As Stephanie Newell, an accomplished historian of West African literary culture, browsed the newspapers and administrative archives of colonial-era Lagos, she could not help but find an abiding preoccupation, among Africans and Europeans alike, with filth. Dirt, it occurred to her, was more than mere substance. It was ‘an idea – or a complex set of representations – that shaped people's perceptions of one another's cultures and bodies and influenced their attitudes toward waste, urbanization, ethnicity, and health’ (p. xii). Dirt might also be a key to grasping how people today related to the urban environment, to each other, to their government and to media. Thus was born ‘The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa’ – Dirtpol for short – a remarkably ambitious interdisciplinary project launched in 2013 with a nine-person team of researchers based in the UK, Nigeria and Kenya, and initially supported by 2.2 million euros from the EU's European Research Council. According to the project's various published outputs, however, it appears that funding was eventually cut (for reasons that are unfortunately not made clear). At any rate, the Nigerian and Kenyan research teams still each interviewed more than a hundred residents in Lagos and Nairobi, respectively. Newell, Dirtpol's principal investigator, has written the first book to emerge from the project.

The first half of Histories of Dirt comes out of Newell's historical work on colonial Lagos. The first chapter addresses how various British officials in the early twentieth century framed the city as the epitome of filth, blaming its African residents and their supposedly unhygienic practices, when in fact the sanitation problems ultimately resulted from the administration's neglect of public infrastructure. The second chapter addresses the racist presumptions of malaria control, in which public health officials identified black bodies as the problem, rather than mosquitoes and colonial policy – prejudice that, as in many colonial cities, justified racial segregation. The third chapter offers a reading of the city's African press, demonstrating how the elite who contributed to these newspapers shared much of the biases of colonial officials. The dynamics Newell describes in these chapters will be familiar to most scholars of colonial cities. Then there's a chapter that is not about Lagos at all, but rather the hygiene education films that colonial health officials produced for people in the Nigerian countryside. The colonial film industry is well-trodden ground for scholars, as are the reactions of African audiences, who in so many different contexts interpreted films in ways quite contrary to the intentions of filmmakers – laughing at ‘inappropriate’ moments and uninterested in the messages that they were supposed to digest whole. What follows is a chapter dedicated to a review of the scholarship on reception theory; it emphasizes just how difficult it is for the historian of today to understand the spectators of the past, especially when the only real clues come from the reports of colonial administrators. We are now far from narrow questions of dirt and hygiene, and well into the history of cultural misapprehension, one of the animating themes of the book.

The book's second half jumps over a half century of late colonial and post-independence Nigerian history into the near present. These are the chapters based primarily on the interviews conducted by Dirtpol researchers. One finding: Lagosians distinguish between waste that is disgusting (like organic waste) and waste that might be useful to others (like debris). Another: some Lagosians charge ethnic groups that are not their own with unhygienic practices while other city dwellers are more charitable in their thinking. Another: due largely to a public awareness campaign, Lagosians now have much greater respect for waste workers; a job that once made pariahs of ‘scavengers’ and ‘night-soil men’ is now associated with the smiling faces of young women. When the interviewers’ questions turned to homosexuality, interviewees responded almost universally that it was wrong. But, unlike so many political and religious leaders in Nigeria, Newell reports, not all the respondents thought homosexuality was ‘dirty’. Some thought it was merely a psychological disorder.

If such findings seem to paint a simple picture of how Lagosians see their world, one can point to the project's methodology. Focus groups and sit-down interviews in which people are asked directly, by strangers, about dirt and dirtiness (and migration and homosexuality) are hardly the best way to explore the nuances and complexities of urban life. Ethics protocols are the submerged story here. Newell and other members of the team co-authored an essay in 2018 in which they discussed the ethical considerations involved in Dirtpol.Footnote ¹ They focused on the interview consent process and the suspicions it raised, and how it created its own difficult dynamics in the field. What results when Eurocentric research ethics standards are imposed on Kenyan and Nigerian contexts, with their different and often contrary notions of appropriateness, makes for a more revealing tale of cultural misapprehension than what Histories of Dirt can tell us.

The 2018 essay discussed the care that researchers took in interviewing young children for the project. It did not, however, fully address what I thought was a particularly troubling issue raised by one of the book's chapters. A section of chapter 6 deals with how children in Lagos as young as seven absorbed the government's public health messaging. One of the researchers marvelled at how the Dirtpol interviews gave Nigerian schoolchildren the uncommon freedom to ‘say their mind about issues’ (p. 102). According to Newell, here is what resulted:

The girl's story was a horrific tale of parental beatings, armed robbers and cut-off tongues found in pockets – a mixture of fantasy and intimations of authentic terror that resonated with the accounts of other young girls who were interviewed. ‘Beginning with a description of the cruel behavior of her parents’, Newell writes, ‘the girl's account had grown into a picture of a monstrous world where real harm was done to children by adults’ (p. 103). Based on Newell's description, it sounds like Dirtpol subjected young children to the kinds of stressful, ‘bizarre’ situations – in this case, interviews in which they relived trauma for strangers – that researchers promised to avoid. These are interviews that, to my mind, should have been halted once this dynamic became evident. They ‘added an important layer of meaning’ to the project, but what did they do for the girls?