Poverty and the travails of the family in late colonial Lagos

This study exposes the responses to poverty and social change by individual and collective consciousness within the family in the Lagos of the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that colonial domination of local Lagos society imposed new poverty and altered individual and collective lifestyles, presenting real life experiences of children, young men, women and the elderly among immigrants and indigenes who lived on the Island of Lagos during the period under consideration. Its conclusions are substantially derived from the analysis of archival records, particularly the handwritten petitions of teenagers and adults to the colonial administration in the 1940s and 1950s. It submits that the new poverty promoted among men, women and children in colonial Lagos had lasting and continuing implications for the family institution in the colonial as well as the post- colonial period.