How Lagos Got Its Name — From Eko to a Portuguese Port

Before Lagos was Lagos, it was Eko — and before Eko was a city it was a string of fishing camps and salt-pans on a sheltered lagoon. The Awori Yoruba, led by Olofin from Isheri, had settled the islands by the late 15th century. By the early 1600s the Bini conqueror Ashipa had imposed an Oba on the town; in the Edo of Benin, *Eko* meant 'war camp' — the staging-ground from which Benin projected force westwards along the coast. That name, Eko, is the one Lagosians still use among themselves today.

The Portuguese arrived in the 1470s. Ruy de Sequeira's caravels coasted past the lagoon in 1472 on the Crown's reconnaissance of the Bight of Benin, and over the next century Portuguese traders — operating out of São Tomé and the Mina factory — turned the lagoon into a regular call for pepper, cloth, ivory and, increasingly, captives. They needed a name for it on their portolan charts. They chose Lago de Curamo — 'lake of Curamo' — and then, more lastingly, simply Lagos: 'lakes', after the chain of inland lagoons that fanned out behind the bar.

The choice was not accidental. Lagos is also the name of a town on the Algarve coast of southern Portugal — a small Atlantic port that had been, in the 1440s, the launch-pad of Henry the Navigator's African voyages and the site of Europe's first organised slave market in 1444, when Lançarote de Freitas landed 235 captives from the Mauritanian coast and auctioned them in the town square. The mariners who named the West African lagoon were sailing out of, or in the institutional shadow of, that other Lagos. They were not paying homage so much as reaching for the most familiar word in their vocabulary for a lagoon-fronted harbour — and bringing with it, by accident of language, the older town's freight.

The Portuguese name stuck because the Portuguese stayed. Through the 17th and 18th centuries 'Lagos' was the entry on every European chart, every Dutch and English trading ledger, every Brazilian slaver's manifest. When the Aguda — Afro-Brazilian returnees from Bahia — began arriving on Lagos Island in the 1830s and 1840s, they brought the name back with them in its Portuguese pronunciation, along with bungalow architecture, akara, feijoada and the surnames (Da Silva, De Souza, Pereira, Gomez) that still mark the old Brazilian Quarter on Campos Street. When the Royal Navy bombarded the town in December 1851 and the British annexed it in August 1861, the colonial gazette did not bother to coin a new name — 'Lagos' was already on every chart in every Admiralty office.

So two names sit on the same place. *Eko* — Bini, militant, indigenous, the name in Yoruba mouths and Yoruba songs — and *Lagos* — Portuguese, cartographic, exported, the name on the British colony, the federal republic's former capital, the state, the airport, the international datelines. The town was renamed without being consulted, by mariners who had a town of the same name back home, and the second name outlasted the empire that imposed it. The Aguda brought back the syllables their ancestors had been shipped out under. Today the city is the largest in Africa, and it carries — without comment, in every passport stamp — the name of a small Portuguese port where, in 1444, the European trade in African bodies was first organised as a market.