Nation on Board

by Lynn Schler

  Several distinct approaches have taken shape in these debates. There are those who find explanations in institutional weaknesses, many of which are attributed to the legacy of colonialism. Thus, Mahmood Mamdani has argued that the roots of inequality in postcolonial Africa are found in the colonial legacy that institutionalized unequal structures of power that served the needs of only a small elite at the expense of the masses.35 Scholars from the schools of underdevelopment theory and dependency theory also argue that the colonial legacy is largely responsible for instituting a world system that leaves postcolonial states at a perpetual disadvantage in international markets. But while acknowledging the immense obstacles colonialism placed on Africa’s road to development, many are beginning to feel ill at ease with these explanations that do not confront the postcolonial factors shaping Africa’s present. As Timothy Burke summarized the situation, “The problem of postcolonial Africa is treated by the majority of scholars, especially anthropologists and historians, as an extension of or continuation of the problem of the colonial, that the moral and political challenge of postcolonial society is subordinated to or situated within a modernity whose character is largely causally attributed to colonial intervention.”36

  As we move further away from the colonial era, there is a growing need for understanding postcolonial realities beyond the impact of the colonial legacy. In recent years, several significant works have argued that the postcolonial instability and weakening of African polities and economies must be understood against the backdrop of the cultural contexts of local societies. Thus, argue Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, African states will never evolve into exact replicas of the Western state because this transplanted model does not serve the interest of local elites. African elites prefer to maintain a deeply rooted traditional system based on “a reciprocal type of interdependence between leaders, courtiers and the populace. And it is a system that works, however imperfectly, to maintain social bonds between those at the top and bottom of society.”37 The persistence of patron-clientism and moral obligation has been cited by many scholars as a prominent cause of misappropriation and corruption in African political and economic systems. Jean-François Bayart wrote, “A man who manages ‘to make good’ without ensuring that his network shares in his prosperity brings shame upon himself and acquires the reputation of ‘eating’ others in the invisible world.”38 J. P. Olivier de Sardan also cites local cultures as the source of poor governance and corruption in Africa. Included in his survey of widespread social practices that ultimately lead to corruption are practices of negotiation, gift-giving, and the logics of predatory authority and solidarity networks. But unlike Chabal and Daloz, de Sardan rejects the notion that these are precolonial carryovers: “All these logics are syncretic, none is ‘traditional,’ none comes directly from any so-called pre-colonial culture.”39 While hardly an exhaustive survey, these few examples illustrate the types of polarities that exist in the ongoing debates about the “failures” of postcolonial Africa.

  This history of the Nigerian National Shipping Line reveals that there are no simple formulas for explaining the unsuccessful economic and political ventures of the postcolonial era. As we will see, the NNSL began as an ideological project. For Nigerian politicians and businessmen, the indigenization of shipping was a powerful symbol of decolonization, representing a reversal of centuries of economic exploitation at the hands of European colonizers. But the success of an international shipping venture required far more investment than just ideological zeal. From its creation, the national line suffered because of inadequate financial support from the very politicians who had reaped political rewards by grandstanding its establishment. Political motives, rather than economic ones, hindered decision-making processes, evident in the hasty buyout of the technical partners, Elder Dempster and the Palm Line, after only two years of operations. This move greatly weakened the already scarce managerial resources of the company, and the NNSL suffered from a lack of expert knowledge essential to running an international shipping line. Political instability further exacerbated this situation, as the revolving door of ministers led to constant hirings and firings of staff, and no one stayed around long enough to ensure solid business practices. The lack of leadership and authority at the NNSL ultimately led to the unchecked pillaging of the company by politicians and their networks of clients who had no interest in the success of the shipping venture. With time, there was a trickle-down effect seen in practices of misappropriation and corruption. All parties involved in the shipping line, from the management to officers and captains, down to the rank-and-file crew, looked for ways to maximize opportunities. By the 1980s, illegality flourished at all levels: seamen engaged in theft and drug trafficking, captains and officers used the ships for their own private enterprises, and management embezzled millions in company resources.

  The history of the NNSL demonstrates that a complex array of factors, spanning the colonial and postcolonial eras, led to the demise of the Nigerian National Shipping Line. From the start, material inequalities became a breeding ground for abuses of power, illegality, and misappropriation. Local responses to the instability and scarcity of resources were indeed culturally rooted, but they cannot be understood in isolation from inequality and injustice. In his work on corruption in postcolonial Nigeria, Daniel Smith has argued that the roots of corruption are neither purely institutional nor purely cultural, but rather can be found at “the intersection of local culture and larger systems of inequality.”40 Against the backdrop of political and economic insecurity and inequality, Smith argues, people exploit all available resources, whether they be economic, political, or cultural, in order to survive and thrive.

  This history of the Nigerian National Shipping Line provides a unique view into the evolution of a postcolonial enterprise from multiple perspectives. By focusing on the evolution of the NNSL from the perspective of seamen, but also engineers, captains, and management, it aims to reveal how each class fared against the backdrop of broader political, economic, and ideological developments. In maintaining a view of all the actors involved, the study provides insights into the divergent ways in which working classes and elites experienced the opportunities and limitations that characterized the history of postcolonial Nigeria.

  ON SOURCES

  Histories of enterprises and the workers employed by them are profoundly lacking in the history of Africa, largely because archival evidence either has not been preserved out of disinterest or has been deliberately destroyed. This study overcomes the absence of a well-organized and preserved archive, and demonstrates that it is nonetheless possible to write postcolonial histories of African enterprises and the labor employed by them. While no complete archive of the NNSL has survived, I have located a broad base of primary documents in government, corporate, and personal archives in Nigeria, Liverpool, London, and Amsterdam.

  The archives of the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool and at the British National Archives in Kew Gardens provided vital documentation on British shipping interests in the colonial era. The archives of Elder Dempster in particular, located at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, provided rich information about the shipping company’s involvement in Nigeria, as well as information about recruitment and employment of seamen, and relations between the company and the Nigerian Union of Seamen. Colonial policies toward “coloured” seamen in general, and Nigerians in particular, could be found at the National Archives. The archives in Liverpool and London also included vital information on the process of decolonization, and on the negotiations behind the founding of the Nigerian National Shipping Line in partnership with Elder Dempster and the Palm Line. For the 1960s–1980s, the British National Archives contain records of the Port Authority regarding illicit trade and drug smuggling involving seamen in general and Nigerians in particular. The Peter Waterman Papers at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam contain primary and secondary material concerning labor organizing in Nigeria in the postcolonial era. Finally
, archives in Liverpool and London included correspondence concerning the various shipping conferences operating between Africa and Europe in the colonial and postcolonial eras.

  In Nigeria, few records of the former Nigerian National Shipping Line have survived. But several important sources of information were available in various archives in Lagos and beyond. The Nigerian Shipping Federation houses a partial collection of official ship logbooks from the 1960s through the 1980s. These captain’s logs contain rich and detailed documentation of specific incidents that took place on board NNSL ships, and provide rare insights into hierarchies of power and relations between officers and rank-and-file seamen, as well as any disciplinary actions, medical emergencies, and personal issues concerning crew members that arose. The Nigerian Institute of International Relations contains a well-organized collection of Nigerian newspaper articles relating to shipping and seamen from the colonial era to the present. In the collections of the National Archives in Ibadan, I was able to find correspondence about seamen in the colonial era, with an important collection of files concerning repatriations. I supplemented the information found in these archives with official documents, photos, personal letters, and various keepsakes found in the personal archives and photo albums of former seamen, labor union officers, captains, officers, and NNSL management. Many of these records have never been used before by historians.

  Without detracting from the significance of all these written sources, this study was largely made possible by the information obtained through oral interviews. Over the course of three research trips to Nigeria from 2007 to 2011, I conducted more than seventy interviews with Nigerians who had varying degrees of involvement with the Nigerian National Shipping Line. As the study began with a focus on seamen themselves, I initially concentrated on interviewing rank-and-file seamen who had worked on colonial and NNSL ships. With the help of research assistants, I located some former seamen and these men directed me to others. The officers at the Nigerian Union of Seamen in Apapa, Lagos, also provided assistance in contacting former seamen, and they generously allowed me to conduct some of the interviews in their offices. While this was an extremely helpful arrangement that enabled me to schedule consecutive interviews over a few days, the interviews that I conducted in seamen’s homes were often richer for the insights they provided me. Through dozens of visits to former seamen’s homes across greater Lagos,41 I was able to get an invaluable glimpse into seamen’s offshore lives, and to gain a deeper understanding of how their careers as seafarers had shaped their lives and the lives of their family members. Some had a piece of furniture or another keepsake from their time at sea, while others had pictures of their foreign girlfriends and children on the walls of their homes. But mostly, visits to seamen’s homes in the low-income neighborhoods of Lagos provided physical evidence of the dire fate of the working class within the history of the NNSL. The interviews I conducted with seamen were open-ended, but they covered a range of topics including seamen’s recruitment and training, life on board ships in both the colonial and the postcolonial eras, time spent at international ports of call, their involvement with independent trade, relations with their families abroad and back in Nigeria, the seamen’s union and labor protests, and seamen’s perspective on the circumstances leading to the demise of the NNSL. Often, seamen’s wives were present at the interviews, and I was able to use this opportunity to interview the women as well. Seamen’s wives told very different stories than those of their husbands, as they had to struggle with many months and years of maintaining the household and caring for their children in their husbands’ absence. Women provided an essential perspective on the financial significance of men’s independent trading enterprises, and they also provided fascinating insights into the romantic relationships their husbands maintained abroad.

  As the interview process progressed, and more and more seamen voiced criticisms of Nigerian officers and management, I soon realized that in order to gain a fuller perspective of life on board NNSL ships, it was imperative to interview former captains, engineers, and managers. Interviews with captains and engineers offered a very different perspective from those of seamen. These NNSL officers received far more extensive training than rank-and-file seamen, which included several years of academic study in Britain, and thousands of hours of practical training logged on foreign vessels. They therefore possessed a wealth of knowledge, and the ability to draw comparisons, about the technical and economic aspects of running ships and cargo in the international shipping industry, and the functioning of the NNSL within it. Captains and officers had their own criticisms of both rank-and-file seamen and management, and their perspectives were an important complement to seamen’s testimonies. As opposed to the officers, it was fairly difficult to locate former managers of the NNSL who were willing to provide an interview. Many who had occupied positions of influence and power in the former company were not willing to meet with me, probably in light of the rampant misappropriation and corruption that led to the NNSL’s failure. But a few key informants from both middle and upper management of the NNSL did provide important information on the general running of the company, financial issues, and the links between the volatile political history of postcolonial Nigeria and its impact on the National Shipping Line. Finally, one former government official who oversaw the process of liquidation also provided a key interview regarding the final years of the NNSL.

  This research would not have been possible without these interviews, as no official or complete archive of the NNSL exists. Even in the presence of the available sources, interviews provided me with invaluable insights that brought to life, enriched, and contradicted the written material found in archives. But as historians of Africa are well aware, the use of oral histories can raise its own set of concerns, including issues of remembering and forgetting, and questions of accuracy, authenticity, and bias. I attempted to overcome many of these problems by conducting over seventy interviews with a range of informants, thus enabling me to find common threads and themes that emerged again and again from the interviews. Yet, throughout the research, and particularly in this effort to overcome biases and partialities in oral testimonies, I remained keenly aware that many of my informants did not necessarily share my agenda. While my primary concern was to produce a book that accurately portrayed their experiences, I realized that those who provided interviews did so with the earnest hope that telling their stories would make a difference. For rank-and-file seamen, officers, and managers, the intersections between their lives and the history of the NNSL were not simply a matter of historic interest, but an unfinished business that still evoked varying claims. This issue was all the more complicated by the fact that there were stark contrasts between the agendas of each class of informants. Officers and managers offered systematic analyses of the political economy of shipping in Nigeria, and how the wrongdoings of the past could be overcome and corrected by reestablishing the national line. Working-class seamen, on the other hand, gave testimonies full of pride, anger, disillusionment, and a sense of betrayal around their experiences with the NNSL, and interviews often ended with a bitter lament of their extreme poverty and lack of prospects. Despite stark differences in the material and political agendas that characterized each class of informants, none told their stories to merely enrich the historical record. For all those interviewed, the story of the NNSL strongly resonated in the present, and there had to be utility and impact in its retelling. While conducting interviews, and later analyzing and interpreting the testimonies, I was confronted with the dissonance that existed between my primary concern for constructing an accurate account and my informants’ efforts to convey a story that addressed the injustices and disappointments they experienced. I hope that the narrative that has taken shape, and the lessons it can provide, resolves this issue by signifying something of use to those who shared their insights with me.

  AN OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS

  The first two chapters of the book trace the origins of Nigerian s
eafaring in the late colonial period and describe the work and lifestyles of seamen employed on colonial vessels. Chapter 1 provides background on African seafaring in the modern age, and the processes that led to the recruitment of Nigerians en masse. This chapter describes work on board the ships, and the types of jobs seamen were engaged in, training provided, relations with European crews, incidents of racism and discrimination, and the background of union organizing among Nigerian seamen and labor relations between seamen and management of the colonial shipping lines. Chapter 2 examines the cosmopolitanism that characterized the economic, social, and cultural lives of seamen offshore. This chapter describes the trade conducted by seamen in secondhand goods such as electronics, small and large appliances, foodstuffs, clothing, and even in scrap metals and used cars. The chapter also looks at the social lives of seamen abroad, and examines particularly the romantic relationships seamen established with European, Asian, and Latin American women in the course of their travels. This review of the centrality of cosmopolitanism in seamen’s consciousness and experiences provides essential context for understanding the eventual impact of nationalism and nationalization on seamen’s working lives.