Lost history · About 1840 to 1959 · Mixed
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A boy from Ilesa was taken as a slave to Brazil, came back to Lagos and dug a well in his yard. His son turned that well into a water supply for Lagos Island and became known as Nigeria's first millionaire.
The story of Water House starts with a ten-year-old boy. His name was Esan, and he was Ijesa, from the Ilesa country in today's Osun State. Around 1840 he was captured and sold as a slave, and he ended up in Brazil.
He did not stay lost. Esan, known later by the Brazilian name João Esan da Rocha, survived slavery, had a family, and his son Candido was born in the Bahia region of Brazil in 1860. In time the family made the long journey back across the ocean to Lagos, like many other freed Africans who returned from Brazil in those years.
On Kakawa Street on Lagos Island, João built a house in the Brazilian style the returnees brought with them. At first it was only one storey. What made it special was in the backyard. He dug a well there.
That sounds like a small thing. In old Lagos it was not. The town had no proper public water supply, and clean water was something people had to find, carry and pay for. A family with a good well in the middle of the island had something every household around it needed.
The house became known simply as Water House. It was named not for how grand it looked but for what came out of the ground behind it.
Candido grew up in Lagos. He went to CMS Grammar School, where his classmates included Isaac Oluwole and Herbert Macaulay. His brother, Moses da Rocha, became one of the earliest Western-trained Nigerian doctors. It was a family that had climbed a long way in a single generation.
When João died, Candido inherited the house, and with it the well. He did something bigger with it than his father had. In the 1920s he launched a public water distribution system from Water House, supplying clean water to Lagos Island and the areas around it. The house was the first in Lagos to have a private borehole and a working water fountain, and its water went to ordinary residents and to colonial officials alike.
That is how he came to be called the "first water millionaire". The water was only one part of his fortune, though. He lent money and traded in gold, sometimes making profits as high as 100 per cent, and he owned property across the city. People came to call him one of the Merchant Princes of Amaro, the name for the Brazilian returnee community. In 1907 he joined the Lagos businessmen J. H. Doherty and Seidu Williams to set up a lending business called the Lagos Native Bank, an early try at an indigenous bank to stand up to the foreign ones. He later ran the Industrial and Commercial Bank. Both were short-lived, but they lent money to local people when foreign banks would not. The collapse of the Industrial and Commercial Bank did not kill the idea of Nigerian-owned banking. If anything, the lessons from it helped shape the more successful Nigerian banks that came later.
He also had a restaurant, the Restaurant Da Rocha, a stake in a deep-sea fishing company in Sierra Leone, and a love of horses. In 1891 he built the Lagos Racing Club and raced there with friends like Doherty. He was also a founding member of the Lagos branch of an anti-slavery and aborigines' rights society, a fitting cause for the son of a man who had been sold.
Candido changed the house his father had built. He redesigned it and added a second storey in the sobrado style, the tall townhouse form of Brazil. The result is one of the best-known pieces of Nigerian-Brazilian architecture in Lagos, and the Nigerian government has listed it for preservation.
The house got a second life in print as well. The Brazilian writer Antonio Olinto wrote a novel called The Water House, and it carried the name of the Kakawa Street home far beyond Lagos.
Candido held the chieftaincy title of Lodifi of Ilesa, so the family's link to the town his father was taken from as a child came back round in a title. He also owned the Bonanza Hotel in Lagos, now gone.
He died on 11 March 1959, aged 98, and was buried at Ikoyi Cemetery. His children included Alexander Da Rocha, Adenike Afodu, Angelica Folashade Thomas and Louissa Turton, and one of his grandchildren, Abimbola Omololu-Mulele, became an educationist. The family that began with a captured boy went on to produce doctors, bankers and teachers in Lagos.
If you stand on Kakawa Street now, it is easy to walk past. Lagos has pipes, boreholes and sachet water on every corner. But for a time this house, built by a man who had come back from slavery, was where part of the island went for a drink. The whole fortune began with a hole dug in a backyard.
