Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Postcolonial Lagos, Stephanie Newell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Postcolonial Lagos by Stephanie Newell Hope Eze BOOK REVIEW of Newell, Stephanie. 2020. Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Postcolonial Lagos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 272 pp. $99.95 (cloth), $26.95 (paperback). Lagos, a cosmopolitan city in southwestern Nigeria, is known for its enormous population, bustling commercial activities, wealth, hunger, and dirt. Over time, the category of dirt has served as the most common descriptor for the complexity of Lagos, especially by the European colonial media and their African representatives. The single narrative of Lagos—and, by extension, other urban cities in Africa—as a dirty place filled with hungry and dying children has conveniently served as a political tool, with which a negative Eurocentric image of Africa has been projected on the global scene. In Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Postcolonial Lagos, Stephanie Newell explores dirt in Lagos as a "slippery category" (109), which yields itself to multiple interpretations, from the perspective of the European government officials during the colonial era and that of contemporary Lagosians. Newell provides a nuanced analysis of dirt, not only as an empirical substance, but also as an interpretive framework for the cultural and political representations of filth, ranging from material waste to nonbinary sexualities. The book captures the scarcity of public opinion in Lagos during the colonial era owing to the silencing of African voices and rigid control of the national media and theater by the colonial authorities. It opens with an examination of the European colonizers' perception and interpretation of dirt in Africa and how that influenced their relationship with Africans, along with the public-health policies and propaganda put in place in a bid to control Africans' attitudes toward dirt. Particularly important is how, carefully overlooking the entrenched systemic injustice of the time, as well as the poor town planning, the European government officials dubbed the deplorable living conditions of the poor masses dirty and put the blame for deteriorating public health on Lagosians' alleged lack of proper hygiene. This victim-blaming served as a pretext for expelling Lagosians to the outskirts of the city, allowing them to come within a close range to Europeans only as domestic workers—a situation that echoes the attitude of the capitalist landowners in J. M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K (1983), who built fences to exclude the poor masses, permitting them to come close only as laborers. Having explored numerous colonial archives and collected data on the subject, Newell succinctly evaluates how the colonizers' perception of dirt in Africa contrasts with the cultural interpretations of dirt from Lagosians' perspectives. Chapters 1 through 5 examine colonial Lagos, represented by a strong European media hegemony devoid of African voices, but the following chapters represent a shift from the Eurocentric perspectives to the perspectives of contemporary Lagosians interviewed by Newell's local research [End Page 146] partners. Although dirt has disparate transcultural interpretations, as Newell unravels, she finds that a common denominator among various interpretations is the apartness or otherness of dirt: dirt is regarded across cultures as the unfamiliar and unclean, useless, something to be discarded. Within this interpretive framework, the Other, which could be human or nonhuman, is relegated to the margins of society in the guise of sociocultural purity. One fascinating thing about Newell's Histories of Dirt is the timeliness of its publication. This is because the book explores the bubonic plague of the 1920s, a public health situation that has many similarities with the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in terms of sanitation. Newell's analysis of how Lagosians managed and survived the bubonic plague amid colonial difficulties offers insights to present-day Lagosians—and Africans at large—on how to control and survive the COVID-19 situation. Also fascinating is how Newell captures the voices of ordinary Lagosians directly, including children, through recorded interviews. Nevertheless, one cannot help but notice that the interviewees, while giving individual opinions about dirt, seem to have a uniform tone, which makes them seem overly empathetic and highly tolerant of different cultures—a behavioral pattern that is a far cry from how average Lagosians truly behave. Given...