This book brings together the newest and the most innovative scholarship on Nigerian children¿one of the least researched groups in African colonial history. It engages the changing conceptions of childhood, relating it to the broader themes about modernity, power, agency, and social transformation under imperial rule.

Chapter 1: Researching Colonial Childhoods: Images and Representations of Children in Nigerian Newspaper Press, 1925-1950, by Saheed Aderinto Chapter 2: Processing Juvenile Delinquents at The Salvation Army's Boys' Industrial Home in Lagos, 1925-1944, by Simon Heap Chapter 3: Children's Masquerade: Performance and Creativity in Benin City, by Uyilawa Usuanlele Chapter 4: '500 Children Missing in Lagos': Child Kidnapping and Public Anxiety in Colonial Nigeria, by Saheed Aderinto and Paul Osifodunrin Chapter 5: 'A World of Good to our Boys': Boy Scouts in Southern Nigeria, 1934-1951, by Adam Paddock Chapter 6: The Colonial Office and the Employment of Children in the Nigerian Tin Mines in the 1950s, by Tokunbo Ayoola Chapter 7: Framing the Colonial Child: Childhood Memory and Self Representation in Autobiographical Writings, by Saheed Aderinto Chapter 8: Within Salvation: Child Hawkers and the Colonial State in Development Era Lagos, by Abosede George