Nation on Board. Lynn Schler
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for work on foreign vessels were commonly identified by European merchants as “Kru.” This labeling took on official status by the Liberian government’s recognition of the Kru ethnic group in the nineteenth century.10 The emergence of the Kru social construct thus represents the earliest coalescing of African identities and social groupings around maritime employment. The Kru were employed on steamships as deckhands and stevedores moving cargo from ship to shore, and later as firemen and stokers on deep-sea steamships.11 European shipping companies eventually became reliant on these African seamen, and most ships from Europe would stop in Freetown to pick up Kru coal handlers, deckhands, and firemen before continuing down the coast.12
The Kru in turn exploited this dependence. They controlled the supply of seamen through a system of labor recruitment based on a headman and his apprentices. Headmen acted as middlemen between seamen and their employers, recruiting laborers from the interior and negotiating terms of employment. Headmen decided who went to sea and for how long, took care of lodging and food, and represented their apprentices in any grievances. The system opened the door to many abuses, and the colonial administration received complaints that crewmen were forced to pay large bribes to headmen in order to get employment on ships. In some cases, in the initial period of employment, the headmen earned the wages of the young men in training and thus amassed considerable wealth and influence for themselves. Headmen took pains to develop personal relations with European captains, who would in turn give them preferential treatment in the process of recruitment. Shipping companies also paid headmen large sums for providing labor. The system was well entrenched by the beginning of the twentieth century, enabling the Kru to establish a near monopoly on the supply of seafaring labor until the Second World War. It was not only the headmen who benefited, and years of specialization and efficient organizing enabled the headmen to continually negotiate for improved terms of employment for all the African crew engaged in Freetown. This earned the Kru a position of relative prosperity, symbolized by the fact that Kru women were never allowed to work outside the home in petty trading or market work, as most other Freetown women did.13
Until the period following World War II, European shipping companies overwhelmingly favored this system of labor recruitment based in Freetown because it passed the responsibility for monitoring the labor supply, crew behavior, and work supervision onto the Kru headmen and away from them as employers. The preference for this arrangement substantiates Fred Cooper’s claim that European economic interests prior to World War II preferred to cast African labor in a tribal mold, and argued that even workers migrating to the city should remain subordinated to Native authorities. In proposing that labor remain linked to “a traditional African way of life,” employers and the colonial administration could avoid taking responsibility for masses of “detribalized” Africans.14 Likewise, rather than acknowledging the proletarianization of the Kru as laborers in a modern, industrialized economy, and thereby clearing the way for potential demands for workers’ rights and benefits, the system of headmen and apprentices enabled shipping companies to abdicate their responsibility for the newly born African working class. Within this model of preserving a premodern workforce, there was no room for trade unions, and British shipping companies, led by the Liverpool-based giant Elder Dempster, refused employment to union members up until World War II.15
From the end of the nineteenth century, the Elder Dempster company controlled the lion’s share of cargo, mail, and passenger shipping between the United Kingdom and the West African coast.16 Elder Dempster was founded by Alfred Jones, a one-time clerk who slowly rose to managerial positions in the African Steamship Company in Liverpool. Over the course of the years 1884–1891, Jones gradually orchestrated the merger of six smaller shipping companies to form what would ultimately be known as the Elder Dempster Lines.17 The shipping company was one of the largest in UK history and, in addition to operating hundreds of deep-sea vessels, also provided small-vessel services to transport cargo and passengers from inland, riverside bases to and between coastal ports. By the time of his death in 1909, Alfred Jones had led Elder Dempster in the establishment of an extensive and integrated transport and storage infrastructure throughout West Africa.18 The company held a monopoly for carrying mail and coal between the UK and West Africa, and, in addition to shipping, held large interests in banking, agriculture, and the trade in oil, coal, and cement.19 By 1925, Elder Dempster had a share of 85 percent of the West African Shipping Conference, which controlled all trade to and from West Africa.
Until the outbreak of World War II, Elder Dempster routinely recruited the Kru of Freetown as supplemental labor for their ships. But the war increased demands on the company, as their headquarters in the port cities of West Africa oversaw ship repairs, in addition to handling the increase in cargo activity associated with the war.20 Janet Ewald has argued that in times of hardship, European shipping companies historically sought out fresh sources of “coloured” seamen to recruit throughout the maritime world, and tapped them to offset rising costs of labor.21 The acute need for seamen pushed Elder Dempster to begin hiring in Nigeria, where the company could enjoy several advantages. In Lagos, European shipping companies readily found ratings at much cheaper rates than in Freetown. The Nigerians were initially hired directly by representatives of the shipping companies, and came from a wide range of ethnic groups including Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw, and Urhobo. The multiethnic Nigerians lacked the deep-rooted headman system for organizing seamen that the Kru had developed over decades. During the war, the shipping companies came to see this as an advantage. There were growing concerns that the Kru recruitment system had become increasingly corrupt with the additional demand for seamen. According to Diane Frost, the Trades Union Congress Colonial Advisory Committee received a complaint from Sierra Leone during the war concerning the increasing abuses and improprieties in the system of Kru recruitment. It was claimed that the practice of bribery intensified as a result of increasing demands for labor. Thus, Frost wrote, “the Wages Board was so disturbed by the amount of bribery and corruption characteristic of headmen recruitment that it was suggested the Labour Department should take over responsibility for it.”22 Following the war, it was decided that recruitment in the ports of West Africa would be under the control of the Port Labour Board rather than headmen. Bribes were no longer allowed, and shipping companies filled vacancies on board ships through official employment exchanges.
Elder Dempster’s move to hire in Lagos was thus designed to circumvent the highly organized and increasingly corrupt Kru establishment in Freetown. Shipping companies seized upon the opportunity to cut costs by hiring in Lagos, and Elder Dempster established a four-tiered pay scale during World War II: at the bottom were Nigerians recruited in Nigeria, then Africans recruited in Freetown, then Africans employed from Liverpool, and finally European seamen who were paid the National Maritime Board rates.23 The discrimination Nigerians faced did not go unnoticed by seamen, as one recalled, “In the shipping world, we were the most poorly paid seamen.”24 Sierra Leone officials complained to the Colonial Office that Elder Dempster’s new methods of recruiting “cheap labour” in Lagos were “deplorable,” and left many skilled seamen in Freetown without jobs.25 Officials in Lagos, on the other hand, were highly supportive of the move. The 1942 governor of Nigeria, Sir Alan Burns, did not see any reason to protest the cheap wages, and instead expressed great enthusiasm for Elder Dempster’s new hiring policy. He wrote, “The development which has taken place is natural and inevitable and provides opportunities of employment for the more adventurous spirits in Nigerian which cannot well be denied them.”26
But while the Nigerians were a cheap alternative, hired to undercut Kru wages and terms of employment, the shipping companies initially paid a price for the lack of experience that characterized Nigerian crews in the early years. Many Nigerians recruited during the war lacked the knowledge and training required to successfully fulfill their responsibilities on board.
In some cases, recruits claimed that they were completely uninformed or even misled by shipping companies about the work for which they were being recruited. In one archival account, two Nigerian boys at the age of secondary school jumped ship in Liverpool and were eventually intercepted by an immigration officer, who reported, “They told me they were recruited by Elder Dempster. A Mr. Dyson, a European employed by the Company, came to their homes and told them that the Government needed men to go on ships and suggested to them that they might like