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Urbanization and Political Change: The Politics of Lagos, 1917-67

1975; The MIT Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/202257

1530-9169

Robert Melson, Pauline H. Baker,

Urban and Rural Development Challenges

The primary objec? tive of this new book on local level politics is to examine the political process in an urbanizing African community to determine how urbanization has affected the exercise and distribution of power and influence. Lagos, now the capitol of Nigeria and one of the richest and fastest growing cities in the Third World, is an excellent setting for such a study. The metropolis has grown tenfold during the last half-century, and throughout this period it has remained in the forefront of West African economic and political life. Perhaps no other African com? munity so exemplifies the problems, social, economic, and political, which attend rapid growth and economic development. The central concern of Ms. Baker's study is the development of a new model to explain political behavior in Lagos between 1917 and 1967. The book begins by briefly considering existing approaches to the study of local politics; the stratification school which believes that communities are ruled by representational and decision-making elites and the pluralist school which holds that competing interest groups share in the effective exercise of power. Both of these models are dismissed as inappropriate for the study of urbanization in a developing country, which the author feels is characterized by distinct cultural attributes that differentiate the non-Western from the Western experience (p.5). African urban centers, it is argued, exist as separate social systems, a distinctive unit of analysis, and therefore require a new approach to explain how they operate politically. The method employed by Ms. Baker to derive a new model to ex? plain the impact of urbanization on politics in Lagos is the historical analysis of key variables, political leadership, political behavior, and the formal structure of government. This analysis is supplemented by three case studies of political influence, chieftancy, market women, and the constitutional status of Lagos. The author traces these phenomena through four phases: the period between 1917 and 1938 when Lagos was chiefly a port and commercial center and when power was monopolized by an oligarchy consisting of European colonial adminis? trators and a small group of educated Africans; two intermediate stages