British ‘Colonial governmentality’: slave, forced and waged worker policies in colonial Nigeria, 1896–1930

Abstract

In this article, we explore employment policies and practices in Colonial Nigeria, during a period of planned development, from the late 19th to early 20 th century. We consider the relationship between colonial government, commerce and development of a labour force against the working experiences and growing aspirations of many colonised locals. Our work builds on the ideas of Michel Foucault and in particular the concept of governmentality. We draw on an archive that comprises British government and colonial administrative reports, complimented by a range of official and unofficial documents of the period. The British colonial administrators were not able to enforce governmentalist thinking throughout colonial Nigeria.There was a coexistence of colonial governmentality through waged labour (a non-traditional practice in precolonial Nigeria), sovereign power through localised rule by traditional leaders and slave labour) and forced labour (introduced by the British). The segmentation of the labour force in this way as many locals refused to engage in the waged labour system, and the number of workers needed through the waged labour system was insufficient to support policy targets.In the Lagos area in particular there was concentration of commercial, administrative and waged employment, with Lagos also the main hub for the organisation of labour and the seeds of resistance to colonial governmentality among workers dissatisfied in particular with wage and taxation levels. This article will cover a number of areas including British colonial administration, governmentality, indirect rule, forced and slave labour, waged labour and the creation of labour markets, employment policies and laws, and community and worker resistance, in colonial Nigeria. We also use the Foucaudian approach of the deep archive, which captures the interplay between governmental policy and its outcomes, and accounts of the lived experience, as our method of evaluating our research archive.

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