Nation on Board. Lynn Schler

Ships were used by captains and management for personal gain, and seamen were forbidden to conduct their own trade. In the context of their employment in the NNSL, seamen encountered a new set of prejudices based on ethnic rivalries and injustices around new forms of corruption and exploitation. The seamen, who had once seen themselves as “workers of the world,” ultimately found themselves without employment or prospects as the Nigerian National Shipping Line underwent liquidation in the early 1990s. Just as seamen had embraced nationalism from the prism of seafaring, so, too, did they evaluate the outcome of decolonization through their experiences as seamen, and disillusionment with the NNSL was translated into a broader critique of corruption and inequality in postcolonial Nigeria.

      REVISITING AFRICAN LABOR HISTORY

      Nation on Board: Becoming Nigerian at Sea signifies a return to labor history, a field that has been largely neglected in the historiography of Africa over the last two decades. While historians attributed a crucial role to working-class organizations and struggles in the years leading up to independence, labor has slowly disappeared from histories of the postcolonial era. The move away from labor and working classes as categories of analysis is apparent not only in the field of African history, but can be seen as part of a general departure from a strict materialist agenda across the social sciences in the last two decades. This was not always the case in the field of African studies. To measure the sea of change that has taken place, one needs only to recall the 1984 proclamation of Bill Freund: “No subject has in recent years so intruded into the scholarly literature on Africa as the African worker. Labor has become a fundamental issue to those who seek to develop African economies or to revolutionize African polities. The elucidation and debate about the relationship of labor to historical and social issues is currently under way over an impressive range of places and a number of languages.”⁴

      Beginning in the colonial era, labor became a focus of Western research in Africa, but early studies produced on African workers and productivity were permeated with the colonial agenda. Particularly from the 1930s, European regimes advanced increasingly complex development schemes, and the need to extract labor from Africans became more pressing.⁵ Colonial officials commissioned sociologists and demographers to study the cultures, migration patterns, living quarters, and birth rates of African workers in an effort to maximize their productivity.⁶ In the postwar era, African working classes came under more scrutiny as labor movements played an increasingly prominent role in anticolonial agitation. European officials sanctioned the formation of trade unions in an effort to contain the discontent.⁷ These concessions were not enough to quell the unrest, and, by 1960, organized labor and working classes had joined broad-based nationalist movements to successfully negotiate a transfer of power. Historians of nationalist movements throughout the continent have highlighted the pivotal role played by African labor unions in the transition from colonialism to independence.

      In the first decades of independence, labor continued to draw the attention of historians and sociologists in Africa, with research deeply shaped by both Marxist ideology and an idenitification with the nationalist agendas of postcolonial states in Africa. Trade unions were seen as the uncontested representatives of working classes, while their role in nation-building was scrutinized and debated.⁸ The conceptualization of these histories remained faithful to a universalist narrative of proletarianization, and evidence of solidarities among laboring constituencies that were not class-based were deemed to require analysis and explanation. By the 1970s and 1980s, “labor” became one of the most researched fields within African history.

      Within this broader field, Nigeria played a prominent role as the site of some of the most influential studies produced on African labor in this era. Research in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the evolution of wage labor from the colonial era through independence, and was generally preoccupied with evaluating the effectiveness of the proletariat in organizing against economic and political exploitation. Tijani Yesufu’s pioneering work was one of the first broad studies of the evolution of industrial relations from the late colonial era into independence in Africa. Yesufu evaluated the extent to which joint consultation and collective bargaining had taken root in employee-employer relations in Nigeria. Using Great Britain as his model, he explained Nigeria’s failure to evolve according to the principles of industrial democracy as “problems of adolescence.”⁹ Most of the subsequent work focused on Nigerian labor unions themselves, and scholars engaged in heated exchanges concerning the role unions played in advancing pro-labor legislation. This debate was set off by a 1964 article by Elliot Berg and Jeffrey Butler, who claimed that Western scholars had highly exaggerated the role that trade unions played in advancing the political agendas of African working classes.¹⁰ A dispute around the significance of trade union organizing ensued, and the General Strike of 1964 in Nigeria provided fodder for scholars on both sides of the issue. W. M. Warren and Peter Kilby each argued that unions had indeed played an effective role in the achievement of wage increases, while John Weeks countered that unions were fairly limited in their ability to pressure the government on the issue of wage legislation.¹¹ Other studies looked at specific sectors of the working class in an effort to understand the nature and significance of working-class activism. In an in-depth examination of shop-floor organizing among factory workers in Lagos, Adrian Peace concluded that urban working classes were most effective when they mobilized against their specific employers for better working conditions.¹² Peter Waterman’s study of worker organization at the Port Authority of Lagos attempted to understand how conservatism among dockworkers prevented the emergence of broad alliances among working classes.¹³ Robin Cohen’s seminal work, Labor and Politics in Nigeria, 1945–71, provided a broad view of the relationship between wage earners and working classes in transition from colonialism to independence, and concluded that unions could claim “occasional” successes in the struggle for higher wages.¹⁴ Theoretical and empirical differences notwithstanding, all these studies adopted a strict Marxist perspective from which to examine and evaluate the role of organized labor in Nigeria. As Adrian Peace wrote, “The Nigerian 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