ratings at much cheaper rates than in Freetown. The Nigerians were initially hired directly by representatives of the shipping companies, and came from a wide range of ethnic groups including Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw, and Urhobo. The multiethnic Nigerians lacked the deep-rooted headman system for organizing seamen that the Kru had developed over decades. During the war, the shipping companies came to see this as an advantage. There were growing concerns that the Kru recruitment system had become increasingly corrupt with the additional demand for seamen. According to Diane Frost, the Trades Union Congress Colonial Advisory Committee received a complaint from Sierra Leone during the war concerning the increasing abuses and improprieties in the system of Kru recruitment. It was claimed that the practice of bribery intensified as a result of increasing demands for labor. Thus, Frost wrote, “the Wages Board was so disturbed by the amount of bribery and corruption characteristic of headmen recruitment that it was suggested the Labour Department should take over responsibility for it.”22 Following the war, it was decided that recruitment in the ports of West Africa would be under the control of the Port Labour Board rather than headmen. Bribes were no longer allowed, and shipping companies filled vacancies on board ships through official employment exchanges.
Elder Dempster’s move to hire in Lagos was thus designed to circumvent the highly organized and increasingly corrupt Kru establishment in Freetown. Shipping companies seized upon the opportunity to cut costs by hiring in Lagos, and Elder Dempster established a four-tiered pay scale during World War II: at the bottom were Nigerians recruited in Nigeria, then Africans recruited in Freetown, then Africans employed from Liverpool, and finally European seamen who were paid the National Maritime Board rates.23 The discrimination Nigerians faced did not go unnoticed by seamen, as one recalled, “In the shipping world, we were the most poorly paid seamen.”24 Sierra Leone officials complained to the Colonial Office that Elder Dempster’s new methods of recruiting “cheap labour” in Lagos were “deplorable,” and left many skilled seamen in Freetown without jobs.25 Officials in Lagos, on the other hand, were highly supportive of the move. The 1942 governor of Nigeria, Sir Alan Burns, did not see any reason to protest the cheap wages, and instead expressed great enthusiasm for Elder Dempster’s new hiring policy. He wrote, “The development which has taken place is natural and inevitable and provides opportunities of employment for the more adventurous spirits in Nigerian which cannot well be denied them.”26
But while the Nigerians were a cheap alternative, hired to undercut Kru wages and terms of employment, the shipping companies initially paid a price for the lack of experience that characterized Nigerian crews in the early years. Many Nigerians recruited during the war lacked the knowledge and training required to successfully fulfill their responsibilities on board.
In some cases, recruits claimed that they were completely uninformed or even misled by shipping companies about the work for which they were being recruited. In one archival account, two Nigerian boys at the age of secondary school jumped ship in Liverpool and were eventually intercepted by an immigration officer, who reported, “They told me they were recruited by Elder Dempster. A Mr. Dyson, a European employed by the Company, came to their homes and told them that the Government needed men to go on ships and suggested to them that they might like to take the journey to England.”27 Fresh recruits such as these were completely lacking in skills needed on board, and some captains began to complain about the new hiring policy.28 Ships were slowed down or nearly stalled at sea when inexperienced Nigerian firemen did not feed the boilers properly. As one Kru seaman recounted, a British captain who went to recruit in Lagos during a wartime strike in Freetown paid dearly for taking on the inexperienced Nigerian crew: “Was a captain called J. J. Smith of Elder Dempster, he said, okay if Sierra Leoneans don’t want the job, I’m taking my ships to Nigeria—took all the ships to Nigeria to start taking Nigerians. This Elder Dempster got three sister ships with 21 fires. So these Nigerian they can’t stand it, they can’t fire the ships! From Lagos to Takoradi, they don’t fit. They have to send to Freetown back.”29
ROUTINE AND RISKS IN THE AFRICAN SEAMAN’S WORK
As employees of British shipping companies in the colonial era, Nigerian seamen performed a range of duties on board cargo vessels and passenger ships known as mail boats. The workforce of the steamship was divided into three distinct crews: sailors on deck, firemen and trimmers in the engine room, and stewards in the catering and housekeeping departments.30 The three departments were strictly demarcated, and seamen were trained for specific positions.
According to Diane Frost, most of the Africans recruited for work on European vessels worked as deckhands, which included both maintenance chores and cargo handling. Deckhands did stevedoring work, which involved loading and discharging cargo at ports of call. Before the container shipping industry emerged in the 1960s, boxes and bundles of goods of various types and sizes were used to transport cargo, and despite some technical innovations involving derricks and winches, the system was slow and inefficient. The labor-intensive process could take several days, and ships could spend more time at port than at sea while dockers and seamen unloaded and loaded cargo. Upon arriving in port, deckhands removed the hatches, rigged the booms and falls, and began the work of swinging the ship’s cargo out upon the pier. Prior to the mechanization of the loading and unloading processes, seamen also carried cargo on and off vessels. As soon as compartments were emptied and cleaned, crews began loading the outbound freight that was waiting on the pier. The coal gang took on the laborious task of filling the ship bunkers with the fuel.31 Although considered unskilled labor, the work of cargo handlers was at times very dangerous and required caution in dealing with the machinery moving heavy loads. Seamen could be seriously injured, crushed to death, or knocked overboard by loads that were poorly secured or mishandled. Some seamen interviewed described the difficulty of handling cargo on deck in the bitter cold of winter in Europe.32 In West Africa, African deckhands were hired “to save white seamen from exposure to the sun and mosquito-infested swamps.”33 While at sea, deckhands worked on upkeep and repair of the ship, with chores including painting, overhauling gear, rust removal, and cleaning. Scrubbing the deck was also a task performed each morning. Diane Frost described a job that was known as holystoning “because the men cleaning the deck did it on their knees. The decks were sprinkled with water and then sand. Krooboys would kneel four abreast (if the ship was wide enough), each kneeling on a small pad, and push up and down a piece of sandstone the size of a house brick.”34
The work of the stewards and catering crews varied with the size and type of ship. Cargo ships needed only a small catering department that was responsible for feeding the crew. On passenger ships, the responsibilities of the stewards were far more extensive, but most of the work centered around housekeeping and personal service. Stewards cleaned cabins, did laundry, and attended to the personal needs of passengers when necessary. They also prepared and served food, and cleaned up afterward. While these jobs were less dangerous and demanding than those of deckhands, stewards were exposed to demeaning attitudes of passengers and European crews. This could be seen in the following description of an African steward by a British ocean-liner passenger: “The first-cabin passenger is apt to look upon the steward as not exactly human. To him the steward is an automaton who serves deftly and silently, appears at the right moment, anticipates wants, and when not wanted keeps out of sight, but within call.”35
The seamen who worked “down below” were responsible for the boiler rooms and coal bunkers. Work in the engine rooms was the most physically challenging on the ship. The firemen were responsible for firing the boilers and keeping up steam by shoveling coal into the furnaces. Firemen worked in two four-hour shifts, four hours on and eight hours off. Stoking a steam engine with coal was dirty work, and firemen and trimmers were known as the “Black Gang” because of their work with the coal.36 As Laura Tabili described it, the engine room was “hotter than hell,” and had up to twenty boilers with three to four fires each. At each boiler worked a fireman, who threw coals on the fire and sliced them with a hundred-pound iron bar to keep them burning.37 A 1900 account of the firemen’s work describes the perils of the engine room:
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