Carolyn A. Brown

Shifting Boundaries between Free and Unfree Labor: Introduction

In 1905, Henry Nevinson, at the time a well-known British journalist, visited Angola. He discovered that the slave trade was still going on in secret in that region, many years after it had officially been abolished. Deep inside Southern Africa slaves were caught; they were forced to walk hundreds of miles to the coast until they arrived at Katumbella, where “the slaves were rested, sorted out, dressed, and then taken on over the fifteen miles to Benguela, usually disguised as ordinary carriers.” In Benguelas main street, there is a government office where the official representative of the “Central Committee of Labor and Emigration for the Islands” (having its headquarters in Lisbon) sits in state, and under due forms of law receives the natives, who enter one door as slaves and go out of another as servicaes . Everything is correct. The native, who has usually been torn from his home far in the interior, perhaps as much as eight hundred miles away, and already sold twice, is asked by an interpreter if it is his wish to go to [the island of] San Thome, or to undertake some other form of service to a new master. Of course he answers, “Yes.” It is quite unnecessary to suppose, as most people suppose, that the interpreter always asks such questions as, “Do you like to fish?” or “Will you have a drink?” though one of the best scholars in the languages of the interior has himself heard those questions asked at an official inspection of servicaes on board ship. It would be unnecessary for the interpreter to invent such questions. If he asked, “Is it your wish to go to hell? ” the servical would say “yes” just the same. In fact, throughout this part of Africa the name of San Thome is becoming identical with hell, and when a man has been brought hundreds of miles from his home by an unknown road and through long tracts of “hungry country”—when he also knows that if he did get back he would probably be sold again or killed —what else can he answer but “yes”? Under similar circumstances the Archbishop of Canterbury would answer the same. The servical says “yes,” and so sanctions the contract for his labor. The decencies of law and order are respected.

The Dialectics of Colonial Labour Control: Class Struggles in the Nigerian Coal Industry, 1914-1949

This paper is a case study of the labour movement at the Enugu Government Colliery, Nigeria from its opening in 1914 until a massacre of 21 striking miners in 1949. It focuses on the emergence of worker consciousness in a context of overlapping ethnic and class-based affiliations and its expression in acts of collective and individual protest. The workers struggled against a complex system of labour control emanating from both inside and outside the industry. Through confrontations with the state, they came to understand their own importance to the national and regional economy.

The Military, Race, and Resistance: The Conundrums of Recruiting Black South African Men during the Second World War

Introduction At the outbreak of the Second World War, South Africa joined the Allied forces; however, South Africa was ill-prepared for war. The Union Defence Force (UDF) had a small cohort of permanent staff of 260 officers and 4,600 men and was similarly ill-equipped with weapons. A drastic reorganization took place, with emphasis on recruitment. Race determined the focus of the initial recruitment drives: Recruitment of white male soldiers received immediate attention. White men who volunteered for service were deployed as frontline combatants serving in East Africa, North Africa, and eventually Italy. These men were involved in two important battles: The first was the defeat of the Allies at Tobruk, where a South African division had to surrender to the German Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel in June 1942, and at El Alamein, where the Afrika Korps was forced to retreat. As a result, the South African military command realized the urgency of expanding its forces, as had been the case in the First World War. The expediencies of the war forced the government into mental gymnastics: it temporarily waived aspects of its racial policy of segregation, opening its recruitment drive to include black men, Indian men, and men of color. The Native Military Corps (NMC), under the control and command of the newly established Directorate of Non-European Army Services (DNEAS), was created under the command of Colonel Ernest Thomas Stubbs as a military unit specifically for black recruits. About 500 of the recruited black soldiers eventually served in North Africa. The historiography on the participation of Africans in the Second World War has been quite extensive, with the latest book by David Killingray, Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War (2010), adding to the list. Academic works focusing specifically on recruitment of African soldiers during the Second World War are limited. The most important publications directly related to this chapter are those of Robert J. Gordon, Hamilton S. Simelane, and Ashley Jackson, all of them touching on aspects of recruitment.

Locals and Migrants in the Coalmining Town of Enugu (Nigeria): Worker Protest and Urban Identity, 1915–1929

This article focuses on the varied workforce in and around the Enugu Government Colliery, located in south-eastern Nigeria and owned by the British colonial state. Opened in 1915 at Udi and in 1917 at Iva Valley and Obwetti, the mines were in a region with a long history of slave raids, population shifts, colonization, and ensuing changes in local forms of political organization. The mines brought together an eclectic mixture of forced and voluntary unskilled labor, prisoners, unskilled contract workers, and voluntary clerical workers and artisans. Moreover, the men were from different ethno-linguistic groups. By taking into account this complex background, the article describes the gradual process by which this group of inexperienced coalminers used industrial-protest strategies that reflected their habituation to the colonial workplace. They organized strikes against the village men, who, as supervisors, exploited them in the coalmines. Their ability to reach beyond their “traditional” rural identities as “peasants” to attack the kinsmen who exploited them indicates the extent to which the complex urban and industrial environment challenged indigenous identities based on locality as well as rural status systems and gender ideologies. One of the major divisions to overcome was the one between supposedly backward “locals”, men who came from villages close to the mine, and more experienced “foreigners” coming from more distant areas in Nigeria: the work experience as “coalmen” led “locals” to see themselves as “modern men” too, and to position themselves in opposition to authoritarian village leaders. The article thus traces the contours of the challenges confronting a new working class as it experimented with unfamiliar forms of affiliation, trust, and association with people with whom it shared new, industrial experiences. It investigates the many ways that “local” men maneuvered against the authoritarian control of chiefs, forced labor, and workplace exploitation by “native” and expatriate staff.

Becoming ‘Men’, Becoming ‘Workers’: Race, Gender and Workplace Struggle in the Nigerian Coal Industry, 1937–49

On 18 November 1949, police fired on a group of miners engaged in a sit-in strike at the Iva Valley mine of the Enugu Government Colliery in south-eastern Nigeria. They killed 22 miners and injured 50. Additional fatalities occurred during demonstrations led by radical nationalists in eastern Nigeria’s major cities of Calabar, Aba, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, and Enugu. The shoo and opened the Labour government to attacks over the pace and nature of political change in Nigeria. The riots involved radical nationalists, the urban working class, the unemployed and disaffected indigenous traders – just the broad-based political alliance that imperial labour reforms sought to prevent. In the context of the Cold War such a combination could create the type of political instability that opened space for ‘communist infiltrators’. For the Nigerian nationalist movement, the tragedy temporarily unified the rival groupings, leading to a new coalition that portended to represent the Enugu miners in the investigations to follow.