B
iafra is an active port region near the southeastern border of Nigeria, perhaps most known in the popular mind for a civil war lasting from 1967 to 1970. In this illuminating book, The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements, Joseph Godlewski attempts to describe how its “agents and spaces” (p.7) become central to a globalizing capitalist modernity, from the 1600s to the present. In place of a conventional monograph exploring regional architecture, which might have described an array of building typologies and their urban or rural settings, Godlewski analyses paradigmatic spatial configurations prevalent in various historical moments of Old Calabar (now Calabar, the capital city of Cross River State). These are set within different phases of the trade with European slave-runners, and against the architectures and practices of other major coastal sites in West Africa. The attempt, in the author’s words, is to “challenge notions of unique, bounded sociocultural spaces and highlight the uneven entanglement of local and global forces” (p.7).
The first of these paradigmatic spaces is the compound, which served as a primary locus of life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bounded by a rectangular fence, this comprised a series of halls around open courtyards, providing accommodation for domestic and spiritual activity, as well as trade. The interior world of the courtyard was flexible but ordered to reflect a clear spatial hierarchy of masters, wives, children, and servants. These were “lightweight, expedient structures” (p.42) built of mud and thatch, which could be reconfigured to account for the changing conditions of the urban life of this period. Despite their impermanence and need for regular upkeep, compounds populated a polis: an agglomeration of hamlets and fishing villages that “slowly emerged from the rainforest to become one of the most bustling nodes of the transatlantic slave trade” (39). This trade, in turn, exercised strong influences over the design of the compounds, as domestic slavery—and the control of traffic at the building perimeter—was a central concern.
A second, corresponding paradigm, is what Godlewski calls masquerade. This refers not to a space, so much as a social institution with spatial outposts and characteristics. In the context of the increasing trade in human beings, which required delicate mediation between Biafran and foreign powers, secret societies (Ékpè) worked as a powerful, much feared, and often unseen authority. Wielding considerable disciplinary and retributive force, and a very real threat of violence, Ékpè members established themselves in lodges at key points across the Biafran littoral, and through a practice of masquerade. Their presence, and their spatial organization, were at once occult (in the dual senses of spiritual and hidden) and public. The “mechanism” of Ékpè was dominant, in the region, throughout the 18th century as a check on the increasingly voracious capitalist enterprise of slavery.
Godlewski’s third paradigm is the offshore. Again, this is less an architecture than a system with architectural characteristics and components, determined by the requirements of coastal trade. This was “a terraqueous network of ships, canoes, plantations,” and other facilities linked to the growing rise in palm oil trade in the period up to 1846, when Presbyterian missionaries established the first permanent European foothold. Interestingly, however, the offshore does not merely describe a coastal condition, but a much wider traffic: in particular, of the prefabricated houses shipped from Europe (often from manufacturers in Liverpool and Scotland) to be integrated into the compounds of important Biafran families.
In the fourth and fifth chapters, the two final paradigms are introduced: enclaves and zones. After 1846, the decentralized landscape of Biafran settlement is increasingly dominated by ostensibly enclosed campuses, beginning with mission stations. This period marks a shift from the slave trade toward “civilizing” institutions and colonial administration. Godlewski argues that this paradigm extends to the gated enclosures of Pentecostal organizations and factories. The most contemporary iteration, though it is much larger in scale, is the zone—another walled paradigm that, today, represents aspirations to participate in a global economy. The recurrent example is Tinapa Free Zone and Resort, a much-criticized attempt to woo international investment in projects such as studios for Nollywood (Nigeria’s prolific film industry). While acknowledging the flawed nature of this project, Godlewski nonetheless sees more significance in this example, and a deep connection between the zone and the region’s spatial history.
The adoption of paradigms, as method, arises from a sensitivity to essentialist and a-historical discourses. Godlewski is careful to avoid the reductive tropes—put forward in Western and post-independence accounts—which depict the region’s buildings and urbanism as either crude and unchanging, or as culturally essential and autonomous (that is, independent of the complexly intermeshed and dynamic histories of the Black Atlantic). By contrast, he demonstrates that these have been restless sites of interaction: appropriation and subjugation, but also ingenious resistance and self-making. This is true of their morphologies, and even more so of the rich social worlds which they house and enable. Godlewski does not shy away from the violent histories that often punctuated these spaces; however, his depiction of Biafran cultural life and economic history is marked by meaningful interactions, hopes, and exchanges, as much as by the horrors of the slave trade or of honor sacrifices (alleged and real). The result is highly engaged and engaging; it reads as a methodological meld of architectural history and historical anthropology.
To achieve this, the study does away with conventional architectural-analytic categories such as typology, which tend to freeze lived spaces into forms. This is an important intervention, and Godlewski’s study goes a long way in demonstrating the novel tools that spatialized histories might bring to bear. The entanglements of the text are vividly described and brilliantly balance Calabar’s fluid human geography with modes of flexible order. At the same time, the book raises important questions about these newer models. While socially and historically attentive analyses must embrace more porous and flexible approaches, network-influenced models run the risk of becoming ontologically “flat” and diagrammatic. While dazzlingly complex and far from unidirectional, historical interactions in the Black Atlantic were marked (as the author notes) by unequal power and brutal causality. Entanglement, an omni-directional and inclusive model, may require additional theorization and qualification to retain sight of this. Likewise, spatial paradigms can unintentionally return to a kind of formalism; there is a hint of this in the final substantive chapter (Zones), in which the 5.8km free trade zone of Tinapa is described as a contemporary heir to the housing compound—not just because it is walled, but also because it is internally fragmented, “interlaced by a number of agents,” and subject to negotiation with external forces (230). This seems less rigorous than the foregoing chapters, as architectural analysis, and suggests that such labile models might sometimes land on the side of analogy. This is not an issue that is unique to The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra, but one for scholars who seek to surpass the limitations of received models, and perhaps particularly for those working on the complex and heterodox built environments of the post-colony.
The book is richly illustrated, with engravings, plans, and maps, and photographs that capture both historical and contemporary views of Calabar and its surroundings. The inclusion of Godlewski’s own architectural drawings and maps (produced with Allison Howard and Scott Krabath) are a particularly welcome addition; these allow the reader to visualize architectures that no longer exist—or remain only in partial and transformed iterations. Most importantly, these address different scales of the Biafran spatial paradigms featured in the text. As a reader, I occasionally hoped for a sense of the broader landscape: Godlewski speaks evocatively of the relations among coast and inland regions, forest and townscape, and the dispersed and mobile armatures of the “offshore.” This is the world that is straddled, for many years, by Ékpè masquerade and power-protocol. It is an intricate subject, and for this reason one might have difficulty imagining how such entanglement structures a geography of everyday life, especially amid rapacious and potentially destabilizing colonial pressures.
Regardless, The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra is a landmark intervention to African architectural history—one that acknowledges this region’s own longstanding modernity, and its ambivalent role in the construction of an international order. It succeeds in describing Calabar’s famously varied and decentralized urban condition while avoiding utopian claims made by well-meaning post-independence scholars (echoed more recently by Rem Koolhaas). Most importantly, perhaps, Godlewski demonstrates the new analytic resources that might be applied in thinking the spaces of the post-colony.
Joshua Comaroff is an architectural designer, urban geographer, and assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at National University of Singapore. He is the author of the forthcoming Spectropolis: The Enchantment of Capital in Singapore (University of Minnesota Press) and coauthor of Horror in Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).
