Joan Ilevbaoje

Topic

Health, Hierarchies and Power; Sanitation and Disease Control in Colonial Ibadan, 1930-1950

Department of History

Date & location

• Monday, August 17, 2026
• 11:00 A.M.
• Clearihue Building, Room B007

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Adebisi Alade, Department of History, University of Victoria (Supervisor)
• Dr. Elizabeth Vibert, Department of History, UVic (Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Funmilola Ayotunde, Faculty of Law, UVic

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Julie Williams, School of Public Administration, UVic

Abstract

Ibadan during the colonial era experienced an impact of sanitation and public health practices between 1930 and 1950, emphasizing sanitation as a pivotal mechanism of urban governance and social control. This thesis argues that colonial sanitary governance in Ibadan, Nigeria between 1930 and 1950 functioned primarily as a mechanism of administrative control rather than genuine public health provision, substituting the low-paid labour of African sanitary inspectors (also called wole wole) for the capital-intensive infrastructure investment that the city's rapid growth required. Drawing on primary sources accessed from the National Archives, Ibadan – including inspection files, Native Authority correspondence, court records, and resident petitions – this study reconstructs how sanitary enforcement operated as daily administrative practice rather than as the epidemic-driven history that existing scholarship on colonial Ibadan has emphasised. It shows that this pattern was structural: while investigations into a citywide water supply began in 1932, construction did not commence until 1938, even as inspector deployment, prosecutions, and unpaid communal labour continued without interruption throughout the decade. The Township Ordinance of 1917 institutionalised this inequality geographically, concentrating protected water, drainage, and medical care in the European Reservation while leaving the Native Town's agbo-ile or indigenous compounds to a chronically underfunded and politically captured inspectorate – one whose personnel were as often appointed through chiefly patronage as through professional merit. The thesis further demonstrates that Ibadan's residents were not passive subjects of this system: petitions such as the 1939 appeal by seventy-two African and Lebanese residents against Dr W. C. Dale's transfer, and the Olubadan-in-Council's own intervention in the same matter, reveal a population that understood precisely what colonial medicine had provided and withheld, and that used the institutional channels available to contest it. The wartime decade of the 1940s exposed the fragility of this enforcement-without-infrastructure model, as court backlogs, personnel shortages, and a near-tripling of the smallpox case-fatality rate coincided with the passage of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940, whose promised reforms Ibadan's Native Administration and educated elite pressed for but received only partially. By 1950, sustained petitioning and political pressure had helped bring Nigeria's first medical school to Ibadan, even as the structural deficits in drainage, water, and sanitary infrastructure that had defined the preceding two decades passed largely unresolved into the postcolonial period.
In tracing this history, this thesis contributes a study of colonial power as it was exercised and contested.