ABSTRACT
The description of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, similarly to macro-engineering projects in antiquity (e.g., the Hellenistic “Seven Wonders of the World”), has much in common with modern, large-scale building and infrastructure projects. This is in terms of striving for grandeur by the initiating state, sociopolitical implications, and often, without good maintenance, decline, decay, and destruction. Inspired by these topics, this chapter is engaged with the technopolitical and societal aspects of railway projects in Africa, with a focus on a mid-scale infrastructure project in British colonial Nigeria, that is, the Lagos Steam Tramway (1902–1933). This project is examined against the background of British colonial town planning policy in early twentieth-century Nigeria, with reference to the effects its layout and services had on Lagos’s street morphology and ethnic tapestry. Drawing on contemporary evidence regarding colonial plans as well as local physical and social circumstances, the chapter shows that the tramline was used by the British colonial authorities to reinforce a pre-existent informal residential segregation in Lagos between the indigenous and the expatriate populations. This, however, stood in direct opposition to the biblical account of the city and tower of Babel, which had been designed to unify human beings under a common regime, ethnicity, culture, and language.
By examining both social and morphological structures in order to understand the political and ethnocultural implications of the Lagos tram, this chapter contributes to the recently growing literature on the history of European modes of planning outside Europe. In this literature, interdisciplinary in its character, sub-Saharan Africa has relatively limited representation.
