Graphic illustration by Anke Dregnat.
This talk explores how marginalized communities in coastal Nigeria and the American South draw upon historical practices of marronage to create autonomous spaces and combat environmental degradation within cities.
Marronage refers to the practices of enslaved Africans who escaped to form free communities in inaccessible terrains. By connecting Black ecologies from Lagos and the Niger Delta to New Orleans and South Carolina, this presentation examines how communities adapt to environmental challenges, preserve cultural heritage, and develop alternative socio-ecological systems as forms of political and ecological empowerment.
These contemporary case studies of resistance and resilience reflect the enduring legacies of maroon societies across the Black Atlantic, offering new insights into global struggles for human rights and environmental justice.
About the speaker
Charisma Acey is Associate Professor and Arcus Chair in Social Justice and the Built Environment in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her research focuses on environmental justice, urban sustainability, and equitable access to basic services in cities. Dr. Acey’s work spans the Americas and Africa, addressing issues such as climate vulnerability, access to clean water and safe sanitation, women’s empowerment, and urban agroecology.
She currently leads projects on air quality and food justice in California, employing participatory action research to identify inequitable policies impacting vulnerable communities. As Faculty Director of the Berkeley Food Institute and co-founder of the Dellums Clinic to Dismantle Structural Racism at the Institute for Urban and Regional Development, she champions interdisciplinary approaches to urban planning and environmental governance.
Dr. Acey holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and a Master’s in Public Policy from UCLA. She is a UW-Madison Health Equity Leadership Institute Scholar. Her work has been recognized with awards for excellence in community-based scholarship. Dr. Acey’s publications appear in journals such as World Development, Landscape and Urban Planning, and The Lancet Global Health.
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0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript, and graphic recordings are available on our website Shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.
0:00:43.4 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts virtual colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman. And together with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today, we’re delighted to host Dr. Charisma Acey. Charisma is Associate Professor and Arcus Chair in Social Justice and the Built Environment in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on environmental justice, urban sustainability, and equitable access to basic services in cities. Dr. Acey’s work spans the Americas and Africa, addressing issues such as climate vulnerability, access to clean water and safe sanitation, women’s empowerment and urban agroecology.
0:01:48.6 Julian Agyeman: Dr. Acey holds a PhD in urban planning and a master’s in public policy from UCLA. She’s a UW Madison Health Equity Leadership Institute scholar, and her work’s been recognised with awards for excellence in community-based scholarship. Dr. Acey’s publications appear in journals such as World Development, Landscape and Urban Planning, and The Lancet Global Health. Charisma’s talk today is Urban Environmental Marronage, Connecting Black Ecologies from Coastal Nigeria to the American South. Charisma, a Zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.
0:02:27.7 Charisma Acey: Thank you so, so much, Julian, for that wonderful introduction. And I wish I could be with you all today. I understand there’s a watch party where there’s some good food. Please eat and drink for me. But I’m really excited to be with you all today to talk about the research that I’ve been doing in Nigeria, and some of my new thinking connecting it to an emerging scholarship in the field of Black geographies called Black Ecologies. And within that, a focus on marronage, which I’m gonna get into what is this term, marronage.
0:03:00.4 Charisma Acey: So today, we’ll be exploring that concept of Urban Environmental Marronage and Connecting Black Ecologies from Coastal Nigeria to the American South. We’ll examine how Marginalized communities create spaces of autonomy and resistance within cities, and adapt to environmental challenges, and drawing parallels between historic maroon communities and their practices and contemporary urban struggles. Okay, so I’m just gonna quickly go over what we’ll cover today. So I wanna get into a little bit more of the term, the conceptual grounding in this term, marronage, and specifically Urban Environmental Marronage, and then talk about what are the transnational connections that I see? Why do this? Why put Nigeria and the American South into context or into conversation, and then go into depth with some case studies from coastal cities in Nigeria, from Badagry, a former slave port, where we’ll look at cultural preservation as a resilient strategy to Lagos, Nigeria, where you have, at the same time, a mega city kind of the size of Manhattan being built off the coast, where they’re doing a lot of land reclamation from the ocean, and building a city for the elite versus massive informal settlements and people living, building their own housing because of neglect by the state.
0:04:27.2 Charisma Acey: And then we’ll go to the Niger Delta, where the very region of the country that drives the economy, the oil producing region is one of the most impoverished, and how environmental justice struggles there and alternative Socioecological practices form part of contemporary marronage strategies there. And then we’ll put those three cases in conversation with marronage and maroon ecologies in the American South, and then conclude with some remarks on what are the implications for urban and environmental practice. All right, so let’s talk about what is marronage. So the term maroons, which you’ll hear in the literature, refers to enslaved Africans who escaped slavery in the New World to create independent groups and communities on the outskirts of slave societies. So historically, it refers to this creation of autonomous communities who escaped bondage. And they often formed independent settlements in remote, very difficult to access terrains like mountainous regions or dense forests, very swampy areas.
0:05:42.3 Charisma Acey: And the existence of maroon societies challenged the social, political, and economic structures of colonial powers. And you had some communities that existed for a few years, and others persisted for centuries. In some countries, and especially in South America, for example, in Brazil, Colombia, you have descendants of maroons that still live in semi autonomous societies, although they’re increasingly under siege. You find marronage that the practice of people escaping plantations escaping enslavement happening all across the Atlantic, all across the Americas, from the Great Dismal Swamp, here in the United States, which covers Virginia and North Carolina, across the Carolinas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, to South America, already mentioned Brazil, Colombia, Suriname to the Caribbean, Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic. And what I’m… Part of what I’m trying to do in this talk and in work that I’m gonna build off of this talk is to bring more of the experience of marronage on the African continent into this scholarship. So there’s not much scholarship on the practice of marronage in Africa, although it did happen people were held in captivity, awaiting transport across the Atlantic, and often did escape, we and sometimes to the hinterlands, sometimes integrating into the cities and towns around slave ports.
0:07:18.5 Charisma Acey: So I wanna bring that conversation into that larger, this larger scholarship on marronage. But there’s been a traditional focus on rural communities, and their escape from plantations. But increasingly, people are using marronage to look at other forms of resistance. And that’s what we’re gonna focus on today. And so some of how the scholarship has evolved is that shift in looking at marronage, or escape and resistance from rural to what does that look like in urban settings. Also, the scholarship has evolved to focus on modern day implications of marronage insisted in cities rather, and then connecting black geographies to ecological resistance. Over time, the scholarship on marronage has expanded beyond rural areas to consider urban settings. And researchers are now exploring the tactics of resistance and autonomy that are employed by communities both in the past, in the present, and especially in response to exclusionary policies and environmental challenges.
0:08:25.5 Charisma Acey: And so some key concepts we’re gonna be looking at are how marronage intersects with black geographies, which are frameworks that focus on how marginalized communities resist and adapt, using ecological knowledge to survive in hostile environments. Scholars like James Scott, and others have connected maroon strategies of retreat to out of the way places like swamps, forests and mountainous regions, to contemporary practices of oppressed groups who flee state tyranny, and surveillance and control, and flee to what Jamal White calls unruly environments, but which offer alternative spaces for creating community and safety. So let’s talk about the transnational connections and why putting Nigeria and the US into context. So two of the reasons are right on the screen.
0:09:21.8 Charisma Acey: As I mentioned, marronage in the African context and trying to understand how ecological knowledge has been preserved across regions, we know that key to the survival of maroon societies was being able to live in the forest in the swamps. And so relying on the knowledge of livelihoods from Africa, and being able to use that in the new world, while also adapting to new survivors, new surroundings, as well as the shared histories of displacement, and resistance that continue to this day in a context in a global context of anti blackness. So the cases today are gonna focus on those transnational connections between what we see in Nigeria, and what can be found in the American South, and historic swamps, say around New Orleans, or in the environmental justice struggles of Cancer Alley.
0:10:10.0 Charisma Acey: And by examining those shared histories of displacement and resistance, we can bridge gaps in black geographies and ecologies with the context of marronage on the African continent. And the whole idea is, for this comparison is to understand how these different strategies evolve in different places. And what are the similarities and what might be some of the differences, and the implications of those. So why urban environmental marronage? So urban marronage, as I mentioned, extends the historical concept into contemporary urban settings. So how, so going from creating resist fleeing the plantation fleeing bondage, to live in remote areas that were hard to reach? How does that what is the parallel of that today in creating autonomous spaces of resistance within cities, often in response to exclusionary urban policies and development practices.
0:11:12.5 Charisma Acey: And then environmental marronage is around those survival mechanisms in hostile environments that require ecological adaptation, as well as cultural preservation, both of which are crucial for environmental justice for communities. I wanna just pause for a minute to talk about marronage as both method and practice where we bridge theory and action. And so I’m drawing on four different approaches that are used in the literature and scholarship on marronage. So abolition geography, and ecology. So if we think about it, marronage as a method involves decolonizing the way we understand resistance, and even the way we approach and understand the archive. When it comes to abolition, geography, Ruthie Gilmore defines it by starting with a spatial understanding of social justice, and the idea that freedom is a place, and talking about people, the bonds among us and how we organize, as well as use resources to shape our environments. And then Nick Hainan and Hardin extend this concept, using political ecology to critically think about land in that equation.
0:12:29.2 Charisma Acey: Then we talk about decolonizing the archive is a really important part of marronage scholarship, because a lot of in the American South, for example, they didn’t even wanna use the term maroons, there was a lot people knew by way of how news trend spread across the Americas that you had these large maroon societies in the Caribbean and South America, and plantation owners in the South didn’t want that same kind of mythos developing in the US South. And so a lot of maroon society is obscured in the archive. And it relies on the passage down of oral history and traditions and a lot of ethnographic work, as well as the using clues from what is in the archive, what is in maps to fill in the blanks.
0:13:16.1 Charisma Acey: Even archaeology comes into play here, there are teams of archaeologists who are going now into the dismal swamp, and uncovering and digging up artifacts from maroon societies that once lived there. I have an image here on this slide of one of my dear colleagues, who’s a professor of history at UC Riverside, Adelusi, and her work involves restoring Lagosians to the colonial archive. So if you look at maps of old Lagos, they’re the only visible parts of the maps are what’s relevant to the colonizers to the it’s the ports, right and their buildings and their structures, and the 10s of thousands of people who live there and all the communities and the residents and the daily life, all of that is invisible and missing from old maps from and from the archive.
0:14:07.6 Charisma Acey: And so what she does is use present day, artifacts, GIS, and what is available in the archive, as well as what’s been passed down with oral history and in poetry to reconstruct maps that put people back into history. And so that’s a really powerful method in marronage research. So really, capturing lived experience of communities and then speculative black geographies is important for providing a framework for imagining futures free of oppression and environmental exponent.
0:14:39.6 Charisma Acey: And that’s that connects to Moulton and Salo’s framing of black geographies as insurgent eco criticism. So we can use the past to inform present day ecological and urban struggles, bridging scholarship with activism. And the piece feeling thinking the archive participatory mapping marronage scholar Ana Laura Zavala Guillen notes that Latin American territories have been politically constructed as white mestizo spaces erasing the presence of Afro descendant and indigenous people and their legacies.
0:15:14.6 Charisma Acey: In Columbia, these racialized groups are known as the other Columbia. And so in her work, she uses a decolonial participatory method to map the geography of descendants of fugitives from slavery, combining the existing archives and extensive oral history of maroon descendants. And she says, “Feeling thinking about dispossession and resistance, while counter using the colonial archive to reclaim Afro descendant history is a subversive undertaking, one that is ingrained in the legacy of maroon resistance.” And so even doing maroon scholarship embodies the spirit and the legacy of marronage. Okay, so today, I’ll mostly focus on maroon ecologies in Nigeria, as I mentioned, with reference to the Americas and focusing on how distinct regions have developed strategies to resist ecological and spatial oppression. I do wanna acknowledge that the idea for connecting the scholarship I’ve been doing in Nigeria with the concept of marronage was really inspired by travel this past summer where I had the good fortune to participate in the black ecology summer field school in New Orleans, Louisiana with my colleague Justin Hosbey, who co organizes it with JT Roane, who’s at Rutgers, and the field school focused on themes of educational infrastructure in the post Katrina context, historical and contemporary forms of marronage water scapes and carceral ecologies.
0:16:46.6 Charisma Acey: We were able to meet with community partners in the lower Ninth Ward, Algiers, Plaquemines Parish, and as well as tour maroon sites on New Orleans West Bank. And we learned, for example, how older houses constructed with mangroves were able to withstand a lot of the damage from Hurricane Katrina, and a lot of that knowledge and practice of how to work with mangroves, which is a direct knowledge transferred from the African context to the Americas has been lost. But there is the story in the community of how these much older houses actually were able to fare better with the flooding. Judith Carney and talking about that kind of place based knowledge that transfers from one region to another, specifically talking about mangrove swamplands, which were marginal to European territorialization during the colonial period, versus African and Afro descendant placemaking. So on both sides of the Atlantic, the environment that Europeans feared provided Africans with food, basic necessities, as well as refuge from slavery. And Justin and JT have written about this idea of maroon ecologies and their work on the dual histories of racial slavery and environmental degradation in the Tidewater region of Virginia and the Mississippi Delta. Their work a totally different form of living on the legacies of displacement and marronage as black ecologies.
0:18:15.5 Charisma Acey: They argue that during slavery, swamps, bayous, rivers and wetlands were geographies in which a fleeing black commons could be sustained and hidden away from the violence of the plantation. The problem is at the same time, those same ecologies are now under extreme duress, whether it’s coastal subsidence, whether it’s toxics from the petrochemical industry, climate change, or the pressures of displacement. Those ecologies that once provided refuge are now under attack. And so their project is to chart cultural, spiritual, intellectual, and practical insights from black southern communities to understand alternative ecological practice that come out of the kind of imaginaries around marronage.
0:19:01.0 Charisma Acey: And so in that spirit, I’m engaging in this today. So I wanted to, I’ll start my, the first two places we’ll go to today are Badagry, as I mentioned, the former Slave Port and Lagos, which has it’s current name, used to be called Eko by the Indigenous Yoruba, but was named, Lagos by the Portuguese for Lakes. And today is popularly known as Lagos among the people of Nigeria. And so you see that on the map here. So they’re near each other. And technically Badagry is part of the larger urban agglomeration that is Lagos. And this, and both sites are part of the huge urban corridor that is West Africa, that’s home to 70 million people, and is a kind of continuous expanse that goes from Lagos all the way to Abidjan in, Cote d’Ivoire. So let’s go into our first case.
0:19:55.4 Charisma Acey: So let’s talk about Badagry. So I’ve written about Badagry, and it’s a beautiful place in Nigeria. It’s not as well known among the former slave ports as say, sites in Ghana or like Elmina Castle or Gorée Island in Senegal. There’s a kind of undeveloped feel to it. That is the first time I went. It was quite emotional because it almost, you could almost feel as if you were taken back in time. But what’s remarkable about Badagry is that this is a town where people who, families that used to be involved in the slave trade illegally kept some of the artifacts, the chains, all the metals, the leg braces, the irons, all the things that were used to enslave Africans and have over time have turned those into a thriving tourism industry that mostly Nigerians from other parts of Nigeria come to.
0:20:57.8 Charisma Acey: There’s not as much of an international tourism destination in Badagry, although it’s starting to become known and people do visit Evander Holyfield, has been there, and other, well-known Americans have been there as well. And they’re actively trying to build partnerships with African Americans as well. But they’ve preserved a kinda homegrown cultural tourism. Local youth will take you on canoes and you can even follow and walk for hours the same route that formerly enslaved Africans had to walk in the journey from capture from the Barcos to the ships. What’s happening now though, although that they’ve developed this thriving kind of cultural tourism based on this preservation of heritage, the state is moving in. Now Badagry is seen as a site for redevelopment. There’s plans for a Badagry Marina and bringing lots of boats and recreation and no discussion or mention of the indigenous community that has protected and preserved this history that holds festivals that, pass passes down world tradition.
0:22:05.6 Charisma Acey: And in fact, the state has built their own museum. And when you, when I took my students there last in 2019, and anybody who goes there, there’s actually a very spirited competition in terms of who is gonna take a given group on the tour and to see and to follow the, go to the point of no return and do the walk and go on the boats and see the artifacts. I always take my students to the Mobee Slave Relics Museum, which is one of the families that have kept their relics in that are now, they’re now part of an abolition movement and but also a part of preserving cultural heritage. So the interesting thing is that the redevelopment in Badagry is being done in the name of climate change and protecting the coast, and it’s about protecting the land, but not necessarily the people.
0:22:54.7 Charisma Acey: So in Badagry we see a modern form of marronage where local communities assert control over their historical narratives and as well as cultural heritage. And this, I feel, reflects how maroon communities historically develop their own cultures and systems of governance, and that these preservation efforts represent a form of cultural marronage and maintaining autonomy and resisting kind of external appropriation of history. So I just wanna take you through a few slides just so you can see. This is a monument with that you can find. And once you complete the voyage of the walk of no return, and you stop at these different stations where there’s wells where the enslaved were drugged, keep them docile to load them onto ships at the end. Now there’s this large monument, the Iron of Liberty at Gberefu Beach, at Badagry, and this spot served as the official marker of where large slave ships waited on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean centuries earlier to lead millions from life in the West African interior to the Americans.
0:23:57.6 Charisma Acey: And as I mentioned, this was, this site was also a contested site where conflicts, hostilities broke out between representatives from the Lagos State Badagry Heritage Museum, who had, who claimed to organize the official tour and descendants of the local slave trading family, who felt that the state had usurped their rightful role. And at stake was who is going to tell the story, the real story of Badagry. And so embedded in that small moment that happened with my students was a conflict over meaning and the goals of heritage preservation and high stakes with climate change impacting the coast. And these plans for coastal adaptation. This is just a picture inside the Mobee Slave Relics Museum. And you can see down below in the image are some of the actual changes on display that were used. And they let, they actually let you hold them. You can feel how heavy they were. It’s a very visceral experience.
0:24:56.6 Charisma Acey: So over time, the effort to memorialize the endurance of enslaved Africans in the town itself has become a strategy of resilience as the local community has embraced heritage tourism for economic development. At the same time that local sustainability is threatened by both the lack of infrastructure and services and coastal erosion that the state is trying to address with this plan, which is, this is a rendering of what the redevelopment of the Badagry Marina would look like when it’s completed. And this is another image of it. And what’s striking to people in Badagry is how little of it reflects the heritage of slavery, or that memory is very much geared towards high-end tourism and recreation. And so this is an ongoing struggle. And, before we leave Badagry, just wanted to share a quote from the chief, one of the chiefs of the area. And bale is another word for chief, who is complaining about discrimination despite the fact that they’re taxpayers.
0:26:00.6 Charisma Acey: And he says, when you, when he is, when he was interviewed, he says, if you go around the community, you’ll see that my people have developed distrust for the government. Every tax imposed on people living on the mainland is also applicable to us. And we’ve been paying to both the state and the local government. It is like they’re waiting for us all to die. And he goes on to describe how far people must travel for healthcare, for water from government boreholes that barely function, the lack of electricity, the lack of teachers, and so forth. And so he’s describing the dire circumstances faced by the community. And so there really, this, the economy around preservation of culture and this history of the slave trade is really one of survival that is under threat, paradoxically by this strategy of protecting the coast that the state is leading.
0:26:51.9 Charisma Acey: Next, I wanna take you, and I’m sorry, I wanna take you to all these places in Nigeria. We’re going very quickly, but hopefully we’ll have more time during the Q&A and discussion and have future opportunities to talk. So each of these cases is really rich and so much more could be shared. So I wanna go to Lagos in terms of the metropolitan area, the center of Lagos, which was once in a war Europe, a fishing village of 5,000 people, the largest cities in Nigeria, pre-colonial, where in the interior along rivers like Ibadan. It only with, it was only with the slave trade and with the extraction of Nigeria’s natural resources that the coasts and the ports became important. And now you have a city, in Lagos that is a mega city pushing 20 million people, one of the largest cities in the world, very strained in terms of being able to provide clean water, sanitation energy to such a massive population. And amid all of this in Lagos, you have a massive amount of what are called informal settlements.
0:27:58.2 Charisma Acey: And I know that term is problematic because when governments tend to talk about informal settlements they took, they tend to focus on the informality of the poor and not the informality of the wealthy who are building, say, without permits in ways that make areas more prone to flood and actually can cause more problems for people with less secure and sturdy housing. But I am talking about the informality of the poor in terms of looking at marronage in the Lagosian context. And we’re also gonna talk about Eko Atlantic, which introduces another wrinkle in this context. And we’ll, I wanna show some pictures of, of Eko Atlantic. Like I said, it’s this massive development where they’re reclaiming land off the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Victoria Island, about three quarters the size of Manhattan, and plans for it to be fully electrified water flowing, 24 a day.
0:28:53.7 Charisma Acey: High-rise in Chevron was the first to buy a plot. It’s building slowly but surely. So the last time I took my students there, about six of the high-rises had been built. But they are going up and the development has like a 200 year lease on the land. And so it is being built. The question is, the pressure that development is being, is putting on the waterfront communities and causing massive displacement, which is being enforced by the state government in violent ways. When I talk about Lagos and Nigeria in general, I do have to bring up Fela Kuti who was an amazing, not just an artist on an Afrobeat pioneer, not the current Afrobeats of that. Everybody that’s very popular right now with Burna Boy and Davido and all of that, which is wonderful music. But this is the original Afrobeat music and one of my favorite songs, ‘Water No Get Enemy’. Cause my, the focus of my dissertation was on clean water and access to water. And Fela was one to bring the struggles of the people into his music. And in fact, his mother was also an activist and was killed by the military dictatorship. So Fela was very militant and his music inspired millions of Nigerians. Oh, I think it was gonna, okay, there’s a little piece of it.
0:30:15.2 Charisma Acey: Okay, I don’t have time to listen, but hopefully a little piece, encourages you to go look up fellows, music for yourself. So usually when you see Lagos, you’ll see images like this. This is from a BBC article. The Lagoon, metropolis and Lagos is notorious for the growing population, the infrastructure challenges, and as well as the practices of state distinction. Land capture, particularly from waterfront communities who engage in fishing livelihoods, sand dredging, all kinds of and contribute to the society are productive members of the, of Lagos society. But they live on land that’s highly coveted, and the government is in the business of forcibly evicting, illegally evicting according to the courts, people off the land, even though they have traditional rights and have lived there for centuries, many of the people that live in the waterfront community are actually immigrants from other parts of West Africa who’ve settled and negotiated land tenure with traditional authorities.
0:31:14.0 Charisma Acey: And those rights have been upheld by courts, but not respected by the Lagos government. So you have that happening. So land is, it’s the largest, most populated state, but the land is the smallest of Nigeria states. And so the state is in this business of taking land from people. This is from a poetry by, I’m sorry, a visual artwork by Wura-Natasha Ogunji, a well-known Nigerian artist. And this was part of a studio that me and a colleague, Ivy Mills from History of Art took students to in 2019, where we were looking at both the role of art and planning the green city from below.
0:31:58.7 Charisma Acey: And in Lagos, visual representation plays a central role in struggles over land and competing visions of Lagos future, visions that impact planning practice and people’s livelihoods in concrete ways. On one hand, you have the state investing in public art as part of the mega city project that’s like Eko Atlantic, that’s supposed to bring foreign investment and it’s top down development and critics describe it as Eco-gentrification on a grand scale. And then you have more grassroots artists that are more about protest and pushing back on the condition. So in this piece where Natasha Ogunji is commenting on the struggle of women having to collect water, because essentially women are the, they are the pipes of the city. When the city doesn’t care enough to invest in providing clean water to everyone and investing in the infrastructure for that, it’s women who actually have to carry water through the city to their homes and to their families.
0:33:01.4 Charisma Acey: This is an image of, one of the waterfront communities after their homes had been bulldozed by the government. And the New York Times called the people in the photo homeless, but they’re not homeless, their homes are being destroyed, and they were illegally evicted. So contrast that with Eko Atlantic. So on the left, this is a rendering of the Marina district, which is the central plan development of Eko Atlantic. And then I have a series of satellite images. So you can see how that massive infilling that’s happening off the coast of Nigeria, this project won a Clinton Global Initiative award, again, done in the name of addressing climate change and coastal erosion, but a very elite driven development. There are plans for 24/7 infrastructure. Nowhere else in is this being planned in the city. And this, so this whole project is being conceived as a futuristic city, the financial epicenter of West Africa being built on this reclaimed land that’s supposed to be land that used to be part of Lagos.
0:34:03.4 Charisma Acey: So it used to be public land. And then the reality on the ground is are these waterfront communities. Here you see some of the communities that are engaged in logging along the waterfront, that are under threat because of developments like Eko Atlantic and the scarcity of land. And so it’s really a tale of two cities, the luxury development and a focus on elite on the other hand, and the struggles of people. This is on the left is a photo I took in body of Lagos, one of the areas that are considered blighted, that’s the word used in Lagos for what the UN would call slums areas without adequate water, sanitation, durable housing, and where tenure is insecure. And about 70% of people in Lagos are living on less than, $2 a day. And so in past, I’ve talked about this as part of infrastructural violence, which we can talk about in more detail.
0:34:55.7 Charisma Acey: And this image is showing, this was one of the communities, waterfront communities we visited and they showed a, they told, we visited the area that was now all luxury mansions and infill, and it used to be a waterfront, and it used to be a community of thousands of fishing villages that lived on the water. And the community is a total Gabame. And there’s a movement in Lagos called hashtag Save the Waterfronts. And what happened here was really tragic. On the morning of April 9th, 2017, the community was awoken by armed police who fired guns and tear gas, set fire to homes, forced children, women elderly to flee many into the lagoon where they drowned. And 5,000 people were forced to leave their possessions behind. And even though they’ve won court battle, they’ve not been able to return. And so you have groups like the Nigerian Slum Settlement Federation, working with justice and empowerment initiatives, fighting back, fighting to reclaim this land and this territory and resettling.
0:36:05.8 Charisma Acey: So they, what is remarkable is the amount of community and the kind of, black commons that’s created in this process. So rather than people being displaced, and then just whether it’s going back to other parts of Nigeria or to other countries, other community, other waterfront communities have taken in everyone who’s been displaced and each time another community is displaced, another waterfront community will take them in even though they have very little resources themselves. So that was very powerful to see when we were able to visit Makoko with justice and empowerment initiatives. And these are, this is one of my favorite photos taken by a former student who is part of the studio of women who engage in what they call profiling.
0:36:49.7 Charisma Acey: Profiling is a positive thing in the Nigerian context, where it’s all about putting your community on the map. And so they use satellite imagery and then go to door and literally map each house and each community and who lives there and do they go to school and their economy and use that to advocate for land and for tenure and for rights. I don’t have much time to go into the Niger Delta, but I do wanna talk, about it because it is an important site of environmental marronage and environmental justice in the Nigerian context. So here we see environmental marronage manifested through in several ways through multi-stakeholder governance, where there are new models that are emerging after decades of not only protest, but militant action, kidnappings violence against oil companies. Oil companies have conceded to this new form of government called setting up global memorandums of understanding with different communities in the Niger Delta, and I should mention the Niger Delta is a region of nine states of tens of millions of people.
0:37:56.4 Charisma Acey: So it crosses nine states, tens of millions of people living in the, not in, some in urban areas, but traditionally living in the creeks and the swamps, the delta, because that’s where they engaged in traditional livelihood. But as oil production and done in the worst and most irresponsible and reckless way, abed in many ways by the government, people’s water, the forest have been polluted, have been destroyed. And so more people have been living in cities as a result. But you do have some elements of resistance, which I’m gonna talk about shortly. So you see environmental justice activism as marronage in the Niger Delta.
0:38:36.0 Charisma Acey: And as part of this, our strategies of self-governance, collective resource management on this, negotiating with the oil companies directly. The government is very little involved. It’s really directly between communities and the delta, and the oil companies. And they’ve been able to, negotiate to get money to pay for infrastructure and things like that. Women have been a critical part of mobilizing in the Niger Delta, and they’ve been a key part of bringing more, creating more peace for it, not to just be violence and kidnapping, but really protesting and securing gains in terms of representation and governance and things like that. And the transformative role of women in the Delta really aligns with narratives of women in Maroon societies who play crucial roles in community resilience, in creating, communities of care, which themselves are radical politics of resistance and underscores the importance of gender.
0:39:36.0 Charisma Acey: Also in looking at strategies of Marronage in both the historic and contemporary context. And the last image I wanna leave you with of the Niger Delta is just to talk about alternative sociological ecological systems. Right now, when people talk about the delta, a big focus is on, oil bunkering, which is where militant groups will steal, will siphon oil from the massive oil pipes that crisscross the region and set up kind of their own alternative refineries. And the government is really interested in Shell and Chevron and all the other companies are interested in stamping out this activity. But another way to see it is as a way of securing their own livelihoods, their own autonomy, and stealing fuel from these large multinational oil companies and engaging in bunkering directly and getting money. And that you even have other countries that come off the coast of Nigeria and you have communities trading directly with other countries to get foreign currency, which they, which then filter into the communities.
0:40:39.2 Charisma Acey: They get more from this activity than they ever get from the state government. So these kinds of alternative socio-ecological practices. On one lens, it’s cracked down just in the same way that during the time of slavery, Marronage, escaped slaves and was seen as something illegal and to crack down on. And they were always trying to destroy these Maroon societies and Maroon communities, although some were able to withstand those tactics and actually engage in trade and build some kind of normal relationship with the surrounding societies. But in general, the state wanted to crack down. Plantation owners wanted to crack down. And so again, we see this kind of parallels in the kind of illegal or elicit activity in strategies of survival. So with the last few slides, I just wanna talk about the legacies of Marronage and Maroon society in the Americas.
0:41:38.8 Charisma Acey: And so by comparing ecological and spatial resistance strategies across Nigeria and Americans, we can gain insight into how these legacies influence contemporary environmental justice movements. And so Marronage and the study of it has evolved, but it seems really relevant to understanding today’s urban struggles and offering kind of new frameworks for thinking about resilience and resistance. I can’t do justice to this topic fully here. And that’s what the larger project is looking one, to look more at how the instances of Marronage in the African context and bring that into the scholarship, as well as bring different practices to really do comparative analysis to bring different practices of Marronage, both historically and contemporary across the continent and the diaspora. But there’s some concepts here that I wanna leave you with, which Marronage is resistance, not just physical resistance. So traditionally that’s what it meant, right?
0:42:38.8 Charisma Acey: Flight from slavery, flight from the plantation, but it’s also metaphorical or ideological escape from various forms of repression. Another key concept that comes from thinking about Marronage in the Americas that I’m eager to look at in the African context is are the geographies of Marronage. And this idea of geographic refuse, which is all about making a way out of no way or transforming spaces that are undesirable or inaccessible by dominant society, into sites of freedom and self-determination. And I even see that in my work currently. Especially since the pandemic I’ve been doing more work in California on environmental justice and most recently working in East Oakland, California, which used to have be a large side of the African American community in Oakland. But people are being displaced and pushed out. And there’s a lot of, the way East Oakland is characterized in terms of dangerous or all kinds of things, negative characterizations.
0:43:41.9 Charisma Acey: But when you talk to people who live there, it’s vibrant, it’s culture, it’s home. And in a way that narrative, that larger narrative in some ways serves to protect people and people who are able to make space and create their own space in that larger context. So I’m even seeing parallel in that. Fugitive infrastructures and the Black Commons. So fugitive infrastructures is about understanding how black communities create and maintain their own systems of care, governance and resource management. We see that in Lagos where informal settlements have to provide their own water, their own electricity, their own services, but also in the Niger Delta where people are engaging in their own oil refining illegally and black cooperative placemaking as well is part of this. And then lastly, strategic entanglement. So Marronage is not only about fleeing or escaping, it’s also about strategically engaging with the dominant society.
0:44:39.6 Charisma Acey: Much as groups today have to think about how do we engage with the larger society and still keep our place to say, how do we demand more from our government to clean up our environment? Say for environmental justice without getting pushed out of our community. So strategic entanglement. So these are concepts that can be put into conversation. I won’t go into, there’s lots of implications for urban theory that Marronage speaks to by bringing Maroon ecologies, black ecologies into urban studies and environmental studies as well. I wanna leave you with two images. So one, this is an image by Olalekan Jeyifous, Shanty Mega-Structures. He’s commonly known as Lek, he’s a Nigerian born visual artist out of Brooklyn, New York, and he’s known for works like this, which transform shanty dwellings into sleek high rise towers.
0:45:30.3 Charisma Acey: And so in this image, the dispossessed are given prominence and visibility through these large towers made of patchwork materials. And it, to me, this image really symbolizes the idea of Marronage and he created it to highlight the deep divide and socioeconomic inequality. But it also provokes a series of questions that have guided, my work in Lagos and some studios that I’ve, had in the past taking students there. Where to question the common sense understanding of urban informality in the African context. To look for infrastructure not only in roads and water, but in people social relations and popular urban aesthetics, to listen to the voices of community members who are re-imagining a future for African cities that doesn’t impose an outside bourgeois vision or what a well-planned green city should look like. And to ask how might the future city look if the beautiful green city is imagined and planned from below.
0:46:26.9 Charisma Acey: So I’ll leave it there. Idea of transatlantic black ecologies, there’s both continuity in looking at the past, but also transformation of this concept as we look at how it continues to evolve over time. And so I would say that today’s exploration shows how marginalized communities can create autonomy and resist environmental challenges in cities, by connecting black ecologies from the coast of Nigeria to the American South. We can see how those Marronage strategies continue to evolve in contemporary social and environmental justice movements and really highlighting opportunities for solidarity across the black Atlantic. Thank you very much.
0:47:08.3 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much. Charisma. That’s particularly poignant for me when you mentioned the slave castles, I visited Elmina Castle in my father’s country of Ghana and it’s a kind of bucket list experience in many ways, but it is one of the most moving things. I think when you see the gates of no return and you can feel centuries of souls, uneasy souls, it…
0:47:34.3 Charisma Acey: Absolutely.
0:47:36.9 Julian Agyeman: Anybody who wants to experience the worst side of humanity, I think going to these slave castles, but there’s an uplift to them as well. We’ve got a bounce in it. And I wanna bring in Bobby Jones. Bobby is, lives in Georgia and he says, listening from Georgia, I would love to hear Charisma’s thoughts on the Gullah Geechee Culture, and how it is part of or distinct from the larger context history of Marronage, particularly with the recent disaster on Sapelo Island.
0:48:03.9 Charisma Acey: Yeah, I really have to first of all just acknowledge the tragedy that just happened and all of us in our prayers to all of the people impacted and the survivors and yeah, the Gullah Geechee are a part of this project that I plan to continue to explore. But they’re a remarkable community that has really preserved a lot of the, actively preserve the culture and even the dialect and way of speaking of the West African context and actively preserved and maintain those traditions. And yet those, just like in other parts of the south, those terror, their land is under siege.
0:48:43.5 Charisma Acey: There’s a lot of effort currently underway to push people off the land similar to the way people are, black people are being and vulnerable people are being pushed off of land and other places all around the world. This is happening to the Gullah Geechee. And so while we’ve done this remarkable, amazing job of preserving culture and tradition and heritage, it is under threat and it’s been a process that’s been ongoing. And so I think there’s a lot to learn from the strategies. And that’s, I think that’s some implications for practice, right? How do we support communities and see that as part of planning practice, say in terms of preserving heritage and preserving culture as a political act.
0:49:26.8 Julian Agyeman: Great. Charisma. Can we all give a Cities@Tufts, warm thank you to Dr. Charisma Acey from Berkeley. Fantastic presentation Charisma.
0:49:37.3 Charisma Acey: Thank you so much, Julian. Sorry I didn’t leave more time for questions. [laughter]
0:49:41.1 Julian Agyeman: Well, I suspect you’re gonna get some emails and, Charisma tells me a lot of this is coming out in a book over the next year or so. So keep an eye out for Charisma’s work. Thank you.
0:49:53.1 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in shareable, with support from the Barr Foundation, shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark By Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graph recording was created by Anke Dregnat. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candice Spivey. And the series is Co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.