Space of Power and Power of Space

Abstract

Spatial struggles can shed light on sociopolitical processes in the evolution of African cities. Pressures on urban amenities apart, there are hassles over space orchestrated by the drift of large population of Africans to the cities. As a result, conflicts over space exist among the living as well as the “dead,” given the shrinking interment spaces in most cemeteries of urban Africa. This paper identifies the more recent controversy over burial space between Hausa Muslims and government, in the 1980s, as a continuation of an earlier struggle in the colonial era. Cemeteries are not just spaces for burying the dead; for Hausa Muslims in colonial Ibadan, the struggle for cemetery space presented a mode of agitation against colonialism. The struggle also sought to reassert Muslim Hausa identity and autonomy, which lost their potency under the weight of profound social changes activated by nationalist aspirations in colonial Nigeria.