The Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize is supported by the IEEE Life Members’ Fund and administered by the Society for the History of Technology. The prize is awarded annually to the best paper in the history of electrotechnology—power, electronics, telecommunications, and computer science—published during the preceding year.
IEEE representative Alexander Magoun presents the 2024 Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize to Adewumi Damilola Adebayo. (Photo SHOT)
Adewumi Damilola Adebayo, York University
“Electricity, Agency and Class in Lagos Colony, c. 1860s–1914,” Past & Present, no. XX (2023).
In “Electricity, Agency and Class in Lagos Colony, c. 1860s–1914,” Adewumi Damilola Adebayo develops an original perspective in a case study of electrification and colonization in West Africa. He offers a well-researched, revisionist portrait of three issues: the study and use of electricity; the role of Africans in influencing installation of British imperial power plants; and the complexity of Nigerian electricity consumption in Lagos, especially along popular and class dimensions. The study contributes to scholarly debates over the role of electrification in colonial development and state building as well as the impact of colonial infrastructure on African populations. The author offers a prehistory of Lagos as a tiny island colony long before industrialization became widespread and the city became a megalopolis. Adebayo centers under-examined African efforts to shape communities, industries, and countries, as well as the history of empire. Indeed, as the author demonstrates, centering Africa’s enormous geography and diverse polities, economies, and cultures allows us to replace strictly Euro-American readings of technologies and systems with accounts that highlight native agency and local contingency.
Adebayo shows that Lagos’s experience of colonial electrification was exceptional. Due to the paucity of references to electrification in British or Nigerian national archives, he makes creative use of short-lived contemporary newspapers beginning in the 1860s. He provides a strong geographical, demographic, and political reconstruction of Lagos – one of the earliest and most developed British colonies in West Africa – at the high watermark of European empires. Lagos’s unique experience with electrification was tied to its growth as a non-settler, non-mining, and non-industrial colony. Adebayo provides insight into the popular experience of that process – from street lighting to religious spaces – as well as informal and formal electrical engineering and physics education in Nigeria and West Africa. He explores the social impact of electricity consumption and chronicles successful popular resistance to the introduction of a taxation scheme to pay for power production. Overall, Adebayo highlights the role of Africans themselves in the development of colonial infrastructures and draws attention to new sources and sub-national variations in Africa’s experience of electrification.