People · 1913-1960s
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The soft, square loaf Nigerians call Agege bread has a Jamaican grandfather. He came to Lagos to work on the railway, hated the job, went home, came back, and built a bread culture almost from nothing.
All over Nigeria people know Agege bread: soft, springy, square, and sold whole, never sliced. It is named after Agege, a district of Lagos. What very few of the people eating it know is that the story of this loaf begins with a man from Jamaica.
The Nigerian writer Feyi Fawehinmi told that story in the Jamaica Gleaner, and he started with the ocean between the two countries. Between the early slave trade and abolition, somewhere between six and nine hundred thousand Africans were carried by force to Jamaica. Shipping records show that a good share came from ports in what is now Nigeria. Around sixty-eight thousand captives were taken from Bonny alone, and thousands more from Old Calabar and Elem Kalabari.
Far less is said about people who later travelled the other way. In the early twentieth century, colonial Nigeria was building railways and needed trained clerks and station masters. Men from the West Indies, schooled in the same British system and used to railway work, were hired to fill that gap. They sat in an awkward middle place. They were not treated as Europeans, but they were not expected to be treated as natives either.
One study found that by the end of 1913 only seven new West Indian railway workers had been hired for Nigeria. Six came from Trinidad and one came from Jamaica. That one was Amos Stanley Wynter Shackleford, born in Charles Town, a Maroon community.
Nigeria did not welcome him the way he may have hoped. In 1914 an unsigned letter from "A Jamaican", written from Ebute Metta in Lagos, complained of a miserable state of things and warned that the pay did not match the cost of life on the ground. Fawehinmi thinks the writer was almost surely Shackleford himself. Other West Indian railwaymen wrote home about worse. Some went without hats so they would not have to keep lifting them to Europeans. One clerk was said to have been struck for not removing his hat quickly enough. Four men from Trinidad walked off their jobs and sent a telegram asking to be taken home: stranded, help, return, notify families.
Shackleford had every reason to leave, and in a way he did. His railway contract ended in April 1917, and he went back to Jamaica. But by January 1918 he was in Nigeria again.
He married into a small Jamaican world that had already taken root in Lagos. His wife was Catherine Ricketts, the daughter of a Jamaican Baptist missionary who had arrived in Nigeria in 1895. Together the couple opened a small bakery in their own neighbourhood of Ebute Metta. Fawehinmi calls it, in effect, the first commercial bakery of its kind in Nigeria.
Bread was still something new in the local diet then, though more people were coming to like it. Flour had to be imported, and that was costly. So in the early 1920s Shackleford brought in a dough-kneading machine. Before, the dough had to be worked by hand. The machine did it for him, and his bakery could now turn out far more bread, which helped make up for the price of the flour.
He also refused to sit and wait for buyers. He sent vans and buses out from Ebute Metta, loaded with soft, sweet, fresh loaves, to areas like Agege, and in that way he made people want bread in places where hardly anyone had bought it before. By the 1930s his business had spread beyond Lagos to other towns in Nigeria, and even across to the Gold Coast.
People grew so used to his loaves that his name became a word. In Lagos, "Shackleford" came to mean bread.
The last step happened after him. In the early 1960s, one of his former associates, a man named Alhaji Ayokunnu, set up his own bakery in the Agege area. He bought the same kind of kneading machine that Shackleford had brought in forty years earlier. The bread he made was soft and springy, square in shape, and sold unsliced. It became hugely popular, and people began calling it after the place it came from. That is the name that stuck: Agege bread.
Since then the loaf has followed Nigerians abroad. It is baked and bought in Canada, in London, and in other places where Nigerians have settled, a taste of home. Fawehinmi points out the circle in it all. Africans went from Nigeria to Jamaica in chains. A Jamaican came to Nigeria by choice. And now a loaf made from his methods travels out of Nigeria with the people who grew up on it.
He also notes how little the two countries know of each other, despite all this shared past. There are official meetings and talk of direct flights, but ordinary people mostly meet through music. When the Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff died in November 2025, one of Fawehinmi's Nigerian WhatsApp groups spent the whole day talking about his songs.
Shackleford did not come to Nigeria to become anyone's symbol. He came to work, was let down, and could have stayed away for good. Instead he came back and stayed long enough to change what a whole country eats in the morning. Today the Wheatbaker Hotel in Lagos stands where his home once stood. There is no plaque for him. But his story is baked into every loaf of Agege bread, whether the person eating it knows his name or not.
