Agege Station probably contains more criminals, past, present and potential than any town of its size in the world.

—National Archives Ibadan (NAI), Survey Department, C. 69, Ikeja District from Intelligence Report of the Ikeja District 1935

Such a dramatic note from a British officer in 1934 could not have been written a few decades earlier, not only because Agege Station was a new, small town of 6,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of Lagos, but because the town and all of its districts became in the 1930s a particularly depressed area, a place of residence for thieves and burglars and a place where one of the first gangs of violent armed robbers operated in Nigeria. This particular example reflects the rise of crime and urban poverty during the Great Depression in Africa.

Many social scientists have emphasized the issue of crime in Nigeria, especially the rise of violent crime after the Civil War (1967–70), the culture of the Area Boys of Lagos, and the use of vigilante groups as a measure of crime control in the 1980s, but the historical dimension of such phenomena is often missing. John Iliffe was one of the first to stress the historical roots of crime, delinquency, and poverty in Africa. According to him, juvenile delinquency was not unique to the colonial era, even though child poverty appeared to increase during the late colonial period: “The chief reason was probably that the social welfare officers appointed in many colonies during the 1940s actively looked for poor children and—as so often with poverty in Africa—found what they were looking for.” Iliffe argues that juvenile delinquency became an obsession only in the late colonial period; vagrant youth were not new to Africa but the Second World War made juvenile delinquency a “problem.” More recently, historians have shown that specific forms of juvenile delinquency, namely those organized in gang activities, developed during the colonial period in African cities such as Ibadan, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Coast. These studies indicate that the upsurge of juvenile delinquency in urban Africa was due to a set of factors such as urban/rural discontinuity, social dislocation in city life, the breaking down of “tribal life,” a lack of schooling and of recreation facilities, weakness of parental control, diminishing respect for elders, and unemployment and poverty.