Abstract
While far from an aficionado of architectural history, it is still possible to recognize a compelling story whatever the guise. In this intricate choreography of intersecting temporalities which are the convoluted riverine terrain of Southeast Nigeria and its major metropolitan center, Calabar, time indeed moves in all kinds of directions to propel trajectories of prolonged endurance and wildly oscillating manifestations of rapid development and ruin. Far from simple adaptations, diasporic mixtures and violent impositions, the built environment of Calabar reflects steady inventiveness of varying degrees of viability, exhibiting capabilities to perform nearly any kind of spatial product yet frequently undermining and withdrawing from them. Covering a long durée, The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra relies primarily on a wealth of archival materials to elaborate a series of propositional phases over which four long tumultuous centuries are depicted—from the time of compounds, masquerades, offshores, enclaves, and zones.
Godlewski’s purpose is to is “to describe how spatial conditions from various historical periods can co‑exist in non‑linear ways, competing and contesting one another in unexpected ways.” (26). Above all, it posits the importance of entanglement as a means of accounting for the ways in which largely decentralized and plural forms of sovereignty and spatial production constantly pushed and pulled in relation to each other, providing new affordances for each other’s relative autonomy, while at the same time configuring tacit lines of coordination, which in turn enabled different clans, economies, authorities, inhabitants, and buildings to both participate in worlds beyond themselves yet with specificity and room to maneuver.
For, what does it mean to build something that both reflect the accommodations made among a plurality of sometimes competing and sometimes complementary interests and histories but yet exceeds the specificities of construction to appeal to and service a wide range of heterogeneous territorial and economic articulations. Situated at the confluence of intricate topographies and landscapes that constitute settings for the folding and extending of different kinds of bodies, orientations, and goods, Calabar, as a singular mode of implantation historically has hedged its bets, ensconced as it is within multiple sovereignties and spatial claims.
Buildings are discursive “partners” in that they must participate in all kinds of conversations with people, objects, abstractions, and other buildings, participating in various exchanges that require oscillating rhythms of commitment to stalwart positions and indifference to them as well. In these entanglements, Godlewski offers us a remarkable account of what a built environment actually does in terms of curating a way of being in the world rather than pragmatically carrying out specific function. As such, buildings in Calabar could embody a dynamic anxiety over how to manage the proportionality of socio-spatial exposures, how proximate or distant an individual or household might be to others and how to mediate conflicting claims and access to resources. Settling and unsettling were not so much distinct modes of inhabitation but always wrapped themselves around each other in provisional forms of mutability and endurance.
Godlewski implicitly asks, how is it that specific modalities of construction come to represent their builders and inhabitants as fundamentally deficient or even monstrous? How do buildings become a critical aspect of an overarching racial vernacular—signs of an essential otherness instrumentalized for various purposes? More than discursive, buildings in Calabar could also be instruments of transformative spatial entanglement, mobilizing a diverse set of vernaculars, materials and financing to reshape the city as a platform of polyvocal exposures, resistances, consolidations, and outward trajectories.
This is powerfully represented in the institution of masquerades, Ékpè, in the 17th to 18th centuries that “functioned as a spatiotemporal threshold or portal between trading life in the ethnic communities of the region and the spiritual realm of ancestors and wild sylvan deities” (83). These were enacted in an extensive network of lodges occupying preeminent positions in each district of the city. Ékpè was nothing less than an overarching spatial consolidation of the indigenous city’s role in the ferociously competitive slave trade, providing a unifying mechanism for traders foreign and local and ensuring that territorial control remained largely in local hands, at least until long into the 19th century. It is also an explicit recognition that inhabitants are not just human but include a panoply of spirits whose agencies are deemed critical in the attainment of any normalized functioning. Not only did it modulate the relationship between the material and immaterial, but adjudicated all kinds of matters, ruled over property relations and established protocols for everyday contact and conduct.
As the slave trade waned, replaced by palm oil, the residual operations of the Ékpè facilitated a transition to a voluminous accumulation of foreign goods, luxury items, and bric-a-brac that signaled an ascending logic of authority through the display of wealth, and where the house accommodated this excess almost as a laboratory for more comprehensive symbolic interchanges between the foreign and the local. These were not strictly syncretic but facilitated acculturation to protracted periods of unsettledness, invention, and revision. Instead of being simply a conduit for the slave trade, the offshore—both literally and metaphorically—acted “as a terraqueous network of ships, canoes, plantations, and prefabricated wood houses intricately linked to the Atlantic world” (127). Here the house was part of the offshore—“an emerging complex amalgam of integrative, negotiated, and socially produced spaces of encounter”(141), The house as a site of collections was a locus of for the fashioning of a self that could exert relevance to the things collected, and more importantly, the territories from which they came.
On the other hand, the white man was (always) on a mission, and spreading the word of God became a vehicle of extraterritorial incursion and incremental territorial consolidation by disparate yet coordinated colonial projects, as their way was paved by the expectations of local authorities that specific skills and resources might be shared. Although classic patterns colonial segregation ensued, interfaces were unruly and often porous in that the imposed infrastructures sometimes used locally as places of refuge, resistance, and reinvention.
The entire history of Calabar is imbued with a sense of temporariness, as if the focus on trade and extroversion continuously unsettles space and a population attempting to exceed the familiar attributions in a pattern of development intensely informal and decentralized. When the city ventures into developing an exorbitantly expensive free trade zone (Tinapa) replete with massive studios for the film industry as well as resorts and shopping centers, it seems to jump ahead to its own obsolescence before ever hitting the ground, as if its massiveness, rather than summarizing or consolidating, stands for the impossibility of standing still under some overarching rubric of rule. Zones that are presumed to operate autonomously are in practice “supported by a web of visible and invisible networks. . .comprised of diverse agents—informal traders, clandestine sex workers, charismatic preachers, and evil spirits” (227).
Therefore, cities, particular turbulent African cities, must continuously respond to mediating the need to belong to whatever global order is on hand, attempt to shape the composition of that order but also act as if separate from it. How this is done in the confluence of the material and political is the substantial and brilliant contribution of this book. For, Godlewski asks: “How does one represent the conflicting values, invisible forces, connections to imagined futures, or beliefs that catalyze the construction of these rather abstract schemata. To do so, it’s necessary to disassemble these models and reveal they’re not autonomous containers situated in a fixed locality but composed of heterogeneous and conflicting fragments, processes, and meanings” (250).