by Lynn Schler
In the colonial era, crews were generally segregated, with blacks and whites occupying separate quarters. They often ate in separate areas, and African seamen complained that they were served poor-quality food compared to Europeans. This segregation was the result of a ship hierarchy based on the intersections of race and class biases. Thus, ship hierarchies drew clear distinctions between officers and the rank and file, and in most vessels, these distinctions also coincided with racial difference. Opportunity for advancement in the hierarchy was reserved for Europeans only, as representatives of seamen complained in 1959, “No African seamen . . . irrespective of their number of years are in responsible posts. We always serve in a subordinate role. The African seamen who do the same type of work as white crews cannot share equal advantages with them in the sphere of working conditions, after many years of contribution to the progress of the Companies.”63 White officers ate better food, lived in superior accommodations, and enjoyed unlimited rations of cigarettes and beer. The officers socialized in their own bar, which was better furnished than that of regular seamen. While hierarchies such as these were not explicitly racist, African seamen were keenly aware of the connections between race, class, and status on colonial ships. Seamen’s perceptions of discrimination touch upon these intersections; as one explained: “If you talk about maltreatment from the European officers, it was general. They prevented us from their quarters.”64
In ports of call, the situation was not better, and seamen’s missions were segregated by race. In times of illness and hospitalization, African seamen complained that shipping companies did not give the same treatment to blacks as to whites, as can be seen in the following complaint filed by seamen in 1958: “When an African seaman is stranded, due to no fault of their own, proper care is not taken of them. When Mr. J. Woin, deckboy in a cargo boat, was sick on December 3, 1958, he was discharged after seven days in Victoria hospital. The shipping master at Victoria gave him 3 newspapers to sleep on in the streets. This is a sample of the sort of action which makes cooperation sometimes absurd. We are not sure that the shipping master would serve 3 newspapers to any white crew for supper or sleeping pillows.”65
Nigerian seamen suffered racist attacks by white crews, but the racialized hierarchies on board ships meant that captains and officers would often side with European crews in times of conflict. The officers themselves were also accused of making racist remarks toward African crews. As seamen’s representatives complained in 1958, “We know of instances where officers have told African crews quite openly that they hate not only them but Africans on the whole.”66 European officers were known to abuse their power in requiring Africans to work overtime for them personally. For these types of jobs, the payment was usually in kind, but sometimes Africans were not paid at all. This could be left to the officer’s discretion, as one captain explained: “The chief steward may wish to have a storeroom cleared out, or have the inside of the storeroom alleyway painted. He would be paid in goods—in rice and biscuit. Likewise, the chief or second steward would have their laundry done for free or rather would pay the head washman in rice or biscuit.”67 The practice of asking African crews to do personal work for white officers was a source of great contention, as one seaman recalled: “It was a long story. That is why I said there was maltreatment by the white officers. The chief steward used to bring his car to the dock and he asked one of the black stewards to wash his car. We all resisted and refused to obey because the car in question was not the company’s car, but a personal one. If you want to wash your car, take it to the car wash and pay them. The steward wanted to wash his during the working hours and at free of charge too. We said, we weren’t doing that again.”68
African seamen were not always so empowered to resist the discriminatory practices of officers. This was painfully evident on the MV Egori, when, in 1958, the Nigerian crew complained bitterly of the racist attitudes of Captain Everall. After many reports of abuse, seamen in Lagos refused to sign articles with him, and a representative of the seamen went on board to investigate the matter. In a report to Elder Dempster, it was claimed that the entire crew complained of Everall’s “hatred and wickedness towards members of the African crew.” The crew was particularly angered by the captain’s demand that they work long hours of overtime, with no breaks, on the weekends. According to the report, the captain met with the seamen’s representative, and assured him that the seamen would cease to work from Saturdays at 1300 until Monday morning. The seamen were told of the promise and signed articles on the ship. But once at sea, the captain ordered them to work for the whole weekend. The seamen asked the captain about his promise, and, according to the report, “he turned round to ask them whether they have known of any Englishman who has kept his promise to a black man? They informed him that the man he was talking about happened to be their President. The captain then asked, he is a black man. Is he not?” They offered the captain to work all day Saturday to finish the tasks at hand so that they might have Sunday off. The captain agreed and they worked as hard as they could, finishing all the work by 1700. Yet, on Sunday, the captain called them up to start work again. The African seamen reported, “This man then said that Africans have been serving Englishmen for centuries and that he wants to inform them that the cities of Liverpool, Manchester and London were not only built by African slaves but by the profit made by selling them to the American planters. He continued to say that he would use them as he pleased and they were already committed by signing the Article.” The seamen refused to work, and the captain called in the police from Takoradi, Ghana, when they were in port. The men were arrested in Ghana, fined, and banned for over six months. At their trial, the local magistrate asked the captain whether or not the African crews were being paid for their overtime, and whether or not European crews were paid for overtime. The captain replied that only the Europeans were paid for overtime, and that this was the policy of ED Lines and he could not change it.69
The incident demonstrates the vulnerability of rank-and-file seamen to the abuses of power by European officers. Regular crew were also victims of abuses committed by the very few African seamen who rose to positions of power on board such as head stewards. Owning their positions of privilege to their proximity to the European officers, these headmen could not always be counted on to represent the needs of the rank-and-file seamen. Thus, on the MV Accra in 1959, seamen complained to their head steward, Joseph Akintayo, that there was not enough food being fed to the African crew. Akintayo did not pass this information on to the chief steward, and following a lack of action, the crew went directly to complain to the chief steward themselves. This breaking of rank infuriated Akintayo, and they reported, “He jumped from the cabin and abused all of us and came back after five minutes with porthole keys and broke the door of the cabin for we locked the door because he made a lot of noise after he had gone out. He used porthole keys, axes, and knives to chase us.” The problem was resolved only when the captain intervened. He reported to the shipping company that there was indeed not enough food for the African crews, and he arranged for more supplies.70
UNION ORGANIZING
Nigerian seamen did not remain passive in the face of what they perceived as unjust treatment. Colonial shipping companies had imagined that the Nigerians would be more easily exploited than the Kru because they were less organized than their Sierra Leonean counterparts, and they lacked the same experience in labor contract negotiating. What the colonial employers did not anticipate was the quick turnaround among the Lagos-based recruits from easily exploited and inexperienced manpower to agents of industrial discord and protest. Sir Alan Burns reported that two unions for seamen and shipping workers were already registered in Nigeria in 1942.71 In the early years, the seamen’s union was hardly a broad-based organization, with membership dropping to an all-time low of six in 1946. But the Nigerian Union of Seamen underwent reorganization in 1947. Following this spirit of revival was a swift climb in dues-paying membership, reaching 2,250 by 1953.
The union’s declared objectives remained the same from the earliest years: to protect the interests of its members, regulate work hours and wages, ensure adequate accommodation for all seamen on vessels and ashore, to promote the general welfare of seamen, and to regulate relations between employers and employees.72
At first Elder Dempster attempted to avoid any recognition or contact with the organization. But suddenly, in 1948, in what appeared to be a stark turnaround, Elder Dempster conceded recognition of the Nigerian Union of Seamen as the sole representative of seamen engaged in Lagos. This conciliation was followed by several years of limited contact. But in 1952, the two sides formed a local board with representation from the union, the shipping companies, and local government to monitor the recruitment and supply of seamen working out of Lagos.73 The board was to establish and maintain a register of seamen, and West African ratings were to be recruited only from those whose names were on the register. Both parties agreed that all matters pertaining to Nigerian seamen should be decided in Lagos. Cooperation began in earnest in 1954, when representatives of the Nigerian Union of Seamen met with Tom Yates of the National Seamen’s Union in Britain, and the British union helped to negotiate an effective working relationship between the Nigerian seamen and the British shipping lines.74
The change in the shipping companies’ position toward the Nigerian seamen’s union was in line with an overall shift in colonial policy toward African labor unions in the post–World War II period. A wave of strikes across the continent forced colonial governments and business interests to make some concessions in their stance toward organized labor. But while recognizing the need for reform, Fred Cooper has argued that governments and employers “wanted to confine the labor question to a set of institutions and practices familiar to them from the industrial relations experience of the metropole: to treat labor as [separate] from politics. The threat of a labor crisis becoming unbound—linked to people other than waged workers . . . made governments especially willing to pay the costs of resolving labor issues [through recognized unions].”75
In the case of the Nigerian Union of Seamen, the shipping company fully engaged with the union following a formal request from the colonial Labour Department in Lagos in 1952. While reluctant to comply at first, officials in the shipping company ultimately came to the conclusion that cooperation with the union would be the most efficient means for dealing with labor disputes. The local agent wrote, “Whilst we are still far from satisfied that the present officers of the Union are responsible and trustworthy persons, there has of late admittedly been a marked improvement in their demeanor and attitude, and the resumptions of Meetings of the Board would provide a means of negotiation preferable to attempts by the Union to send deputations on the slightest pretext.”76 To ensure that the union would not be any source of real agitation, the shipping company nurtured good relations with union officers and provided them with special benefits that would ultimately prevent these officers from agitating for the union. This could be seen in 1956, when the general secretary of the union, Franco Olugbake, wrote to the managing director of Elder Dempster to inquire about a new job with better pay at the United Africa Company. He wrote:
I have no alternative but to continue to hang on to my present employment—the seamen. What was more, I can not help but to keep the job, even though the salary is anything but compatible with my status in life. My Executive, knowing full well that my efforts to land another job seem gloomy, they tied me to all sort of conditions. For instance, my Executive pressed on me to agitate for the question of overtime, etc. I had to do this reluctantly. I had to write a memo covering overtime, Sundays as sea and holidays—you will probably see it.77
In developing a close relationship with the union leadership, Elder Dempster hoped to ensure that unrest among seamen remained at a minimum.
Thus, the decision to engage with the Nigerian Union of Seamen was a calculated attempt at making limited yet controlled concessions to Nigerian seamen, but did not represent any fundamental shift in the shipping companies’ views on seamen’s rights, and the whole endeavor was undertaken with a frustrated yearning for the good old prewar days when African seamen had not yet awoken to claim their rights. As one Elder Dempster official wrote in 1959, “We have looked through the rules of the Nigerian Union of Seamen. . . . It is a shocking document and much of what the Union appears to be aiming to do could not possibly be accepted by the [shipping] lines. I am referring to ship committees and so forth. I suppose in the old days there would have been someone in Nigeria who would have told the Unions not to be silly in framing rules of this kind, but I do not know whether there is anyone bold enough or authoritative enough to do so at the present time.”78
The document this official was referring to was the Rules of the Union, formulated and submitted to the shipping companies in 1959. These rules were aimed at regulating the internal workings of the union, and formalized procedures such as elections, dues collection, and the running of general assemblies. The union’s rules also made it a priority to maintain harmony among seamen and reduce incidents of tribalism, corruption, and conflict. But the detailed document was largely focused on a long set of demands and ideological positions taken by the union toward the shipping companies. The Rules of the Union called for improved working conditions, salary increases, the payment of overtime, and the upgrade of accommodations on board ships. The issue of hiring and recruitment was also raised, with the union calling for the institution of a closed shop. This demand was totally unacceptable to officials at Elder Dempster, who insisted that shipping companies reserved the right to select seamen according to personal ability and availability, regardless of their union membership.79 The shipping companies were also strongly opposed to crews organizing representative bodies on ships. The union had proposed electing a “ship’s committee” on board each vessel that would “settle all minor matters or disputes between European crews and African crews on board ships; settle all minor matters or disputes between the representatives of the shipping companies and the African crews on board ships; and try to settle all minor matters or disputes between one African and another or one group of African crews and another group.”80 This proposition was preposterous to the officials at Elder Dempster, who argued that the hierarchy of the ship was based on an established chain of command, with the captain the ultimate commander, and this would not be compromised by the establishment of elected seamen’s committees.
The most fundamental point of contention between the shipping companies and the seamen’s union emerged around allegations of racism. The existence of racism on ships was clearly acknowledged in the union’s rules, which demanded that “the committee should see to it that the African crews are not misused or unduly insulted because of the colour of their skin, which is a common practice on board ships.”81 This was an issue of immense sensitivity among officials at Elder Dempster, and they categorically rejected any allegations of racism on board their ships. They refused to even engage in any dialogue around the subject, and consequently would take no steps to stop it. Thus, while the shipping company had begrudgingly recognized the union, the ways in which they dealt with the explosive issue of racism on board demonstrates that the shipping company still hoped to limit and frame the terms of debate between shipping company officials and union representatives. For Elder Dempster, the issue of racial discrimination or prejudice was completely off-limits, and officials went to great efforts to strike the allegations from the lists of complaints and demands made by the union.
For seamen and their representatives, racism was a pervasive and inescapable feature of life on board colonial vessels. One seaman interviewed said, “On the British ships, you may be lucky to meet a nonracist. Your right is recognized and is given to you, but they don’t mingle easily.”82 Time and again, the issue was raised by union leadership in meetings and correspondence with Elder Dempster officials. Thus, in a letter written by union officer Akpan Monday in 1958, it was reported that “Africans
are ill-treated by the English seamen with whom they work and ‘their so-called superior officers.’” He described several incidents when African crewmen were beaten by gangs of English seamen, and claimed that these incidents were reported but nothing was done about them. “In each case, the culprits went free without even receiving a warning.” Akpan provided vivid descriptions of racial violence against black seamen on several voyages and the lack of response from officers on board:
On the Aureol’s last trip, an English sailor threw hot water on the back of Mr. S. Ikpi, an African greaser. When Ikpi turned around and asked why, he was attacked by five other English sailors. When he ran to the Engine room for help, the officer said he was busy and could not come. Another African seaman was called a “bastard nigger” by the chief store keeper. When he reported this to the chief steward, the chief steward defended the store keeper. . . . This goes to show that whatever the black man says, right or wrong, he is always wrong in the eyes of the white man who is always prepared to defend his white brothers.83
The shipping companies’ refusal to acknowledge racial discrimination on board ships infuriated the seamen’s union. They claimed that management’s denial of the problem allowed it to continue unabated, and this inaction was in fact at the root of the problem. This could be seen in an impassioned letter from General Secretary Sidi Khayam, submitted to Elder Dempster in 1959. Khayam claimed that white crews had made a hobby out of provoking African crews, but because of their close relations with the European captains, they were never punished for it. On the contrary, Khayam claimed, those black seamen who filed complaints against white seamen were blacklisted from further employment. He claimed that the situation was unbearable for African crews, “when they realize they have no possibility of defense before the shipping master.” Under these circumstances, Khayam charged that the shipping company must stop denying that racism existed on board ships, and take measures to put a stop to it. He wrote:
