João Baptista da Costa was a master builder of the Afro-Brazilian community of Lagos — the Agudá, formerly enslaved people and their descendants who returned to the Bight of Benin from Brazil across the nineteenth century, bringing with them the masonry, stucco and tile-work trades they had been forced to learn in Salvador and Recife. Almost nothing of his life is recorded; what is recorded is that he directed the building of the Shitta-Bey Mosque on Lagos Island between 1891 and 1894, assisted by a local builder named Sanusi Aka. The mosque's tiled and moulded facade is the best-preserved statement of the Brazilian style in Lagos. Note that Wikidata's architect claim for the mosque points at a same-named Brazilian painter and is a data error.
