Chapter V: Lagos and Its Port—the Future Bombay of West Africa

Early in the seventies, a decade after the British occupation, Lagos, for more years than one cares to remember an important export centre of the slave trade, was a small settlement inhabited by Yoruba and Bini agriculturists and traders. The Hinterland, threatened by Dahomeyan invasions from the west and Fulani inroads from the north, distressed by internal struggles between various sections of the Yoruba people rebelling against the central authority, was in a state of perpetual ferment. Severed from the mainland, maintaining themselves from hand to mouth, and swept by disease, the few British officials led an unenviable existence. A small three-roomed house protected from the rains by an iron roof harboured the Governor, and the members of his staff were glad to accept the hospitality of European merchants earning a precarious if lucrative livelihood by trading with the natives in palm oil, kernels, ivory, and cotton.

To-day Lagos is a picturesque, congested town of some 80,000 inhabitants, boasting many fine public buildings and official and European and native merchants’ residences, churches, wharves, a hospital, a tramway, a bacteriological institute, a marine engineering establishment, to say nothing of cold storage and electric light plant, hotels, a racecourse, and other appurtenances of advanced civilization. Like every other part of West Africa that I have seen, Lagos is full of violent contrasts. Every variety of craft—the tonnage of the place is something like 250,000 tons per annum—is to be observed in the water and every variety of dress in the busy streets, from the voluminous robes of the turbaned Mohammedan to the latest tailoring monstrosities of Western Europe. The Yoruba lady with a Bond Street hat and hobble skirt; her sister in the infinitely more graceful enfolding cloths of blue or terra-cotta, with the bandanna kerchief for head-gear; opulent resident native merchants or Government clerks in ordinary English costume; keen-featured “uneducated” traders from whose shoulders hang the African _riga_—a cosmopolitan crowd which includes Sierra Leonean, Cape Coast, and Accra men, attracted by the many prospects of labour an ever-increasing commercial and industrial activity offers to carpenters, mechanics, traders’ assistants, and the like. Here a church thronged on Sundays with African ladies and gentlemen in their finest array; here a mosque built by the local and rapidly increasing Yoruba Muslims at a cost of £5,000. Here a happy African family laughing and chattering in a tumbledown old shanty within close proximity to a “swagger” bungalow gay with brilliant creepers; there a seminary where a number of young ladies, looking supremely uncomfortable in their European frocks, supplemented by all the etceteras of Western feminine wardrobes, their short hair frizzled out into weird contortions, are learning as fast as their teachers can make them those hundred and one inutilities which widen the breach between them and their own beautiful, interesting land. A certain kind of prosperity is writ large over the place, but there is good reason to believe that economic pressure in its different forms, none more acutely felt than the ascending price of foodstuffs, is beginning to bear hardly upon the poorer classes, and the political and social atmosphere of the town is not altogether healthy.

Historical circumstances rather than natural advantages have made Lagos the most important commercial emporium of British West Africa and the starting-point of a railway into the interior. It is difficult to see, if the traffic of this railway and its future feeders develops, as there is every reason to believe it will, how the already crowded and circumscribed area of Lagos can possibly prove equal to the demands upon it. Indeed, its physical features are in many respects most disadvantageous for the _rôle_ of the West African Bombay it appears called upon to bear, and it is only by the expenditure of millions which, spread over the Protectorate, would have achieved results of much greater fruitfulness, that Lagos can be converted into a harbour worthy of the name. For Lagos is cursed with a bar which vessels drawing more than fourteen feet cannot cross, and the absurd anomaly, to say nothing of the expense and loss of time and damage to valuable cargo involved, is witnessed of vessels with merchandise consigned to the premier port in Nigeria having to steam 120 miles south of it and there discharge their freight into branch steamers for conveyance to destination. An elusive and sinister obstruction is Lagos bar, strewn with wrecks and hitherto refractory to dredging, which shifts its depths three feet in a single week, while the position of the channels is continually altering. As one surveys the coast-line and notes the two, comparatively speaking, deep and roomy anchorages of Forcados and Old Calabar, one cannot refrain from marvelling somewhat at the curious chain of events which has conspired to concentrate effort and expense upon a place so difficult of access. However, the past cannot be undone, and no doubt there is much to be said in favour of Lagos, or rather of the happenings which have ministered to its selection. Be that as it may, the destinies of Southern Nigeria have for the last five years been in the hands of a Governor of large ideas and enormous energy. Sir Walter Egerton, who, despite numerous disappointments and maddening delays, has pursued with dogged persistence and infinite resource the object dearest to his heart—that of opening the harbour. A comprehensive scheme of works, entailing the construction of two stone moles, one on either side of the entrance, combined with harbour and channel dredging, is proceeding under the direction of Messrs. Coode, Son, and Matthews, and the constant personal supervision of the Governor, in the confident belief that its completion will ensure (combined with dredging) a depth of twenty-seven feet at high water, corresponding to twenty-four feet at low tide. When I was in Lagos a month ago[7] the work on the eastern mole had advanced 4,500 feet seawards, but the western mole is not yet started, and will not be, it is feared, for some time, a further delay having been caused by the foundering of the _Axim_, with much indispensable material on board.

One must have stood at the extremity of the eastern mole and watched the greedy, muddy-coloured sea absorbing like some insatiable monster the masses of grey rock hurled, at all times of the day and every day in the week, into its depths, to appreciate the colossal difficulties of a task which, brought to a successful issue, will always remain an impressive testimony to human perseverance under climatic and other conditions of perennial difficulty. West Africa has certainly never seen anything comparable to it. Nature disputes with man for every inch of vantage. As the work progresses the sand twists and withes into ever-changing formations; banks arise and disappear only to again re-form; the foreshore on the outer side of the mole grows and swells and rises weekly, threatening to become level with the wall itself and even to overwhelm it; the scour of the sea scoops into the ocean’s floor, thus forcing the advancing mole into deep water, which demands a proportionately larger meal of stone. From out the greyness of the horizon the remains of the _Kano_, _Kittiwake_, _Egga_, and other vessels that once were, lift lamentable spars above the angry breakers. From Abeokuta, thirty miles away, these innumerable tons of granitic boulders must be brought, despatched in “boxes” from the newly-opened quarries to Ebute-Metta by rail. There the “boxes” are lifted from the waggons and hoisted by cranes into lighters, the lighters are towed to the wharf, the “boxes” lifted out of them, run along the mole, and their contents hurled into the sea. Every foot’s advance requires sixty tons of stone. At the accelerated rate of progress now ensured the eastern mole will be finished in four years. The labour and organization required to bring this great work to its present stage—initial steps in West Africa being invariably characterized by endless impediments—have been prodigious. Despite the sombre prognostications one hears in certain quarters, there seems no reasonable doubt that the bar will yield in time, as the forest has yielded, to British genius and pertinacity aided by African muscles, but at a cost which, when the time comes to add up the bill, will prove, I think, much heavier than generally supposed.

Lagos is joined to the mainland by two substantial bridges, one connecting the island with another small island called Iddo, which stands between Lagos Island and the continent, and one connecting Iddo with the continent itself at Ebute-Metta. From thence the railway starts on its way northward, traversing the whole of Yorubaland and tapping the Niger at Jebba.