Nation on Board - Lynn Schler New African Histories

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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

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