Nation on Board

by Lynn Schler

  I met with Capt. Tajudeen Alao in his home in a middle-class neighborhood in Lagos. Alao’s house was full of guests—family and friends who either lived there or had stopped in to visit. The interview was conducted in his living room, with many onlookers. Alao was an extremely warm and forthcoming interviewee. He recounted many stories of life at sea and work for the NNSL. Like other captains and officers, he had studied many years in England and he had logged thousands of hours on foreign vessels before becoming a captain for the NNSL. Throughout the years, Alao had a camera and took many photos of his career at sea, and he had several photo albums and scrapbooks to show me. As we went through the pictures, he recalled incidents and people he encountered. His scrapbooks provided a rich basis for jogging his memory about his years with the NNSL. As we looked through these “scrapbook archives,” he told me colorful stories about seamen’s antics and showed me pictures of his friends abroad. In making and saving these photo albums, Alao had preserved a rare archive of knowledge, and this helped to make the interview with him extremely informative and insightful.

  Thus, in the case of the elites—the politicians, management, and officers who had worked for the NNSL—interviews exposed the deep links between the construction of knowledge and the exercise of power. Former politicians and management were aware of how the collection and use of knowledge can be a political tool, and many came to the interview process with a clear agenda. They demonstrated a keen awareness of the potential for interviews to establish their own version of events and the ways in which this knowledge could later be used. Former management, officers, and captains had either a personal or an official archive that they drew upon in the interview process. Thus, the men who had held positions of power in the NNSL continued to wield this power in the process of historicizing the NNSL.

  The process of interviewing those who had been rank-and-file seamen in the NNSL provides a stark contrast to interviews with former management and officers. Unlike the elites who left the NNSL with academic degrees, comfortable pensions, and necessary connections for finding alternative employment, seamen left the NNSL without any of these financial, political, or social resources. Most live in dire poverty; some are homeless and living under bridges in Lagos. This situation made it far more difficult to contact and establish interview times and meeting places. With both elites and the working class, the interview process was deeply influenced by the physical spaces in which interviews were conducted, and these physical spaces were in turn another form of evidence of the past. Whereas captains and management met me in exclusive country clubs or air-conditioned offices with an administrative staff and filing cabinets full of documents, seamen lived in the low-income neighborhoods of Lagos with poor infrastructure and access. In some cases, their homes lacked electricity or even a place that was convenient to sit for conducting an interview. They had fewer, if any, souvenirs or photos that could be presented as evidence. Seamen did not have the letters, documents, photo albums, or scrapbooks that officers had in their homes and offices. This had significant implications for the interview process and the ways in which seamen’s memories could be recovered and preserved. This case study teaches us that history is not just a matter of the past, but remains embedded in the material lives of both ruling elites and working classes in the African present.

  But interviews with seamen revealed a deeper divide between the ways in which the relationship between knowledge and power had shaped their lives. Unlike former officers and management, seamen did not approach the interview process as a tool for crafting a narrative that would potentially serve or empower them in the broader political landscape. Rather, they provided interviews with a more personal material agenda. Some welcomed the opportunity to tell their stories to someone who would listen. Many sought a tangible, material benefit in the form of a small gift at the end of the interview. Others hoped that I might be able to help them get a job with a foreign shipping company. Unlike elites, rank-and-file seamen saw little utility in the process of historicization itself. Having been so marginalized from history, seamen’s lives did not reflect any benefits that “history” could provide. Thus, as the research grew and developed, I became increasingly aware of the ways in which the history itself was imprinted in the process of historicization. The underclass of history were also the underclass in the process of recovering this history.

  Yet, seamen continue to look for ways to maneuver around this status. In seeking out the immediate material potential the interviews provided, seamen were in fact continuing to identify and exploit opportunities as they presented themselves, much in the same way they had as a colonial working class, and as the working class of the NNSL. Both in the past and the present, seamen were continually drawing from whatever toolboxes were available to meet their immediate, material needs. In their lives as seamen, they had found emotional consolation in their connections with foreign wives, and financial opportunities in their independent trade. When these opportunities slowly disappeared, some turned to the clandestine and lucrative drug trade. Thus, time and again, seamen exploited whatever opportunities made themselves available to overcome the hierarchies of power that rested upon their exploitation.

  It has been seen that despite these efforts, the move to the NNSL represented a gradual narrowing of possibilities and opportunities for Nigerian seamen. The ultimate price was paid when the NNSL folded and seamen had to forfeit seafaring entirely. Whereas officers and management found employment in various branches of government or private shipping enterprises, seamen no longer had any alternatives to exploit. The dissolution of the NNSL left them without any horizons. Occasionally, Nigerian seamen still manage to sign on to foreign vessels as they pass through Lagos, but this is fairly rare. Some of the seamen interviewed nevertheless maintained a hope that seafaring can still provide a springboard for improving their economic, social, and political options. One seafarer said, “Just as you know, it is not easy to get a visa, and some of these people use this shipping work to sail abroad and then abscond. This is still going on.”12

  Nigerian seamen experienced, and subsequently evaluated, nationalism through the prism of their work as seafarers. When the move to the national lines proved ruinous, for many seamen this became a metaphor for their own plight as Nigerian nationals. As one seafarer said of the officials who managed the NNSL, “They just tarnished Nigeria’s image.”13 The rise and development of nationalist consciousness in Africa is too often studied as a process engendered by political elites within the borders of nation-states. This history of Nigerian seafaring in the transition from colonialism to independence has argued that nationalism was experienced as a process that both created and eliminated solidarities and opportunities. The history of seamen deepens our understanding of the promise that nationalism held for some Africans, and the extent to which they experienced disillusionment with its ultimate outcomes.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Diane Frost, ed., Ethnic Labour and British Imperial Trade: A History of Ethnic Seafarers in the UK (London: Cass, 1995); Frost, Work and Community among West African Migrant Workers since the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999).

  2. British shipping agents and colonial officials referred to all colonial seamen as “coloured,” thus including all seamen of African and Asian origins in this category.

  3. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003).

  4. Bill Freund, The African Worker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2.

  5. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  6. Ibid., 369–73; Monica M. van Beusekom, “From Underpopulation to Overpopulation: French Perceptions of Population, Environment, and Agricultural Development in French Soudan (Mali), 1900–1960,” Environmental History 4, no. 2 (1999): 198–221; Lynn Schler, “Historicizing the Undisclosed: Questions
of Authority and Authenticity in Writing the History of Birth in Colonial Cameroon,” Lagos Notes and Records 13 (2008): 1–34.

  7. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 54.

  8. Elliot J. Berg, “Urban Real Wages and the Nigerian Trade Union Movement, 1939–60: A Comment,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 17, no. 4 (1969): 604–17; Paul M. Lubeck, “Unions, Workers and Consciousness in Kano, Nigeria: A View from Below,” in The Development of an African Working Class: Studies in Class Formation and Action, ed. Richard Sandbrook and Robin Cohen (London: Longman, 1975), 139–60; Jon Kraus, “African Trade Unions: Progress or Poverty?” African Studies Review 19, no. 3 (1976): 95–108; Richard Sandbrook, Proletarians and African Capitalism: The Kenyan Case, 1960–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

  9. Tijani M. Yesufu, An Introduction to Industrial Relations in Nigeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 178.

  10. Elliot J. Berg and Jeffrey Butler, “Trade Unions,” in Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa, ed. James S. Coleman and Carl G. Rosberg Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 340–81.

  11. W. M. Warren, “Urban Real Wages and the Nigerian Trade Union Movement, 1939–60,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 15, no. 1 (1966): 21–36; Peter Kilby, “Industrial Relations and Wage Determination: Failure of the Anglo-Saxon Model,” Journal of Developing Areas 1, no. 4 (1967): 489–520; John F. Weeks, “A Comment on Peter Kilby: Industrial Relations and Wage Determination,” Journal of Developing Areas 3, no. 1 (1968): 7–18; Weeks, “Further Comment on the Kilby/Weeks Debate: An Empirical Rejoinder,” Journal of Developing Areas 5, no. 2 (1971): 165–74.

  12. Adrian J. Peace, Choice, Class and Conflict: A Study of Southern Nigerian Factory Workers (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979).

  13. Peter Waterman, Division and Unity amongst Nigerian Workers: Lagos Port Unionism, 1940s–60s (The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1982).

  14. Robin Cohen, Labor and Politics in Nigeria, 1945–71 (London: Heinemann, 1974).

  15. Adrian J. Peace, “The Lagos Proletariat”: Labour Aristocrats or Populist Militants?” in The Development of an African Working Class: Studies in Class Formation and Action, ed. Richard Sandbrook and Robin Cohen (London: Longman, 1975), 281.

  16. William H. Sewell Jr., “Toward a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History,” in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. Lenard R. Belanstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 15, quoted in Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1.

  17. Robin Cohen, “Resistance and Hidden Forms of Consciousness amongst African Workers,” Review of African Political Economy 7, no. 19 (1980): 8–22.

  18. See, for example, Keletso E. Atkins, The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money!: The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900 (Porstmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993).

  19. Paul M. Lubeck, Islam and Urban Labor in Northern Nigeria: The Making of a Muslim Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Lubeck, “Islamic Protest under Semi-Industrial Capitalism: ’Yan Tatsine Explained,” Africa 55, no. 4 (1985): 369–89.

  20. Carolyn A. Brown, “We Were All Slaves”: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery (London: Heinemann, 2003), 327.

  21. Lisa A. Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).

  22. Philip Bonner, Jonathan Hyslop, and Lucien Van Der Walt, “Rethinking Worlds of Labour: Southern African Labour History in International Context,” African Studies 66, nos. 2–3 (2007): 137–67.

  23. Ibid., 144.

  24. For a broader discussion of the disempowerment of rank-and-file labor in postcolonial Nigeria, see Waterman, Division and Unity amongst Nigerian Workers; Lubeck, “Unions, Workers and Consciousness”; and Peace, “Lagos Proletariat,” 281–302.

  25. Richard Roberts, “History and Memory: The Power of Statist Narratives,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 33, no. 3 (2000): 513–22.

  26. David Newman, “On Borders and Power: A Theoretical Framework,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 13–25.

  27. Susan Geiger, “Tanganyikan Nationalism as ‘Women’s Work’: Life Histories, Collective Biography and Changing Historiography,” Journal of African History 37, no. 3 (1996): 466.

  28. Jean M. Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

  29. Geiger, “Tanganyikan Nationalism,”’ 466. Meredith Terretta makes a similar argument about women’s petition writing in Cameroon. See Terretta, Petitioning for Our Rights, Fighting for Our Nation: The History of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, 1949–1960 (Mankon: Langaa, 2013).

  30. Tefetso H. Mothibe, “Zimbabwe: African Working Class Nationalism, 1957–1963,” Zambezia 23, no. 2 (1996): 157–80.

  31. Frederick Cooper, The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar Africa (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1992).

  32. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 6.

  33. Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 7–8. See also Ruth Ginio, “African Colonial Soldiers between Memory and Forgetfulness: The Case of Post-Colonial Senegal,” Outre-Mers 93, no. 350 (2006): 141–55.

  34. Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  35. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

  36. Timothy Burke, “Eyes Wide Shut: Africanists and the Moral Problematics of Postcolonial Societies,” African Studies Quarterly 7, nos. 2–3 (2003): 205–9.

  37. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 44.

  38. Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (New York: Longman, 1993), 233.

  39. J. P. Olivier de Sardan, “A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa?” Journal of Modern African Studies 37, no. 1 (1999): 44.

  40. Daniel J. Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6.

  41. For logistical reasons, in Nigeria I conducted interviews only in the area of Lagos. Many former seamen settled in Lagos after retirement, and it was therefore possible to locate a large and diverse group of informants. Although the study was limited to the greater Lagos area, the seamen interviewed represented a diverse group of ethnicities with large concentrations of Yoruba, Ijaw, and Igbo, but also included men who originated in the Middle Belt and Northern Region of Nigeria.

  CHAPTER 1: THE WORKING LIVES OF NIGERIAN SEAMEN IN THE COLONIAL ERA

  1. W. Jeffrey Bolster, “‘Every Inch a Man’: Gender in the Lives of African American Seamen, 1800–1860,” in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920, ed. Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 138.

  2. Walter Hawthorne, “Gorge: An African Seaman and His Flights from ‘Freedom’ Back to ‘Slavery’ in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 3 (2010): 416.

  3. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001).

  4. Laura Tabili, “‘A Maritime Race’: Masculinity and the Racial Division of Labor in British Merchant Ships, 1900–1939,” in Creighton and Norling, Iron Men, Wooden Women, 178.

  5. Laura Tabili, “The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925,” Journal of British St
udies 33, no. 1 (January 1994): 63.

  6. Tabili, “Maritime Race,” 180.

  7. Tabili, “Construction of Racial Difference,” 63.

  8. Tabili, “Maritime Race,” 171.

  9. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 48.

  10. Diane Frost, Work and Community among West African Migrant Workers since the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 8.

  11. Ibid., 25.

  12. Ibid., 27.

  13. Ibid., 45, 102.

  14. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 58–60.

  15. Marika Sherwood, “Elder Dempster and West Africa, 1891–c. 1940: The Genesis of Underdevelopment?” International Journal of African Historical Studies 30, no. 2 (1997): 266.

  16. Frost, Work and Community, 16–17.

  17. Sherwood, “Elder Dempster and West Africa,” 255.

  18. Paul Wood, “The History of Elder Dempster,” http://www.rakaia.co.uk/elder-dempster-history.html.

  19. Sherwood, “Elder Dempster and West Africa.”

  20. Peter N. Davies, The Trade Makers: Elder Dempster in West Africa, 1852–1972, 1973–1989, Research in Maritime History 19 (St. John’s, Newfoundland: IMEHA, 2000), 256–59.

  21. Janet J. Ewald, “Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000): 69–91.

  22. Frost, Work and Community, 47.

  23. Marika Sherwood, “Strikes! African Seamen, Elder Dempster and the Government 1940–42,” in Ethnic Labour and British Imperial Trade: A History of Ethnic Seafarers in the UK, ed. Diane Frost (London: Cass, 1995), 130. See also PRO-British National Archives, CO 859/40/2, National Union of Seamen, 13 February 1941.