodological experimentation is required to in- their way into negotiations over the urban every- terrupt the “frictionless image of the African city day in several examples from contemporary fic- as ‘failed,’ ‘hopeless,’ in ‘need of help.” Such a nu- tion. This section, “Nomadic Ground, Nomadic anced approach is a prerequisite to producing en- Subjects,” explores the resonance of changing gaged urban theory about African cities,26 but it is coastal landscapes within a broader urban imagi- also required in order to deepen our knowledge of nary, illustrated primarily through the novels of human- environment interactions along the global Chris Abani, A. Igoni Barrett, and Nnedi Okora- urban coast. for. These examples demonstrate how quotidian coastal landscapes absorb memory and aspiration, Part 1: The Dubai of Africa saturate the phenomenology of the urban every- When contextualized within a local genealogy of day, and carry the possibility for radical trans- uneven development, Eko Atlantic demonstrates formations on both the individual and collective how sedimentary ecologies are often entangled levels. As AbdouMaliq Simone argues, “blank with exclusionary, antipoor, aesthetically moti- slate” urban mega projects in the global south not vated modes of urban planning. As figures 1 and only evict the bodies, homes, and livelihoods of 2 both suggest, Eko Atlantic is now a monumental urban dwellers, but such projects often obliterate landform viewable from space. It announces itself the capacity to circulate certain stories of urban as an ostentatious appendage to the preexisting

23. Holmes and Milligan, “Feedback: Designing 25. Ernstson et al., “Conceptual Vectors,” 1567. rocentric categories and a theoretical open- the Dredge Cycle.” ing grounded in the specificities of African ur- 26. Ibid. Elsewhere, Lawhon et al. argue that banism is needed. This essay engages similar 24. Simone, For the City Yet to Come. urban political ecology is far too reliant on Eu- approaches. 460 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:3 • 2018

city, a pale sandy landscape jutting into the ocean, Saharan Africa, proposing that the pervasiveness bordered by its seawall to the south. Its shape mir- of these “African urban fantasies” stems from the rors the commercial hub of Victoria Island directly search for new investment frontiers following the to its north, as if the two districts are a pair of giant financial crisis of 2008.28 Ashley Dawson similarly terrestrial butterfly wings, and this geometric twin- sees Eko Atlantic as yet another urban capital sink, ning literalizes the phenomenon that urban histo- a vision “of the extreme social injustice of emerg- rian Martin Murray calls “city doubles”: exclusive, ing neoliberal urban phantasmagoria in a time of master-planned developments on the outskirts climate change.”29 Stephen Graham further high- of densely populated urban areas. Such develop- lights the role of land reclamation, arguing that ments are meant to escape the perceived blight “Eko Atlantic shows that the world’s real estate and of the existing city while remaining conveniently reclamation industries increasingly sell the manu- linked. Murray compares and typologizes Eko At- facturing of land as a miraculous solution to prob- lantic against “city doubles” in Morocco, Mauritius, lems of congestion, population growth, and urban Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, development.”30 Taken together, these scholars among others.27 Like Murray’s, most scholarly anal- treat Lagos as one example of powerful real estate yses of Eko Atlantic have emphasized its horizontal fantasies and urban development strategies circu- echoes of other developments in Africa, southeast lating throughout the world. Asia, and the Middle East. Vanessa Watson, for Urban researchers specializing in Lagos add example, tracks the proliferation of such satellite some helpful detail. The political ecologist Idowu cities appended to urban edges throughout sub- Ajibade, for example, describes Eko Atlantic in

27. Murray, “City Doubles.” 29. Dawson, Extreme Cities, 61.

28. Watson, “African Urban Fantasies.” 30. Graham, Vertical, 304. Ben Mendelsohn • Making the Urban Coast • The Imaginative Capital of Lagos 461

the context of “the combined problem of climate the combination of government officials, police of- change, disaster risk, and capitalist urbaniza- ficers, and plainclothes assailants forced occupants tion.”31 Despite Eko Atlantic’s use of sustainability to flee, blocked them from returning to retrieve rhetoric, Ajibade argues that developers have effec- any of their personal property, and then set fire to tively decoupled resilience planning from climate any structure in the area, including “homes, busi- change adaptation. Her article concludes that Eko nesses, churches, mosques, other community fa- Atlantic reveals how “ ‘future city planning’ as a cilities.”35 Despite the brutality of such operations, political project perpetuates enclosure and com- former Lagos state governor Babatunde Fashola modification practices with the goal of increas- justified forceful evictions by stating simply that ing the resilience of capitalist investors, economic it was necessary “to take people out of living on elites, and the transnational class.”32 a refuse heap,” adding, “We will bulldoze away Yet Eko Atlantic and several additional mega your difficult conditions.”36 The operation mirrors developments now underway in Lagos can also other evictions both before and after this one. The be read within a long trajectory of exclusionary highest-profile example in recent years was Otodo planning that spans both colonial and postin- Gbame, a fishing and dredging community of ap- dependence regimes. Such projects frequently proximately 30,000 residents near Lagos Lagoon equate poverty to pathogen while also promoting that was forcefully evicted in three waves through- the adoption of generic signs of urban modernity out late 2016 and early 2017. like wide boulevards with twenty-four-hour street While refusing to address directly the vio- lights. Eko Atlantic not only perpetuates “enclo- lence of the evictions, proponents of Eko Atlantic sure and commodification practices,” as Ajibade City instead describe the development as an ex- demonstrates, but also extends a local legacy of pertly engineered coastal management and urban equating informal settlements and undeveloped planning scheme. Its infrastructures are being swampland as blight in need of taming by state or sculpted and staged in plain view, with highly de- state-allied forces. These visions can only happen veloped “modes of address,” demonstrating an- through earthmoving. thropologist Brian Larkin’s observation that infra- In present day Lagos, the capacity for the structural signs and representations are “deployed state and its allies to access more powerful dredg- in particular circulatory regimes to establish sets ers and excavators allows these elite actors to force- of effects.”37 On the Eko Atlantic website, a gallery fully seize landmasses constructed or developed of images depicts ongoing construction activities, by the urban poor. On the morning of August 18, including scenes like the one shown in figure 3 2008, in order to make way for the construction below. In this image, water and sewer mains are of Eko Atlantic, an estimated 80,000 residents effortlessly deployed beneath newly constructed of the Bar Beach area along the Victoria Island ground. This image emphasizes developers’ abil- coast were forcefully evicted by what activists con- ity to install new infrastructural networks without sider the “Lagos State Government’s demolition resistance, with no “inconvenient” people, dwell- squad.”33 A legal complaint filed with Nigeria’s ings, or legacy networks in the way. An excavator National Human Rights Commission details how digs a trough in the sand; the interlocking tubes personnel, including “a heavily armed police es- are dropped in place; the excavator covers them cort and plainclothes thugs . . . brandishing guns up. Such images are used to position Eko Atlan- and cudgels,” descended on Bar Beach with little tic as the long-awaited arrival of infrastructural warning or restraint.34 The complaint narrates how modernity in Lagos. Yet in reality, the project has

31. Ajibade, “Can a Future City Enhance Urban August 2008: Petition to National Human 35. Ibid. Resilience?,” 87. Rights Commission, Submitted 19 November 36. Sawyer, “Natures Remade,” 9. 2013.” www.scribd.com/document/185392106 32. Ibid. /Progressive-Union-Residents-Association 37. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics of Infrastruc- 33. Social and Economic Rights Action Cen- - PURA-NHRC-Petition-19-November-2013. ture,” 336. ter, “Forced Eviction Affecting Nigerian Ports 34. Ibid., 4. Authority-East Mole Bar Beach Settlement, 16 462 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:3 • 2018

Figure 3. Laying underground water infrastructures at Eko Atlantic. Also included as one of the sixteen photographs by George Osodi exhibited at the RELE Gallery in 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist

been plagued by delays and capital shortages and for the city’s future. Furthermore, urban historian remains a mostly barren sandscape dotted by a few Liora Bigon and urban housing researcher Lind- clusters of development. say Sawyer both establish that postcolonial Lagos Lagos’s history suggests that skepticism to- inherited its fantasy of a brand-new city next to ward Eko Atlantic’s future is warranted, as efforts the old from the colonial authorities. Given such to rationalize or tame urban space have invariably a history, Watson’s observation that “satellite city” led to more of the very same problems those ef- developers exude unjustified optimism appears forts intended to solve. Rather than “the dawn of a accurate in Lagos: “The hope that these new cit- new horizon for Africa,”38 the development reveals ies and developments will be ‘self-contained’ and the regularity of antipoor violence in the service able to insulate themselves from the ‘disorder’ and of radically transformative socioecological visions ‘chaos’ of the existing cities is remote.”39

38. “Eko Atlantic 5,000,000 Square Meters 39. Watson, “African Urban Fantasies,” 15. Dedication Ceremony.” Ben Mendelsohn • Making the Urban Coast • The Imaginative Capital of Lagos 463

While modes of uneven development, dis- was itself caused by a previous episode of coastal placement, and antipoor violence are exhaustively engineering. This sequence of events closely aligns documented in Lagos research across multiple with what the Dredge Research Collaborative has disciplines, the centrality of human earthmoving termed “the dredge cycle.”42 The Dredge Research to this process is undernoticed. Bigon identifies Collaborative is a group of North American land- swamp drainage and land reclamation schemes scape architects who argue that dredging — the as “among the first development projects of the excavation and manipulation or relocation of un- colonial authorities.” In 1928, the Lagos Execu- derwater sediments — constitutes an overlooked tive Development Board (LEDB) was initiated to infrastructure that is “essential to the functioning deal with escalating public health concerns over of contemporary coastal urban systems.” Yet the malaria and the bubonic plague. Yet as Bigon ar- act of dredging, they continue, “can only be prop- gues, the drainage and land-making schemes that erly understood within the context of the wider set the LEDB pursued “focused, almost exclusively, on of human activities that manipulate sediment.”43 the provision of residential units for government Thus in this section, I analyze the interrelation- officials and African staff in the colonial admin- ship of shipping channel maintenance and land istration.”40 In fact, Bigon has written about the reclamation in Lagos as it is dramatized by Eko perception of this marshy ecology as wholly inhos- Atlantic. The concept of the dredge cycle empha- pitable to urban management dating farther back sizes how one sedimentary intervention merely ne- in history, citing a former governor and medical cessitates another, and yet another. In this way, the doctor who viewed the city as “a notorious haunt dredge cycle highlights a mismatch between confi- of malarial fever . . . geologically a combination dent policy or promotional discourse and the un- of lagoon, swamp, and low-lying sand, or mud, or ruly dynamics of an anthropogenic coastal system. clay, partly of fresh, partly of brackish water.”41 As Eko Atlantic City is an artifact not only of I elaborate below, colonial modes of seeing La- Lagos’s genealogy of exclusionary planning but gos’s coastal ecology as an inhospitable, dangerous also of the desire by European traders to secure wasteland have historically overdetermined the direct access channels from the sea to inland wa- production of urban space and continue to do so. ters across West Africa’s Bight of Benin Coast. While Eko Atlantic has deep precedents, it is not Lagos is set amid a “drift aligned barrier Lagoon simply that contemporary elites are repeating the complex” — a uniform, systemically linked coastal decisions made by colonial authorities; Eko Atlan- sedimentation cell that stretches from the eastern tic also reflects how colonial- and postcolonial-era edge of the Volta River in Ghana to the western coastal infrastructures continue to steer and con- edge of the Niger River in Nigeria.44 In this system, strain action in the present. sand is injected into the sea by the Volta River and then transported, deposited, and lifted by waves Part 2: The Lagos Dredge Cycle in repetitive cycles that form thin ribbons of land. Erosion along the developed and highly valued Lagos’s tidal channel — a rare break in the region’s coastline of Victoria Island, particularly the pop- barrier islands — was long attractive to traders, as ular public waterfront of Bar Beach, was the pri- historian Robin Law writes: “The Portuguese were mary catalyst for the construction of Eko Atlan- already trading through the Lagos channel with tic City (see fig. 4). The development addresses the Yoruba kingdom of Ijebu at the beginning the erosion issue by expanding the beachfront of the sixteenth century . . . although Lagos was through hydraulic dredging and sandfill and en- not to become major port for the Atlantic trade closing the new landform behind an elaborate sea- until the 1790s.”45 While the channel was conve- wall. Yet as I detail below, Lagos’s coastal erosion nient, the active littoral sand drift along the coast

40. Bigon, History of Urban Planning, 169. 42. Holmes and Milligan, “Feedback: Designing 44. Blivi et al., “Sand Barrier Development,” the Dredge Cycle.” 199. 41. Ibid., 132. 43. Ibid. 45. Law, “Between the Sea and the Lagoon,” 215. 464 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:3 • 2018

Figure 4. A May 2005 satellite image of the Lagos harbor “moles” and resulting accretion to the west and erosion to the east, prior to Eko Atlantic City’s construction. Google Earth, image © 2018 Digital Globe

forced European navigators to negotiate a perilous clear,48 between 1908 and 1920 the British colonial sandbar that blocked larger vessels from reliably authorities constructed a fateful series of three accessing the interior lagoon. This “bugbear of “harbor moles,” stone jetties that could help regu- the bight” is well documented in European litera- late this shipping lane.49 The terminology is reveal- tures,46 making “the lagoon entrance . . . notori- ing, as mole stems from a French word referring to ous for the strong wave action and for accumula- a large physical mass, often of stone;50 the harbor tion of eastward drifting sand in the inlet access moles seek to transform turbulent sand and water channel.”47 After persistent groundings and the with piles of granite boulders. These stone barriers challenge of regular dredging to keep the channel do still help keep the channel mostly clear, though

46. Olukojo, “The Port of Lagos,” 112. 48. Holmes and Milligan offer a simple defini- 49. Tonder et al., “Bar Beach, Lagos.” tion of dredging; see “Feedback: Designing the 47. Tonder et al., “Bar Beach, Lagos,” 1168. 50. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. Dredge Cycle.” “mole.” Ben Mendelsohn • Making the Urban Coast • The Imaginative Capital of Lagos 465

without fully taming the environment. The harbor thus essentially approached from a real estate per- moles also severely disrupt the local equilibrium spective through the reclamation of some of the in longshore sedimentary drift. Since the moles’ land lost to the sea and making this available for construction, Lagos’s Victoria Island waterfront the development of a Waterfront and future Tour- has experienced nearly a kilometer of erosion. ism Gateway to Lagos and Nigeria.”53 Although Postindependence authorities in Lagos have these initial plans failed, the logic of linking tried to mitigate this coastal erosion with a series coastal protection and commercial land making of dredging and nourishment schemes. To under- persisted. Eventually, former Lagos state governor stand how the idea of Eko Atlantic emerged, it is Bola Tinubu proposed that the Lebanese-Nigerian helpful to review the evolution of erosion control brothers Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury could im- efforts at the Bar Beach site. Among the first at- plement this dual vision of coastal protection and tempts, in 1958, was a simple effort to place large high-value land making along the Victoria Island quantities of sand near the edge of the east mole waterfront. Doubts about their suitability were so that currents could gradually distribute this raised, as a federal government committee found material along Victoria Island’s waterfront. A sand little evidence that the Chagoury brothers’ firm pumping station was built in the 1960s, and at “had the capacity and competence to undertake least nine episodes of beach nourishment, dredg- such an expensive venture.”54 Yet the construction ing sand from the sea and depositing it along the of Eko Atlantic continued, with the centerpiece of waterfront, took place between 1969 and 1999.51 a seven-kilometer stone and concrete storm surge Despite these persistent and repeated efforts, the barrier that they call the Great Wall of Lagos. ability to design, finance, and deploy permanent By fusing real estate and coastal protection, erosion control remained elusive. The challenge of Eko Atlantic’s developers not only claim to be im- halting, slowing, or reversing Lagos’s coastal ero- posing discipline upon urban space and the bodies sion was compounded by financial concerns. The circulating within it, but also to comprehensively federal and state governments lacked adequate discipline the coast and its geomorphological pro- capital to implement the best recommendations cesses. Yet Eko Atlantic is far from the last word on of costal scientists and engineers. News reports coastal engineering and flood protection in Lagos. quote government officials saying that they could The Great Wall of Lagos may protect the land di- only afford periodic beach nourishment and that rectly behind it, but, unfortunately, it does so by a seawall would be out of the question: “The cost displacing erosion onto communities farther along of constructing breakwaters is enormous, and the the Lekki Peninsula. While several of these com- government does not have the funds for it now.”52 munities are affluent beach estates, many of them Then, in 2002 a group of South African consul- are populated by informal settlements. For exam- tants was hired to produce a comprehensive study ple, residents about seven kilometers east of Lagos and proposal for the waterfront, in partnership in villages like Alpha Beach, another once-popular with the Nigerian Institute for Oceanographic and public waterfront, have experienced catastrophic Marine Research. erosion in their community. While developers and In the end, the effort became more focused politicians at first denied the link, a causal rela- on generating funds than protecting the public tionship is clearly outlined by the environmental waterfront. Within this paradigm, the consultants impact assessment compiled by the Dutch dredg- ultimately determined that “partial financing of ing firm Royal Haskoning and reiterated by addi- the protection works is generated by simultane- tional foreign coastal researchers: “Since the revet- ously creating developable property through land ment fixes the coast of the newly reclaimed land, reclamation. . . . The restoration of Bar Beach is the erosion of the Bar Beach is shifted eastward

51. Tonder et al., “Bar Beach, Lagos.” 52. “Africa Underwater,” E: The Environmen- 53. Ibid. tal Magazine, July 20, 2004, emagazine.com 54. Oghifo, “FG Commits N4bn to Bar Beach.” /africa- underwater/. 466 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:3 • 2018

by the construction of the project.”55 Additional his images of Eko Atlantic City and other earthmov- mitigation measures, including manual beach re- ing sites in Lagos, told me, “Everyone in Lagos has plenishment, would be necessary to alleviate these to, one way or the other, make land.”57 Since the processes fully. Instead, the community of Alpha Lagos state government introduced the Lekki Mas- Beach (among others) has steadily slipped farther ter Plan in the late 1990s, Lagos’s main exurban and farther into the sea. While community advo- axis has been identified as one of the most rapid cates have successfully lobbied for the installation sites of mangrove destruction in the world. Fueled of small jetties perpendicular to the beachfronts in by the housing needs and lifestyle desires of middle- order to try to assuage these effects, such groins, class and wealthy Lagosians, phase after phase of which trap, block, and redirect sediment much piecemeal development has flourished, anchored like the harbor moles but on a smaller scale, are by the Lagos-Epe Expressway. Yet new land making unlikely to succeed at much beyond slowing some must contend with the intensifying threat of ero- localized erosion.56 sion and inundation. The seemingly straightfor- In twenty-first-century Lagos, the Atlan- ward act of dredging a shipping channel and lining tic coastline is now defined by three iterations of it with stone walls at the entrance to Lagos Lagoon stone structures, each meant to prevent one or marks an epochal shift in the structure of Lagos’s more unique categories of coastal disasters. The coastal ecology. The longshore drift current that Lagos harbor moles were deployed to avoid ship- defines the Bight of Benin coast is no longer the wreck on an underwater sandbar at the mouth of primary land-making force in Lagos. Yet, the waves the tidal channel linking the Atlantic Ocean with that once deposited sand to construct the barrier Lagos Lagoon. The Great Wall of Lagos that rims islands lining the Atlantic coast remain active and Eko Atlantic was positioned to halt the coastal ero- indifferent to human engineering. They find sand sion that the harbor moles triggered, but also to wherever they can, lifting it from the coastline to re- minimize flood risk to the newly sand-filled real es- place the sand that has been trapped by dams and tate. And about five kilometers to the east, a series stone seawalls, thereby accelerating erosion. As hu- of groins — stone breakwaters perpendicular to the mans respond to these new circumstances, efforts waterfront — was installed in an attempt to slow the to tame the modified system often backfire. coastal erosion that the Great Wall of Lagos has To European traders and colonizers, the intensified. While these three sets of structures Bight of Benin’s “drift aligned barrier lagoon are linked in a causal chain, it is important to note complex” posed a problem for effective maritime that this linearity is only one vector by which hu- navigation and transfer between land and sea. The mans have altered the fluid relationships between Europeans perceived Lagos’s unique geomorphol- land and water. As the literary examples analyzed ogy as pure obstacle and a target for transforma- in the following section demonstrate, the relation- tion, even though for West African coastal dwellers ship between land, sand, and water permeates the the region’s interior lagoons were always a naviga- city and envelops its inhabitants in ways that can tional asset, suggesting an entirely different preco- be fragmentary and unpredictable. lonial coastal imaginary.58 Yet in the next section, It is difficult to overstate the pervasiveness we see how this precolonial coastal imaginary has of dredging, sand filling, and related land-making receded almost entirely from view, as contempo- strategies throughout the Lagos region. Construct- rary fiction shows a range of Lagosians searching ing a home in Lagos often means first constructing for individual autonomy within a landscape that the land upon which it will rest. As the documen- has been overdetermined by colonial transforma- tary photographer George Osodi, commenting on tions and their aftermaths.

55. Van Bentum, The Lagos Coast, ix. See also Lagos Bar-Beach, Victoria Island, Eti-Osa Local 57. George Osodi, interview by the author, Royal Haskoning DHV, “Draft Final Environ- Government Area, Lagos, Nigeria,” 2011. March 10, 2016, Lagos. mental Impact Assessment (E.I.A.) Report for 56. Edward J. Anthony, telephone interview by 58. Law, “Trade and Politics.” the Proposed Shoreline Protection and Recla- the author, July 21, 2016. mation of 900 Hectares of Land: Phase I of the Eko Atlantic City Development Project at the Ben Mendelsohn • Making the Urban Coast • The Imaginative Capital of Lagos 467

Part 3: Nomadic Ground, Nomadic Subjects lective memory in contemporary Lagos.59 In 1990, Everything about Eko Atlantic’s promotional and nearly 300,000 residents were dispossessed from design rhetoric coveys control and mastery — over their homes. Now renamed Oniru, the area is fully urban space and the bodies circulating within, unrecognizable except perhaps for its susceptibil- over the Atlantic coast and its geomorphological ity to frequent flooding. While forceful evictions properties. Even more, it seeks to exercise narra- have a long history, policy scholar Sheriff Folarin tive control over the trajectory of the city at large, argues that Lagos’s broader “spatial economy of determining the structure of imaginable futures abjection” — the regularity with which the urban and memorable histories. Yet Lagos’s sedimen- poor can expect a combination of neglect and tary flows move not only in contact with coastal violent displacement by state forces — can be read infrastructure and urban planning schemes, but through this one forceful eviction.60 Maroko is also also with the flows of memory and aspiration ex- directly linked to the Bar Beach site and the Eko pressed in contemporary literature as well. The Atlantic fantasy not only as a kind of precedent shifting boundary between land and water occu- and prophesy, but more fundamentally, many of pies a central position in Lagos’s urban imaginary, the evictees from Maroko made their way to Bar and two examples in particular, Abani’s Graceland Beach. Activists believe that many urban dwellers (2004) and Barrett’s Blackass (2015), link these experienced both episodes. ecological conditions to the persistent challenge Throughout Graceland Elvis stubbornly in- of both imagining and producing more inclusive sists on his future as an entertainer. Elvis tries to urban futures. This section demonstrates an inti- earn money busking for a group of white expa- mate link between urban and personal develop- triates that are lounging at Bar Beach. He is ulti- ment, between self-fashioning city dwellers and mately laughed away without payment, only able to self-fashioning swamplands, and the two novels earn money later when he begins dancing with a best establish the intimate connection between more traditional traveling Yoruba theater troupe. nomadic ground and nomadic subjects in Lagos. Yet the comfort of tradition is short lived, and he In both, social mobility and urban subjectivity are gives up on dancing after his family fails to lead imbricated with the mobile natures of the urban their neighbors in a resistance to forceful eviction landform. Further, I show that a third novel — by the authorities. The setting of Elvis’s adolescent Okorafor’s Lagoon (2015) — establishes the accumu- awakening in Maroko suggests that the energies lation of collective memory at the Bar Beach site needed to train himself and his surrounding envi- and the challenge of imagining a more inclusive ronment are beyond his reach. Yet his attachment coastal future in Lagos. to the image of Elvis Presley and his decision to im- Graceland is set in Maroko, a swampy set- migrate to the United States with a fake passport tlement that had been partially land-filled by reveal that even before Maroko assumed the mask residents prior to its conversion into a sprawling of a Euro-American shopping mall, it was a space residential estate with a shopping mall and in- of cosmopolitan imagination and hybridity. ternational hotels. Abani’s protagonist, Elvis, is a Abani’s Graceland haunts the background of sixteen-year-old Elvis Presley impersonator from Barrett’s Blackass. In Blackass, Maroko exists only as Maroko, and his story of economic and social striv- a whisper buried beneath the street, the amphibi- ing is rooted in this neighborhood. The climax ous marshland fully solidified into the ground of the novel occurs during a forceful eviction by of Oniru Estate and the Palms Shopping Mall. the state in 1983, a violent incursion that preceded Here, Barrett stages a story of a young Lagosian the destruction of Maroko in its entirety. Maroko’s male striving, self-fashioning, and masquerading story surfaces in several different novels and plays, his way toward a better life that he can’t quite de- as it is a deeply significant locus of contested col- fine. In this story, a college graduate named Furo

59. See Harrison, “Suspended City.” One impor- of Area Boy, in which the main characters ob- 60. Folarin, “The Spatial Economy of Abjection.” tant canonical example discussed by Harrison serve the haunting march of Maroko’s refugees is Wole Soyinka’s 1995 play The Beatification through Lagos Island. 468 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:3 • 2018

Wariboko mysteriously wakes up one morning as a find itself exiled from the city as well, pushed back white man, thus providing him access to the reno- into the sea. The new costume worn by the coastal vated luxury and retail district erected atop the landscape — solid roads made of cobblestones, former informal settlement. Unlike Abani’s Elvis, prone to frequent flooding, running between im- Furo is convincing in his mimicry so long as his posing stucco homes — is tied to the costumes worn backside remains covered by his pants — his ass by those who walk on top of it. It may look convinc- is still black. Passing as a white expatriate, Furo ing, but it is not necessarily sustainable. launches a corporate career and secures an ex- Both Graceland and Blackass are set in loca- ceptionally attractive, sexually adventurous girl- tions of dramatic topographical transformation friend. Yet Furo embodies Homi Bhabha’s concept tied to the sequence of events that has produced of mimicry, being almost the same, but not quite Eko Atlantic City. Their own mimicries mirror the white.61 He is psychologically tormented both by costuming, instantaneous shape-shifting, and su- his black ass and by chance encounters with in- perficial architectural masks that similarly charac- dividuals from his previous life. Unable to settle terize Eko Altantic. Like the “reclamation” of land into a life with his girlfriend, he flees to Abuja, the at Eko Atlantic, literature helps further reclaim orderly planned city that replaced Lagos as the Ni- Bar Beach as a site thick with collective memories, gerian capital and that remains an aesthetic foil to most of which Eko Atlantic papers over with an un- Lagos’s kinetic fragmentations. convincing facsimile of a generic urban elsewhere. In linking the excavation of memory with Bar Beach was considered a beloved and rare out- the excavation of sediment, and the fabrication of door public space, one where Nigerians of all so- ground with the fabrication of individual urban cial strata would visit with their family. It was also a identity, literature and land making are collabora space of possibility — for dangerous but potentially tive forces in producing the urban everyday in Lagos. liberating political or personal transformation. These stories reveal the Lagos coast as a site of ac- In Okorafor’s 2015 sci-fi novel Lagoon, Bar Beach cumulated and ongoing trauma through forceful becomes the site of a transformative alien inva- eviction of the urban poor, the privatization of pub- sion, where an omnipotent female shape-shifter lic space, and the unequal distribution of urban emerges from the water in a vast explosion that opportunity or hazard. Yet in linking the self- immediately overwrites Bar Beach’s dense social fashioning ambitions of city dwellers with the history (see fig. 5). As Okorafor writes: self-fashioning ambitions of the landform itself, In many ways, Bar Beach was a perfect sample of Graceland and Blackass both chase the question of Nigerian society. It was a place of mixing. The how the repressive and exclusionary logics I out- ocean mixed with the land, and the wealthy mixed line in part 1 can be escaped, as well as how the cy- with the poor. Bar Beach attracted drug dealers, clical logics I outline in part 2 can be managed or squatters, various accents and languages, seagulls, tolerated. In each novel, the performance of mim- garbage, biting flies, tourists, all kinds of reli- icry fails, or at least compels the characters to flee gious zealots, hawkers, prostitutes, johns, water- Lagos. Their movements as individuals are heavily loving children, and their careless parents. . . . impacted by the movements of the landform — as Bar Beach’s waters were too wild for any serious swimming. Even the best swimmers risked a wa- neighborhoods are bulldozed, rebuilt, and reno- tery death by its many rip currents. (7) vated, they harbor different sets of possibilities for those who occupy or pass through them. Yet If Bar Beach was once a unique geosocial site of the novels’ conclusions may also be prophesy for multivalent gathering and personal exploration,62 Eko Atlantic — its mask may also fall off, and it may Eko Atlantic has ensured that this is only selec-

61. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.” nearly drown as the tide overtakes him. These daydreaming about romance. Similar themes themes of openness, flaneury, and danger are also drive Okay Nbide’s 2015 novel, Arrows of 62. This narrative of risk and threat is further echoed in the filmmaker Femi Odugbemi’s Rain, which follows a homeless former journal- echoed in Teju Cole’s short story “Water Has 2004 docu-fiction, Bar Beach Blues, where a ist who witnesses soldiers raping and murder- No Enemy,” in which the narrator witnesses young unnamed Lagosian drifts along the wa- ing a sex worker at Bar Beach, only to be impris- a showboating man on an all-terrain vehicle terfront, falling asleep beneath a cabana and oned for the crime. Ben Mendelsohn • Making the Urban Coast • The Imaginative Capital of Lagos 469

Figure 5. George Osodi’s iconic photograph of an Aladura, or prayerist, Christian worshipper with her child on Bar Beach in 2002. Also displayed in his series of sixteen photographs documenting the site over several decades at the RELE Gallery in 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist

tively still the case. Developers have hosted a range more inclusive, collaborative, multispecies urban of ticketed events, including music and food festi- coast in Lagos. As literary scholar Hugh Charles vals, polo and soccer tournaments, and car races. O’Connell comments, there is a “long recognized These events address a narrow segment of Lagos’s relationship of the first contact narrative to colo- middle and upper classes, even if they continue nial and neocolonial conquest as well as the slave- in the tradition of the Bar Beach’s long history of trade,” but in Lagoon, the alien arrival ultimately staging public spectacles, including the execution results in “the reawakening of a seemingly struc- of petty criminals during the era of military rule turally unpresentable anticolonial subjectivity that in the 1970s. is pitched against the ideological confines of the Of the three novels, Lagoon ultimately pro- neoliberal present.”63 The alien figure at the cen- vides the clearest gesture of opening toward a ter of the novel, Ayodele, emerges from the water

63. O’Connell, “We Are Change,” 292. 470 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:3 • 2018

in an elegant spectacle that mirrors Eko Atlantic’s Lagos. It ostensibly erases accumulated trauma, own fluid emergence. In this way, both invoke the although it often only displaces it, all the while West African water deity Mami Wata, who in many ignoring the development’s complicity in ongo- traditions brings promises of instant wealth as well ing patterns of spatialized abjection. Yet, Lagos’s as clear capacities for violence.64 Yet the geosocial long history of exclusionary planning, as well as histories outlined above demonstrate that Eko At- its emergent reality of frequent flooding and en- lantic’s transformative claims are not to be trusted. vironmental crisis, demonstrates that Eko Atlantic The template for such a transformation has yet to City’s confidence is a ruse. Whatever its claims, this emerge in Lagos. In Lagoon, as O’Connell contin- development lacks the capacity to tame the unruli- ues, Okorafor’s aliens “are the figuration of that ness of the coast, the lives of coastal dwellers, and which can’t be thought” — that is, the template for the imaginations they express. a future Lagos in which some form of geosocial stability and equitability might finally emerge.65 References Abani, Chris. Graceland. New York: Farrar, Straus and Gi- Conclusion roux, 2004. Eko Atlantic City is fraught with the myriad pit- Adebayo, Bukola. “Shifting Sands: Lagos Communities falls associated with scholarly representations of Count the Cost of Dredging.” Punch, September 13, Africa and cities throughout the global south. It is 2017. shiftingsands.punchng.com/. both a spatial and analytical ready-made, invoking Ajibade, Idowu. “Can a Future City Enhance Urban Resil- Ananya Roy’s critique that “southern cities [are] ience and Sustainability? A Political Ecology Analysis studied in the valence of surprise and dismay; they of Eko Atlantic City, Nigeria.” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 26 (2017): 85 – 92. are seen to be weak copies of a Western urbanism, [and] a betrayal of an indigenous formation.”66 Ajibade, Idowu, Gordon McBean, and Rachel Bezner- Kerr. “Urban Flooding in Lagos, Nigeria: Patterns of Roy’s observation is linked to Achille Mbembe’s Vulnerability and Resilience among Women.” Global declaration that the clear majority of academic Environmental Change 23 (2013): 1714 – 25. discourse describing Africa does so under the Alo, Babajide, Kehinde Olayinka, Aderonke Oyeyiola, signs of monstrosity or intimacy — an irrational Temilola Oluseyi, Rose Alani, and Akeem Abayomi. compulsion to narrate African sociality as either “Studies and Transactions on Pollution Assessment 67 horrifically excessive or impenetrably insular. of the Lagos Lagoon System, Nigeria.” In The Land/ Elsewhere, Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall argue that Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone of West and Central a strategy for avoiding this pitfall should “take seri- Africa, edited by Salif Diop, Cyr Descamps, and Jean- ously the fact that Africa like, everywhere else, has Paul Barusseau, 65 – 76. New York: Springer, 2014. its heres, its elsewheres, and its interstices. Indeed, Barrett, A. Igoni. Blackass: A Novel. Minneapolis: Graywolf historically, the continent has been and still is a Press, 2016. space of flows, of flux, of translocation, with mul- Beiser, Vincent. “Sand Mining: The Global Environmen- tiple nexuses of entry and exit points.”68 tal Crisis You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.” Guard- Sediment is at the center of Lagos’s fluxes ian, February 27, 2017. and flows, its heres and its elsewheres. Eko Atlantic Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence City invites an account of exclusionary pasts inter- of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (1984): 125 – 33. mingling with a precarious present in which in- Bigon, Liora. A History of Urban Planning in Two West Af- creasingly frequent floods mark landscapes under rican Colonial Capitals: Residential Segregation in Brit- constant, often collaborative construction. At the ish Lagos and French Dakar. Lampeter, Wales: Edwin center of this story is sand and its role in regulat- Mellen, 2009. ing the boundaries between land and water. Eko Atlantic proposes a new geosocial space-time in

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