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,
