In 1950, a young man named Ayo Salako went to work for the Nigerian railway as a casual laborer. He hoped to be like his father, a locomotive driver who had worked for the railway from 1916 to his death thirty-four years later. Indeed, Ayo Salako became a successful railwayman, climbing the career ladder to locomotive driver, transferring to a number of different stations and retiring with a pension in 1987. Although the two generations of men both made long, continuous careers in railway employment, Ayo Salako was rather different from his father in terms of his domestic life. The elder Salako had parlayed his employment success into a polygamous marriage and the maintenance of a farm and patron–client relations in his hometown of Ogbomosho. His son, in contrast, married his current wife only after the dissolution of a previous marriage, visited Ogbomosho infrequently and retired in Ibadan rather than in his patrilineal hometown. During his career he saw himself as a modernizer, involved with industrial technology, well-traveled within the country, monogamous, and building a life and educating his children in the booming towns of post-war Nigeria.

Ayo Salako's young adulthood during the 1940s and 1950s coincided with important economic, social and political transformations in Nigeria and throughout Africa. The Second World War and the end of the depression brought economic expansion and a new wave of government interventionism. Cities were swollen with migrants looking for cash and the independence from elders that came with it. African railways expanded to meet new demands for transport and their work forces were among the largest and most politically active on the continent. Faced with imperial financial pressures and widespread African dissent, officials were turning to new policies for the colonies. Ambitious planners attempted to rationalize peasant agriculture to increase production, stabilize wage labor to improve efficiency, reshape African cities to make them less ‘disorderly’ and mold African family life to conform more closely to a bourgeois European image.