Fernand Po, or Bioko, is a relatively large volcanic island a hundred kilometres off the coast of Nigeria. In the 1820s, the British “rented” it from the Spanish, who had occupied it in the eighteenth century. The British remained on the island, making it the centre of their fight against the enslavers, and allowing the introduction of other kinds of labour relations or labour exploitation. The freed slaves became not only the nucleus of the local Creole population, the Fernandinos, but they were also employed by the British in all sorts of economic activities as “free” labourers: as clerks; servants; manual workers; plantation workers; for policing and security, for instance. The island became a plantation site for palm oil. This activity brought in waves of different kinds of people who also mixed with the indigenous population, the Bube. Workers were recruited in Western Africa, especially today's Nigeria. After being incorporated into Spanish West Africa in 1904, the island began to attract Hispanophone immigrants. Some established themselves as a class of plantation owners. This book highlights the labour and social history that emerged from the planation economy, characterized by economic profit and labour exploitation.
The plantation economy required a massive amount of labour that was not present on the island. The twentieth century saw an expansion of the basin of labour supply, which consequently stretched from Liberia to Central Africa. The sources are vast and geographically disparate: the author has used annual reports on migration, police reports, missionary documents, and companies or trade collections from Spain to Britain to Germany. His book assesses the social and labour history of Fernando Po in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries using universalistic and Marxian categories, such as the relationship of money and free wage labour, capital accumulation, legal frameworks adopted by companies, and the relationship of contractual frameworks and forced labour.
Martino's research concentrates mainly on the recruiters, the touts, which also gives the book its title. However, there is much more here that is essential for general students of labour history. The book, in fact, seeks to present a history of the transformation of labour relations. Touts are “virtuosos of commercial life beyond the regulations of the state within the domain of the labour market”. To become a tout “required, as appreciated by the foremost colonial-era African labour studies specialist, the ‘exceptional and peculiar gifts of the able recruiter’” (p. 107). Martino also explains how touts not only recruited workers but also enabled their radicalization.
Touts were driven by their share of the dash, but they were also personally solicited as they enabled a radicalization of workers’ strategies and expectations. Together they produced an extraordinarily creative praxis, a co-operative but risky logistics, that tuned the colonial order through a savoir-faire and rejected its preformatted rules of contract labor exchange. Recruiters could surprise the imperial economics of labor demands; they could lean into and jam the force of an entire agro-capitalist plantation island and make it collapse onto itself (p. 195).
The touts are basically presented as enablers of the capitalist transformation of the island's economy, with implications that go well beyond its shores. They were certainly important figures who were not just intermediaries between workers and the colonial power; they were also enablers for the great capitalist transformation. It is therefore rather striking that African labour historiographies have missed the opportunity to analyse their role. Why are these figures important? Because they were not just intermediaries and recruiters; they came from a social class of labour merchants (lumpen-brokers, see Chapter Five) that determined the price of labour power and incorporated workers into new forms of labour relations, based on remuneration and not pure coercion. This book thus also touches on the emergence of a labour market culture at the margins of empire.
The book's second chapter is dedicated to the recruiting techniques put in place, and concentrates on two concepts that, in pidgin, are called dash and panya. Dash literally means “a gift as an ancillary component to an exchange” (p. 22). Braceros – labourers on the plantation – received this payment in advance, at the moment a contract was established. Martino notes that “recruitment techniques involving debt generated a two-way movement, a mobile form of submission and subversion, a friction that both enabled and undermined imperial plantation economics” (p. 165). So, dash means to give on the part of the employer. This was the basis of the entire plantation system, together with the panya, which means “taken”, or “removal to the unknown”. The two recruiting systems, described in Chapters Two and Three, are presented as the beginning of two pillars of labour capitalism: wage and freedom.
The bracero is not forced to enter into a relationship with the exploiter but chooses to do so, just as the free wage worker does. This is a proto-form of freedom because the recruitment involved dishonesty and trickery: the worker voluntarily agreed to sell their labour power, but without knowing where or how. “Touts did not create capitalist labour markets through slaving violence but by applying a hermeneutical skill set and supplying misinformation about destinations and type of work”, Martino writes (p. 22). In Chapter Three, it is also explained how imperial labour codes facilitated the panya system of recruitment. Interestingly, this ambiguous system of deceiving workers in order to recruit them and put them to work on the plantation, in appalling conditions not dissimilar to those of a chattel slave, actually served to overcome the measures produced by the abolition of slavery in Nigeria. For the British, contractual voluntariness was enough not to pursue touts and their activities as slavery. But the post-abolitionist plantation was not dissimilar to the slavery plantation.
Dash is a wage advance. It is a crucial element in a system of production that is capitalist because it presupposes the existence of labour power that can be sold and bought, i.e. the commodification of labour power, unlike in labour relations based on slavery, where the labourer (the slave) is the commodity. Dash constituted a kind of transaction historically new in the Gulf of Guinea. The dash also created a sort of labour market based on skills: the more skilled the bracero, the higher the dash. Martino, however, explains how the dash was not really a wage yet. The problem is time. Strictly speaking, a wage is an exact payment based on time worked or piece produced (including sharecropping). Here, the worker is paid in advance, but without knowing the amount of time they will work (how many years) or how much work (production of goods) the plantation will demand from them. Again, deception and trickery is present here. The dash became the focal element of a system of indebtedness that Martino relates to indentured contract labour.
However, despite all this, there is a good deal of workers’ agency in this story. The workers used the dash as a measure for their claims and demands. When Fascist Spain reduced labour rights – especially the right of movement under the Vagrancy Laws of 1940 (p. 124) and introduced more stringent border regulations – on the island, the touts became a sort of mediator on behalf of workers. During the 1940s and 1950s, the repressive political system and worsening labour conditions triggered the circulation and turnover of workers from one plantation to another. In this later period, touts also facilitated this process, and the dash was used by workers to switch employer or plantation. This competition, according to Martino, improved labour conditions and created an embryonic form of competitive labour market (Chapter Four).
The concept of “lumpen-broker”, introduced in Chapter Five, also derives from the role touts played as recruiters and middlemen. The labour mediators and recruiters are “lumpen” for two reasons: because they themselves live in the grey area between legality and informality, and because their “clients” are African lumpen-proletarians. The use of such Marxian categories might seem odd in the context of early twentieth-century Fernando Po, but it is not. However, it is rather interesting how, in this final and potentially crucial chapter, the story of the touts, the braceros, and the plantation system of Fernando Po gives way to a long discussion on the plausibility of the use of the Marxian category of “lumpen”. Everyone is there, from Eric Wolf to Max Weber, Jarius Banaji, E.P. Thompson, Stirner, Bakunin, Kautsky, Foucault, Hobsbawm, Fanon, Rosa Luxembourg, and, of course, Karl Marx. Martino's intention is evident: to insert African labour history and his research within the body of “high literature” on capitalism and its history. This literature is mostly from the Global North, but not necessarily Eurocentric – unless one considers “Eurocentric” to mean everything that comes out of Europe.
Finally, Martino tries to demonstrate, and with success, how in Fernando Po capitalism emerged in the context of semi-criminal, dodgy, illegal, and murky social relations. We are perhaps in the proximity of a rare example, in today's historiographical research, of a neo-Marxian or post-Marxian explanation of labour market creation as the beginning of a capitalist mode of production in Africa. The focal points of this approach are the intermediaries of labour and capital. This book certainly constitutes a must-read for scholars of African labour history.
