Nation on Board. Lynn Schler
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like to thank Deborah Posel, Shamil Jeppie, Ilana van Wyk, Zethu Matebeni, Heather Maytham, and Rifqah Kahn for the opportunity to be a part of their vibrant intellectual community. A particular thanks goes to Deborah Posel for helping me to jump-start the concluding arguments of the book. I would also like to thank the Department of History at UCT for the opportunity to present my work, and for the encouraging feedback. While in Cape Town, we were assisted in numerous ways by Ronit and Stephen Segerman and Janine and Werner Thetard, all of whom have become lifelong friends.
There are several institutions and people in Israel that provided support for this project. Funding for the research was provided by an individual research grant from the Israel Science Foundation. Nurit Klein helped with the administration of these funds. Additional sources came from the dean’s office in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. I was assisted by several graduate students with the bibliography and references, and I would like to thank Hilah Segal, Itamar Dubinsky, Noa Ginosar, Roy Knafo, and Tally Eyal for their hard work.
I divide my time at Ben Gurion University between two homes. I am honored and extremely fortunate to be a member of the Department of Politics and Government. This community of scholars embodies the best mixture of intellectual rigor, professional support, and deep dedication to human rights and political and social justice. Despite the ongoing challenges presented by the encroachment of antidemocratic forces, the Department of Politics and Government promotes a multiplicity of opinions and vantage points, evidenced by the crucial role the department played in the revival of African studies in Israel. For providing me with this exceptional and valued institutional home, I am extremely grateful to Gal Ariely, Dani Filc, Michal Givoni, Neve Gordon, Becky Kook, David Newman, Jennifer Oser, Sharon Pardo, Rene Poznanski, Ahmad Sa’di, Haim Yacobi, and Dina Zisserman-Brodsky.
My second home is the community of Africanist scholars, including colleagues in the Inter-University Program in African Studies and the Tamar Golan Africa Centre at Ben Gurion University. I would like to thank Ruth Ginio, Louise Bethlehem, Galia Sabar, and Ella Keren for years of camaraderie in the effort to promote African studies in Israel. A special thank you is due to Ruth Ginio, who has been the ideal colleague for many years. It has been my great fortune to work so beneficially with someone whose research interests overlap so closely with my own, and who has consistently provided a critical eye, enthusiastic encouragement, and friendship. I am also extremely privileged to work with the talented and dedicated staff of the Africa Centre. It is impossible to enumerate the countless ways in which Ayala Kuriel, Noga Miller, Moran Mekamel, Noa Levy, Itamar Dubinksy, and Tamar Ben Moshe work tirelessly to promote knowledge of Africa in Israel, and the human rights of Africans in and beyond Israel. Individually and as a staff, they constitute an example to follow.
This project was born in the course of field research for my PhD that focused on the history of Douala in the colonial era. Richard Roberts was my adviser then, but many years later, he continues to be a source of intellectual and professional guidance. And as a teacher and mentor, Richard is a rare role model that all his former students aspire to emulate. From those days in graduate school until the present, Kathryn Barrett-Gaines, Walter Hawthorne, Benjamin Lawrance, Thom McClendon, and Emily Osborn continue to provide support and friendship. Becky Kook, Walter Hawthorne, Tijani Hakeem, Ayodeji Olukoju, Louise Bethlehem, Ruth Ginio, Emily Osborn, and Gai Rofeh have read all or parts of the manuscript and gave important feedback. A special thanks to Haggai Ram, who has heard and commented on each of the arguments in endless car rides to Beer Sheva. I owe an intellectual debt to the scholars whose work has fundamentally shaped the theoretical and empirical grounding of this research. This list includes, but is not limited to, the work of Toyin Falola, Ayodeji Olukoju, Peter Davies, Diane Frost, Frederick Cooper, Carolyn Brown, and Tijani Hakeem. I have learned from each one of these scholars, but the shortcomings of this work are, of course, mine alone. To the editors of the New African Histories series at Ohio University Press: Jean Allman, Gillian Berchowitz, Allen Isaacman, and Derek Peterson, and I would like to express my sincere appreciation for their hard work and support of this book. The final product has been much improved by their close reading, insightful criticisms, and their strong commitment to high-quality scholarship. The entire field of African studies has been greatly enriched by the many important works that this editorial team has put their support behind over the years.
Several friends have been enthusiastic supporters, despite having little connection to or knowledge of African history. Danny Rosen, Lisa Russ, Debbie Hill, and Gayle Kirschenbaum have pushed me for detailed updates at every stage of the project, thus helping me more than they each realize to clarify the arguments to myself, and to make sure that I always had some progress to report. My sister, Miriam, remains my most enthusiastic reader even without reading, and I cherish her for being my link to every part of my past and present.
The final thanks go to those who deserve them the most. At some point in the course of writing, I realized that the storage shed in our yard would make an ideal office space. I thought George would talk me out of my sudden need for “a room of one’s own,” but instead he immediately took part in the planning and implementation. Ellie and Mika helped with the painting. Amos provided some sharp critique of the decor. In these symbolic gestures, and in countless acts of similar significance, my family has provided me with the physical, intellectual, and emotional spaces that I have needed for both work and home. To George, Amos, Ellie, and Mika—all of my love and deepest gratitude.
Introduction
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Nigerian seamen was in the stories I heard and collected in Douala, Cameroon, in the late 1990s. I was in this West African port city to research and interview residents about the social and cultural history of the colonial era, and several of the testimonies and reminiscences that I gathered made reference to the African seamen who passed through Douala while employed on colonial ships. Women in particular described the spectacle of the eye-catching seamen in their bright white uniforms as they crossed the city from the port to the bars and brothels of the popular quarters. These seamen inspired admiration among the local residents, but the former beer brewers and prostitutes of Douala also remembered the seamen as a raucous bunch of troublemakers. The larger-than-life portrayals and stories of these African seafarers stuck with me, and ultimately inspired the research that led to the writing of this book.
My initial imaginary of these African seamen was a romantic one, as I envisioned adventurous men traversing seas and cultures and social landscapes, leaving their indelible mark along the way as evidenced in the popular memory of Doualans. Opportunities such as these for transnational mobility were extremely rare among working-class Africans in the colonial era, and I was deeply curious about the worlds that opened up to seamen in the course of their travels. At the same time, as a historian of colonialism in West Africa, I was also keenly aware of the ways in which seamen’s status as colonial subjects must have shaped and limited the freedoms and opportunities they enjoyed in the course of their travels. While seamen were extraordinarily unique among colonial subjects in Africa for their experiences of transnational mobility, I believed that research into the history of their lives on and off colonial vessels could shed new light onto the ways in which colonialism shaped and limited the opportunities of African subjects.
The early stages of research into Nigerian seafaring in the colonial era confirmed this anticipated trajectory. Beginning in World War II, British shipping companies began the mass recruitment of African seamen in Lagos. From the very start, Nigerian seamen’s entrance into the colonial shipping industry was characterized by contradictory experiences. On the one hand, these seamen were cast as cheap and unskilled labor performing menial tasks on vessels where hierarchies of class intersected with hierarchies of race. Both on board with European crews and offshore among local populations, seamen experienced discrimination and hardships that characterized the experiences of black working classes across the Atlantic World in the post–World War II era. At the same time, transnational travel opened up a world of opportunities that seamen were quick to seize. To supplement meager wages, many developed a lucrative business as traders of secondhand goods. Offshore hours also provided seamen with opportunities to encounter cultural and social landscapes far removed from Nigeria, and many nurtured relationships that traversed racial and ethnic boundaries. Thus, as unskilled labor in the workforce of the colonial shipping industry, Nigerian seamen confronted