Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T08:15:36.276Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“Wives Wishing to Join Their Husbands”: Colonial Forgery, Gender Legibility, and Labor Migration in West Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2022

Ndubueze L. Mbah*
Affiliation:
Department of History, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Abstract

European mobilizations of Africans for labor relied on the forgery that Africans can be harnessed into modern units of capitalist production only when organized into households led by wage-earning men supported by domesticated women. Between the 1930s and 1950s, Nigerian male labor migrants to Fernando Po and Gabon, as well as their wives, advanced diverse forgeries in response to the legibility protocols that European states used to control African migrants. Nigerian men used colonial documentation of their status as husbands to claim women’s bodies. Nigerian women used colonial documentation as wives and mothers to mask autonomy, illicit mobility, child trafficking, and sex work. This article develops a historical theory of forgery to explain how colonial legibility protocols and African manipulations of colonial documents constituted gendering practices. It focuses on the diverse documentary strategies women developed to evade colonial surveillance, including photographs to manufacture kinship and colonial court records to generate identities as temporary wives and fictive mothers. As European agents and African men strove to exploit women’s economic and sexual capacities, women used documentary and social forgeries to exploit fissures in colonial rule and create autonomous spaces of mobility and economic opportunity.

Résumé

Résumé

Les Européens ont réussi à mobiliser le travail des Africains en s’appuyant sur l’idée fausse selon laquelle les Africains ne peuvent être exploités dans des unités modernes de production capitaliste que lorsqu’ils sont organisés en ménages dirigés par des hommes salariés soutenus par des femmes forcées à rester à la maison. Entre les années 1930 et les années 1950, les travailleurs migrants nigérians à Fernando Po et au Gabon, ainsi que leurs épouses, ont produit diverses contrefaçons en réponse aux protocoles de lisibilité que les États européens utilisaient pour contrôler les migrants africains. Les hommes nigérians ont utilisé la documentation coloniale et leur statut de mari pour s’emparer du corps des femmes. Les femmes nigérianes ont utilisé la documentation coloniale en tant qu’épouses et mères pour masquer l’autonomie, la mobilité illicite, la traite des enfants et le travail du sexe. Cet article développe une théorie historique de la falsification pour expliquer comment les protocoles de lisibilité coloniale et les manipulations africaines des documents coloniaux constituaient des pratiques genrées. Il se concentre sur les diverses stratégies documentaires que les femmes ont développées pour échapper à la surveillance coloniale, que ce soient les photographies pour fabriquer la parenté ou les archives judiciaires coloniales pour générer des identités en tant qu’épouses temporaires et mères fictives. Alors que les agents européens et les hommes africains s’efforçaient d’exploiter les capacités économiques et sexuelles des femmes, les femmes ont utilisé des contrefaçons documentaires et sociales pour exploiter les fissures de la domination coloniale et créer des espaces autonomes de mobilité et d’opportunités économiques.

Type
Artifacts and Archives Anew
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the African Studies Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aderinto, Saheed, When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015).Google Scholar
Aird, Michael, “Growing up with Aborigines,” in Pinney, Christopher and Peterson, Nicolas (eds.), Photography’s Other Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Amadiume, Ifi, Male Daughters and Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987).Google Scholar
Bernault, Florence, Colonial Transactions: Imaginaries, Bodies, and Histories in Gabon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).Google Scholar
Breckenbridge, Keith, “Power Without Knowledge: Three Nineteenth Century Colonialisms in South Africa,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 26 (2008): 331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breckenbridge, Keith, “Flesh Made Words: Fingerprinting and the Fantasy of Documentary Panopticism, 1900–1930,” International Development Studies: Occasional Paper 23: 7696.Google Scholar
Burrill, Emily S., States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015).Google Scholar
Chapdelaine, Robin P., “Marriage Certificates and Walker Cards: Nigerian Migrant Labor, Wives, and Prostitutes in Colonial Fernando Po,” African Economic History 48–2 (2020): 136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarence-Smith, William G., “Spanish Equatorial Guinea, 1898–1940,” in Fage, J. D., Roberts, A. D., and Oliver, R. A. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Africa: From 1905 to 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Clarke, Graham (ed.), The Portrait in Photography (London: Reakton Books, 1992).Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Desai, Gaurav, Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Ejituwu, Nkparom C., “Anglo-Spanish Employment Agency: Its Role in the Mobilization of Nigerian Labour for the Island of Fernando Po,” in Barkindo, Bawuro M., Asiwaju, A. I., and Mabale, Ricardo Elo (eds.), The Nigeria-Equatorial Guinea Transborder Cooperation (Lagos, Nigeria: Terminal Products, 1995).Google Scholar
Fontcuberta, Joan (ed.), Photography: Crisis of History (Barcelona, Spain: Actar, 2002).Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality , vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).Google Scholar
Jean-Baptiste, Rachel, Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Jenkins, P., and Geary, C., “Photographs from Africa in the Basel Mission Archive,” African Arts 18–4 (1985): 5663.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kunstmann, Rouven, “Fashioning Nationalism and the Shaping of the Public Sphere in 1950s Nigeria,” Journal of West African History 7–1 (2021): 2754.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martino, Enrique, “Touts and Despots: Recruiting Assemblages of Contract Labour in Fernando Pó and the Gulf of Guinea, 1858–1979,” PhD dissertation, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin (Berlin, 2016).Google Scholar
Martino, Enrique, “Clandestine Recruitment Networks in the Bight of Biafra: Fernando Pó’s Answer to the Labour Question, 1926–1945,” International Review of Social History 57 (2012): 3972.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martino, Enrique, “Dash-Peonage: The Contradictions of Debt Bondage in the Colonial Plantations of Fernando Po,” Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 87–1 (2017): 5378.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mbah, Ndubueze L., Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oham, Anthony C., “Labor Migration from Southeastern Nigeria to Spanish Fernando Po, 1900–1968,” MA thesis, Central Michigan University (Michigan, 2006).Google Scholar
Peffer, John, “Introduction: The Study of Photographic Portraiture in Africa,” in Peffer, J. and Cameron, E. L. (eds), Portraiture & Photography in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Pinney, ChristopherIntroduction: How the Other Half … ,” in Pinney, Christopher and Peterson, Nicolas (eds.), Photography’s Other Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pratten, David, The Man-Leopard Murder Mysteries: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Ranger, Terence, “Review Article: Colonialism, Consciousness, and the Camera,” Past and Present 171 (2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reed, Michael C., “A Neo-Colonial Enclave of Enduring French Interest,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 25–2 (1987): 283320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, Gayle, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Reiter, R. Rayna (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975).Google Scholar
Schneider, Jurg, “Portrait Photography: A Visual Currency in the Atlantic Visualscape,” in Peffer, J. and Cameron, E. L. (eds.), Portraiture & Photography in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Sekula, Allan, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984).Google Scholar
Sheehan, Tanya, “Introduction,” in Sheehan, Tanya (ed.), Photography, History, Difference (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015).Google Scholar
Smith, Timothy Farley, “Nigeria, Report on Employment of Nigerian Labour in Fernando Poo,” 97110, in Sunderland, David (ed.), Economic Development of Africa, 1880–1939: Labour and Other Aspects of Development (London: Routledge, 2011).Google Scholar
Sprague, Stephen F., “Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves,” in Pinney, Christopher and Peterson, Nicolas (eds.), Photography’s Other Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Sundiata, Ibrahim. K., From Slavery to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827–1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Werner, Jean-Francoise, “Photography and Individualization in Contemporary Africa: An Ivorian Case-Study,” Visual Anthropology 14 (2001): 251268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar