working classes are those wage-earners who stand in a consistently subordinate relationship in the industrial mode of production, whose surplus product is appropriated by those who own the means of production . . . and who on the basis of this relationship can identify a common opposition to their own economic interests and act accordingly.”15
The commitment to the classic narrative of proletarianization in African labor history began to unravel in the wake of widespread disillusionment with socialist regimes both inside and outside Africa at the end of the 1970s. The corrolary weakening of labor movements at the end of the twentieth century led to a general crisis in labor studies, as William Sewell has noted, “because the organized working class seems less and less likely to perform the liberating role assigned to it . . . the study of working class history has lost some of its urgency.”16 It was increasingly evident that Africans had not been transformed into a revolutionary proletariat even when engaged in wage labor within capitalist enterprises. In addition, universalist conceptions were challenged by the growing body of literature focusing on local meanings for productivity and materiality. As Robin Cohen conceded in 1980, the major weakness of research into African working classes was the uncritical adoption of “traditional formula dichotomies,” and a narrow focus on strikes and unionization, with no attention to the ways in which local cultural and social influences shaped labor consciousness.17
Post-structural criticisms cast doubt on the applicability of Marxist analysis to African contexts, and the growing discomfort with universalist categories led many historians to avoid class all together as a category of analysis. But rather than joining the retreat from the study of labor, some scholars have mobilized post-structural and postcolonial critiques to revisit materialist perspectives in African histories, and thus reinstate class as a valuable means of historical analysis. Recent studies are grounded in specific cultural and social contexts, and describe the ways in which African laborers have negotiated class interests in dialogue with ethnic, religious, regional, and gender-based alliances.18 There is a more complex understanding of the interactions and contestations that exist between capitalist and noncapitalist sectors, and the multiplicity of strategies and ideologies leveraged by laborers. These are timely efforts, especially in the face of the gradual slide of working classes toward economic, political, and social marginalization in recent decades. African labor has experienced persistent poverty, failed schemes of development, and disempowerment, and there is a pressing need for more research on the ways in which African workers have lived, interpreted, and responded to their changing material and political circumstances. We need to better understand the diverse histories and cultures of work in Africa, and the impact that broader processes have had on African working lives over time.
In the Nigerian context, recent scholarship demonstrates that there is much to be gained from a reinvigorated focus on the working class. Several studies focused on the experiences and perspectives of labor have informed us of how work and productivity take on meaning and operate in specific social and cultural contexts. This can be seen in Paul Lubeck’s work, which examined the coexistence of precapitalist and capitalist social and economic institutions in postcolonial Kano. Lubeck found that Koranic students and malams constituted a vocal and influential subgroup within the industrial proletariat. Rather than occupying a separate sphere, Lubeck claimed, the ideologies and social practices of Islamic institutions articulated with capitalism and shaped class consciousness.19 Carolyn Brown’s study of coal miners in the Enugu Colliery during the colonial era also emphasized the role played by local culture in the construction of work regimes, class consciousness, and organizing among Igbo miners. According to Brown, Igbo miners drew upon local ideologies, cultural practices, and economic spheres to negotiate “what they would and would not do” in the face of exploitative structures in the mines.20 Finally, Lisa Lindsay examined the impact of wage earning on the construction of gendered identities and roles among Yoruba railway workers and their wives in southern Nigeria. Similarly to Brown, Lindsay argued that local notions of gender were resilient in the face of colonial modernizing projects, and shaped the ways in which working classes and their families navigated the colonial workforce.21
Taken together, these contributions affirm that the ideologies, experiences, and identities of African working classes cannot be understood outside of the local contexts from which they emerged. Each of these groups of laborers resisted or modified the process of proletarianization within the context of the Islamic, Igbo, or Yoruba cultural and social institutions in which they operated. At the same time, the focus on a specific regional and cultural context has made it difficult to problematize the role of ethnicity in the construction of consciousness among the Nigerian working class, or to offer an alternative to the trope of ethnicity that has dominated the study of Nigeria in the past and present. As seamen were drawn from a broad range of ethnic groups and did not share a common cultural or social foundation, their experiences provide an alternative case study that can further complicate our understanding of the experiences of postcolonial labor in Nigeria. Among the socially diverse group of seamen, it will be seen that the lack of ethnic cohesion gave birth to new types of solidarities and conflicts within this one sector of the working class in the postcolonial era.
The focus on seamen can further deepen and broaden our understanding of labor in the national context of Nigeria by including a transnational perspective in the examination of working-class lives. Leading scholars in the field of labor history have argued that a major limitation of classical labor history in Africa was that most studies were confined to the boundaries of national histories. As Philip Bonner, Jonathan Hyslop, and Lucien Van Der Walt argued, when national borders define the unit of analysis in the history of labor, we lose sight of the regional or transnational solidarities that often shape and define working-class identities and organizing.22 Bonner and his coauthors advocate for a transnational approach to labor history, which “does not accept that its field of enquiry should stop at the ‘national’ border, or that a ‘national’ unit is self-evident, or necessarily a particularly useful unit of analysis.”23 This investigation into the experiences of Nigerian seamen confirms that a transnational perspective can be imperative for understanding African working-class histories. Beginning with an analysis of the transcontinental migrations and cosmopolitan lifestyles that characterized seamen’s working lives, the narrative that unfolds problematizes and destabilizes the nation-state as a fixed context of analysis in the study of African labor. As will be seen, seamen’s working lives were deeply shaped by the broader histories of British imperialism and the black diaspora. Their organized struggles and working lives were inherently connected to the ideological currents and social ties linking communities across what Paul Gilroy has called the “Black Atlantic.” Seamen’s ties to the black diaspora provide rare insights into working-class expressions of Pan-Africanism. But as will be seen, seamen also forged bonds that cut across boundaries of race. Seamen’s organized and individual struggles exposed the broad array of cultural, religious, and ideological discourses that attracted them, inspired them, and shaped their worldviews.
This was not an unbridled process, and as discussed later in this book, nationalism and nationalization became hegemonic forces that slowly ruled out these transnational alliances. The broader context of decolonization was characterized by the triumph of European capitalist interests and their African elite collaborators in constructing a postcolonial future favoring and protecting elite economic and political interests at the expense of rank-and-file labor. As several scholars have shown, African working classes have continually confronted limitations on their ability to assemble and exploit solidarities when these have come into direct conflict with the political and ideological agendas of power elites.24 Thus, in the era of decolonization, African labor was corralled into allegiances reflecting the political programs of the African power elite in collusion with colonial capitalist interests. Both local and transnational imaginaries lost ground to the nationalist perspectives, and it was ultimately the nation-state that became the preeminent framework within which class struggles were negotiated and fought in the postcolonial era.25 Thus, only by maintaining an awareness of seamen’s transnational experiences and perspectives can we more fully appreciate the ways in which Nigerian seamen experienced the rise of nationalism and the bordering processes that accompanied it.26
