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

Abstract

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 20th 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 study draws on Michel Foucault's work on 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. 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). 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 unfair working conditions and colonization among workers dissatisfied in particular with wage and taxation levels. 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.