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Recruiting Assemblages of Contract Labour in Fernando Pó and the Gulf of Guinea, 1858–1979

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Recruiting Assemblages of Contract Labour in Fernando Pó and the Gulf of Guinea, 1858–1979 Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Dissertation Touts and Despots: Recruiting Assemblages of Contract Labour in Fernando Pó and the Gulf of Guinea, 1858–1979 zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades doctor philosophiae (Dr. phil.) Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftlichen Fakultät Enrique Martino Präsident der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Prof. Dr. Jan-Hendrik Olbertz Dekanin der Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftlichen Fakultät Prof. Dr. Julia von Blumenthal Gutachter: 1. Prof. Dr. Andreas Eckert 2. Prof. Dr. Alexander Keese Datum der Einreichung: 18 November 2015 Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 22 April 2016 1 2 Abstract This dissertation follows Fernando Pó’s labour recruiters wherever they went— between the 1860s and 1920s recruiters traversed the entirety of the Gulf of Guinea and enlisted mostly Kru from Liberia and Fang from Rio Muni, Cameroon and Gabon; between the 1930s to 1960s they gathered particularly around the Bight of Biafra and brought an unprecedented number of contract workers into the island’s booming cacao plantations, mostly Igbos and Ibibios from south-eastern Nigeria. Recruiters tended to appear in a modality that I will describe and theorize as ‘touts’. They operated almost exclusively with an excess of language and money—deceit and informal advances. They operated ‘outside’ the law and the regulated, yet it was only the shape of the contract on Fernando Pó—forced, long and irrevocable—that allowed recruiters to deploy their techniques. Recruiters created and relayed a series of wholly impermissible twists: quasi-enslavement through fraud that was a form of kidnapping, quasi-debt bondage with informal wage advances enabled by the contracts, and even a movement of really quite free but fugitive labour across borders and work-sites. A sustained attention on the ambivalent practices of recruiters reveal a series of juxtapositions of free and unfree that produced creative potentials for intensification and unravelling, rather than single points along a ‘free-unfree’ labour spectrum. Keywords: Equatorial Guinea, West Africa, Contract Labour, Recruiters, Free and Unfree Labour Diese Dissertation folgt Fernando Pó Arbeitskraftanwerbern wohin sie auch gingen dort, wo sie zwischen den 1860er und 1920er Jahren den gesamten Golf von Guinea überquerten und hauptsächlich Kru von Liberien und Fang von Rio Muni, Kamerun und Gabon anwarben; und dort, wo sie ab den 1930er bis 1960er Jahren vor allem um die Bucht von Biafra eine noch nie dagewesene Anzahl an Vertragsarbeitern, vor allem Igbos und Ibibios aus dem südöstlichen Nigeria auf die florierenden Kakaoplantagen der Insel brachten. Die Anwerber tauchten vornehmlich als eine Modalität auf, die ich als ‘tout’ beschreibe und theoretisiere. Diese operierten fast ausschließlich mittels eines Exzesses an Sprache und Geld mittels Täuschung und informellen Vorschüssen. Zwar agierten sie ‘außerhalb’ des Rechts, doch erlaubte genau die Vertragsform von Fernando Pó, die langfristig und unwiderruflich zur Arbeit zwang, den Anwerbern die Ausübung ihrer Techniken. Eine Reihe an unerlaubten Verdrehungen wurden 3 geschaffen und durchgereicht: Quasi-Versklavung durch Täuschung in Form von Kidnapping, Quasi-Schuldknechtschaft mittels informellen Lohnvorschüssen, die die Verträge ermöglichten sowie die grenz- und Arbeitsort überschreitende Migration einer relativ freien, allerdings flüchtigen Arbeitskraft. Der anhaltende Blick auf die ambivalenten Praktiken der Anwerber legt eine Reihe an Nebeneinandern von ‚frei’ und ‚unfrei’ offen, was kreative Potentiale für deren Intensivierung und Auflösung schuf, und über einzelne Punkten entlang eines Spektrums der freien-unfreien Arbeit hinausgeht. Schlagwörter: Äquatorialguinea, Westafrika, Vertragsarbeit, Anwerber, freie und unfreie Arbeit 4 Acknowledgements This dissertation formally began in 2010 at the Institute of African Studies of the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2011 I joined the research group “Forced Labour Africa: An Afro-European Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa (1930–1975)” funded by the ERC Starting Grant no. 240898 under Framework Programme 7 of the European Commission. My gratitude goes first and foremost to my two supervisors; Andreas Eckert who took me in at the beginning even though I only possessed a vague plan and little motion; being around The International Research Center ‘Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History’ (Re:work) has been a real boon and provided a constant beam of insight for my investigations; and Alexander Keese, head of the research group that provided an inordinate amount of support and made all the field work possible. For being there from the early stages or really throughout many other key parts, I thank Benita Sampedro, Dmitri van den Bersselaar and William Clarence-Smith; a big wholehearted thank you. In the critical first phase of getting the plan for a thesis off the ground, with all its self-induced false starts, I am still forever grateful to Peter Hallward, Ulrich Fleischmann and Michael Zeuske. At the Institute of African Studies I am also forever grateful to Joël Glasman, Michael Pesek, and Ineke Pfaff-Rheinberger for their very helpful orientations and advice. At the AGA, the archive, in Alcalá de Henares, I thank Juan José Villar Lijarcio for revealing the existence of their internal digital index that made the quasi-unnavigable Guinea section actually accessible through their staff-only search engine, ‘interpares’. Thanks also to Ana Naseiro Ramudo, the chief cataloguist of the new Guinea index, that is still under construction, for explaining how it was exactly that large swathes of the Republican and Francoists colonial archives never made it into the only publicly available catalogue. In Equatorial Guinea I would like to thank many people but I should only publicly acknowledge the official institutions: the Biblioteca Nacional de Malabo, the Universidad Nacional de Guinea Ecuatorial and the Spanish cultural centre in Bata, without which getting the visas would have been close to impossible. Similarly, for helping me to know and travel to the Nigerian archives in Enugu and Calabar, I thank Simon Heap, David Aworawo, David Pratten, Axel Harneit-Sievers, Chima Korieh, Gloria Chuku, Ute Röschenthaler, David Imbua, Nnanna Onuoha Arukwe and Edlyne Anugwom. 5 At the writing stage, as parts of the text have been prepared for publication in journals (specifically the articles “Panya: Economies of Deception and the Discontinuities of Indentured Labour Recruitment and the Slave Trade, Nigeria and Fernando Pó, 1890s– 1940s”, to appear in a future issue of the journal African Economic History, and “Dash- Peonage: The Contradictions of Debt Bondage on the Colonial Plantations of Fernando Pó”, to appear in a future issue of Africa: Journal of the International African Institute) I wish to thank various people for various comments on these article drafts, and especially Ugo Nwokeji, Paul Lovejoy, David Pratten, Chika Onyenezi, Jelmer Vos, Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, as well Bill Freund, Stefano Bellucci, Zachary Kagan Guthrie, Prabhu Mohapatra, Keith Breckenridge, Barbara Cooper, Cheikh Babou and Benoît Henriet. I am thankful to Juan Aranzadi, Gustau Nerín and Gonzalo Alvarez Chillida for including me, since early 2014, in the research group based out of the UNED in Madrid. My investigations have benefited much from the regular gatherings of the research group. When it was time to write, revise, talk, revise, read and revise my absolute gratitude, as ever, goes to Sabine Scheuring and Anton Nikolotov for being there every step of the way. 6 Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................ 3 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................. 5 Contents ............................................................................................................... 7 List of Maps ......................................................................................................... 9 List of Figures ...................................................................................................... 9 Abbreviations .................................................................................................... 10 1. Introduction: Recruiting with Language and Money ............................... 11 1.1 Economies of Deception and Escalation: Panyarring and Dash ............ 17 1.2 Main Findings and Contributions ............................................................ 19 1.3 A Brief Outline of the Chapters .............................................................. 25 1.4 Methods and Sources .............................................................................. 26 2. Imperial Formations and Atlantic Constellations ..................................... 31 2.1 First Contracts, First Recruiters, 1850s–1890s ....................................... 34 2.2 Tout Preludes: Fernandinos and Agudas, 1880s–1910s .......................... 43 2.3 Despots Displace Touts in Liberia, 1890s–1920s ................................... 52 2.4 Touts and Despot Supplant Each Other in Rio Muni, 1900–1930s ........ 57 2.5 Figures in West and Southern African Colonial History ........................ 70 3. Touts and Despots Combine: Panya or the Bonding of Labour with Language ........................................................................................................................ 76 3.1 Economies of Deception ........................................................................
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