The incremental houses of urban fringes: Yoruba personhood and popular culture in Ibadan, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article, based on a qualitative study of incremental self-help housing in a peripheral neighbourhood of Ibadan, southwest Nigeria, focuses on the motivation for homeownership of urban low-income earners. It offers an anthropological perspective, with particular attention paid to social embedding of homeownership. The article depicts incremental homes as reflective of a local consciousness of personhood and autonomy, as well a response to a growing urban culture of homeownership. I argue that people move into the incremental homes they build through self-help as owner-occupiers so as to attain a level of social ostentation that by popular accounts confers personhood on the individual, and likewise as a protest against the unequal power relationship between low-income renters and city landlords in Nigeria. In either case, the article reckons the poor-quality homes as occurring altogether as a material expression of both an enduring and emerging worldview of the self and self-actualisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Incremental housing
• urban low-income population
• personhood
• popular culture
• the Yoruba

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The Yoruba are an ethnic majority in Nigeria, populating in the main the southwest geopolitical zone of the country.

2 Ifá is a both a religion and a system of divination of the Yoruba.

3 No timeframe was attached to this figure, and it has not been confirmed by any other known credible source.

4 The architectural designs and external structures of some houses suggest the owners are middle- and high-income people.

5 Other Yoruba speaking subgroups in Nigeria include Egba, Ijebu, Ijesha, Ekiti, Ondo, Ilaje, Ilorin and Okun.

6 Èsúsú is the local name for rotating credit and savings schemes.

7 Ire in the Yoruba worldview stands for traditional ‘good things,’ which sometimes are referred to as ‘blessings.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Babajide Olusoji Ololajulo

Dr Babajide Olusoji Ololajulo is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is a development anthropologist with research interests ranging over identity politics, oil and environmental politics in Nigeria, heritage and memory. He has published widely on these themes.