Cocoa & Tastemakers of ‘Brazilian’ Nigeria
How Afro-Brazilian Architecture Influenced The Yoruba Homes of Colonial Western Nigeria
We didn’t eat much chocolate during my childhood in Nigeria. Despite that curious fact, cocoa ruled virtually everything around me. European lollipops, bubblegum and intensely-colorful Indian sweets were the confections of choice in my middle-class Lagosian neighborhood, from what I remember. But even during those ebbing years of its economic vitality, cocoa was king in western Nigeria, permeating the histories of buildings, streets, family fortunes and civic development. It was the region’s quintessential foreign exchange earner and before it was displaced by the disorienting oil wealth of the 1970s, cocoa agriculture and trading created what was arguably West Africa’s most affluent merchant class in colonial-era Yorubaland. Their accumulated wealth fueled the creation of the distinctive architecture that inspires this blog. I want to take a short but comprehensive look at how these buildings were constructed and why they deserve our attention.
The Seeds of The Aguda House
There’s some dispute about how cocoa came to West Africa originally but it’s clear that the remarkable trader-traveler James Pinson Labulo Davies was intimately involved. The cacao tree is indigenous to South America, but the ecological similarities between that region and Western Africa prompted some agricultural experimentation in the 19th century. Various attempts were made to transplant a Brazilian variety to West Africa in the second half of the 19th century, with mixed results. What is certain is that successful cacao farms took off in the Agege and Sango Ota districts of present-day Lagos and Ogun states by the 1880s. In fact, by 1880, J.P.L. (James Pinson Labulo) Davies had taken note of the high demand for cocoa in the world market and the steep prices a good crop commanded and had launched a successful experiment in Ijon. There’s much to say about this distinguished Sierra Leonean Yoruba returnee, who was for several decades the wealthiest man in West Africa and marital relative of Queen Victoria, but we’ll save the details for a future post. It’s enough to point out that a new biography of Davies digs up a reference from the one-time colonial Chief Justice of the Gold Coast crediting Davies for being the man who introduced cocoa to West Africa.
Taking up his example, other entrepreneurs like J.K. Coker (a protege of Davies) invested in ever-larger plantations, forming a trade collective called the Agege Planters Union with like-minded businessmen. The APU used their farming ventures and international experience as a way to spread Christian morality, a colonial British version of social progress and a nascent pan-Yoruba cultural nationalism, which they viewed as inextricably linked . These ‘Saro’ businessmen, many of first- or second-generation descent from the small but disproportionately successful Yoruba community in Freetown, Sierra Leone, inspired smallholder farmers in Ibadan, Ilesa, Ondo and Abeokuta to try their hand with planting and exporting the new crop as well.
The rapid success and bountiful profitability of cocoa attracted a generation of entrepreneurs. As one scholarly study of the era put it, “Coker’s gross income rose from five thousand pounds to about twenty thousand pounds … as men came in droves from both the immediate vicinity of Lagos and the interior of Yorubaland to work on the plantations. Between 1904 and 1920, Coker and the other Agege planters employed over twelve thousand laborers from the Yoruba hinterland. These laborers were involved in all the stages of cocoa production, from planting to harvesting and fermenting. They thereby acquired critical skills that would prove invaluable in later years in the city-states of the hinterland.” (Culled from “Rise and Decline of Cocoa Production in Southwestern Nigeria, from 1900 to 1993", by Ezekiel Ayodele Walker, PhD dissertation in history, MSU, 1999).
These migrant laborers returned home with more than agricultural and entrepreneurial acumen, however. They had also acquired some of the cosmopolitan tastes of this 19th-century Lagos Yoruba elite, a uniquely well-traveled and internationally-oriented African group that included Brazilian (or “Aguda”) and Cuban (or “Amaro”) repatriates alongside the afore-mentioned Sierra Leonean and wealthy indigenous traders (read “Black Atlantic Religion” and “The English Professors of Brazil: On The Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation”, both by Duke University professor J. Lorand Matory, for detailed investigations of these accomplished trans-Atlantic merchants).
This teeming global Yoruba diaspora is only just beginning to receive the intellectual attention it desperately deserves, but it is clear that the Brazilian contingent was eminently influential in architecture. By the end of the 1880s, there were 3,321 Brazilians living in Lagos, fully nine percent of the burgeoning city’s population. “Since many of the returning Yoruba had worked in the building trades in Brazil, they found their skills as carpenters and masons much appreciated in Lagos … Afro-Brazilian carpenters not only built houses for themselves and their fellow countrymen in that city but also several major public structures including Shitta Bey mosque, Central Mosque and Holy Cross Cathedral. The competence of these Afro-Brazilian builders, particularly exemplified by their work on Holy Cross Cathedral, so impressed colonial governor Sir Henry McAllum with what black people could do that in 1897 he set up a program to send Nigerians to England for vocational training. A decade earlier Governor Moloney, in an address to a ‘Brazilian’ social club, observed that their “professional and vocational training made (them) admirable, valuable and necessary centers for the diffusion among their countrymen in Yorubaland of the enlightenment and civilization, which however cruelly acquired are notwithstanding theirs.” (Culled from “The Brazilian House in Nigeria: The Emergence of a 20th-Century Vernacular House Style” by John Michael Vlatch, Journal of American Folklore).
The Aguda Brazilians, and to a lesser extent the Amaro Cubans, were prominent in construction and civil engineering, training they had acquired in their diasporan homes before relocating to Nigeria. Their ornate tastes and baroque stylings impressed the more austere Sierra Leonean returnees, and it was this Afro-Brazilian architecture that became the hallmark for wealth in 19th and early 20th-century Lagos.
Candido Da Rocha’s home in Lagos is a preeminent ecample of Yoruba-Brazilian architecture.
Ebun House in Lagos, Nigeria. Part of a presentation by Adedoyin Teriba entitled “Architecture and Afro-Brazilian Ideals in Southwestern Nigeria c. 1894–1960" at Harvard University, Feb. 20, 2013.
An example of an “Aguda” Yoruba-Brazilian home, courtesy of legendary Nigerian photographer Okhai Ojeikere. The most opulent examples are two-storey homes with prominent balconies (or “verandas”) and the carved columns in the “Ebun House” example.
Candido Esan Da Rocha’s “Water House” is one of the most well-known examples of Aguda architecture in Nigeria. Da Rocha was the son of a reputedly Ijesa (or Ijexa in Portuguese orthography) repatriate from Bahia, and his family went on to distinuish themselves in Lagosian business, politics and civic life. Like many Brazilian returnees, the family traded textiles, produce and religious paraphernalia between West Africa and South America. Candido Da Rocha was successful enough to earn a reputation as the wealthiest Lagosian of his day, and built his house with a connection to the Iju waterworks. This was an extraordinary feature in the late 19th-century, during which pipe-borne water was so rare that Da Rocha could sell water to his neighbor’s and make a significant profit from supplying it. This novel feature led Da Rocha’s home to be known locally as “Ile Olomi” in Yoruba, or “the water-bearer’s house” in English.
One subtle but fascinating factor in the spread of Yoruba-Brazilian design is that it was self-consciously adopted by non-elite Yoruba builders as their emblematic “modern” style. Other researchers like John Vlatch have pointed out that there were a variety of architectural influences in colonial Yorubaland that could have become predominant in place of the Brazilian aesthetic. British colonial architecture, an aesthetic shared by Sierra Leonean Yoruba, was identified with the government and foreign rule. Despite the proximity of this aesthetic to power and prestige, Yoruba builders beyond the direct influence of Lagos repeatedly rejected colonial architecture as a residential template. Even Sierra Leonean Yoruba returnees, who were directly connected to British education and sensibilities, preferred to adapt the Brazilian style for their residential and civic needs. During the first half of the 20th century, as direct links with Brazil receded and other competing forms of modern architecture became available, the Aguda form remained the most popular and prestigious form. Cocoa entrepreneurs in the interior drew their primary design inspiration from the Lagosian pioneers, but with modifications that reflected their own indigenous norms and also their lack of formal training in Portuguese-style masonry and construction techniques.
Some researchers attribute this popularity to a rejection of colonial aesthetics in favor of another ‘modern’ option with more culturally palatable origins with Brazilian Yoruba. It is perhaps as likely that this architectural aesthetic, sharing roots with the profitable and prestigious cocoa tree, symbolized both inspiration and accomplishment to the farmers and traders who made a living from this produce. This unique network of entrepreneurship, architecture and aesthetic innovation that made 19th- and 20th-century Yorubaland a center of African modernity is at the core of its distinctive Aguda architecture, and it should be protected, rejuvenated and even enhanced for present and future use.
