Poverty and the travails of the family in late colonial Lagos

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Periodical article

Title:	Poverty and the travails of the family in late colonial Lagos
Author:	Decker, Tunde
Year:	2013
Periodical:	Lagos Historical Review (ISSN 1596-5031)
Volume:	13
Pages:	31-50
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Nigeria
Subjects:	family poverty social change social problems juvenile delinquency colonial administration
Abstract:	This study exposes the responses to poverty and social change by individual and collective consciousness within the family in Lagos, Nigeria, in 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. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]