In The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra Joseph Godlewski examines changes in the spatial organization and architecture of the Bight of Biafra region. Centering his analysis on the historic city of Old Calabar, Godlewski contends that the politics of the region alongside entanglements with global capitalism impacted patterns of urban transformations since the seventeenth century. He argues that a combination of the region’s decentralized politics and global market pressures, from the Atlantic trade to the postindependence eras, intertwined “to produce patterns of urban enclavization” in Old Calabar (10). According to Godlewski, these shifts in Old Calabar are reflected in the built environment and spatial experience of the city and in this way, the author brings the built environment into conversation with historical transformations in the political economy of the city.
Utilizing an impressive range of archival and visual sources, including European travel accounts, maps, missionary documents, oral sources, colonial records, and contemporary fieldwork, Godlewski conceptualizes the built environment of Old Calabar as sites of sociocultural, political, and economic entanglements. The author deploys the concept of “entanglement” to analyze the diverse and interconnected “relationships that constitute a space without presuming to study them in isolation or reverting to oversimplified narratives about cultural and technological progress” (15). Within this framework, the Efik traders of Old Calabar, alongside their partners in the interiors, built disparate domestic and offshore spaces that were integrated into the infrastructure of trade and relationships with European missionaries and colonial administrators.
Divided into an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, the book traces the evolution of five paradigmatic spaces: the walled “compound,” the “masquerade,” the “offshore,” the “enclave,” and the “zone.” Through these spaces, Godlewski shows how the built environment of Old Calabar is intricately linked to the emergence of a Black Atlantic modernity starting from the seventeenth century to contemporary times. The first chapter foregrounds the traditional walled compound of Efik communities, which the author argues were not only domestic spaces but centers of daily life, trade, and worship. Chapter Two introduces the “masquerade,” a concept deployed to analyze the activities of the Ekpe secret society. Godlewski shows how Ekpe regulation of the Atlantic trade, alongside its local judicial functions and religious roles, created “a charged space of transaction” that aided Efik traders to maintain their sovereignty until the advent of colonialism (24).
Chapters Three and Four turn to the “offshore” and “enclave” environments. The “offshore” represents canoes, ships, and prefabricated houses made in Europe. While the canoes and ships were deployed in the transportation of enslaved persons and later palm oil, the prefabricated houses became symbols of power and spaces for the self-fashioning of the African elites. Godlewski emphasizes that these spaces—canoes, ships, prefabricated wooden houses—were not simply instrumental to trade but were enmeshed in the Atlantic world, reshaping the landscape of Old Calabar. He presents the offshore as “a fluid, diasporic space connecting hinterland spaces, trading houses, and distant metropoles” (127). Chapter Four, by contrast, explores the enclaves formed out of the power contestations between local Efik authority and encroaching missionaries and colonial officials. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Efik sovereignty waned and was eventually displaced by British colonialists. The Old Residency, a building which housed colonial officials and missionaries, becomes a focal point of analysis, serving as an example of a space of power contestations and entanglements. Godlewski argues that the Old Residency was a symbol of power and a sanctuary for colonial officials and missionaries, and that the boundaries created by these enclaves were “porous and ridden with socio-political tensions” (201). Chapter Five shifts focus to contemporary times, to the Tinapa Free Zone project which had initially pulled Godlewski to the region. Situating Tinapa alongside contemporary private compounds, churches, banks, and businesses, the author interprets the “zone” as paradigmatic spaces that attempt to establish their own jurisdictional authority but fail due to conflicts with government institutions. These zones are contested arenas and have become spaces for religious zealots and political battlegrounds for Biafran separatists. Chapter Six brings together the arguments and claims made in the book.
A major strength of this book lies in the breadth and diversity of sources the author used to investigate the spatial history of Old Calabar and to foreground the built environment as an important site of historical enquiry. By critically reading European sources, Godlewski is able to recover African perspectives and show how the built environment of Old Calabar was deeply integrated into global trade and cross-cultural networks from the seventeenth century to contemporary times. In that regard, this book makes an important contribution by centering African agency and perspectives in the history of the Bight of Biafra. Nonetheless, the analysis in Chapter Five might have been further enriched by more sustained engagements with how the natural environment impacted the built environment; for issues originating in the natural environment—such as crude oil spillages, the militant crisis of the 2000s, kidnappings and general insecurity in the region—undermined on the one hand tourism and business investments in the Tinapa project and, on the other hand, encouraged fundamentalist forms of Christianity as locals sought spiritual reprieve from the chaos and instability of that era. Overall, The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra is an important addition to the scholarship on West African history and the built environment. By situating the architectural and spatial history of Old Calabar against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade, missionary activities, and colonialism, Godlewski deepens our understanding of the region’s spatial transformations and highlights the agency of diverse actors who actively shaped the historical and urban trajectory of the region.
