When British gunboats bombarded Lagos twice in late 1851, they displaced not only the incumbent king but also the significance of local narratives around the event. The November bombardment was meant to end the city's reliance on the profits of the slave trade; but it failed. The December bombardment represented an effort to make up for this defeat and install a king amenable to British interests. Britain's success in this ija agidingbi or ‘booming battle’ is popularly interpreted as the first step in the process that ended with the cession of Lagos to Britain in 1861.

This chapter focuses on the effects of British intervention in Lagos in 1851, and again in 1861, on domestic slavery, especially on women who were enslaved. Historians have analysed the profits from the slave trades, as well as the processes of dismantling slavery and emancipating the formerly enslaved. The aftermath involved a variety of labour relationships whose conditions often mirrored slavery, including forced labour, pawnship, redemption, apprenticeship and indentured servitude.

Known in the British records as the ‘reduction of Lagos’, the November and December bombardments of 1851 had repercussions which were felt as far east as Porto Novo (where slave dealers fled) and as far north as Abẹokuta, where Christian missionaries and their local allies celebrated the first strong step in British intervention. Within a decade of the bombardment, Lagos had become a formal colony. Drawing upon Foreign and Colonial Office correspondence, maps and sketches, court testimonies, travel narratives and missionary journals, this chapter investigates two ways in which women and children were enslaved but then found and maintained their freedom. It also maps their itineraries, showing how Lagos became a focal point for freedom, first after the British bombardments in 1851 and again after it was annexed in 1861. I analyse how the experiences of two enslaved females shed light on female mobility and produce a spatial biography of these encounters. Of the many people enslaved in the Bight of Benin between 1851 and 1865, two female figures, Awa and Alabọn, come to life in the archival record. Both found freedom in Lagos. For Awa, emancipation came after she fled domestic slavery in Abẹokuta. She was one of many pawns in a moral and economic crisis over slavery in the 1860s involving John Glover, Lieutenant Governor of Lagos, and the ‘Native Christians’ who lived in Abẹokuta and Lagos.