This paper explores the phenomenon of Government Reserved Areas in late colonial Nigeria. Known as ‘European Reservations’ until 1937, they were areas of low density housing, often large bungalows, inhabited by white British colonial officials. Scholars such as Anthony King and Robert Home have studied the reasons for the construction of these built environments, but their use and transformation in the late colonial years has received less attention.
This paper explores the ways in which Reservations were key sites in the transformation of the colonial state after 1945. Reservations were expanded to house the newly arrived colonial officials, the foot soldiers of the ‘second colonial occupation’ who were despatched to Nigeria to oversee economic and social development. The simultaneous ‘Nigerianisation’ of the civil service also transformed Reservations, as substantial numbers of Nigerian civil servants took up residence alongside white British colonial officials.
Reservations were seen as symbolic of the rapid changes in Nigerian politics and society, and were depicted in novels by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, T.M. Aluko, and others. Drawing on these representations, and state archives, this paper argues that Reservations were key sites around which the end of empire in Nigeria was experienced and contested. Just as the experience of colonial rule was uneven across the geographical area of colonised territories, with cities often particular nodes of colonial influence, the experience of the end of empire was often disproportionately focused on cities, and even particular urban districts.