initial imaginary of these African seamen was a romantic one, as I envisioned adventurous men traversing seas and cultures and social landscapes, leaving their indelible mark along the way as evidenced in the popular memory of Doualans. Opportunities such as these for transnational mobility were extremely rare among working-class Africans in the colonial era, and I was deeply curious about the worlds that opened up to seamen in the course of their travels. At the same time, as a historian of colonialism in West Africa, I was also keenly aware of the ways in which seamen’s status as colonial subjects must have shaped and limited the freedoms and opportunities they enjoyed in the course of their travels. While seamen were extraordinarily unique among colonial subjects in Africa for their experiences of transnational mobility, I believed that research into the history of their lives on and off colonial vessels could shed new light onto the ways in which colonialism shaped and limited the opportunities of African subjects.
The early stages of research into Nigerian seafaring in the colonial era confirmed this anticipated trajectory. Beginning in World War II, British shipping companies began the mass recruitment of African seamen in Lagos. From the very start, Nigerian seamen’s entrance into the colonial shipping industry was characterized by contradictory experiences. On the one hand, these seamen were cast as cheap and unskilled labor performing menial tasks on vessels where hierarchies of class intersected with hierarchies of race. Both on board with European crews and offshore among local populations, seamen experienced discrimination and hardships that characterized the experiences of black working classes across the Atlantic World in the post–World War II era. At the same time, transnational travel opened up a world of opportunities that seamen were quick to seize. To supplement meager wages, many developed a lucrative business as traders of secondhand goods. Offshore hours also provided seamen with opportunities to encounter cultural and social landscapes far removed from Nigeria, and many nurtured relationships that traversed racial and ethnic boundaries. Thus, as unskilled labor in the workforce of the colonial shipping industry, Nigerian seamen confronted discrimination and poor working conditions on the one hand, but they also exploited numerous opportunities for both adventure and personal gain on the other.
Although my focus was the colonial era, numerous interviews with former Nigerian seamen quickly revealed that seamen’s life stories and experiences were not molded by colonialism alone. Moreover, I was surprised to hear many of those interviewed describing colonialism as an idealized era that had been lost. While seamen acknowledged the discrimination they suffered on board British ships, most remembered their employment on colonial vessels as years of golden opportunities, justice, and propriety. In fact, seamen described their most poignant experiences with injustice and disempowerment as taking place following the transition from colonialism to independence. In the postindependence era, seamen in Lagos were no longer recruited directly by British shipping companies, and many took up employment with the Nigerian National Shipping Line (NNSL). Inspired by nationalist fervor, seamen were initially optimistic about the creation of the national line, and many hoped that conditions would be more favorable aboard Nigerian ships. But a lack of sufficient resources and mismanagement doomed the venture, and seamen ultimately experienced deep disappointment with the move to the NNSL. The bitter disillusionment these seamen experienced in the context of their work in the postcolonial era impacted the ways in which seamen remembered and described colonialism. It became clear to me that the history of Nigerian seafaring in the colonial era could not be studied in isolation from postcolonial experiences.
Seamen’s testimonies thus led me to reshape the focus and scope of the project. Rather than a history of colonialism, this book evolved into a working-class perspective on decolonization, nationalization, and the meaning of the “postcolonial” for labor in Nigeria. By looking at the history of Nigerian seafaring from the colonial period through independence, I could gain a better perspective on how seamen experienced and interpreted the broader strokes of Nigerian history over the last sixty years. The history and life stories of Nigerian seamen provide poignant testimony into the complex and contested process experienced by working classes while “becoming Nigerian.”
What follows is a history of Nigerian seafaring from the late colonial period of the 1950s through the processes of decolonization and the first decades of independence in Nigeria. The aim is to provide a working-class perspective on the critical developments and transitions of this volatile period in the modern history of Africa. While histories of the end of colonialism abound, they often privilege a familiar trajectory. They outline the anticolonial struggles of Westernized African politicians, European concessions, and a negotiated transition to the establishment of independent nation-states. Much has been written about the ways in which elite interests, both African and European, were protected in this process. Largely missing from this narrative are the working classes and their perspectives and experiences on the end of colonialism, the promise of nationalism, and the significance of independence.
AN OVERVIEW ON NIGERIAN SEAFARING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
From the very beginning of international shipping between Africa, Europe, and the New World, Africans were employed on merchant vessels as crewmen. Particularly from the eighteenth century onward, the increase in commercial traffic on these routes led to the large-scale recruitment of Africans on European ships, serving as a cheaper and more efficient alternative to white sailors, who suffered from the tropical climate and its associated diseases.1 “Coloured” seamen2 engaged in ports throughout the British Empire were paid considerably lower rates than white seamen, and shipping companies increasingly exploited this cheap source of labor. From the era of the slave trade until the outbreak of World War II, the vast majority of Africans who worked on European vessels were Kru sailors recruited in Freetown, Sierra Leone. As the forerunners in the evolution of a pool of seafaring labor in West Africa, the Kru exploited colonial dependency upon them to establish relatively favorable conditions of employment for African seamen.
The Second World War changed the hiring practices of shipping giants such as Elder Dempster, which controlled the lion’s share of cargo, mail, and passenger shipping between the United Kingdom and the West African coast. The war greatly increased demands on the company, and the need for seamen was acute. Hiring was moved to Nigeria, where Elder Dempster could sign on inexperienced fresh recruits for salaries lower than those of the Kru. Nigerian recruits came from a wide range of ethnic groups spanning southern Nigeria, and they lacked the social and cultural cohesion that had facilitated Kru labor organizing over the years. Colonial shipping companies exploited the Nigerians’ lack of experience and organization, and paid Lagos recruits considerably lower wages than the Kru. Elder Dempster established a four-tiered pay scale during the war: At the bottom of the scale were the Nigerians signed on in Lagos, followed by the Kru recruited in Freetown. The third level of pay was given to Africans employed from Liverpool, while the highest salaries were reserved for European seamen, who were paid the National Maritime Board rates.
Thus, seamen recruited in Nigeria were embraced by colonial shipping companies as the cheap alternative to the Kru, with the additional benefit of being inexperienced in labor contract negotiating. But Nigerian seamen did not accept this inferior status passively, and they immediately sought ways to improve the conditions and benefits of their work. They soon formed the Nigerian Union of Seamen and began agitating for better working conditions. Seamen also exploited unofficial channels and opportunities to improve their lot. The primary source of additional income was the independent trade conducted by seamen, and most men leveraged whatever resources they had to engage in this trade. In Europe, seamen bought a wide variety of secondhand goods for resale in Africa, such as electronics, kitchen appliances, furniture, mattresses, ceramic goods, clothing, tires, and even used cars. Seamen nurtured and negotiated their relations with captains, immigration officers, customs officials, dockers, European retailers, African customers, and fellow crewmates in order to ensure their ability to buy, transport, and sell goods from one continent to another, and seamen had to continually adapt their activities to changing circumstances. Trading was a vital aspect of seamen’s activities, and proof of seamen’s ability to creatively and autonomously improve their financial standing.
While independent trade sustained seamen
