Panya: Economies of Deception and the Discontinuities of Indentured Labour Recruitment and the Slave Trade, Nigeria and Fernando Pó, 1890s–1940s

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, most of Fernando Pó's contract workers came from societies in southeastern Nigeria which had been heavily impacted by the transatlantic and internal slave trades. These contract workers were recruited by a new generation of labor recruiters, dispatched covertly by Spanish imperial employers, through a form of kidnapping known as panya. Panya was the largest labor smuggling and trafficking network in colonial West Africa, bringing tens of thousands of migrants to long and obligatory contracts on Fernando Pó. In contrast to scholars who have interpreted this history as a holdover from the pre-colonial period, this article argues that panya arose from the contractual order of Spanish imperial rule. Extensive archival research reveals the voices of those caught in the warp of post-abolition colonial labor regimes, in order to rethink the passage from the pre-colonial slave trade to imperialism within West African history. Using a series of vivid and precise petitions submitted by those who found themselves on the island of Fernando Pó, the article shows how these sources contain the potential to reconceptualize the disjunctures between enslavement in the slave trade and the recruitment of contract labor.

Dash-peonage: the contradictions of debt bondage in the colonial plantations of Fernando Pó

“…From the sparse and distant 10 existing literature, the movement of people from eastern Nigeria onto Fernando Pó’s plantations is seen to have had two phases. During the first phase, for over a decade after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, up to 10,000 people per year were being smuggled onto the island by canoe owners from the Cross River Delta – illegal recruiters had ‘shanghaied’ or kidnapped many of them (Osuntokun 1978a: 38; Martino 2016: 93). The second phase (1943–73) saw an ‘indentured labour treaty’ organized by the John Holt company and the government of Nigeria, which expressly aimed to ‘control and regulate on a sound humanitarian basis a traffic which existed on a slave basis’ 11 .…”