Thomas’s pioneering serial charts the experiences of former prostitute Segilola in Nigeria’s metropolis during a time of unparalleled change. Published in Akede Eko(the Lagos Herald) between 1929 and 1930, Segilola’s fictional life convenes an urban public, caught between condemning the novel’s eponymous heroine, and being fascinated by her shortcomings. Her life reveals a constellation of Lagos life, and revels in stitching its fictional world into the fabric of the colonial city. It shows how long before Nollywood, Lagos was a vital imaginative resource for Nigerians, and that this aesthetic relationship between the city and its fictional representations has a largely uncharted history of its own. This paper will reveal how Segilola offers her reader a fictional guide to colonial Lagos that exceeds and compliments the resources of the colonial archive. In doing so, it will consider how Segilola’s gender, her ambiguous economic agency, and her narrative authority help shape our understanding of colonial Lagos. To date, charting the representational history of cities has largely remained the privilege of Western metropolitan centres (Benjamin, 2002; Nora, 1996), but this is slowly changing as South Asia’s cities begin to receive their own cultural histories (Mazumdar 2007; Prakash 2011), as have African conurbations such as Johannesburg (Nuttall and Mbembe, 2008) and Accra (Quayson, 2014). But despite Lagos’s status as a global megacity, its cultural history before 1970 remains poorly understood. Segilola’s tale offers one way of redressing this predicament.