From Yoruba Town Road To Baddo: Lagos, Memory, And Ethnic Politics
By ABDUL MAHMUD
TIME has a curious habit of thrusting pitiable characters, figures so burdened by their own tragic flaws, into the limelight. These characters, in their desperate attempts to reorder time, end up warping memory and meaning and casting space not as shared geography or collective belonging, but as a narrow enclosure hemmed in by their own stunted vision. These are not figures who repeat history, not in the tragic or farcical sense Marx described, but rather the spectral echoes time coughs up, familiar in their posturing, and forgettable in their legacy. They do not make history. They trail it. They are footnotes, brief, noisy, and ultimately disposable, that no one reads. And now, time has once more granted these piteous characters the illusion of significance. Who are these characters? They are the small men and women of power in Lagos who are work again, furiously, almost with a conspirator’s silence, renaming streets in Lagos. Without dialogue. Without deference to history. Without the courtesy of memory. Their actions highlight a fundamental fear of the other, as if erasure of the other might obviate relevance.
Naming matters.
It defines who we are, what we value, and who we accept. When those in power change names to suit their ethnic preferences, they are not just renaming. They are redrawing the map of belonging. If Lagos is allowed to become a homogenous ethnic capital, then the idea of one country is lost. The fight to save Lagos is the fight to save our country. From itself. From the tyranny of narrow identities. From the politics of exclusion. From the erasure of memory. Charley Boy Bus Stop must be restored. Not for sentiment. But for the principle that no one group owns the right to define a shared city.
But, renaming is not reimagining; it is senselessness disguised as erasure. In seeking to erase what citizens always remember, they reveal their own dread of being forgotten.
The latest venture is the renaming of Charley Boy Bus Stop in Lagos as Baddo Bus Stop. The state hasn’t provided a sensible reason for the renaming. But, Lagosians know the insidious politics at play. They know that the Charley Boy Bus Stop wasn’t originally named by the government. They always know that it emerged from their tongues as marker of cultural relevance. From use. From lived memory. A tribute to an irreverent artist who stood at the intersection of art, rebellion and popular culture. They know that Charley Boy, the man, is Igbo. But, as it now seems, his identity is his offence. They also know the singer and music producer, Olamide Gbenga Adedeju, AKA Baddo. He is Yoruba. They know this isn’t just about names. It’s about atavistic politics. About identity. About who belongs and who does not belong.
This isn’t the first time street naming in Lagos has stirred ethnic tensions. In 1943, when the Colonial Lagos Executive Development Board sought to name a street in Surulere as “Yoruba Town Road”, the people who had been relocated from Olowogbowo and the Brazilian Quarters and the Lagos elites stood their ground, the same way that residents of Ilaje Street in Lagos have today stood their ground by rejecting the renaming of their Street as King Sunny Ade Street. They understood the dangers of ethno-urban gerrymandering, of turning cosmopolitan, plural, and defiant Lagos into a tribal hotchpotch. They saw through the ruse of cultural compartmentalisation of the imperialists. And they resisted, boldly and unyieldingly, the project to Yorubanise a city that had always been greater than any ethnic nationality group. The West African Pilot, ever vigilant, captured the moment with searing clarity. It condemned the move as “the ethnic pigeonholing of Lagos” – a phrase that has since echoed through time as a warning against small-minded governance and the manipulation of identity for political ends.
Sadly, today, our quarters of governance have become populated by tragic figures, piteous in their ignorance and disruptiveness, in their recklessness, who know nothing of our history, nor care for the memory of those who walked before them. These new custodians of our civic life wobble and fumble (with sincere apologies to Fanny Ikhayere Amun) through time and space, dragging us into the shadows of unlearning. These ones, oblivious to this legacy, have entered their own ahistorical stage. Unlike those who resisted the colonial politics of difference, the colonialists’ sinister attempts to weaponise identity and divide the city along ethnic lines, these ones are writing their own hideous, rootless, cynical, and dangerous history, tearing at the threads of unity, unaware that history, once again, is watching. But, the saga of the 1940s was not just about a naming. It was about what the name and naming signaled: exclusion. The beginning of an idea that Lagos was for some and not for others. The name didn’t stick. The people rejected the name and the naming.
Fast forward to the 1960s. In the aftermath of the 1966 coup, General Yakubu Gowon, born of the Ngas on the Plateau; but, for much of his early public life, more readily associated with Wusasa, Zaria, until the politics of identity caught up with him decades later during his ill-fated bid for the presidential ticket of the Social Democratic Party in Zaria in 1992, emerged as the Head of State. The military government renamed Broad Street, one of Lagos’s oldest and most iconic streets, after him. Again, Lagosians pushed back. Broad Street wasn’t just any road. It held memories of CMS Grammar School, King’s College, Methodist Church. It was a street that told the story of Lagos as a British colony, as a port city, as a place where our elites were educated and history was made. Renaming it Gowon Street felt like an imposition. It smacked of the arrogance of power, and worse, of northern triumphalism. Lagos resisted. The name faded. Broad Street returned.
But today’s Lagos is different. The ethnicisation is more brazen. Bar General Olarewaju, the silence of the Lagos elites is deafening. The renaming of Charley Boy Bus Stop is not innocent. It is part of a growing pattern. A slow purge of Igbo-associated names, symbols, and even presences from the public space in Lagos. From the burning of markets dominated by Igbos, to voter intimidation in Igbo-populated areas, to social media narratives calling for the “reclamation” of Lagos, it’s clear that something dangerous is brewing. This danger isn’t new. It is the same toxin that poisoned our country in the 1960s. The same ethnonationalism that led to pogroms in the North. That led to the birth of Biafra. That cost over two million lives. And it is this same toxin that now dresses itself in the benign robes of naming and renaming. Lagos, once the symbol of our diversity, is being reshaped by strangers whose provenances lie elsewhere in the Southwest. The rhetoric is no longer whispered. It is shouted from rooftops. “Lagos is Yoruba land”. “We must take Lagos back”. “Too many of them here”.
Them. Always them.
But who are “them”? And who has the right to Lagos? Lagos was a crown colony. A colonial administrative city. It historically belonged to the Aworis and other Yoruba-speaking peoples indigenous to Lagos. Not outside Lagos. But from the 19th century, freed slaves from Brazil (Agudas), Sierra Leonean returnees (Saros), Igbos, Itsekiris, Urhobos, Hausas, Ijaws, Ilajes and Europeans all arrived Lagos like Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. They settled and called Lagos home. The early political and commercial elites of Lagos were multi-ethnic. Its churches, newspapers, schools, and social clubs were shaped by multiple tongues and cultures. Lagos became our country’s capital not because it was Yoruba, but because it was inclusive, modern, and connected. To claim Lagos today as the exclusive preserve of one ethnic group is to lie against history. To rename streets in the service of that lie is to betray the very idea of a city many accepted as home.
But this isn’t just about history. It’s about what kind of politics we are descending into. When naming becomes a political weapon, it signals a shift from civic to ethnic politics. From merit to indigeneity. From nation building to nation ruination. It’s not just names that are being changed. It’s maps. Memories. Meanings. When you change Charley Boy Bus Stop to Baddo Bus Stop, you are not merely altering a signpost. You are sending a message: some stories are not welcome here. Some heritage must be erased. Some presences must be silenced. The implications are chilling. If you don’t bear the right name, or speak the right language, your claim to space, identity, and even safety becomes tenuous. This is how countries break. Not with bullets, but with maps.
What we are seeing is the creeping ethnicisation of politics in a federal commercial capital. The rise of ethnic majoritarianism in a city built on multiplicity. It is the triumph of the primitive over modernity. And it is dangerous.
This form of atavistic politics thrives on fear. On resentment. It says to the Yoruba Lagosian: you are being overrun. Your culture is under siege. It says to the Igbo Lagosian: you are a guest. Be grateful. Stay quiet. Don’t ask for too much. But Lagos is a multicultural homeland, with indigenous specifiers. And that is what makes it great. Lagos didn’t become our commercial nerve center because it was homogeneous. It became that because it was plural and open. A place where anyone could trade, live, love, fail, and rise again. The plurality and openness are under threat. The elites of the 1940s understood this. That’s why they resisted the naming of Yoruba Town Road. They knew that once you begin to draw lines on the basis of ethnicity, you never stop. First, it’s a road. Then a market. Then school. Then voting rights. Then who can run for offices. Then who belongs. Today’s Lagos elites, political, cultural, religious, have a choice. They can speak up, as their predecessors did. Or they can remain silent and let the erosion continue. The issue is not about Charley Boy. It is about what kind of country our citizens want. What kind of city Lagos must remain.
Lagos is not a village; it is the mirror of our country. And if that mirror breaks, we all lose. No government has the right to break the mirror or has the right to shrink Lagos into an ethnic conclave.
