Abstract This article uncovers how Black interfaith communities agitated to preserve public cemeteries on Lagos Island from the nineteenth century until the 1930s. As burial grounds became full during the 1920s, the British administration proposed closing Muslim and Christian cemeteries. The Black residents would be expected to bury the dead on Lagos mainland, which was connected to the island by the Carter Bridge. News of the cemetery closure galvanized Africans to successfully campaign for the expansion rather than the closing of public graveyards. Historians of mortuary politics and colonial planning have studied how European rulers mandated cemeteries and how Africans developed new burial rites in public burial grounds. This article demonstrates that the cemeteries were more than colonial instruments of dispossession. Interfaith practitioners developed new meanings for burial grounds that later motivated their struggles to ensure cemeteries’ accessibility. Despite their varying attitudes to burial grounds, as the traditional rulers maintained the precolonial practice of home burial, Lagosians claimed the right to inter their loved ones in the same area that they considered home. I argue that Black residents agitated against cemetery closure to challenge colonial residential segregation and maintain belonging to Lagos Island. The campaigns for burial grounds offer insight into Lagosians’ intervention in the built environment and resistance to colonial planning schemes.
Read full abstract