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Labour Migration to the Northern Nigerian Tin Mines, 1903–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

W. M. Freund
W. M. Freund
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

The study of migrant labour in Africa has tended to emphasize social form rather than historical context. This study of the immense migrant labour force that worked the Northern Nigerian tin mines is placed in the context of the ongoing subsumption of labour and existing social relationships by capital. Colonial conquest was required for the establishment of tin mining in Nigeria on a capitalist basis to serve the industrial needs of the West. Pre-colonial social organization prevented the release of sufficient labour for this purpose. After conquest, a migrant labour force was built up in conjuncture with a growing reserve army of labour by means of cash taxation, penetration of the market, weakening of slavery and state use of forced labour. In the second decade of the twentieth century there was substantial pressure from mineowners for the colonial regime to institute Rhodesian-style labour recruitment methods, but this was ultimately rejected because of the costs involved, the desire to encourage cash crop growth and the overarching aim of social stability. As a result, it was largely market forces which threw up the pool of labour that worked the mines, notably from the cash crop poor parts of Northern Nigeria and neighbouring French colonies. Initially, migrant labour was the most satisfactory option for many Northern Nigerian peasants, whose wages earned most in the pre-World War I era. The purchasing power of a miner's wage tended to decline, but social forces continued to throw up cheap labour. In World War II, the state instituted forced labour to mine tin, but the scheme was expensive, unproductive and opposed by business. The 1940s represented the nadir of worker poverty and the war was followed by a period of heightened social and political resistance to capital and the state. The tin mines both helped to cause and profited from the decay of the older mode of production in Northern Nigeria.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , January 1981 , pp. 73 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

1 For an effective critique of the standard literature on migrant labour in West Africa which consequently needs no repetition here, see Amin, Samir, Modern Migrations in Western Africa, introduction (London, 1974).Google Scholar See also Osoba, S. A., ‘The Phenomenon of Labour Migration in the Era of British Colonial Rule: a Neglected Aspect of Nigeria's Social History’, J. Hist. Soc. Nigeria, iv, 4 (1969).Google Scholar

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8 Among sporadic discussions of labour in Nigerian tin mining, the main published work is: Anjorin, A. O., ‘Tin Mining in Northern Nigeria during the Nineteenth and Early Part of the Twentieth Centuries’, Odu, new series, v (1971)Google Scholar; Bower, Penelope, ‘The Mining Industry’, in Perham, Margery (ed), Mining, Commerce and Finance in Nigeria, second volume of Economics of a Tropical Dependency (London, 1948)Google Scholar; Fox, William, Tin: The Working of a Commodity Agreement (London, 1974)Google Scholar; Hodder, B. W., ‘Tin Mining on the Jos Plateau of Nigeria’, Economic Geography, xxxv, ii (1959)Google Scholar; Morrison, J. H., ‘Early Tin Production and Nigerian Labour on the Jos Plateau 1906–21’, Canadian J. Afr. Stud., xi (1977)Google Scholar; Orde Browne, G. St J., Labour Conditions in West Africa (Cmd. 6277, London, 1941).Google Scholar See also Gonyok, C. K., ‘Creation of Labour for the Tin Mining Industry in the Plateau (or Proletarianization?)’, unpublished seminar paper, Department of History, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, 14 May 1977Google Scholar and ‘Impact of the 1930s Depression (1927–34) on the Labour Force in the Tin Industry’', unpublished paper, Seminar on the Economic History of the Central Savanna of West Africa, Kano, 5–10 January 1976. Among published work on West African mining labour presenting striking parallels to this, see especially two excellent pieces: Bonté, Pierre, ‘Conditions et effets de l'implantation d'industrie minière en milieu pastoral: l'exemple de la Mauritanie‘, in Monod, Théodore (ed), Pastoralism in Tropical Africa (London, 1975)Google Scholar, and Thomas, Roger, ‘Forced Labour in British West Africa: the Case of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast,’ J. Afr. Hist. xiv (1973).Google Scholar The material here is treated in a more comprehensive setting in Labour and Capital in the Nigerian Tin Mines (Longmans, Ibadan History Series, 1981, forthcoming).Google Scholar

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11 Mining Journal, xcix, 2 December 1912, p. 1060. Railway labour is discussed in Mason, Mike, ‘Working on the Railway: Forced Labour in Northern Nigeria 1907–12’, in Gutkind, Peter, Cohen, Robin and Copans, Jean (eds), African Labour History (Beverly Hills and London, 1978).Google Scholar

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14 A rare reference is in 215/1917, SNP 15, NAK.

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24 Inaugural Meeting, Niger Company headquarters, Jos, 7 July 1910, recorded in Mining Journal, 19 October 1910.

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32 Minute by Harding on extracts of report by J. M. Hogg to Ormsby-Gore, 15 January 1926; CO 583/141, Public Record Office, London.

33 Orde Browne, p. ii.

34 Van Onselen, pp. 116–19.

36 Memorandum by Swinton, Resident Minister in West Africa, 10 October 1943; Compulsory Labour Policy 1943, CO 583/269, Public Record Office, London; Ministry of Supply Methods for Paying Tin, C. 689 v. i; JOSPROF MINESDEPT, NAK; Tin International (June 1945). I discuss the forced labour period in Freund, forthcoming, ch. 5.

38 These mechanisms are crucial in bringing about the Chayanovian peasant economy cycle described so vividly in, Hill, Polly, Rural Hausa: a Village and a Setting (Cambridge, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar I examine this process in some detail, with reference to the Birom peasantry of the minesfield environs where it took place in an extreme form by the 1940s with disastrous ecological implications, in Freund, forthcoming, ch. 6.

37 Third Quarterly Report, Jos Division (1931), 578/1931; JOSPROF I/i, NAK.

38 By contrast, the insistence on ‘full’ proletarianization for effective resistance to capital in Perrings', CharlesBlack Mineworkers in Central Africa (London, 1979)Google Scholar seems somewhat mechanical. For militant migrant workers in Africa, see Iliffe, John, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waterman, Peter, ‘The Concept of the “Semi-Proletarianized Peasantry”, the Lagos Dock Strike of 1968, and the Necessity for Reconceptualizing the Role of the Less-Proletarianized Workers in Africa’, seminar on Third World Strikes, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 12–16 September 1977Google Scholar; Hemson, David, ‘Class Consciousness and Migrant Workers: The Dockworkers of Durban 1870–1974’, Ph.D thesis, University of Warwick, 1980.Google Scholar

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41 In preparing this article, I am grateful to the members of the Seminar on Labour Migration, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, organized by Shula Marks, and to Robin Law.