by Lynn Schler
Several friends have been enthusiastic supporters, despite having little connection to or knowledge of African history. Danny Rosen, Lisa Russ, Debbie Hill, and Gayle Kirschenbaum have pushed me for detailed updates at every stage of the project, thus helping me more than they each realize to clarify the arguments to myself, and to make sure that I always had some progress to report. My sister, Miriam, remains my most enthusiastic reader even without reading, and I cherish her for being my link to every part of my past and present.
The final thanks go to those who deserve them the most. At some point in the course of writing, I realized that the storage shed in our yard would make an ideal office space. I thought George would talk me out of my sudden need for “a room of one’s own,” but instead he immediately took part in the planning and implementation. Ellie and Mika helped with the painting. Amos provided some sharp critique of the decor. In these symbolic gestures, and in countless acts of similar significance, my family has provided me with the physical, intellectual, and emotional spaces that I have needed for both work and home. To George, Amos, Ellie, and Mika—all of my love and deepest gratitude.
Introduction
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Nigerian seamen was in the stories I heard and collected in Douala, Cameroon, in the late 1990s. I was in this West African port city to research and interview residents about the social and cultural history of the colonial era, and several of the testimonies and reminiscences that I gathered made reference to the African seamen who passed through Douala while employed on colonial ships. Women in particular described the spectacle of the eye-catching seamen in their bright white uniforms as they crossed the city from the port to the bars and brothels of the popular quarters. These seamen inspired admiration among the local residents, but the former beer brewers and prostitutes of Douala also remembered the seamen as a raucous bunch of troublemakers. The larger-than-life portrayals and stories of these African seafarers stuck with me, and ultimately inspired the research that led to the writing of this book.
My initial imaginary of these African seamen was a romantic one, as I envisioned adventurous men traversing seas and cultures and social landscapes, leaving their indelible mark along the way as evidenced in the popular memory of Doualans. Opportunities such as these for transnational mobility were extremely rare among working-class Africans in the colonial era, and I was deeply curious about the worlds that opened up to seamen in the course of their travels. At the same time, as a historian of colonialism in West Africa, I was also keenly aware of the ways in which seamen’s status as colonial subjects must have shaped and limited the freedoms and opportunities they enjoyed in the course of their travels. While seamen were extraordinarily unique among colonial subjects in Africa for their experiences of transnational mobility, I believed that research into the history of their lives on and off colonial vessels could shed new light onto the ways in which colonialism shaped and limited the opportunities of African subjects.
The early stages of research into Nigerian seafaring in the colonial era confirmed this anticipated trajectory. Beginning in World War II, British shipping companies began the mass recruitment of African seamen in Lagos. From the very start, Nigerian seamen’s entrance into the colonial shipping industry was characterized by contradictory experiences. On the one hand, these seamen were cast as cheap and unskilled labor performing menial tasks on vessels where hierarchies of class intersected with hierarchies of race. Both on board with European crews and offshore among local populations, seamen experienced discrimination and hardships that characterized the experiences of black working classes across the Atlantic World in the post–World War II era. At the same time, transnational travel opened up a world of opportunities that seamen were quick to seize. To supplement meager wages, many developed a lucrative business as traders of secondhand goods. Offshore hours also provided seamen with opportunities to encounter cultural and social landscapes far removed from Nigeria, and many nurtured relationships that traversed racial and ethnic boundaries. Thus, as unskilled labor in the workforce of the colonial shipping industry, Nigerian seamen confronted discrimination and poor working conditions on the one hand, but they also exploited numerous opportunities for both adventure and personal gain on the other.
Although my focus was the colonial era, numerous interviews with former Nigerian seamen quickly revealed that seamen’s life stories and experiences were not molded by colonialism alone. Moreover, I was surprised to hear many of those interviewed describing colonialism as an idealized era that had been lost. While seamen acknowledged the discrimination they suffered on board British ships, most remembered their employment on colonial vessels as years of golden opportunities, justice, and propriety. In fact, seamen described their most poignant experiences with injustice and disempowerment as taking place following the transition from colonialism to independence. In the postindependence era, seamen in Lagos were no longer recruited directly by British shipping companies, and many took up employment with the Nigerian National Shipping Line (NNSL). Inspired by nationalist fervor, seamen were initially optimistic about the creation of the national line, and many hoped that conditions would be more favorable aboard Nigerian ships. But a lack of sufficient resources and mismanagement doomed the venture, and seamen ultimately experienced deep disappointment with the move to the NNSL. The bitter disillusionment these seamen experienced in the context of their work in the postcolonial era impacted the ways in which seamen remembered and described colonialism. It became clear to me that the history of Nigerian seafaring in the colonial era could not be studied in isolation from postcolonial experiences.
Seamen’s testimonies thus led me to reshape the focus and scope of the project. Rather than a history of colonialism, this book evolved into a working-class perspective on decolonization, nationalization, and the meaning of the “postcolonial” for labor in Nigeria. By looking at the history of Nigerian seafaring from the colonial period through independence, I could gain a better perspective on how seamen experienced and interpreted the broader strokes of Nigerian history over the last sixty years. The history and life stories of Nigerian seamen provide poignant testimony into the complex and contested process experienced by working classes while “becoming Nigerian.”
What follows is a history of Nigerian seafaring from the late colonial period of the 1950s through the processes of decolonization and the first decades of independence in Nigeria. The aim is to provide a working-class perspective on the critical developments and transitions of this volatile period in the modern history of Africa. While histories of the end of colonialism abound, they often privilege a familiar trajectory. They outline the anticolonial struggles of Westernized African politicians, European concessions, and a negotiated transition to the establishment of independent nation-states. Much has been written about the ways in which elite interests, both African and European, were protected in this process. Largely missing from this narrative are the working classes and their perspectives and experiences on the end of colonialism, the promise of nationalism, and the significance of independence.
AN OVERVIEW ON NIGERIAN SEAFARING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
From the very beginning of international shipping between Africa, Europe, and the New World, Africans were employed on merchant vessels as crewmen. Particularly from the eighteenth century onward, the increase in commercial traffic on these routes led to the large-scale recruitment of Africans on European ships, serving as a cheaper and more efficient alternative to white sailors, who suffered from the tropical climate and its associated diseases.1 “Coloured” seamen2 engaged in ports throughout the British Empire were paid considerably lower rates than white seamen, and shipping companies increasingly exploited this cheap source of labor. From the era of the slave trade until the outbreak of World War II, the vast majority of Africans who worked on European vessels were Kru sailors recruited in Freetown, Sierra Leone. As the forerunners in the evolution of a pool of seafaring labor in West Africa, the Kru exploited colonial depende
ncy upon them to establish relatively favorable conditions of employment for African seamen.
The Second World War changed the hiring practices of shipping giants such as Elder Dempster, which controlled the lion’s share of cargo, mail, and passenger shipping between the United Kingdom and the West African coast. The war greatly increased demands on the company, and the need for seamen was acute. Hiring was moved to Nigeria, where Elder Dempster could sign on inexperienced fresh recruits for salaries lower than those of the Kru. Nigerian recruits came from a wide range of ethnic groups spanning southern Nigeria, and they lacked the social and cultural cohesion that had facilitated Kru labor organizing over the years. Colonial shipping companies exploited the Nigerians’ lack of experience and organization, and paid Lagos recruits considerably lower wages than the Kru. Elder Dempster established a four-tiered pay scale during the war: At the bottom of the scale were the Nigerians signed on in Lagos, followed by the Kru recruited in Freetown. The third level of pay was given to Africans employed from Liverpool, while the highest salaries were reserved for European seamen, who were paid the National Maritime Board rates.
Thus, seamen recruited in Nigeria were embraced by colonial shipping companies as the cheap alternative to the Kru, with the additional benefit of being inexperienced in labor contract negotiating. But Nigerian seamen did not accept this inferior status passively, and they immediately sought ways to improve the conditions and benefits of their work. They soon formed the Nigerian Union of Seamen and began agitating for better working conditions. Seamen also exploited unofficial channels and opportunities to improve their lot. The primary source of additional income was the independent trade conducted by seamen, and most men leveraged whatever resources they had to engage in this trade. In Europe, seamen bought a wide variety of secondhand goods for resale in Africa, such as electronics, kitchen appliances, furniture, mattresses, ceramic goods, clothing, tires, and even used cars. Seamen nurtured and negotiated their relations with captains, immigration officers, customs officials, dockers, European retailers, African customers, and fellow crewmates in order to ensure their ability to buy, transport, and sell goods from one continent to another, and seamen had to continually adapt their activities to changing circumstances. Trading was a vital aspect of seamen’s activities, and proof of seamen’s ability to creatively and autonomously improve their financial standing.
While independent trade sustained seamen financially, it was the allure and intrigue of meeting new people and seeing new places that seamen associated most centrally with the core of the seamen’s existence. The exploration of foreign lands and the bonding across geographic and cultural spaces provided seamen with a sort of spiritual compensation for their hard work and meager salaries. Seamen sought to re-create home wherever they were, and many spoke with great pride of their foreign wives and children in ports scattered across the world. The social bonds formed during their travels became the self-fashioned cornerstone of each individual’s identification with a seaman’s lifestyle.
Nigerian seamen’s encounters with the work and lifestyle of seafaring thus nurtured a unique cosmopolitanism. But this exposure to cosmopolitanism also taught them the power of national identities and the hierarchies of the passports that accompanied them. Seamen were thus poised to engage with the nationalist fervor that grew in Nigeria during the post–World War II era, but they did so from their position as seamen. The demand for indigenization was a central focus of the nationalist elite, and included calls for the indigenization of shipping through the establishment of the Nigerian National Shipping Line. Seamen measured and appropriated nationalist ideology through the prism of the national shipping venture, and they equated the end of colonialism with the “Nigerianization” of shipping. Seamen could finally imagine a sense of home and belonging on board Nigerian ships, and they were enticed by the NNSL promise of higher wages and an end to discriminatory practices toward African seamen. Thus, the “freedom dreams” of working-class seamen in the era of nationalist organizing were starkly different from those of the political elite.3
For these seamen who had invested much hope in the outcome of decolonization, optimism quickly gave way to discontent and disappointment with the Nigerian national line. The Nigerian government was never fully committed to the success of the NNSL, and from the outset, politicians refrained from taking the necessary financial and legislative steps that would protect and bolster the enterprise. While the establishment of the national line was extolled as a vital step in freeing the Nigerian economy from colonial exploitation, this ideological support was not enough to ensure its success. Mismanagement and a lack of technical expertise perpetually plagued the enterprise, and company resources were slowly pillaged by management and government officials. Ships were used by captains and management for personal gain, and seamen were forbidden to conduct their own trade. In the context of their employment in the NNSL, seamen encountered a new set of prejudices based on ethnic rivalries and injustices around new forms of corruption and exploitation. The seamen, who had once seen themselves as “workers of the world,” ultimately found themselves without employment or prospects as the Nigerian National Shipping Line underwent liquidation in the early 1990s. Just as seamen had embraced nationalism from the prism of seafaring, so, too, did they evaluate the outcome of decolonization through their experiences as seamen, and disillusionment with the NNSL was translated into a broader critique of corruption and inequality in postcolonial Nigeria.
REVISITING AFRICAN LABOR HISTORY
Nation on Board: Becoming Nigerian at Sea signifies a return to labor history, a field that has been largely neglected in the historiography of Africa over the last two decades. While historians attributed a crucial role to working-class organizations and struggles in the years leading up to independence, labor has slowly disappeared from histories of the postcolonial era. The move away from labor and working classes as categories of analysis is apparent not only in the field of African history, but can be seen as part of a general departure from a strict materialist agenda across the social sciences in the last two decades. This was not always the case in the field of African studies. To measure the sea of change that has taken place, one needs only to recall the 1984 proclamation of Bill Freund: “No subject has in recent years so intruded into the scholarly literature on Africa as the African worker. Labor has become a fundamental issue to those who seek to develop African economies or to revolutionize African polities. The elucidation and debate about the relationship of labor to historical and social issues is currently under way over an impressive range of places and a number of languages.”4
Beginning in the colonial era, labor became a focus of Western research in Africa, but early studies produced on African workers and productivity were permeated with the colonial agenda. Particularly from the 1930s, European regimes advanced increasingly complex development schemes, and the need to extract labor from Africans became more pressing.5 Colonial officials commissioned sociologists and demographers to study the cultures, migration patterns, living quarters, and birth rates of African workers in an effort to maximize their productivity.6 In the postwar era, African working classes came under more scrutiny as labor movements played an increasingly prominent role in anticolonial agitation. European officials sanctioned the formation of trade unions in an effort to contain the discontent.7 These concessions were not enough to quell the unrest, and, by 1960, organized labor and working classes had joined broad-based nationalist movements to successfully negotiate a transfer of power. Historians of nationalist movements throughout the continent have highlighted the pivotal role played by African labor unions in the transition from colonialism to independence.
In the first decades of independence, labor continued to draw the attention of historians and sociologists in Africa, with research deeply shaped by both Marxist ideology and an idenitification with the nationalist agendas of postcolonial states in Africa. Trade unions were seen as the uncontested representatives of working classes, w
hile their role in nation-building was scrutinized and debated.8 The conceptualization of these histories remained faithful to a universalist narrative of proletarianization, and evidence of solidarities among laboring constituencies that were not class-based were deemed to require analysis and explanation. By the 1970s and 1980s, “labor” became one of the most researched fields within African history.
Within this broader field, Nigeria played a prominent role as the site of some of the most influential studies produced on African labor in this era. Research in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the evolution of wage labor from the colonial era through independence, and was generally preoccupied with evaluating the effectiveness of the proletariat in organizing against economic and political exploitation. Tijani Yesufu’s pioneering work was one of the first broad studies of the evolution of industrial relations from the late colonial era into independence in Africa. Yesufu evaluated the extent to which joint consultation and collective bargaining had taken root in employee-employer relations in Nigeria. Using Great Britain as his model, he explained Nigeria’s failure to evolve according to the principles of industrial democracy as “problems of adolescence.”9 Most of the subsequent work focused on Nigerian labor unions themselves, and scholars engaged in heated exchanges concerning the role unions played in advancing pro-labor legislation. This debate was set off by a 1964 article by Elliot Berg and Jeffrey Butler, who claimed that Western scholars had highly exaggerated the role that trade unions played in advancing the political agendas of African working classes.10 A dispute around the significance of trade union organizing ensued, and the General Strike of 1964 in Nigeria provided fodder for scholars on both sides of the issue. W. M. Warren and Peter Kilby each argued that unions had indeed played an effective role in the achievement of wage increases, while John Weeks countered that unions were fairly limited in their ability to pressure the government on the issue of wage legislation.11 Other studies looked at specific sectors of the working class in an effort to understand the nature and significance of working-class activism. In an in-depth examination of shop-floor organizing among factory workers in Lagos, Adrian Peace concluded that urban working classes were most effective when they mobilized against their specific employers for better working conditions.12 Peter Waterman’s study of worker organization at the Port Authority of Lagos attempted to understand how conservatism among dockworkers prevented the emergence of broad alliances among working classes.13 Robin Cohen’s seminal work, Labor and Politics in Nigeria, 1945–71, provided a broad view of the relationship between wage earners and working classes in transition from colonialism to independence, and concluded that unions could claim “occasional” successes in the struggle for higher wages.14 Theoretical and empirical differences notwithstanding, all these studies adopted a strict Marxist perspective from which to examine and evaluate the role of organized labor in Nigeria. As Adrian Peace wrote, “The Nigerian working classes are those wage-earners who stand in a consistently subordinate relationship in the industrial mode of production, whose surplus product is appropriated by those who own the means of production . . . and who on the basis of this relationship can identify a common opposition to their own economic interests and act accordingly.”15
