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:
A stoker works four hours at a stretch, and during that time the temperature of his surroundings varies from 120 degrees to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. One stoker usually has four furnaces to attend to, and while feeding one furnace a man has to be extremely careful or his arm may be burned by the furnace behind him. As a rule a man is occupied about three minutes at each furnace, and directly he has finished he rushes to the air pipe and waits until his turn comes again. The intense heat of the furnaces has sometimes rendered stokers temporarily insane, and there are many cases on record where they have jumped overboard after having made their way to the deck.38
For every three firemen, the stokehold watch carried two coal trimmers, who provided coal to the firemen and had to work quickly to make sure that there was always a pile of coal within reach of the fireman’s shovel. Trimmers had the most difficult job of all, working quickly to supply firemen with a constant supply of coal while struggling with the heat and coal dust. A British seaman, David Simpson, gave a vivid description of their work: “Trimmers have always had the dirtiest and the most physically demanding jobs on the ship—the absolute bottom of the engineering hierarchy. Needless to say—they received the lowest pay.”39 Trimmers would wheelbarrow the coal from the bunkers and drop it on plates at the firemen’s feet. They were in constant motion, moving coal and “trimming” each pile into evenly arranged groupings, ready for the fireman’s shovel. They also took away ash and raked out the ashpits and fires, cleaned and degreased machinery, and painted the engine room when necessary. In short, trimmers did “any unpleasant and filthy job you can think of that didn’t require the touch of a skilled or semi-skilled rating.”40 The trimmers’ responsibilities kept them working even when the ship docked, as Simpson explained: “While in port, most of the crew could count on ‘going ashore’ at one time or another—and blow off a little steam. Unfortunately for the trimmers, when the ship is ‘bunkering,’ they had to stow the coal being loaded and trim as the coal was loaded and moved about—with nothing more than a wet rag tied over their face to keep the choking dust out of their lungs. All, of course, under the watchful eye of the chief engineer.”41
The division of labor on board ships on Europe-Africa routes was largely determined by race. Until the final years of colonialism, and the establishment of the Nigerian National Shipping Line (NNSL), the officers in each of the departments were Europeans. In the engine room, the chief engineer and the second, third, and fourth engineers were all Europeans. On deck, the chief mate, as well as the first, second, and third mates and the boatswain and carpenters, was also European. Finally, in the catering department, there was a European chief steward, second steward, and cook.42 In the colonial era, the vast majority of Africans worked as ordinary seamen, stewards, firemen, and trimmers, and virtually no Africans rose to the rank of officer before the final years of colonial rule.43 As will be seen in chapter 5, the lack of officer training among Africans in the colonial era meant that initially Europeans had to fill the top-ranking positions on the ships of the Nigerian National Shipping Line. The establishment of the national line finally opened the way for large numbers of Nigerian seamen to become officers, but it took several years before any ships were fully under the command of Nigerians, leaving some ratings to wonder what had actually changed.
Throughout the colonial era, African seamen worked on the average ten hours a day, with the workday beginning at 5:00 a.m. and finishing normally at 5:00 p.m. Hours varied with the types