subjects were now hired to fill lower-status positions on board, and a new industrial division of labor emerged. Following the conversion to steam engines, up to 50 percent of African crewmen were engaged in jobs not traditionally found on sailing ships: stoking the engine, housekeeping, and catering. Many seamen deprecated these new shipboard tasks as less than proper seafaring.4
The segregation of African crews into jobs that did not require seafaring skills or training largely erased the “rough equality”5 described on sailing ships. From the beginning of the twentieth century, labor hierarchies on board steamships were entrenched in colonial racial ideologies. It was argued that “coloured” men from the tropics were better suited for jobs such as firemen in the engine room, as they were naturally more capable than whites to handle the heat. “Coloured” seamen engaged in ports throughout the British Empire were paid considerably lower rates than white seamen, receiving one-third to one-fifth of a British seaman’s wage, and took on jobs perceived as menial, unskilled, and feminine.6 From the beginning of the twentieth century, the unraveling of British maritime dominance as a result of growing international competition only intensified the desire to cut costs by underpaying colonial seamen.7
Nigerian seamen, whose recruitment began during World War II, thus entered a world of shipping that had largely erased any kind of benefits enjoyed by black seamen in the Age of Sail. The working lives of Nigerian seamen in the late colonial era bore the political and ideological imprints of colonialism. Nigerian crews were employed on ships where race largely determined the division of labor and shipboard hierarchies. Difficult working conditions and discrimination ultimately led them to organize their own union, but this body had little success as an effective advocate for improving working conditions. Thus, Nigerian seamen shared a solidarity with colonial seamen recruited throughout the British Empire, united by a political and historical relationship of colonial subordination.8 This chapter will outline the beginnings of Nigerian seafaring on British vessels from the end of World War II. We will review the historical circumstances that led to widespread hiring in Lagos, the jobs that seamen performed and the working conditions on board colonial ships, problems of prejudice and discrimination that characterized the working lives of these seamen in the late colonial era, and the early efforts at organizing a Nigerian seamen’s union.
RECRUITING NIGERIANS: HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND
European vessels arriving in West Africa in the era of the slave trade were met by fleets of canoes manned by African mariners occupying the coastal regions. Historical records recount the respect and surprise of European seamen at the skillful handling of canoes that enabled Africans to navigate waterways that were impassable by European deep-sea ships.9 Certain groups stood out for their competence as mariners and began supplying European crews additional deckhands, navigators, and interpreters. In particular, the Kru, inhabitants of the Liberian coast, impressed the Europeans as expert boatmen, and by the eighteenth century became the main source of local recruits on European ships. Although originating from a heterogeneous collection of fisherman clans on the coast of Liberia, the seamen recruited from this region for work on foreign vessels were commonly identified by European merchants as “Kru.” This labeling took on official status by the Liberian government’s recognition of the Kru ethnic group in the nineteenth century.10 The emergence of the Kru social construct thus represents the earliest coalescing of African identities and social groupings around maritime employment. The Kru were employed on steamships as deckhands and stevedores moving cargo from ship to shore, and later as firemen and stokers on deep-sea steamships.11 European shipping companies eventually became reliant on these African seamen, and most ships from Europe would stop in Freetown to pick up Kru coal handlers, deckhands, and firemen before continuing down the coast.12
The Kru in turn exploited this dependence. They controlled the supply of seamen through a system of labor recruitment based on a headman and his apprentices. Headmen acted as middlemen between seamen and their employers, recruiting laborers from the interior and negotiating terms of employment. Headmen decided who went to sea and for how long, took care of lodging and food, and represented their apprentices in any grievances. The system opened the door to many abuses, and the colonial administration received complaints that crewmen were forced to pay large bribes to headmen in order to get employment on ships. In some cases, in the initial period of employment, the headmen earned the wages of the young men in training and thus amassed considerable wealth and influence for themselves. Headmen took pains to develop personal relations with European captains, who would in turn give them preferential treatment in the process of recruitment. Shipping companies also paid headmen large sums for providing labor. The system was well entrenched by the beginning of the twentieth century, enabling the Kru to establish a near monopoly on the supply of seafaring labor until the Second World War. It was not only the headmen who benefited, and years of specialization and efficient organizing enabled the headmen to continually negotiate for improved terms of employment for all the African crew engaged in Freetown. This earned the Kru a position of relative prosperity, symbolized by the fact that Kru women were never allowed to work outside the home in petty trading or market work, as most other Freetown women did.13
Until the period following World War II, European shipping companies overwhelmingly favored this system of labor recruitment based in Freetown because it passed the responsibility for monitoring the labor supply, crew behavior, and work supervision onto the Kru headmen and away from them as employers. The preference for this arrangement substantiates Fred Cooper’s claim that European economic interests prior to World War II preferred to cast African labor in a tribal mold, and argued that even workers migrating to the city should remain subordinated to Native authorities. In proposing that labor remain linked to “a traditional African way of life,” employers and the colonial administration could avoid taking responsibility for masses of “detribalized” Africans.14 Likewise, rather than acknowledging the proletarianization of the Kru as laborers in a modern, industrialized economy, and thereby clearing the way for potential demands for workers’ rights and benefits, the system of headmen and apprentices enabled shipping companies to abdicate their responsibility for the newly born African working class. Within this model of preserving a premodern workforce, there was no room for trade unions, and British shipping companies, led by the Liverpool-based giant Elder Dempster, refused employment to union members up until World War II.15
From the end of the nineteenth century, the Elder Dempster company controlled the lion’s share of cargo, mail, and passenger shipping between the United Kingdom and the West African coast.16 Elder Dempster was founded by Alfred Jones, a one-time clerk who slowly rose to managerial positions in the African Steamship Company in Liverpool. Over the course of the years 1884–1891, Jones gradually orchestrated the merger of six smaller shipping companies to form what would ultimately be known as the Elder Dempster Lines.17 The shipping company was one of the largest in UK history and, in addition to operating hundreds of deep-sea vessels, also provided small-vessel services to transport cargo and passengers from inland, riverside bases to and between coastal ports. By the time of his death in 1909, Alfred Jones had led Elder Dempster in the establishment of an extensive and integrated transport and storage infrastructure throughout West Africa.18 The company held a monopoly for carrying mail and coal between the UK and West Africa, and, in addition to shipping, held large interests in banking, agriculture, and the trade in oil, coal, and cement.19 By 1925, Elder Dempster had a share of 85 percent of the West African Shipping Conference, which controlled all trade to and from West Africa.
Until the outbreak of World War II, Elder Dempster routinely recruited the Kru of Freetown as supplemental labor for their ships. But the war increased demands on the company, as their headquarters in the port cities of West Africa oversaw ship repairs, in addition to handling the increase in cargo activity associated with the war.20 Janet Ewald has argued that in times of hardship, European shipping companies historically sought out fresh sources of “coloured” seamen to recruit throughout the maritime world, and tapped them to offset rising costs of labor.21 The acute need for seamen pushed Elder Dempster to begin hiring in Nigeria, where the company could
