Ṣeun Sedẹ Williams, PhD.
It is, perhaps, no longer news that Nnamdi Kanu was yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment for various offences bordering on terrorism and violent incitement. While many Nigerian eyes and media cameras were fixated on Justice James Omotosho’s Abuja Federal High Court, it appears to me that very few people recognised the fact that certain charges for which the IPOB leader was convicted had much to do with another imposing court complex and the stoking of burning rage in Lagos, the sprawling commercial city where he was first arrested in 2015.
As a historian, I find that salient connection to be worthy of some critical reflection, all the more so in light of the revered judge’s excoriation of Kanu’s repeated fiery outbursts in the course of the long-drawn trial to the point that the judge had to order that Kanu be removed from the court moments before the pronouncements.
Even as it could be argued that yesterday’s conclusion of Kanu’s prosecution brings a measure of closure to an affair that has captured Nigerian public life for a decade, the episode invites us to pay a mind to what has been permanently lost in the consuming inferno that his agitation partly fuelled. The destruction of the Lagos court archives in the throes of the chaos that attended the #EndSARS protests represents an intellectual and historical catastrophe whose magnitude we are only beginning to comprehend.
Granted, the Nnamdi Kanu affair and the #EndSARS movement emerged from different deep-seated grievances, but both converged in expressing profound alienation from the Nigerian state. Kanu’s separatist rhetoric, broadcast from London, reopened the unhealed wounds of the Biafran War, weaponising historical memory and ethnic discontent.
The #EndSARS protests, initially focused on police brutality, quickly metastasised into a broader indictment of governance failure, youth disillusionment, and systemic injustice. When security forces turned their assault rifles on protesters at Lekki Tollgate on October 20, 2020, the fragile social contract came under heavy fire. What followed was a wild rampage of outrageous proportions that devoured many businesses and commercial interests, as well as public infrastructure and government buildings across Lagos, and in other parts of the country. Sadly, the resultant conflagration touched—read torched—the courthouse at Igbosere.
Whether the destruction of the historic court and its archives was targeted or opportunistic remains unclear, but yesterday’s ruling established the fact that Nnamdi Kanu did make broadcasts in which he vehemently ordered his loyalists to “burn Lagos down!” And in those moments of raw rage, a historical goldmine with its generations of legal precedents—documentary foundations of property rights, commercial law, and civil jurisprudence—did “go up in flames” in broad daylight.
Historians like Kristin Mann had used those very court records, some of which date back to the 1876 establishment of the Supreme Court of Lagos Colony, to produce groundbreaking scholarship. Among such magisterial works are the professor emerita’s Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900, and Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change Among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos, both of which illuminated how Lagosians navigated enslavement and marriage under European hegemony.
Several research papers and dissertations by various other scholars have also drew sustenance from this court archive. Such works now stand as an inadvertent memorial to what can no longer be consulted, verified, or reinterpreted by future researchers.
Personally , I still remember the reverent awe that I felt when I first entered the Lagos Court Archives in 2016. As a master’s student at the University of Lagos, hunting for colonial-era documentation for my dissertation, I found myself surrounded by piles of deteriorating, fragile documents that somehow survived over a century of institutional neglect, and national tumult. The preservation conditions were deplorable—no proper humidity control, minimal cataloguing, documents crumbling at the slightest touch—yet the experience I had bordered on the spiritual. Here, in fading ink and yellowed paper, were the voices of diverse Nigerians: merchants disputing contracts, families contesting inheritances and chieftaincies, communities navigating the collision between customary and colonial law.
Indeed, during one of my visits, out of sheer happenstance and unbelievable fortune, I stumbled on a couple of court-attested documents detailing how one of my paternal forebears gifted or sold his landed properties in Badagry to various persons back in 1906! Each document was a time capsule, a fragment of memory that connected me to my ancestors and their layered past. Alas, that irreplaceable archive was, to use Nnamdi Kanu’s words, “razed to the ground” on October 21, 2020!
As an abiding disciple of the archive and potential friend of the court, I understand that colonial courts, like colonial courts, are contested spaces, encoding power relations and privileging certain narratives while silencing others. As such, the documents produced by or through the, require critical interrogation. Yet their permanent disappearance is far more dangerous than their bias. Without documentary evidence, competing claims about the past harden into valorised certainties, immune to contradiction or revision. In a nation where historical memory is already weaponised, the archive’s destruction eliminates a crucial ground for adjudicating disputes through evidence.
We still struggle to come to terms with full extent of October 2020’s toll. Many businesses haemorrhaged and several lives were lost across Lagos and throughout Nigeria in the mayhem. Families continue mourning, even today. Countless young people bear psychological scars from state violence and societal breakdown. These mortal and economic losses demand acknowledgement, investigation, and accountability.
In addition to all that, as a historian, I must also insist that we mourn the archive. Its destruction has impoverished every Nigerian’s ability to understand how we arrived at this precipice, to trace the genealogies of present conflicts, to ground contemporary claims in verifiable evidence.
With Kanu’s legal saga reaching conclusion, perhaps we can begin asking harder questions. What kind of political community destroys its own memory? How do we build a just society without the documentary foundations that make justice legible across generations? Who benefits when the past becomes irrecoverable, when historical claims can no longer be tested against archival evidence?
The smoke and ashes of Igbosere offer no answers, only silence. That deafening silence—the absence of voices that once spoke over some 140 years—may prove to be the most enduring casualty of Nigeria’s season of violent agitations. We have lost not just documents, but possibilities: the prospects of shared truth, of evidence-based reconciliation, of future Nigerians encountering their ancestors’ testimonies. In setting the archive ablaze, we burned bridges to our own past, and perhaps to any common future.
An assistant professor in history, Dr. Williams writes in from Dublin.
