Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic study conceptualizes 'watery agency' to show the intersections of religious, cultural, and environmental processes in Lagos megacity, arguing that sacred water practices invokes sacred-urban continuum necessary for understanding water-induced transformations in urban Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This study invokes 'watery agency' to analyse how urban and environmental transformations intersect with religious and cultural traditions in Lagos megacity. Through ethnographic fieldwork and use of participant observation, life history accounts, in-depth, and key informant interviews to collect data from traditional monarch, priests, and community chiefs and leaders, the study examines practices associated with Odo Ota, a communal and deeply revered stream in the Ikorodu area of Lagos. It explores the historicity, uses, custodianship, and continued importance of Odo Ota and the dynamics of social relations and practices associated with the stream. Analyses revealed that fetishized uses of the stream are institutionalized in communal identity construction and by indigenous political and 'syncretic' religious traditions. While acknowledging diminution in the physical space of Odo Ota, participants largely attribute the change to urban encroachment such as construction of building structures around, and of a motor-way bridge by the local government through, the stream. These urban processes regardless, the resilience of the stream's sacrality and uses are re-enacted in traditional custodianship and the increased decentralization of control and multi-religious appropriation of the water body at different physical spots. The paper tentatively concludes that analysis of the agency of water, through sacred practices attached to inland water bodies, is insightful in understanding not just religion-culture-environment connexion but also in (re)conceptualizing African city as a sacred-urban continuum in the context of global social and environmental transformations.