Disability as Undesirability in Colonial Lagos, 1939–60

This paper sits at the intersection of power, agency, and class to investigate the lived experiences of people living with disabilities (i.e., leprosy, insanity, blindness, deafness, and so on) in colonial Lagos. Disability inspired the colonial conception of undesirability as the metropole’s visualized and expectation of modernity for human and non-human Lagosians necessitated cleansing the streets to get rid of people living with disabilities. In order to achieve this, the government introduced policies with included prosecution, repatriation and rehabilitation. Previous studies have focused on the colonial history of impairments from medical perspectives. This study, more than any other study on the social history of Nigeria, would conceptualize impairment as disability with a focus on the social aspect. The arguments that underpin this paper are two-fold. Firstly, the colonial government’s concept of undesirables and the eventual eradication of people living with disabilities from the streets of Lagos was hinged on the British government’s visualized modernity for her colonies. Secondly, colonial policies on disability were inherently sentimental and biased.

Being a pioneering study on the social history of disability in colonial Lagos, the sources for writing this paper are largely archival, with a corroboration of relevant secondary sources.