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 financially, it was the allure and intrigue of meeting new people and seeing new places that seamen associated most centrally with the core of the seamen’s existence. The exploration of foreign lands and the bonding across geographic and cultural spaces provided seamen with a sort of spiritual compensation for their hard work and meager salaries. Seamen sought to re-create home wherever they were, and many spoke with great pride of their foreign wives and children in ports scattered across the world. The social bonds formed during their travels became the self-fashioned cornerstone of each individual’s identification with a seaman’s lifestyle.
Nigerian seamen’s encounters with the work and lifestyle of seafaring thus nurtured a unique cosmopolitanism. But this exposure to cosmopolitanism also taught them the power of national identities and the hierarchies of the passports that accompanied them. Seamen were thus poised to engage with the nationalist fervor that grew in Nigeria during the post–World War II era, but they did so from their position as seamen. The demand for indigenization was a central focus of the nationalist elite, and included calls for the indigenization of shipping through the establishment of the Nigerian National Shipping Line. Seamen measured and appropriated nationalist ideology through the prism of the national shipping venture, and they equated the end of colonialism with the “Nigerianization” of shipping. Seamen could finally imagine a sense of home and belonging on board Nigerian ships, and they were enticed by the NNSL promise of higher wages and an end to discriminatory practices toward African seamen. Thus, the “freedom dreams” of working-class seamen in the era of nationalist organizing were starkly different from those of the political elite.3
For these seamen who had invested much hope in the outcome of decolonization, optimism quickly gave way to discontent and disappointment with the Nigerian national line. The Nigerian government was never fully committed to the success of the NNSL, and from the outset, politicians refrained from taking the necessary financial and legislative steps that would protect and bolster the enterprise. While the establishment of the national line was extolled as a vital step in freeing the Nigerian economy from colonial exploitation, this ideological support was not enough to ensure its success. Mismanagement and a lack of technical expertise perpetually plagued the enterprise, and company resources were slowly