As I look back on these early days of our struggles to obtain a dignified and rightful place for our African workers, I think […] that the 1920s were critical for us. It was during this period that Nigerian workers began to understand what it meant to be an inferior, to be subject to the “busts” and the “booms” of Western capitalist manipulations. While the suffering of our workers was great, they learned to stand on their own feet. They expressed themselves by means of strikes and unrest which the British did not appreciate. More important than the strikes were the expressions of fraternal interest in workers elsewhere. We did not have an effective trade union organization in the 1920s, but we had a lot of Nigerian workers who thought and acted like trade unionists.
Michael Imoudu, President of the Nigerian Railway Workers’ UnionFootnote 1
In the summer of 1926 miners in eastern Nigeria, a remote outpost of the British Empire, demonstrated their “fraternal interest in workers elsewhere” by going on strike during the British General Strike in which the militant British coalminers had played a leading role. In mid-May the Colonial Office had asked the colliery to expand its operations to compensate for the loss of British coal used to bunker ships along the coast. The manager hired more workers, added a shift, and prepared to increase production. In July the “local” day laborers – tub, rail, and timber – walked off their jobs, demanding a 1-penny increase to raise their wages to 1 shilling and 3 pence per day. The strike was short – from 12−14 July – but successful, because it occurred during a period of high labor demand because of the British General Strike, and was especially significant because it was the first time the inexperienced “local” workers used a conventional form of industrial protest rather than deserting the mines and returning to their farms, as they had until this point. They understood that, although they were not skilled miners, without their tubs the hewers (miners) could not produce, and without their timber no new work faces could be opened, nor roadways reinforced. Moreover, they also recognized the administrative hierarchy of the state by refusing to meet with the local magistrate and insisted on meeting personally with the Resident of Onitsha Province.
The relationship between this consciousness and position in the workforce would be demonstrated in the next decade, when these same “unskilled” workers eloquently explained why their wage demands were reasonable. What was especially remarkable is that now the “locals” were showing the industrial sophistication of the more savvy “foreigners” – skilled men from more distant areas, who had been trained by missionaries and worked in capitalist workplaces where they cultivated a tradition of bothersome militancy.
This was the Enugu Government Colliery, an enterprise owned by the colonial state, which opened in south-eastern Nigeria in 1915. It was the only colliery in West Africa and was considered a vital resource during the world wars. Its coal had strategic value as the main fuel for the Nigerian Government Railway, the steamships that plied the coast, and, during World War II, the convoys and railways of Britain’s West African colonies and their allies. When the colliery began production in 1915, the workforce was an eclectic mixture of forced and voluntary unskilled labor, prisoners, unskilled contract workers, and voluntary clerical workers and artisans. Moreover, the men were of different ethnic groups. The skilled artisans and clerks were either Yoruba, from western Nigeria, or Igbo, from more “civilized” and colonized areas of south-eastern Nigeria. This heterogeneous mixture of men with differing skills, under different systems of labor control, with differential commitments to wage labor, and familiarity with the capitalist workplace, created eclectic forms of protest and work cultures.
Although the workforce rarely exceeded 2,000 in the early decades and 7,000 later on, its power lay in its location in the West African political economy and attracted the concern of the highest levels of Britain’s Colonial Office. The mines and the Nigerian Railway were “sister” state enterprises, and until 1937 both were administered by the Director of the Nigerian Railway. The railway was also the colliery’s main consumer and transporter, creating a functional integration that linked the two industries’ workers in protest. When the railway workers struck, coal could not be evacuated from the mines. When the mineworkers struck, the railway lacked the coal to run. The coal workers had little experience in wage labor and benefitted from the militancy of the railway workers from western Nigeria, who had worked on the western branch of the railway since its opening in the 1890s. In an export economy like Nigeria, workers in transport (i.e. railways, docks, etc.) and fuel production were in a key position. They were often the first labor sector to recognize their own power and to exert it.Footnote 2
The discovery of coal some 135 miles from the Niger Delta led to the construction of a railway line to carry that coal to the coast. Railway construction took several years and did not reach the colliery until May 1916. Both industries used forced labor to introduce a “free labor market” that officials claimed signified the superiority of British “civilization” over the “primitive” slave-holding societies of eastern Nigeria. But despite the fact that “free labor” was promoted as a modernizing force, most of the workers were anything but “free”. The labor market was actually a byproduct of the conquest.
This article describes the gradual process by which a group of inexperienced African coalminers in south-eastern Nigeria used industrial-protest strategies that reflected their habituation to the colonial workplace. Eventually, they organized strikes against the senior 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 indicated the extent to which the complex urban and industrial environment challenged indigenous identities based on locality, rural status systems, and gender ideologies. This forced some of the young men to be open to new forms of affiliation that were more appropriate to their new workplace and experiences as migrants in the city of Enugu. As they interacted with “foreign” men in the workplace and in the city, these young migrants used multiple, intersecting, and contradictory identities as bases of personal construction. Their senior rural leaders were confused and resentful of the challenges posed by these young men to the existing social and generational hierarchies, and tried to undermine industrial actions against the mines.
The article traces, too, the tortuous struggle of young migrant workers to reconcile rural social identities, rooted in regionalism and kinship, with their class position as labor in a despotic colonial industry. Because the colliery opened during the final phase of the conquest, it encountered problems in securing labor for the coalmines and the railway. Most of the workers and inhabitants of Enugu were Igbo, the largest ethnic group in south-eastern Nigeria, but the majority of the skilled workers and urban inhabitants were from more distant areas in south-eastern Nigeria. While government classified them as Igbo, to the local people they were “foreigners”, because they spoke a different dialect, had a strange religion – Christianity – and were trained in sophisticated, modern skills that allowed them to hold the best jobs in the industry and in the town.
Additionally, the city also had a small group of skilled workers and clerks who were Yoruba, the largest group in western Nigeria. They had also been trained by missionaries and were employed as artisans on the railway and as clerks in the city. Finally, there was one other group, called the “Saro”, a cosmopolitan African people descended from slaves who had been liberated from slave ships after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and who were quite familiar with Western culture, British rule, and Christianity. To the “locals” they were all “foreigners”, and they resented the imposition of a city of “strangers” on their land. These divisions between “locals” and “foreigners”, as well as additional divisions among the “locals”, became a barrier to solidarity, so needed in colonial industry. And these conflicts were exploited by government and “traditional” rulers, both of whom recognized in them a mechanism to control workers.
This study focuses on the first fourteen years of the Enugu Government Colliery, 1915−1929, when the industry introduced wage labor to rural communities in south-eastern Nigeria. The colonial state, motivated by early twentieth-century notions of “civilization” and racial hierarchy, organized local governance on the basis of erroneous assumptions about the structure of power in African villages. In a system called “indirect rule”, it incorporated local “men of prominence” in the government project and imbued them with extraordinary powers that violated the most basic traditions of political power in local villages. Supposedly based on “native authorities”, this system imposed colonial “chiefs”, most of whom were former slave dealers, on all communities. Their brief was the daily and detailed operations of the unlawful and brutal state. Much of the power of the “chiefs” concerned the question of labor – supplying the thousands of workers needed by a state operating where no labor market existed. But their influence reached into colonial industries affecting the deployment of labor, systems of worker control, and industrial relations practices.
Connections between the coalmines’ “native” staff and “chiefs”Footnote 3 were usually personal and close, thereby projecting industrial discipline into the rural villages, and in turn bringing rural systems of control into the workplace. The colliery manager encouraged this intervention by assuming a limited managerial style that mirrored the “indirect rule” practices being used to stabilize rural villages. The industry relied on the “boss boys” to handle workers’ complaints, ignoring the fact that they themselves were the causes of most complaints.
Rural identities were powerful bases of personal affinity (and continue to be so even today). Even in the most cosmopolitan of African cities, men considered their natal villages to be their real “homes”. It was in these villages that they expressed political power, attained prestige, exercised authority, and established gendered status. However, despite the power of rural affiliations for both local and foreign young men, those who worked in the coalmines and/or lived in the colonial city were more open to experimenting with new associations involving unfamiliar people who were considered “foreigners”. The junior men who became coalminers and/or migrated to Enugu found in the city a particularly rich and dynamic environment, filled with new freedoms and opportunities for new forms of masculine invention. Additionally, subordinate men – the poor, slaves, and the young – discovered new opportunities to challenge the systems of oppression controlled by senior men in the villages. In this way wage labor and urbanization exacerbated the intergenerational conflicts between older men and their juniors and undermined rural systems of legitimacy and authority.Footnote 4
There were some six strikes from January 1919 to early 1921, followed by a second wave in 1924–1925, and a final crisis in 1929. The protests by “foreign” clerks, artisans, and “pick boys” or miners in 1917, 1918, and 1919 had been successful in securing pay increases to meet wartime inflation. But at that time the “locals” protested by deserting, returning to their farms and villages. However, the protests of the 1920s, the focus of this article, were more tenacious and widespread. Most importantly they were led by “locals”, categories of labor heretofore uninvolved. These strikes established a “culture of protest” that characterized the industrial environment of the coal industry throughout its subsequent existence. The recurrent character of these industrial actions, the use of accepted forms of worker protest, the assumptions that workers made about the social responsibilities of the state, and their manipulation of the policy dissonance among state actors indicates a qualitative change in the consciousness of the workers. They operated from a position that as workers they deserved to live and work under certain conditions, and they wanted the state to secure these conditions on their behalf.
The emergence of “local” workers as the leadership of mine protest indicates the willingness of young men to trust new forms of alliances that they associated with “modernity” and “progress”. As their income made its imprint on the development of local villages, they became “coalmen”, associated with the transformation to a new world. As working men and urban migrants from the adjacent area formed alliances and relationships with other people from outside their natal villages, their senior rural leaders were confused by the influence that “foreigners” had over their men. To the workers this confusion became yet another indicator of the rural leaders’ backwardness and inability to understand the new industrial realities.
Now these young men could utilize elements of the new political and economic system for personal improvement, especially to accelerate the attainment of male maturity. The early history of the “coal city” of Enugu thus exhibits not only the characteristic conflicts between “locals” and “foreigners”, but also those arising from challenges posed by young men to the existing social and generational hierarchies.
THE PEOPLE OF SOUTH-EASTERN NIGERIA
The city of Enugu and the mines were located some 135 miles from the Bight of Biafra coast in the northernmost region of south-eastern Nigeria, called Igboland. This was an area occupied by the Igbo people, one of the three largest ethno-linguistic groups in contemporary Nigeria. Most labor for the coalmines and railroad was recruited from their villages. The Igbo lived in an area of some 15,800 square miles framed on the west by the Niger River (with some settlement on the western bank of the Niger River), the Benue to the north, the Cross Rivers to the east, and the Niger Delta to the south. The Delta was on the Bight of Biafra, and the hinterland sometimes carries that same name.Footnote 5
The Igbo are the largest group in south-eastern Nigeria. They and most of the other numerous ethno-linguistic groups in the area – Ibibio, Efik, Ogonni – had a similar socio-political organization of small autonomous village-groups, or clusters of villages, without chiefs.Footnote 6 Important political decisions were made by a series of overlapping associations and groups (male councils of elders, women’s associations, age grades, associations of “native” doctors, etc.), each with specific responsibilities. The council of senior/elder men and some women, whose opinions were respected, included representatives of constituent villages. But no representative had the authority to make decisions without consulting the group. All the people in a compound, village, or village-group believed that they were descendants of a common ancestor whose several offspring established constituent villages of a “village-group” or “town”. The whole system functioned gerontocratically: the oldest man in a compound, the oldest compound in a village, and the oldest village in a village-group had special authority and sacred power, though none could function autocratically. This all began to change during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and was transformed radically during colonial rule.
In Igbo villages power was especially diffuse since most villages had neither strong chiefs nor kings.Footnote 7 However, these were not villages of equality. By the nineteenth century a new class of wealthy slaving merchants, Ogaranyan, had forced a strengthening of authority based on wealth at the expense of seniority. Many Ogaranyan were involved in the internal slave trade, which expanded with the decline of the trans-Atlantic trade by the late nineteenth century. These savvy traders proved very skillful in hiding their activities and ingratiating themselves with the British invaders in 1900.Footnote 8 Aware of global economic trends, they were quick to supply services to the colonial soldiers. In return, officials assumed that they were chiefs (despite there being no chiefs in pre-colonial Igbo villages). These were the men who would also supply drafted labor to the coalmines and infrastructural projects.Footnote 9
The political fragmentation of Igboland as reflected in regional “ethnic” identities was related to the diverse ecology.Footnote 10 Igboland is located in the Guinea coastal climatic area, a region with a wide range of rainfall. Within this broad region are several micro-ecological zones with varying soil types, rainfall, and vegetation. As was the case throughout West Africa, communities based in the thick rainforests tended to be small and fragmented, while large, multi-ethnic states were clustered in the savannah region, where horses could become the crucial technology of empire building.Footnote 11 Although the Igbo shared some dialects and other cultural traits before the conquest, they never perceived themselves as one distinct “people”, and they had historically organized their ever-shifting political alliances on a sharply defined regionalism. The key regional distinction was the “coast” versus the “interior”.
“Coastal” society came to have a distinct meaning denoting groups who, by the twentieth century, had had some 400 years of contact with Europe, a contact that was reflected in their names, mercantile skill, and receptivity to European culture.Footnote 12 From the sixteenth century the coastal communities had come into closer contact with European traders, missionaries, and the precursors to colonial officials, and over time these regional identities had become more defined, reflecting differential levels of familiarity with European culture, labor systems, and the colonial economy. This familiarity with Western culture was also to become a major influence on how workers engaged with the coal industry and the city.
Figure 1 Map of the Niger Delta.
THE IMPACT OF THE SLAVE TRADE
The most significant factor contributing to the divisive regional identities among the mine workforce was the region’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries over 1.2 million (20 per cent) of the slaves crossing the Atlantic came from south-eastern Nigeria, and most were Igbo.Footnote 13 The internal trade continued into the nineteenth century, when slaving turned particularly violent as the Biafran hinterland became a palm oil producing area.Footnote 14 In a paradoxical way, the “legitimate” trade in palm products actually increased the demand for unfree labor in the palm belt.
The British conquest of Northern Igboland, the area of the subsequent Enugu colliery, incorporated the Udi district, a remote, impoverished area of relatively disadvantaged villages in comparison with groups from the coast. Moreover, Udi was still suffering from the after-effects of centuries of slave trading: Udi people had been a primary source for the Atlantic slave trade and were sold by middlemen to coastal traders. This association with slavery left an indelible mark upon the way they were viewed by other Igbo communities. Igbo from the more “civilized” areas of the south-eastern region – Onitsha, Owerri, Calabar – disparaged the people of Udi as being particularly “backward”, “primitive”, and “degraded”, both because of their enslavement and because of their poverty. They called them “Wa Wa”, a pejorative term meaning “primitive backward people”. They had a reputation for kidnapping, lawlessness, and incessant warfare related to defense systems villages employed to prevent enslavement. They were the last group to be converted to Christianity and consequently lacked the skills to fill the most lucrative jobs that opened up in Enugu, and the skilled posts in the mines and railway.
In the late nineteenth century the destructive impact of the internal slave trade directed to the palm belt reached catastrophic proportions. Wealthy bandit traders, called Awagwu, created their own settlements of multiple wives, free dependents, and slaves, which they ruled with impunity. These marauding bandits operated totally outside the customary traditions of rural politics. They formed private militias, which they dispatched to raid villages and kidnap and sell adults and children, largely to the palm-producing areas near Owerri. This violence fundamentally changed both the governing system and the social stability of the region. The imprint was reflected in the architecture of the area, where watchtowers, maze-like compound entrances, and compact settlements became rural survival strategies. These bandits were particularly active in the area between Onitsha and Udi, where they destroyed villages, sending desperate refugees to areas like the Udi escarpment, a barren range of sandy hills to the west of the city of Enugu. Some of the prominent men who collaborated with the British invasion were from this group of Awagwu.Footnote 15
As the global trade – initially the slave trade, later the palm trade – increasingly infiltrated village economies, wealthy merchants contested the political/ritual power of the elders and forced some accommodations to allow their wealth to translate into political power. The resulting Ogaranyan model of elite masculinity entailed heading a “big compound”, an exaggerated polygamous household of many wives,Footnote 16 children, clients, and slaves, and being engaged in the conspicuous consumption of foreign commodities (i.e. bicycles, cars, Western clothes). Elite men tied to the mercantile economy differed significantly from those senior men who were “household heads” and whose status came from their ability to sustain and defend their household, to maintain personal autonomy, to avenge insult or violence, and to demonstrate commitment to the betterment of the corporate group.Footnote 17 In addition, the model of the Ogaranyan tied elite masculinity to the world market in ways that popularized gender relations based on substantial wealth. The Ogaranyan wore special clothes, danced exclusive dances, belonged to expensive associations, and were buried with considerable ceremony and expense.Footnote 18
By the late nineteenth century elite masculinity impacted upon the aspirations of many men in a new way. The “big men” had transformed their wealth into political and spiritual power using prestigious “title” societies, the most prominent being the Ozo title.Footnote 19 Before colonialism, few men could hope to attain the model of elite masculinity of the Ogaranyan, but regular wages opened this possibility to aspirants, especially as it offered an alternative way to marry, a prerequisite for mature adulthood. In fact, the state pulled into its new economy those young men who had not actually attained mature adulthood. Their conscription into wage labor by the Ogaranyan chiefs paradoxically empowered young men to challenge the power of their seniors in the village – in this way, the chiefs actually created their own nemesis. In fact, as we will see below, the workplace and the city of Enugu became incubators of an anti-chief/elder men sentiment, articulated largely by the Westernized elite and actively supported by young men.
The Udi district had been the northernmost wing of the supply system for the slave trade. The slave trade, however, was experienced differently by the two major Udi groups, the Agbaja and the Nkanu, called “clans” by anthropologists.Footnote 20 While the Agbaja became slaves, the Nkanu collaborated with slave traders. In the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century marauding militias pushed hundreds of refugees to the Udi escarpment, where they formed densely populated settlements. By 1900 the land was so infertile that it was virtually useless for farming.Footnote 21 In these villages, called the Agbaja, lived “locals” who would eventually supply the majority of the mines’ labor force. But in the opening years of the mines, they would resist recruitment. However, this was unsustainable given the inability of young men to establish farms on the overcrowded escarpment. This was especially serious because farming was a precondition for young men to marry, establish their lineage, and form their own compounds and households, a prerequisite for social maturity.
Marriage was an overwhelming preoccupation for young men, desperate to establish their independence and to take their place among the senior men in their village. While an older son in an extended family could look forward to inheriting the compound and land of the father,Footnote 22 the younger sons would have to forge their own way, colonizing new areas to establish their independence, found their own lineages, and establish farms. Fulfillment of the imperative to migrate from one’s father/parents is reflected in the founding narrative of most Igbo village-groups.Footnote 23 In 1900 Agbaja’s young men, thwarted in securing their own farming lands, were in a crisis. They were forced to migrate to the adjacent fertile plains of their neighbors, the Nkanu, who were the local middlemen selling slaves to the coast. Thus Agbaja men depended on access to land owned by the very people who had sold, and continued to sell, their people as slaves.Footnote 24 But Agbaja carried an even more humiliating burden: the more “civilized” Igbo of Owerri and Onitsha accused them of being so depraved as to violate sacred moral codes and sell some of their own children into slavery. It appears, however, that this was a tragic choice that they had to make to secure food to support the remaining family members.Footnote 25 The sale of kin was considered an ultimate indicator of social degradation.
Unlike the refugee communities of Agbaja, Nkanu settlements were on the adjacent fertile plains to which they dispatched slave families. As is the case in many slave-trading communities, by the nineteenth century Nkanu came to retain large numbers of slaves, locally called Ohu, who performed tasks judged “beneath” the status of the Amadi, the freeborn men. This gave Nkanu a particularly rigid and persistent form of slavery which defied British efforts, though indeed quite tepid, to end slavery and discrimination against descendants of slaves throughout the colonial period.Footnote 26 One consequence of the incorporation of slaves in freeborn villages was a series of very large segregated Ohu villages from which the Amadi seized men to work on the railroad and later in the coalmines. While it is difficult to say exactly when slavery ceased to exist,Footnote 27 we do know that wage labor and the cash economy substantially eroded its moorings after World War I.Footnote 28
The experience of Mazi Anyionovo Nwodo, an Ohu coalminer, illustrates the gradual transformation from slave to worker. His account refers to the 1920s:
I and Edenwede Ogbu of Isigwe were pace setters sort of, to the Ihus or Obias.Footnote 29 We were the first set of people to enlist personally to the Europeans without the consent of the chief for their personal betterment. […] I was among those sent by the chief to work in the construction of the railway line from Otakpa, now in Imo State. Otakpa was where the Nkanu people under Chief Chukwuani of Ozalla joined in the railway construction. […] All payment for those that were sent out by the chief, whether on the coalmine or railway construction, was directed to the chief. We were left with nothing, but at a later date the chief started giving us small amounts of what each of us realized. This was after we had realized from the Europeans that we were paid for the job we had been doing for long. Because of the chief’s action we deemed it unnecessary not to be obligatory to the chief.Footnote 30 In the circumstance, we started looking for our own greener pastures for personally paid jobs and the most possible area to look for jobs was in Enugu.Footnote 31
Anyionovo Nwodo had escaped a system in which his “owner” attempted to profit from the agricultural labor he performed for him, as well to claim part of the wages he earned for paid colliery work.Footnote 32
This was a violation of the customary exploitation – “moral economy” – of slavery,Footnote 33 in which slaves could work a certain number of days on fields allocated to them and represented an intensification of exploitation for the Ohu men. As the Amadi tried to seize income the Ohu earned in wage labor, they sparked a revolt in many slave villages, especially in that of Anyionovo Nwodo. His village, Isigwe, was physically distant from that of their owners, which gave them an opportunity to experience daily autonomy over their internal affairs, a process that encouraged solidarity and a collective consciousness. In 1922 the people of Isigwe were in the forefront of the insurrection when the Ohu from Nkanu finally rose up against their owners’ claim on their wages.
Tensions continued to build up as earnings from coalmining emboldened the Ohu to demand social equality with the Amadi. Incomprehensible to the British, they fought most hard to protect their families from kidnapping and sale, to retain their wages, to have full access to land (without the conditionality of slave labor), and the right to join the same types of prestigious male associations that distinguished the most prominent Amadi. The Amadi were enraged, and seized and sold several Ohu children. The Ohu, in turn, expelled the Amadi from their segregated village.Footnote 34 The conflict continued for most of the decade until the state brokered an agreement for land to establish separate Ohu villages, but they were never accepted as equals of the Amadi.Footnote 35
The history of enslavement was humiliating to the Agbaja men and appeared to be but one additional attribute of their “backward” and “immoral” culture. Additionally, they were unfamiliar with the cultures, technologies, and religions of the more “civilized” areas. This disparity became even more intolerable from the late nineteenth century when they interacted with the more modern “foreigners”, ironically in a city -- Enugu -- built on the land of the marginal Agbaja villages. The British had unwittingly built a modern industry and city on the foundation of the nineteenth-century economy – slavery – that had instilled terror, dislocation, and internal discrimination in the self-same area. As colonial rule took root, it intensified the pre-existing regional disparities between the prosperous slave-dealing (and later palm-trading) coastal trading states and the poor hinterland areas, like Udi, ravaged by slaving. This was the difference between the “local” population (and workers) and the “foreigners”, i.e. those who had come from regions further away, like Onitsha and Owerri, to fulfill jobs.Footnote 36 To the people of Udi, Enugu was “their town”.
THE INVENTION OF CHIEFS AND THE CREATION OF NEO-TRADITIONAL LABOR SYSTEMS
The northern area of south-eastern Nigeria was the last region to be incorporated into the Nigerian colony. While Britain’s conquest of south-eastern Nigeria began in 1900, the invasion did not reach Udi, the future area of the coalmines, until 1904, and even then the conquest proved ephemeral as annual military expeditions occurred for four years. Resistance did not end in 1908, however, when initial hostilities concluded. Even then, despite the overwhelming military superiority of the troops it took a decade before the area could be considered “pacified” (in 1914). In the midst of the conquest, officials set the political reconstruction in place; “indirect rule”, as it was called, established chiefs’ courts to adjudicate disputes, levy fines, and to conscript labor.
In 1914 Frederick Lugard became Governor General of Nigeria and centralized more power in the hands of the chiefs.Footnote 37 This increased the burden on the people of a partnership of despotism between an outlaw state and the local collaborators that it recognized. For those so anointed, the tasks of governing were lucrative but formidable and risky, for despite the military superiority of the state, Europeans were too few on the ground when villagers decided to end, once and for all, a chief’s despotic rule. While bludgeoned into submission in the “pacification” of the region, the local people were forced, in defeat, to become “free laborers” for a myriad of colonial projects. This occurred in the first year of the war.
The Enugu Government Colliery opened in 1915 under military guard and defeated villages were forced to supply labor in retribution for their resistance. But the Udi villages rose up again – in an event called “the Udi business” – triggered by the government deployment of colonial troops to the eastern border with German Kamerun. The desperate shortage of coal reserves forced the Colonial Office to open the colliery despite this unsettled context and the financial constraints of the war. Supplies of Welsh coal, the favored source, were far from secure, given hostilities. Since local labor was up in arms, officials recruited workers from Onitsha, a large market town on the Niger River, and later from Owerri, an important commercial center in the palm belt to the south nearer the coast. Colonial chiefs became labor recruiters and young men and slaves were the usual target.
Colonial rule was more established in Onitsha and Owerri, and their men, while from the same ethnic group – Igbo – as Enugu’s “locals”, were far more habituated to wage labor, even in its conscripted form. In addition to these groups of Igbo men there were men from other areas of Nigeria. Railway workers, skilled artisans, and clerks came to the city from the distant cosmopolitan Yoruba city of Lagos in the west (370 miles away). Christianized Yoruba and “Saro”, descendants of slaves captured from ships that violated Britain’s 1807 abolition of the slave trade, became the city’s “foreign” elite. To the local communities, the men from Onitsha, Owerri, and Lagos were “foreigners” who occupied their land and farms, and monopolized the highest paying jobs in “their” city of Enugu. Thus, from the very beginning, the colliery workforce had a “local−foreigner” division that challenged the development of a solidarity the workplace otherwise encouraged.
Workers were paradoxically empowered by the inferior quality of Enugu coal, which was sub-bituminous “soft” coal that broke easily, disintegrating with each handling into ever smaller – and less usable – chunks. It was also prone to spontaneous combustion, a dangerous attribute given the wooden railway wagons that transported coal to the coast. Despite these limitations, Udi was a large, secure regional source of coal when war jeopardized the sea lanes that brought the superior Welsh coal. Because of its fragility and combustibility, purchasers intentionally held small reserves, a practice that made the market especially vulnerable to work stoppages. Miners grew to recognize this strategic advantage, and although they were relatively inexperienced and isolated on the “fringes of empire”, Enugu coal workers quickly reflected the activist image of British miners that so menaced Britain’s energy source. Enugu miners similarly leveraged the power that their inferior product gave them in the regional transport system. They used this knowledge skillfully to create an industrial tradition of troublesome militancy that gave them a national reputation as a strategically powerful sector of Nigeria’s working class. They organized frequent work stoppages, manipulated state officials, and selected as leaders men capable of defending their interests as workers. These patterns would be visible in the first locally led strikes in the 1920s.Footnote 38
The complexity and fluidity of Igbo political systems (colonially perceived as “anarchic” and “chaotic”) frustrated both early government officials and anthropologists who were creating “colonial knowledge” to develop working instruments of local government. They invented categories – such as “tribe” – to refer to virtually every corporate settlement of several lineages. They could not reach a consensus on whether the Igbo were “one tribe” or dozens of “sub-tribes”, each with its own ethnographic profile.Footnote 39 Despite their fraudulence, these categories became the foundation for the “indirect rule” model of local government. This system was embedded in the philosophical foundations of the evolving schools of early twentieth-century imperial ethno-historical research.
From 1899 to 1906 the main proponent of indirect rule, Frederick Lugard, had been the High Commissioner of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. As a military man he was partial to the ordered (and authoritarian) governing system created in Nigeria’s Muslim north. In 1914 he became Governor General of a unified Nigeria and was perplexed by the plethora of governing forms that had developed under colonial rule in the south-east. He began a centralization process in 1912 (acting as Governor of the two protectorates of Northern and Southern Nigeria) that removed European officers from the courts, gave more authority to the chiefs, and laid a foundation for corruption, extortion, and terror, all emanating from the “native courts” controlled by these chiefs.Footnote 40 As noted above, “indirect rule” was the guiding principle for industrial relations in the coal industry. The colonial “warrant chiefs” (government-appointed chiefs who were given a warrant to symbolize the authority of their position) became labor recruiters and were given the power to recruit and discipline labor through their “boss boys”, who brought crews of drafted young men to work. There they supervised them at work and in the labor camps, controlled by the chiefs.
In many cases the chiefs were from within the Ogaranyan class, and they relished this legitimacy conferred by the colonial state. They responded to the state’s first labor demands, which were rationalized as punishment for resistance, by seizing young men and slaves. The labor needs were many: unskilled labor to develop the infrastructure, for head porterage, to clear streams and bush paths, and to build roads. Government buildings and official quarters needed to be built, and the infrastructure for the coalmines and the railway constructed. One example of such a labor-recruiting chief was Chief Njemanze of Owerri. He had been a powerful slave trader, who worked with the Aro slavers, an enterprising Igbo clan who controlled slave procurement -- in the area’s periodic market system.Footnote 41 After the British Aro Expedition in 1901−1902 he switched sides: he helped guide the troops to Aro Chukwu, the Aro capital, and convinced villages not to contest the armies.Footnote 42 Later on, Njemanze sent several hundred workers to Enugu, including a number of tradesmen whose mission-trained skills made them especially valuable to the railway operations. Another case is that of Eze Okoli, a famous dibia (“native” doctor) from Nnoli near Onitsha. He was especially helpful to the British. He embraced Christianity, took private lessons in English, and supplied troops for the Cameroon campaign in World War I.Footnote 43 Okoli sent hundreds of young men to Enugu to work in the mines.
In the Udi area two prominent men, Chief Chukwuani Nwangwu of Nkanu and Chief Onyeama Onwusi of Agbaja, both Ogaranyan, shifted from being slave dealers to labor recruiters, calling up hundreds of men for forced labor and/or local slavery. Both had been prosperous slave and palm traders, and had supplied railway workers from the Agbaja and Nkanu areas of Udi. Now as chiefs, both claimed “customary” rights to conscript workers, although in reality no Ogaranyan could claim labor beyond his own household. In ignorance, colonial field officers assumed that in supplying workers they were merely exercising the same “customary” rights as a “house” head on the coast.Footnote 44 The chiefs claimed the authority vested in several labor laws that allowed the state to conscript labor. These included the Masters and Servants Act, Roads and Creeks Ordinance, and the so-called House Rules Ordinance, which enabled the chiefs to conscript workers, establish courts in the labor camps, and manage the labor camps using their own paramilitary groups to keep order.Footnote 45
Chief Onyeama used his Ogwumili force,Footnote 46 a private militia of “enforcers” and labor headmen, to insure that workers, once in the labor camps, complied with his regulations. Onyeama also invented an elaborate labor-recruitment system emanating from his native court. He contacted subordinate chiefs, instructing them to call up men within specific age grades,Footnote 47 who then had to report to a series of transit camps where agents checked off their names on the list for their villages.Footnote 48 He also used his court to enforce workplace discipline, all with the tacit approval of the political officers. Onyeama and other chiefs were allowed to make deductions from the workers’ wages to cover costs of food and other, less legal, expenses.Footnote 49
While the chiefs conscripted their men for the mines and other projects, they also wreaked havoc in the rural villages. Legal prohibitions notwithstanding, Amadi still enforced slavery in their villages, relying upon the fears of colonial officials that public emancipation would create social disorder.Footnote 50 Attempts by the Amadi to change the terms of slavery to give them more control over their erstwhile workers led to a major revolt in 1920−1922, which required a military patrol for several months and resulted in the deaths of many Amadi and Ohu. In addition, traditional practices in the native courts controlled by the warrant chiefs were increasingly violated. Most warrant chiefs operated with impunity, even after the uprisings during World War I, when many of them were either killed or run out of their villages.Footnote 51 They leveled false charges against men, collected fines, or demanded a daughter as a wife. Others became moneylenders, requiring pawns to work off the interest on usurious loans.Footnote 52
Despite all of these problems and signs of unrest, officials allowed the native court system to continue and consolidate. At one point they even paid Udi’s two chiefs to supply targeted numbers of workers for the mines. In the slave villages in Nkanu, Amadi chiefs used the courts to extort money from their slaves, which became another contributing factor to the violent 1920 revolt. Significantly, this helped Ohu to embrace their identity and mobilize throughout Nkanu, forming a social movement that expanded beyond the slaves to include other poor sectors of the communities.Footnote 53
Despite all the problems with corruption, child stealing, extortion, and violence by the chiefs, what would finally end the warrant chieftaincy system was the 1929 uprising by thousands of Igbo, Ibibio, and Efik women who, fearing that chiefs would tax them, rose up and brought down the entire local government structure in one fell swoop.Footnote 54
“COME TO THE CITY AND BE FREE!”: CLERKS, RUNAWAY SLAVES, AND RURAL DISSIDENTS – ENUGU AS A CENTRE OF ANTI-CHIEF PROTEST
The city of Enugu began as a cluster of labor camps located on land secured from a group of local men claiming to be chiefs.Footnote 55 The camps were located near the railway station and the entrance of the Udi mine, which opened in 1915. Additional camps were set up in 1917, when two new mining sites – Iva Valley and Obwetti – were opened. The pioneer settlers of the new city of Enugu were a polyglot population of European military officers, “foreigners” from Lagos, Onitsha, and Owerri, and a few “locals”, including village dissidents (mostly younger men from the local surroundings) who wanted to escape the abuses of senior men and chiefs in the village.
During World War I Enugu grew rapidly into a cosmopolitan city. In relation to its surroundings, it was indeed a “foreign” town. Until the 1940s, the majority of the Igbo inhabitants were either from Owerri or from Onitsha, both areas about 100 miles away from Enugu.Footnote 56 After the war the rural officials noted the presence of new men who were emerging as troublesome challengers to the chiefs’ control in the villages. The city had become a den of sedition, with clerks and other “foreigners” campaigning against the “traditionalism” of the chiefs. The young coalminers repeated these critiques, which fit quite comfortably with their own disagreements with the elderly chiefs and senior men in their villages. In the villages the “coal men” were a proud, contentious group that articulated the political perspective of young and politically marginal men. This was the inevitable consequence of the industry’s existence amid the contradictions of a bankrupt rural policy and the corrupt hierarchies it created. The miners assumed an identity that opposed exploitative chiefs, thereby undermining local government. One pensioner proudly noted: “The miners were most modern and powerful. Because they were always after democracy. And they don’t allow the chief by opposing him to harass his people. And they always succeeded in opposing him.”Footnote 57
By the end of World War I Enugu had all the trappings of a fully segregated colonial town: a “native” and European area, separated by the customary “neutral zone”;Footnote 58 several trading firms; mission schools; labor camps for the railway and mines; a police force; prisons; and other government agencies.Footnote 59 Like most colonial cities, residential segregation – the European reservation – was an important representation of imperial power and a showcase for the “superiority” of European civilization. This representation of “white” authority was but a façade to the reality of fragile political control in a territory that far exceeded the scope of British military resources. Such representations of the dichotomy between European/African, colonizer/subject, and black/white were especially important in spaces where Africans and Europeans were in daily contact – the city and the colonial workplace.Footnote 60
By 1927 the city had grown to 10,000 inhabitants, 7,000 of whom worked in various government departments.Footnote 61 In 1929 the city changed qualitatively, when Enugu became the administrative capital of south-eastern Nigeria. The variety of jobs in government gave Enugu’s African population a class complexity uncommon in most Nigerian cities. Most workers were accustomed to negotiating with political officials during disputes and had begun to develop a set of expectations for their treatment by the state. The industrial component of the city gave this government town its “edge”, with most workers looking to the coalminers as leaders in labor conflicts. Added to the thousands of coalminers were several hundred clerks employed through the government agencies from throughout the coastal regions of the colony. They and the artisans saw themselves as part of an enlightened group with skills that were valuable, if not indispensable, for the smooth operation of the industry and the colonial state. As “foreigners” they had an awareness of colonial society that came from their earlier exposure to mission education and colonial administration.
The clerks were loyal members of the colonial civil service, but they were critical of the racial hierarchies of colonial society, which they considered to be quite “un-British”. When the white civil service struck for more wages after the war, they launched their own protest, adding a demand for the end of job discrimination. They were enemies of “traditionalism”, and most especially of the rural chiefs, and contributed to a general environment of resistance and protest characteristic of urban life. They were just the type of African that officials viewed with foreboding − “detribalized” Africans free of the moderating influence and control of their chiefs. But they played a contradictory role in the city. They formed urban associations that became an important pillar of urban order for a beleaguered colonial administration, reliant on “native” allies, both rural and urban. In return for this assistance they expected to receive more political authority. This, the state was reluctant to grant.
The jobs in government agencies also meant that male workers could now imitate the “big compound” of the Ogaranyan, with many wives, children, and dependents. In fact, officials found that government workers’ households were two to three times larger than those of other workers. This status model destroyed all British attempts to regulate housing occupancy as a way of controlling the city. One worker’s experience expressed these new possibilities. He was from Udi and chose to marry six wives. He proudly expressed his successful attainment of rural elite masculinity emulating the Ogaranyan:
The development of [the] coal industry did a lot to my village. But for coal industry civilization would have not reached us as early as it had reached us. The coal industry initiated me into Ozo title. I am Ozo Samuel N. Onoh. I was able to train up my children, build good houses. We contributed money and build schools and churches.Footnote 62
The authorities had built the colonial state on a foundation of rural authoritarianism, creating chiefs where none had existed before, and giving them powers far beyond those of any group in Igbo village government. This rural transformation made the city into a refuge for rural dissidents, some from the local areas, and others from more distant “foreign” communities. A few were women who were unhappy with their marriages or marriage prospects, many more were young men fleeing the exactions of autocratic chiefs and slaves deserting their masters. In the city, these rural dissidents joined with the clerks, and participated in a cultural and political struggle over the nature of work and urban life. For the men from local areas minework rotated with farming, and their commitment to the job fluctuated with the farming seasons. For “foreigners”, the distance from home was so great that they were forced to become more acclimatized to life and work in the city. However, they, like most migrants to African cities, nonetheless considered their natal village to be their home.Footnote 63
Many of the young men refused to work regularly, rebuffed missionary attempts at conversion, and clustered in slum settlements that defied administrative control. In so doing, Africans resisted colonialist attempts to instill industrial time into their culture, to restrict access to space through the marketplace, and to restructure their households into nuclear families as against polygynous rural norms.
Both the colliery and the city emerged under the watchful eye of the Governor General Frederick Lugard. Lugard’s personal interest in the city and the industry arose from his belief that while wage labor was of educative value for African labor, Africans should remain socially rooted in their rural communities away from the “dangerous” temptations of urban life. Lugard found that it was very difficult to prevent a permanent urban-based working class from developing.Footnote 64 Despite his efforts to keep the numbers of urban Africans to a bare minimum, his rural policies pushed them into the city.
To Lugard’s dismay, the clerks and artisans were from the Lagos elite that had mobilized so vigorously against the conquest and the discrimination in government employment. Furthermore they had declared war on Lugard, whom they attacked in their press as the archetypal arrogant imperialist.Footnote 65 Lugard hated the Westernized elite for being “Africans out of place”, far too arrogant for “natives”. To him, they were “natives”, and no amount of English competence, Western clothes, and sophisticated literacy would make them equal to the “real” British. Similarly he hated the artisans (i.e. skilled African workers) who, like the clerks, became a thorn in his side by organizing protests against racial discrimination and poor salaries.Footnote 66 As Enugu grew at an extraordinary pace, it created a receptive context for these new traditions of resistance. Thus, while Lugard was busily trying to stabilize rural Igboland around colonial chiefs, the clerks and coalminers were making the city a center of dissent that gave voice to the complaints of the young men who were the chiefs’ victims.
The first contingent of railway clerks and artisans in Enugu originated from mid-nineteenth century Lagos and had gradually dispersed throughout the coast, settling in several cities in eastern Nigeria – Calabar, Onitsha, Owerri, and Enugu. These were a transnational group of men from communities in Britain’s black Atlantic empire: a sprinkling of West Indians, Creoles/Saro from Sierra Leone, returnees from Brazil (called Amaro), Yoruba men from Lagos, and Igbos from the more “civilized” areas on the coast and the cosmopolitan market town of Onitsha on the Niger River. They had a profound belief in personal and group improvement, independence, “progress”, self-reliance, “civilization”, and the supremacy of British culture as the pinnacle of civilization. When they arrived at the coalmines early in World War I, the city of Enugu did not formally exist. They relished the opportunity to “tame” the countryside, to carve this modern industry out of the forest; in this way they fulfilled an aspect of Victorian manhood – the mastery over the self and the environment. In the 1930s officials noted that these men saw themselves as “pioneers”, who had carved the mines and city out of the “bush”, at a time when the locals were still “cannibals”.Footnote 67
During the war the clerks organized new home-town (“tribal”) associations to provide mutual aid, assist in urban socialization, and finance development projects in the home villages, which heightened their prestige in rural politics while they were away. The first urban Nzuko or “meetings” were formed in 1915 by Westernized men from Owerri. The form soon spread to other groups of “foreign” residents of Enugu.Footnote 68Nzuko also allowed the “respectable” members of migrant communities to assist in controlling and socializing the young.Footnote 69
Nzuko represented a new type of men, migrant workers, those whose absence from the village prohibited their daily involvement in rural politics but whose missionary education, industrial training, or wage labor made them intermediaries between the village and the new economy and political apparatus.Footnote 70 As an institution, the Nzuko allowed urban and wage-earning men to exhibit collectively some of the characteristics of “big men”. They redirected financial resources with largesse to “bring the village up”. This element of helping the collective was an important demonstration of a wealthy man’s moral power. The Owerri men were the first to form Nzuko, which enabled them to support “modern” projects, such as schools, maternity clinics, and road construction. At the same time, their claims of “modernity” introduced new criteria for male maturity. This enabled young men to challenge the power of senior men in the village councils.
Nzuko meetings opened an important social environment in which both elite and working-class masculinity could be performed,Footnote 71 especially by the clerks, who avidly demonstrated their command of Western meeting protocols. While the clerks were especially keen to laud their sophistication over the illiterate workers, the postwar economic conditions were encouraging a coalition of these different groups. Although class distance had initially been of crucial importance to the self-identity of the proud clerks, discriminatory wages and residential segregation blurred these divisions. Wartime inflation further depressed their discriminatory wages, putting the “respectable” lifestyle that so defined their identity beyond their reach. This forced them to live in the same squalor as the unskilled urban workers, their inferiors.
While they felt superior to the manual workers, the literate Nzuko leaders nonetheless opened an avenue for the politicization of these illiterate men. This enabled the elites’ values, political expectations, and gender ideologies to filter into the discourse of illiterate workers. Importantly, their meetings became a context in which clerks and artisans demonstrated new ideas about the expectations, role, and responsibilities of “modern” African men. Their relationship with colonial officials was ambivalent: while they saw themselves as assisting in preserving urban order, a function appreciated by the state, they became an organizational platform through which “Westernized” Africans could leverage their power in the transformation of the colony. In fact, during World War II they coalesced into Nigeria’s first nationalist party. In the meantime, Enugu’s unskilled miners would “borrow” the Nzuko form to create their first workers’ organizations.
THE EROSION OF VILLAGE-BASED IDENTITY: UDI’S “NEW” MINERS ATTACK “NATIVE” SUPERVISORS
The first industrial strikes (1917−1919) were led by artisans and clerical workers seconded from the railway. Although both looked down on the unskilled workers, they nonetheless influenced the forms of protest that would later be adopted by the more “local” underground laborers. In 1919 the locals did not participate in a series of strikes related to the inflationary spiral of the war and the consequent postwar unrest among both African and European civil servants.Footnote 72 The center of the strikes was in Lagos, where in 1918 Africans in the Nigerian Civil Service Union petitioned for salary increases and protested against discriminatory treatment – though to no avail.Footnote 73 In any case, these early industrial strikes were led by the “foreign” artisans and organized by the industrial derivatives of the home-town unions, the Nzuko Ifunyana. The strikes were caused by a number of factors: food shortages, payment in unpopular paper money, and the harsh measures used by “native” foremen to control the workers. The new industrial Nzuko synthesized Western voluntary associational forms with Igbo principles of corporate affiliation.
This formation of an autonomous workers’ association, free from the interference of the chiefs or their “boss boys”, was one indicator of the influence of seasoned workers and clerks on the less experienced miners. The postwar agitation expressed personal and collective definitions of “just” and “unjust” compensation and treatment for employees within an evolving set of expectations of the colonial state. The forms of protest reflected differential employment patterns, residential options, and variations in the regional significance of and familiarity with wage labor. These ideas about appropriate treatment and compensation were first expressed by urbanized “foreign” clerical, artisan, and skilled underground workers, but by the mid-1920s this protest culture had been rapidly embraced by local men, despite their continued affiliation with collaborative leaders in their village. This model of protest was an important dimension of the response of African workers to colonial capitalism.
Of the three strikes after World War I, only the first, in 1920, was led by “foreign” workers. At this time most “local” workers followed their normal pattern of protest and chose desertion. However, although the first strike was unsuccessful in securing the restoration of a rate cut made at the beginning of the recession that started in 1920, it demonstrated the forms of protest appropriate to the colonial workplace.Footnote 74 There is little archival documentation about the strike. We know only that skilled underground workers or hewers, “foreigners” from Awka, Owerri, and Onitsha town, participated in the strike. The management rejected the demands, dismissed the protesting miners and station magistrate, and four policemen chased them into the woods.Footnote 75 One of the leaders singled out by management, European staff, and African headmen was Edward Okafor of Umouji (Onitsha division). He was dismissed for insubordination and blacklisted in all other government departments. When the other hewers threatened another strike that April, the management decided to hire only Agbaja men, who they assumed would be less activist.Footnote 76
In following this policy the colliery manager acceded to a request by representatives of the Agbaja clan group, who argued that, since the mines were on their lands, they should be given preference in all hiring. Within five years the Agbaja constituted the majority of the underground workforce, both skilled and unskilled, and the “foreigners” held only the clerical and administrative positions.Footnote 77
This expectation of Agbaja docility proved short-lived. In the aftermath of the British General Strike of 1926, the Agbaja day laborers walked off their jobs in July, demanding a 1-penny increase. This would have raised their paltry wages to 1 shilling and 3 pence per day. Agbaja men had held a series of underground support jobs, often called “dead work”, that supported the “pit boys” (hewers).Footnote 78 They were all on daily wages rather than the hewers’ tonnage rates and could therefore not increase their incomes by working harder. At the same time, the payment of day wages to such a broad spectrum of the underground workforce encouraged solidarity and collective action. As increased effort had no impact on income, securing higher wage rates was the only way that these workers could increase their wages. Clearly, the “backward” Agbajas had learned from the “foreigners” and from their own experience in the mines. They no longer deserted, as they had in the past, but recognized the power of stopping production to underscore their demands.
A second series of strikes was related to rampant corruption and the chiefs’ agents in the mines. The management structure and system of industrial relations at Enugu was an industrial application of “indirect rule”: work in the mines exposed the men to a complex system of extortion and corruption, a fact that was understood by management but, as long as it secured industrial discipline, was of little concern. In fact abusive practices in the system of labor recruitment and control at the colliery were just an industrial expression of the problems inherent in the indirect-rule system at large. African intermediaries were given many managerial functions, with little European supervision. The chiefs’ “boss boys” and various other “native” supervisors handled daily colliery operations. With the general manager insulated from the daily supervision of the men, a culture of predation emerged in which both Africans and Europeans used corruption, extortion, and physical violence to push the workers to produce.
Of all the supervisory staff, the men complained most bitterly about the exploitation of the “boss boys”. From the position of the worker, the “boss boy” was the most powerful “native” supervisor in the mine. He decided who worked and where they would work. He was responsible for discipline, which he could enforce outside the workplace in the villages with the help of the chief and native courts. His power over individual men, exercised through physical violence, was ominous and arbitrary. Ultimately it was the “boss boy” who had the power in production and control over the hewers’ wage-earning capacity.
In September 1929 the “local” hewers walked out of the mines to protest the illegal deductions from their pay by the “local” “boss boys”. This was the most significant strike, from the perspective of regional and “local” identity, as it suggested that clan/village affiliation was not as secure a basis for industrial peace as in the past. The Agbaja workers launched a full frontal attack against the men who recruited and victimized them. Under the industrial application of “indirect rule”, men like the “boss boys” could extort money from the workers without any managerial oversight. If a miner refused to pay a bribe, the “boss boy” retaliated by placing him on a difficult workface where he would be unable to hew large amounts of coal.
The “boss boys” and headmen selected their work crews daily from the men in the labor camps, and they alone knew who was in their crew.Footnote 79 In some cases they received the wages for their entire work crew.Footnote 80 The consequences were predictable, as one miner noted:
The Colliery was paying its workers by the month. The boss-boys and headmen exploited this and often arranged to dismiss laborers a few days before pay day and take on other men. The headmen then drew the pay for the whole month and kept for themselves that of the dismissed men. The paying officer could not check this because he did not know the laborers individually.Footnote 81
Alternatively, the “boss boys” could arrange with the European overmen to have the miners fired. Neglect by management was not coincidental, but expressed a generalized assumption that the “boss boys”, as men from the village, should be given carte blanche in the mines.
Similar accusations were raised against the interpreters, again local men who were intermediaries between their crews and European overmen. One Agbaja tubman complained:
Interpreters caused the sudden dismissal of many workers. They really were very wicked to workers. When they find one resting in the working place and if such a one refuses to bribe him he would accuse such a one [of] sleeping on duty or accuse him of one serious offense which will lead to his dismissal. They always report them to the Europeans who dismissed such a one.Footnote 82
Both “boss boys” and interpreters were of inestimable value to management, especially when they functioned as informers on the miners. They attended workers’ meetings and informed on the ringleaders, who were subsequently dismissed. To counter this, the workers attempted to use “traditional” methods of securing solidarity and began using oath-taking at their secret meetings.Footnote 83 But as the colliery workers became more conscious and organized, curtailment of these corrupt practices was considered a priority, with claims of clan affinity (and corresponding obedience) losing their power.
CONCLUSION
This article has traced 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. This has included investigation into the many ways that local men maneuvered against the authoritarian control of chiefs, forced labor, and workplace exploitation by “native” and expatriate staff. The management and the collaborating rural leaders wanted to continue to use village loyalty as an enduring basis for industrial organization and worker control. But as early as 1919 the “pull” and legitimacy of the village governing system was already under strain. A political official complained about the problems “colliery boys” caused for the chiefs in the village-groups most heavily involved in the industry:
This system of boys [in Enugu-Ngwo, Abor and surrounding towns] living in their town and working at the mines is not one I prefer. The trouble is that the colliery boys living in the towns will not obey the chiefs who complain to the Political Officer that these boys are loafing in the towns and will not obey them.Footnote 84
Too disruptive to live in the village, too threatening to the tenuous urban order to live in the city, the mineworkers challenged all imperial fantasies and stereotypes about the nature of African workers. Their very existence as workers contradicted the ideological assumptions officials had about African society and the patterns of authoritarian rule that officials tried to insinuate into village politics. The miners’ insistence on “democracy” challenged what colonial authorities assumed was an endemic authoritarianism rooted in African society.
Initially most local workers were quite unfamiliar with the capitalist workplace. But the “foreign” artisans – the skilled African workers from other cities and often with a remarkably cosmopolitan background – exhibited a working-class identity that had been encouraged by their education in mission-run technical schools. They were rational, independent, self-improving men, whose pride in performing a skilled task resonated with some aspects of local Igbo masculinity, facilitating a synthesis of gender ideologies. These “foreigners” demonstrated the effective forms of worker protest and organized the industry’s first strikes during World War I.
While “white” bosses used race, class, and gender ideologies to construct repressive systems of labor control in the new colonial workplace, African miners countered by creating eclectic models of masculine prestige, which they demonstrated in the villages. They became providers of “development” and village uplift, thereby using industrial jobs to achieve the valued accomplishments of men in Igbo culture. In this respect they invented forms of self-representation that merged local and foreign gender ideologies arising from work, rural culture, and the influence of the more established industrial workers who came at the beginning of coalmining in Enugu.
As the colliery and the city entered the tumultuous decade of the 1930s, the hold of clan identity on the workers was clearly losing currency. Many young men saw themselves as a different breed. As noted above, even as early as the first years of World War I, District Officers complained that young men had already begun to challenge rural leaders, who they felt were so ignorant and so archaic that they could not really understand the industry. For those in the industry, the conflicts they encountered with their clan mates in the workplace pushed them to question the ability and legitimacy of senior village leaders and those wealthy men, Ogaranyan, who tried to advise them on the problems they encountered in the workplace. Rather, they trusted the workplace commonalities they had with men from “foreign” areas of Igboland, and drew upon their expertise in crafting movements of solidarity and handling problems with management. The experience of working in this industry and living in Enugu led them to abandon rural patterns of affiliation and political leadership based on kinship, age, and wealth, and encouraged them to join in solidarity with co-workers and leaders from areas that had been considered foreign or even hostile before.
This history of labor’s struggles during the first few decades suggests that by assuming the identity of “industrial workers” Udi men were able to reconstruct themselves as “coalmen”, men who both ran a crucial industry and were impressive promoters of modernization – both social and political. The mines gave them an opportunity to celebrate a skill, hidden in the darkness of the mines, and to confront this dangerous and mystical workplace with the courage and self-confidence that few other workers could claim. In this respect Igbo notions of male “bravery” and “commitment” merged with workplace identities in the mines.
