Panya

Fernando Pó’s Drift in the Gulf of Guinea

With recruitment techniques for panya there was no cycle, no circular migration, no equilibrium. Instead, there was a constant drift of recruiters across the entirety of the Gulf of Guinea, from west to south from the 1880s on, and internally in Nigeria itself, where by the late 1940s only a large handful of “illegal recruiters [were] still operating in the northern half” of the Eastern Provinces “where the people are more ignorant and where they can get victims by promising them work in Port Harcourt or Calabar.”³⁷ “From the beginning of the plantations Spanish planters surreptitiously recruited labour from the coastal areas of Nigeria as well as other parts of the West African coast,” though only in the 1930s did they fully deploy “an elaborate recruiting machinery to tap labour from south eastern Nigeria.”³⁸ The economies of deception created a pattern of shifting incursions within recruitment that was only exhausted after half a century. The dynamics of recruitment changed in the late 1940s when the planters’ labor demands, which had been rising over the first half of the twentieth century from 1,000 to 10,000 laborers a year, was met directly by the British and later the Nigerian state through a top-down and centralized “labour agency.” The 1942 “treaty” permitted an association of Spanish planters to pay licensed recruiters small commissions, to construct a large depot in a converted military barracks in Calabar, and to send a dedicated steamship to make bi-monthly pick-ups.³⁹

In the late nineteenth century, cacao exporting plantations had been single-handedly set up by the Fernandinos, the “black capitalists” studied by Ibrahim Sundiata, Martin Lynn and W.G. Clarence-Smith, who themselves or whose parents had formerly been slaves. Fernandinos had mainly come from Freetown, hired by the British merchants and British administrators on the island when it was in their possession earlier in the nineteenth century, or else from Cuba, on the offer of eventual manumission after they took up a contract in the 1860s, when the Spanish state took over Bioko.⁴⁰ Ambitious Fernandinos, such as William Allen Vivour, paved the way for the plantation boom of the 1880s. Vivour himself quickly became the largest planter on the island and employed one hundred laborers, whom he recruited mostly with the help of “two Bassa-people stationed on the coast.”⁴¹ To get workers, this new generation of creole planters and recruiters traversed whatever port towns were connected by steamer, anywhere where “free immigrants” or “slaves escaping their servitude” had “flooded” the “coastal towns,” including Accra and Loango, but especially Lagos and Freetown, both of which were becoming a type of “floating” “labour reserve for all of West Africa.”⁴² This confluence of labor in the coastal trading towns and the more flexible relations that it created “seemed to have blunted somewhat the distinctions between slave, indentured servant, pawn and free labourer,” and by the 1890s “slaving, brigandage, panyarring and pawnship became fused in disconcerting ways.”⁴³

In 1900 there were about a thousand Liberians and another thousand British West Africans from Sierra Leone and Nigeria who were working as braceros (contract laborers) on Fernando Pó.⁴⁴ This shift occurred because the principal free labor force in the Gulf of Guinea, the Kru of Liberia, described by colonial employers during the peak of indenture as “ ‘the Chinese of West Africa,’ ” were no longer going to Fernando Pó as laborers.⁴⁵ When the British Consul in Spanish Fernando Pó, Richard Burton, had earlier passed through Cape Palmes in eastern Liberia to enlist workers he “failed in recruiting men.” “ ‘Nanny [Fernando] Po’ was a word of fear to the Krumen; they had been made to work in gardens and on the roads” even though they were promised work as sailors, stevedores or stewards, and “some of them had been engaged for one year, not two, and had been kept for three.” Hearing Burton’s fellow travelers on the steamer speak “a few words of Spanish,” they deemed him to be “ ‘a Panyer’ [a Spaniard], and resolutely refused, with characteristic independence, to accompany” him.⁴⁶ Fernando Pó consistently had a terrible reputation, so that with the departure of braceros after every round of the contracts lasting between 2–8 years, a new generation of workers came—but always from somewhere else. Touts displaced themselves in waves; a patchwork of ever new fringes emerged, where touts would add ever more elaborate fabrications and false guarantees to the repertoire of their recruiting techniques.

A British Vice Consul traced Fernando Pó’s “first” Nigerian labor tout to one Aguda man, named Bernadino José Reis, from Brazil House in Lagos island. In the 1890s, Reis began “importing Yoruba labour” from Lagos and Ijebu-Ode, but soon this “source of labour supply dried up.”⁴⁷ At the turn of the century, 450 laborers, most of whom Reis recruited, went on strike, and “marched to the Governors house in Santa Isabel with machetes in hand and refused to return to the plantations.” They were met “with guards from the navy who rushed down from the jetty” and the protesters were beaten and deported without their due pay.⁴⁸ After what the Spanish called the “uprising of the Lagosians” the British embargoed labor migration to Spanish Guinea. The prohibition was only partially enforced, and it became quickly “evident that a considerable unchecked traffic in illegally recruited native laborers of British nationality destined chiefly for the plantations of Fernando Po” was being carried out in various port towns in the Gulf of Guinea. Indeed, some of the principal recipients of this illicitly recruited labor were British cocoa exporting houses in Santa Isabel, such as the John Holt company, who “pay 5 pounds for each ‘boy’ landed,” who they then informally lent or rented to various small farmers on the island in exchange for their cocoa.⁴⁹

Reis himself kept recruiting for decades, in different places and targeting different categories of people. In the 1910s, someone accused Reis and a new associate, another “Lagos man” by the name of Thompson, of going “to Bonny and Warri to take little children to sell at Fernando Po. They have sold lots already.” Reis and Thompson had a variety of liaisons, as they would hire canoes to get to Rio del Rey in the German Cameroons and then make the crossing to Fernando Pó.⁵⁰ Other recruiters were operating simultaneously or followed in their steps in different places. Calabar’s first large scale recruiter in the twentieth century was Ekpenyon John Boko, from the Cobham family in Duke Town, who was “suspected of inducing boys to leave Calabar for Fernando Po without either obtaining the consent of the head of their House, or entering into a proper contract of service.”⁵¹ He had been taking advantage of the rising number of deserters and the newly autonomous job-seekers generated by the abolition of slavery in Nigeria in 1901 and the subsequent introduction of the House Rule ordinance, under which former “slaves,” now called servants, were obliged to render tributary service labor to their Efik masters. The rate of flight was so high that even the “most important Chief[s]” found it “difficult to secure enough labour for their trade canoes.”⁵² Dozens of letters reached the Governor in Santa Isabel from a demoted Efik aristocracy, now classified as “chiefs,” such as from Abassi Ita of Duke House, asking about “the whereabouts of his runaway boys.” The Spanish Governor happily ignored all of them and pointed the finger back “at the slavery being condoned by the English, who expect us to return these men who left their region freely.”⁵³ Between the 1910s and early 1930s, most braceros were either recruited by the Liberian state or by the Spanish state, or by recruiters in Rio Muni, Cameroon and Gabon through separate, usually much more violent, recruiting assemblages. However, by 1935, the majority of “the braceros who arrive in our colony [were] all coming from Calabar,” and from this point on the majority of the islands’ inhabitants (including the large immigrant community of traders, smugglers, skilled and self-employed workers and their families) were Nigerian.⁵⁴

“By far the greater number of Cross River people who migrated to seek employment” abroad ended up on the plantations in Fernando Po. Yet “an Igbo saying has it that ‘no one who was comfortable at home ever opted for Fernando Po.’ ”⁵⁵ Extensive migration to the towns in Eastern Nigeria was kick-started in the late 1920s, when the British introduced the poll tax. People moved to “escape tax,” “definitely to escape tax,” wrote a District Officer in 1930. The sudden tax obligation of 7 shillings was often paid out in bulk to district commissioners by appointed chiefs who were paid their wages in pounds; for those who suddenly found themselves debtors, interest quickly accumulated up to £3, and they would be “summoned for this amount and they place[d] themselves in bondage” to creditors and chiefs who “take all our money,” as a resident of Aba in 1930 put it, adding “on account of the tax and various other matters people have pawned themselves.”⁵⁶ In the 1930s, as with previous generations, many of those entering this new labor market were escaping other forms of unfree labor generated under colonial rule. In the districts of Owerri, Aba, and Bende, where a majority of migrants came from in the 1940s, the selling and pledging of land became unusually common. In the “hope of gathering the first installment to pay for a bicycle or a [palm oil] press,” land pledges were being accepted as a “security for a debt.” Land could be seized by creditors for failing to pay back loans and high interests rates, something which had “driven many away from farming to seek their fortunes abroad.”⁵⁷

The wages and conditions in Fernando Pó made the island attractive only to the “miserly situated labour” in Nigeria; most migrants arrived “completely destitute and penniless,” and many “had never worked before,” at least in the sense of the word as it was used by European administrators. They were drawn from the ranks of those who for various reasons could not find work in Nigeria, such as absent social and kin relations, who generally facilitated money-making opportunities and provided the sums of money needed to pay the initial fees that would secure placements, training and apprenticeships in Nigeria itself. Some also had their own reasons for “a hasty exit from Nigeria, e.g. debts, taxes unpaid, family disputes.”⁵⁸ The “evil” reputation of Fernando Pó almost always preceded the spread of the “illegal recruiters in the widely scattered areas of recruitment.”⁵⁹ Fernando Pó and its recruiters quickly “gained a very unsavoury reputation” after “cases of kidnapping were brought to light,” but colonial officials assumed they met with quite “some success,” “partly because the very dense population in Onitsha and Owerri Provinces had created a class of landless peasants, who were compelled to turn to wage earning for a livelihood.”⁶⁰ But on closer investigation, it was clear to those doing the investigative groundwork that only “through such agencies as may exist in Calabar,” that is “through the instrumentality of a ‘recruiting agent,’ ” was it possible for anyone to find their way into the island’s plantation contracts.⁶¹

Economies of Deception, 1930s–1940s

Labor migration to Fernando Pó was not created through violence, which uprooted people from their land; people wanted to or needed to be on the move, just not necessarily towards the places and under the conditions they ended up in. Touts did not induct people into capitalist labor systems through the conduits of slaving violence, but rather through language alone, through a quasi-kidnapping based on misinformation as to the destination or the type of work. Many Nigerians, tens of thousands, ended up forcibly contracted to Fernando Pó’s planters, and considered their temporary fate to be a type of slavery—which in effect it was, just for a delimited period. Recruiters were not armed; they did not purchase or redeem “existing” slaves or raid for new ones, “as it is unthinkable that nations like France and England, from whose colonies our labor power arrives, would have allowed us to employ procedures that require violence and coercion”—as a Spanish diplomat said in defending his colony at the International Labor Organization in 1935.⁶² A Spanish petty functionary on the island explained the modus operandi: “deceitful methods operate in la recluta [recruitment] and this is well known by all, because if it wasn’t for the manipulation of appearances, the indígenas [natives] would not come to work for us.”⁶³ Another settler said that while it was “not always necessary to employ cunning and trickery and other despicable procedures, at least half” were set up this way.⁶⁴ This is as good an estimate as any, as various surveys confirm that at least half of Nigerian recruits in this period “claimed ignorance of knowing that they were being taken to work in the Spanish Cocoa plantations.”⁶⁵

Touts armed themselves with varying degrees of deception, creativity, theatrics, and the most intimate of illicit relations, betrayal. Their peaceful “linguistic” techniques were made up of important omissions and plenty of embellishments, and used to solicit an initially affirmative response. Unlicensed and unregulated labor recruiting in Nigeria was banned, not because it was restrictive or necessarily unfree, but because it was considered “too free” and disinhibited, beyond the laws of exchange in territories of excess. While British District Officers were generally pleased to see the “acceleration of the drift,” shorthand for the emergence of a “pool of surplus labour” arising from the “tendency of young men to drift to centers of semi industrial employment,” they worried about the “drain of labour to foreign possessions,” because this “drift” was imagined to come from both the “avarice” of recruiters and the promiscuous expectations of the “uneducated young man, in search of easy money.”⁶⁶ The recruiters used “lies, deceit, and stealth to get labour from Nigeria,” said a journalist in the Nigerian Eastern Mail during the outpouring of the reading and writing public in 1939.⁶⁷ Scholars who have seen the sources say that “recruiters resorted to deception to entice young men to leave their homes.” Recruiters “were in the habit of making exaggerated promises [and] of hiding the fact that the labourers were going to Fernando Po.” The “sweet-tongued recruiter convinced his victims that Fernando Po was a haven of wealth easily extracted from apprenticeships, shop-assistantships and domestic stewardships.”⁶⁸ The recruit was “stuffed with sufficient falsehoods to induce him to accompany the recruiter to Fernando Poo or sufficiently far on the journey as to make it impossible for him to turn back when he finds out the truth.”⁶⁹ Touts could operate with a manipulative indifference and a mild kind of sadism, but they wielded no weapons; they simply latched on to people who were already on the move, redirecting the desire of migrant laborers and often leading them toward failed hopes and an unwilling fate on Fernando Pó’s plantations.

Dandeson Green, a Krio or Saro and “veteran Calabar reporter” with pro-colonial credentials, wrote that while “many Nigerian labourers went to Fernando Po of their own accord,” a “very considerable number are taken, either by force or with the promise of ‘Utopia’, by ruthless smugglers and illegal native recruiters.”⁷⁰ A trader from Lagos said that he came across a group of recruiters who disembarked with a group of unwitting recruits whom they had brought “under the pretext” of being trading assistants who were hired to carry trade goods in and out of the island: “boys whom they have impressed with the notion of FERNANDO PO being an El Dorado for the unemployed and depression in Nigeria and upon their arrival there are made over to some farmers for some inducive amounts of money.”⁷¹ Ruthless peddlers of “utopia”: the “chief trouble is caused by the army of recruiters who entice young people away, their story of Fernando Po being a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ is, however, true.”⁷² There was indeed a lot of money and accumulated wealth circulating in Fernando Pó. A British missionary in observed in 1938 that Fernando Pó was “so different from anywhere else in West Africa[;] . . . it is an amazingly wealthy little island.”⁷³ Much of the money to be made went to those who “import foreign men to suck dry its honey.”⁷⁴ For the mix of official and underhand payouts from the Spanish labor officers and from individual planters, the recruiters were “prepared to shangai, trick or, by any method open to them to persuade their country men to come over here, provided that they themselves make a handsome profit out of the deal.”⁷⁵ The “recruiters at certain seasons asks and gets as much as £15 per head [with] no questions asked,” a sum higher than the wages for a two year contract, and about the same as the annual average income in the Eastern Provinces.⁷⁶ Indeed, it was the “lucrative commissions” which Fernando Pó’s recruiters could command that gave their activities, in the eyes of scandalized colonial contemporaries, “the character of a slave trade.” These commissions were seen by British colonial officials across the empire as “ ‘a reward for extra cunning in inducing coolies [or even as a] compensation for the risk run in unlawfully inducing or compelling them to go.’”⁷⁷

All touts offered a “free ride”; no one paid for their canoe passage to Fernando Pó, there were no tickets, only arrangements and their errant potentials. This made the barrier to emigration non-existent, but recruits wound up paying for their own displacement. The substantial wage advances that was sometimes promised to them went straight into the hands of the recruiters who dropped them off at the Curaduría—the labor office in the capital, Santa Isabel. No one ever saw this advance money (or dash) the first time around; instead, they were met with an obligatory and irrevocable contract, lasting a minimum of two years, earning the monthly equivalent of the sale-price of three large yams a month. On arrival, “the police department takes charge of them and see that they all get employment.” Arrangements for commissions were made by “unlawful recruiters mostly” and some “old hands who return with boys to his Master.” These mediators “name the Farms or masters with whom they will work. These claimants sign for them and the [braceros] are taken to the Curaduria” to receive a copy of their contract. According to J.W. Kicks-Dadzie, an investigative journalist from the Nigerian Daily Times, it was this commission “which most of the labourers resent when they happen to hear of it.”⁷⁸ For “new arrivals,” the extent and amount of dashes and commissions handed over to recruiters was often “completed over their heads;” they were “not aware that the tout had made capital out of the recruitment and that the employer has had to pay far more than may appear.”⁷⁹ Canoe passengers “found themselves to their dismay, being disembarked at Santa Isabel (Malabo) and auctioned to waiting plantation owners.”⁸⁰ The often delayed realization of the exchange of the commission is why a single blow did not need to be thrown by any middleman to consider oneself temporarily enslaved; workers were bound on site and considered themselves to be effectively working almost for nothing.

The recruiters appropriated subjectivity and labor by receiving their commission, a process experienced as a kind of avarice of accumulation at the expense of others. As Ekpe Eyo, a Christian convert from Uyo, who managed to get a letter to his father through the Methodists mission in Fernando Pó, said: “greet Etim Asibong warmly for me for he brought me here to stay here, and went back in peace and earner his money and ate things and live and let me die and suffer.”⁸¹ An anonymous letter from a laborer contracted in Fernando Pó does not explain how he has was recruited, but only says that “an eket man has brought me here to sell for 7£,” irrespective of whether he was deceived as to the destination.⁸² An Ibibio petitioner on the island representing a group of imprisoned workers denounced the “traders bringing the people to this country in awfully way” because they were “saying that we were going to Tico or Victoria,” on an offer to work in the large British and German plantations in British Cameroons, many of which were “accessibly only by water.” There, the laborers were increasingly from Nigeria, who were “for the most part recruited by Efik contractors belonging to Calabar” and were brought “by canoe from Oron.”⁸³ But for the petitioner, the art of deception was of secondary importance; the realization of what panya meant came only after the contracting had taken place and the commissions had been exchanged. The petition ends with a startling thesis: “I am telling you fact and clearly that [the] canoe-men [are] total selling person to those people [planters] by a great lot of money. Thats why slave is better than us in thousand upon thousand way.”⁸⁴

The recruiters carved out for themselves an extraordinary slice of profits, gained through the labor market they were themselves generating. The recruiters’ commission was well beyond the costs surrounding their labor of logistics, which covered the ensemble of brokers, paddlers, bribes, and the arrangers upstream and downstream, including chiefs and false friends and sub-touts on the island itself. Because of this, “judged solely on the question of motive”—the “thought of nothing else but the prospect of earning the promised commission on the transaction”—recruiters were considered by one newspaper columnist after another “to stand on practically the same footing as the local slave dealers of the early days.”⁸⁵

Tapela distinguishes between outright abduction and misinformation. The former forms part of the topos of the slave trade and is usually referred to as such in the sources. Such instances seemed to be subdivided into two: the kidnapping of children on the one hand and of literate and educated adults, often professionals, on the other. There “was evidence that children were being stolen and sold to the island of Fernando Po in a manner similar to the kidnappings of the precolonial period,” and some of the evidence suggests that such children accompanied some of the better placed migrant laborers to work in their households.⁸⁶ On the other hand, it was quite common that the victims who were “shanghaied from Calabar” and “taken to Fernando Po against their will and arrangement” were actually ordinary passengers and “teachers, traders etc. going on business boarding canoes” which daily left “Oron or Calabar by night.”⁸⁷ Rumors of kidnapping saturated anonymous transportation hubs, but people still needed to be on the move. Obligatory transit points became infused with insecurity, alarm, caution and suspicion. If they could avoid it, people did not travel alone or at night.⁸⁸

Victims were accused of being heedless and unmindful, but succumbing to subterfuge is a very subtle and complicated process. Even in areas far from Oron, where people felt less vulnerable, people could be kidnapped on the open water, such as Peter Udo, who reported that as he was “on his way home from a Cameroons plantation” he was told by the “canoe-man” to “change canoes” only to be “transported to Fernando Po” with five others.⁸⁹ The same canoes carried both the misled and the outright kidnapped; for example, in July 1944, on the same canoe was one “schoolboy from Calabar” who boarded it having been promised a job as a trading assistant on the island, “deceived by the canoeman whom he knew.” Also on board was “a soldier who had been up country to visit his relations” making the “trip from Oron to Calabar.” Both woke up the “next morning on the Island, and [were] sold and contracted.”

The official response to all this was muted. Key British officials managed to turn the way to panya into the failing of “simple minded natives” who “have been induced to join the canoes in the expectation of being given a lift downstream, only to find themselves landed in Santa Isabel.”⁹⁰ District Officers throughout the Eastern Provinces pithily summarized the spate of inquiries submitted by “relatives worrying over the whereabouts” of their family members who had been “taken away by strangers to work at Calabar,” but not having “been traced” their “relatives fear that they have been shipped to Fernando Po.” Recruiters were shifting further north and west, and everywhere they had been seen “prevailing on youths by specious promises and glowing accounts of conditions obtaining in the plantations near Calabar and in the Cameroons, to accompany them” only to end up being “taken to Santa Isabel.”⁹¹ But it was not that simple; colonial authorities fixated on the narrative that the broker could get away with tricks because of the “gullible” and “ignorant peasants from the Ibo and Ibibio areas,” who were being brought over to Fernando by “unscrupulous native ‘black-birders’ who earned a lucrative livelihood by kidnapping” them.⁹² It is as if they were displacing blame onto the absence of an internalized concept of “due diligence” prior to a transaction.

The fine-grained archival material—hundreds of depositions, letters home, voices from police and press reports—reveal that that each recruitment case or scenario had its own iteration of creative opacity and varying degrees of misinformation rendering “informed” consent technically null and void. Experiences varied, for example: Affiat and a group of his friends were recruited by “one lady in Henshaw-Square at Calabar named Ne Edak” who was “making a great craftiness before she” brought them to a plantation belonging to a Spanish lawyer, Estrada, “the worst farm in the Fernando Poo.”⁹³ Ekpenyong Etim, a trader from Calabar, who on the island saw “boys came out in quantum” and “was sad when seeing them, because [they] come and die,” brought by “those tradders [who] make tradding of boys, [not] only the tradding of goods” and “signed the boys with bad amount of 10/– [wage] in bad farm they died away hopeless.”⁹⁴ Akpan Okono, who accompanied his brother who was going anyway to Fernando Pó because he had heard “there was much money and that it would be easy to save up.” Okpay Awa, from a village in Bende who “followed his friend Kalu Ukay, who told him he was going to work in Victoria,” but Kalu “brought him to Oron and handed him over to the canoe-man Sambo Ekpa.”⁹⁵ Bronwson Edem Ekong, of Eket, who had started to trade but “lost his money and became stranded” on the island and contracted himself to a plantation where “tobacco, snuff and free medical treatment” was provided, and who subsequently embarked on a short career as a recruiter until he was arrested in 1938.⁹⁶ Anele Nwosu of Owerri and Elijah Chiolu of Ohoada, who were “at Nwaniba, Uyo, as part-time labourers to U.A.C. [United Africa Company] and at other time as petty traders” when

[o]ne Abriba man advised us to accompany him to Victoria as traders. The two of us conjointly bought 100 yams (£5), two bags crayfish (£1.16/–) and two tins of palm oil (18/–). We all embarked on a canoe at Nwaniba. To our surprise the Abriba man (Eni) clandestinely brought us to Fernando Poo and contracted us to work for Aselope at Bispa.⁹⁷

Wilson Bassey, a “probationary Teacher” who in 1944 “resigned due to my aim of joining the army,” was on his way to Calabar when the “junior clerk in John Holt Office called Utche deceived me not to join the army” by promising him a clerical job “in the shop” of a merchant in Fernando Pó. In a moment of indecision that he came to regret, and remembering his anxiety during his job search, he confided to the British Consul, whom he petitioned, “as you know an applicants heart is always in a circulation and not steady.” Wilson had been in panya, so he realized that once under contract there was no going back, “a matter of no help as I am under contract, I am serving as a labourer in the plantation of Finca el Pino. It is a great pity to me as I am such a great suffering.”⁹⁸

For recruitment to oscillate this way required an entire field of colonial power, not just the “exceptional and peculiar gifts of the able recruiter.”⁹⁹ The head-hunter or human resources specialist, in order to deliver results and get their commissions, more often than not, transformed themselves into what were known in Nigeria as “confidence men” or wayoman.¹⁰⁰ The irregularity and opacity of these recruiters should not be taken as “explanations for the inequities and exploitation surrounding migration,” rather, their techniques and infrastructure and resulting suffering were put into play and funded by structural links to the imperial laws that enabled the demand and the conditions of exploitation.¹⁰¹

Touts and the State, Nigeria

Before I demonstrate how the contract itself generated the intensity of recruitment, I will examine one typical case of panya recruitment in fine detail. Late in 1938, the District Officer of Eket went on tour, and at the last town on the road to Oron from Aba, while out on a late evening stroll, his translator, “Mr. J.I. Peter, met a party of 19 Ibo men” marching “on foot to Oron.” This party was quiet, they “had removed [their] boots for the night march,” but “he overheard [them] grumbling to each other that they could not see why they should be made to travel at night.” They had “started out from Aba in a lorry” that morning and at Okopedi they stopped to meet the paddling crew, to plan a rendezvous in “one of the little creeks near Okopedi where canoes will be waiting.” Startled and after some commotion, the party was led to the nearby rest house where the DO was staying the night. There he tried to arrest the “only non-Ibo” among them, while remembering being quietly impressed with “George Matthew Offiong, alias Asuquo Bassey,” whom he described as a “literate, rather smooth-tongued person.” Under interrogation “Offiong insisted that he had been sent by ‘Mr. H.G. Brown Manager of the Adiabo Plantation,’ ” a United Africa Company rubber plantation east of the Cross River near Calabar “to recruit labour.” Offiong had “represented to the men” the same story, and by “his own statement” recounted how he had “secured introductions” to “a chief (whose name, the men say, is Abang Chibwu) and by means of those persons recruited 19 men.” Before they left Aba, “the men demanded that the conditions of service be given to them in writing,” insisting that they “would not have gone unless they had the conditions in writing.”

Offiong produced a document; it was indispensable and incriminating, its strength and weakness was that it could be deployed with brazen confidence and meticulously inspected. It was a sheet of paper with the header—typo and all—“ ‘Robber [sic] Plantation Adiabo.’ ” This was a felicitous spelling mistake, both because it is what caught the DO’s eye and confirmed his suspicion, and because Offiong, while not a “robber,” was a con-artist, almost fully literate, and able to produce or source forged documents. While the DO was “convinced, he was trying to carry [them] away to Fernando Po” he “had no charge against Offiong.” There had been no “offence in the nature of deprivation of liberty” as there was “nothing in the Criminal Code to prevent a person inducing another to accompany him under false verbal promises.” The DO called it a night and “advised the men” to “keep an eye on” Offiong, and this “they did, and when Offiong tried to go away during the night, they stopped him.” The “next morning” Offiong changed his story and tried to persuade the DO that “in fact he was recruiting labour, not for the United Africa Company, but for ‘his father’s plantation at Akpabuyo near Calabar.’ ”¹⁰² Michael Offiong was sent to Eket prison—not for beguiling or controlling representations in the minds of others, but for “forgery and uttering false documents.” It is not clear how long he was in prison—although it was certainly not for long, because the DO was unaware that he had stumbled on one of the main recruiters, operating since the mid-1930s, with a network of proxies, a delivery crew on the island, and a handful of large Spanish planters as regular clients.¹⁰³ Within a few years of the incident at Okopedi, Michael Offiong, alias Asuquo Bassey, was back in Santa Isabel. He was the biggest recruiter based out of Calabar, with five canoes at his disposal and sixty rowers at his command. With a trail of forgeries and bribed officials in his wake, in a single day in December 1942 he passed on a hundred laborers to the police/labor office/ planter “combine” at Santa Isabel.¹⁰⁴

For the British, the tout was almost unanimously seen as a “modern successor of the slaver,” capable of “any sort of roguery or deceit to cajole his victims.” Even fascist colonial Spaniards under the Franco regime acknowledged that “veritable slave-traders had been resurging in the twentieth century.”¹⁰⁵ The transference of this label nonetheless left the British authorities in a quandary, because they could not intervene through legal means. Touts treaded on fine lines and in legal grey areas; they only became liable to punishment and penalties when they crossed a border out of Nigeria. Even when the British revamped their investigative surveillance and patrols, with a directive to pursue and repress, the border of the state unfolding beyond the customs wharf and check-point outposts was being consistently outmaneuvered. Fernando Pó’s touts concealed many things, but not themselves, as they were doing nothing illegal, and so they could tout undisturbed at riverside markets and junctions, on one of the many thousands of canoes that travelled the waterways that fed the Cross River.

While British officials said they were keeping a “strict watch” and “all illegal recruiters against whom evidence exists are prosecuted,” they also papered over their own inadequacy by claiming that touts were “skilled in the art of evasion and arrests are rare.”¹⁰⁶ Up until 1938 the British “had a motor launch which was used to pursue” these “smugglers of human souls,” but due to budget cuts this “service was stopped” for over half a decade, and so, as David Aworawo says, “the illegal traffickers had a field day.”¹⁰⁷ During this key spike in the canoe traffic, the “water police” forces were themselves only being “equipped with canoes.” In 1939, there were at least sixty canoes going to Fernando Pó on a regular basis. These canoes “generally sailed in convoys,” “large convoys of canoes up to 20 in number” that gathered offshore in this formation so that they could disperse in all directions if pursued by the “water police,” who “proved too slow to intercept some large sea-going canoes, which were said to have shown a clean set of flashing-paddles to the launch as they escaped.”¹⁰⁸ By the end of World War II, a small sea launch was tossed into the Cross River Delta, but should it “call upon the canoes to stop” practically all “escaped.”¹⁰⁹ Even District Officers looked on as some of the “great canoes of the Niger and Cross River deltas” that could be up to “seventy feet long” and carry up to hundred people including “pull-a-boys, or paddlers” “put out to open sea and make the coasts of Fernando Po, at its nearest ninety miles away.”¹¹⁰

Colonial authorities struggled to follow and understand the organization of people who were doing the smuggling; unless they caught someone red-handed on canoes near Fernando Pó, they met with little success when implementing criminalization as policy. British justice found that “illegal recruitment” was “extremely difficult to prove.”¹¹¹ Leads sent in by family members who received letters from relatives in Fernando Pó did not result in convictions until proof could be mobilized in the local courts. In a case of fifty laborers from Ogoni and Eket working in Fernando Pó, not a single person could come back to court, and the magistrate did “not accept SWORN STATEMENT” as there would have been no opportunity “for cross-examination.”¹¹² Nevertheless, the six prosecutions for illegal recruitment to Fernando Pó in the district courts of Calabar, Aba, Owerri, Ikot Ekpene and Opobo courts in 1938 rose to over a hundred in 1941, and even more in 1943.¹¹³ This number, in one year, was more than double the total number of convicted cases of “child kidnapping” in Nigeria during the decade of the 1930s.¹¹⁴ Kingsley Mbadiwe, from the inner circle of Nnamdi Azikiwe’s political party, the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons, noted that, “[i]n the early forties one of the commonest crimes in the Eastern Region was illegal recruiting: the Region was infested with people who by specious promises, induced other people to seek employment in Fernando Po.” Nevertheless, the various laws that “deal with slave dealers” proved to be “ineffective as a deterrent” as there were “always others ready to take their place because the traffic was very profitable,” “the canoe men undoubtedly are seeing that they can get £20 for each labourers they can contract.”¹¹⁵ Further complicating matters was the fact that the state was leaking heavily. S. Muyiwa, an undercover policeman with a heart of steel, shed light on the behavior of some of his colleagues, who he says had “decided that BRIBERY is the best means of living today at a laudable manner.” The “inducement made the irresponsible recruiters to corrupt many a faithful servant of the Nigerian Government for many [had] been so degenerated that some of them serve as instruments to the Recruiters.”¹¹⁶

Touts were an open category, constantly supplanted by various members of the commercial elite, by local fisherman, by traders from Dahomey, and even by former contract workers themselves. The tout’s central nodal point was the colonial boom town of Oron, though they also required the appropriately inaccessible delta island of Atabong, just upstream from Oron, to serve as “the port of embarkation and return of canoes that do the smuggling” with Fernando Pó.¹¹⁷ Oron had a large transient population of “Ibo, Hausa and Yoruba communities,” though the principal “stranger community” was “composed of Efiks from the Henshaw house.”¹¹⁸ Already in 1938 the “Oron native authority council” was denouncing a local corporal’s reign for having promoted “the daily increase of the number of Rogues and Criminals of all classes in Oron Clan, making the Oron Town their headquarters for evil practices. It is beyond doubt that he encourages crimes and sides with these Criminals.”¹¹⁹ No techniques of colonial repression could expose or extinguish recruiters, because they did not operate outside a colonial space. They only stopped operating once the planters got their labor in other places or through different means.

Language and Violence on Fernando Pó

The sudden boom of the “canoe traffic and its inhuman circumstances” triggered the “most serious phase of the Fernando Poo labour question,” explained J.W. Kicks-Dadzie, the first journalist to enter the island after it fell to the fascist Falangista elements of the Spanish military in 1936. Kicks-Dadzie even interviewed the new Spanish Jefe de Policía, the police chief, Miguel Llompart Aulet, and implored him to “chase the wicked canoe traffickers out of the Island,” to which Llompart flatly replied that he could “not possibly put a stop to it,” as otherwise “they will not get labourers at all.” If recruiters were con artists, then in Nigeria small sections of the colonially aligned voices of intellectuals, missionaries and officials were nonetheless complicit in their actions. Even Kicks-Dadzie praised the “highly scientific farming” of Fernando Pó’s large settler plantations, as well as the Spanish colonial penal system and its “full” employment policy, as this allowed “no room for idlers, vagabonds and thieves.”¹²⁰ The resident Methodist Reverend, Ewart Shepherd, also went out of his way to publicly praise the plantations, and their food rations and access to (minimal) health care. This he did while he watched as the “wholesale system of smuggling across in canoes” became “in vogue”: “dozens of these canoes land their human cargoes in a little haven close to Santa Isabel. They come out of the creeks between Calabar and Victoria and the Nigerian Government is powerless to prevent them.”¹²¹ The chief Methodist missionary in the region, the Igbo and Ibibio speaking Frederick Dodds, visited the island and was impressed by the façade of a fascist colony that in one stroke imprisoned “vagrants” en masse. During “the whole” of his month long trip in the spring of 1939, he “did not see a single ill-nourished” or “ill-clad” person. Dodds did, however, find the courage to “condemn” the means by which “much of the labour for the island is now being recruited. There is a constant stream of canoes filled with Nigerians, many of whom have been lured into taking the passage under promise of being taken elsewhere.”¹²²

Putting the middlemen in the crossfire, indulging projections of unwholesome and always suspect “middlemen” central to a Euro-Christian worldview, displaced and mystified the range of institutionalized imperial templates and legal grey areas that gave recruiting techniques their consistency and reach. Some British officials in the 1930s—the Governor in Lagos, Bourdillon, and the British Consul, Twigge Molecey, for example—foregrounded not only a vocabulary that was designed to demonize mediators but also one that accused the victims themselves of backtracking or “changing their minds”: “the ‘slave dealers’ have little or no difficulty in obtaining persons who are willing to go with them to Fernando Po, but the latter after 6 months try to abscond as they naturally miss their freedom and are unaccustomed to hard work.”¹²³ Some kidnapped workers also blamed themselves; one, named Ekpe Eyo, said “it was I who looked for money hence let this happen to me.”¹²⁴ But for most laborers on Fernando Pó, there was a world of difference between a peddler and an enforcer, between improvised solicitation and predatory appropriation, between voluntary but uncertain alliances and imposed filiation from without.

Actual coercion and violence resided in the ends, not the means, subsisting in the structure of imperial contract law. Deception, to set up a ruse, was eminently grounded in communication. But as Walter Benjamin says in his essay, the Critique of Violence, “verbal arrangements fundamentally exclude violence.”¹²⁵ To beguile is to steal through language, but on arrival one is at a loss only if one is prevented from leaving again. If workers could have left relatively unscathed, the way to panya would have simply been dismissed as a waste of time. The future braceros were at no point accosted or assaulted up until the point and no sooner than when they refused to sign a contract at the Curaduría. Though the drift of violence could certainly start on the canoe: the “recruiters did not always stop at promises of work” as “all too often a man who had to make a journey along the coast” would find “that the canoe was putting to sea: if he asked where it was going, he would be told that it was bound for Fernando Po, and that if he didn’t want to go there he could jump overboard.” On a canoe, there would be barely sufficient reason for an accusation of false imprisonment, a violation of habeas corpus, though definitely of reckless endangerment, the canoes, several a year, “from being overcrowded often upset, with the loss of everybody in them.”¹²⁶ Kicks-Dadzie even met and photographed “a batch of kidnapped labourers who were conveyed by canoe just a few weeks before” who told him: “Do all you can to stop the canoe traffic for majority of us had perished in the Sea.”¹²⁷

After describing the distressing daylong passage on the ocean-going canoe, Ekpe Eyo related how on firm ground in Santa Isabel’s Curaduría he “argued that I will not stay, but they said that I would be sent to prison until after two years then we go.”¹²⁸ Anyone “lured to the Island [had] little chance of avoiding entering into a contract once they are there.”¹²⁹ The contract on the island was still mostly what Orde-Brown called of the “old type” or a “legal trap for the unwary native.”¹³⁰ The order of contracts was not very elaborate, nor did it provide much room for manoeuvre, it was simply an obligation to “obey” it as law.¹³¹ The contracts were brought in almost wholesale via Cuba, through the template that the British gave the Spanish when they effectively arranged the hiring of Chinese coolies for them in the 1840s. In any case, what mattered most was a series of localized “Masters and Servants Acts, [without which] indenture would have been impossible.”¹³² On Fernando Pó, it was not only that varying degrees of corporal punishment were permitted and used by both employers and the Spanish police, or that there were elaborate penal sanctions for breaking or refusing a contract—these were in full force until independence in 1968—but that “transgression” was a default. Arriving on the island without appropriate paperwork or connections landed one a bracero contract, with a forced signature on site. If “a labourer declined to accept the contract placed before him he can be treated under the existing Spanish laws, as a rogue and a vagabond,” meaning jail-time with penal labor until forcibly contracted.¹³³ The Spanish policy of having “anyone who arrives in this port, as soon as they disembark present themselves at the Curaduría,” and of “forcing vagos without employers” to be put up “for contract in the Curaduría” had existed since 1910. This forced employment had obviously been “directed to the benefit of la agricultura in these lands, in light of the scarcity of brazos.”¹³⁴ These penal sanctions guaranteeing forced employment were the structural precondition of the recruitment spaces of Fernando Pó’s plantations as they extended around the Gulf of Guinea summoning and beckoning in their wake.¹³⁵ No other medium or presupposition sustained and underpinned these panya recruitment operations and techniques. There was no labor mobility without recruiters or contracts; there was no circulation without meditation and inscription.

Conclusion: Panya People Smuggling

In the nineteenth century, touts, like the other informal brokers who had unsystematically and clandestinely been organizing most “indenture” labor migration (at least in what David Northrup calls the “early phase”¹³⁶) started to be considered a disturbance, an interference, an impediment to the smooth-flowing and highly regulated “free” movement of people whose rational arrival at their destination as proper “capitalist” workers was imaged to be the retroactive result of a transparent and informed displacement, requiring both the state-surveyed infrastructures of registration and explanation and the ideological ideal of an self-sovereign subject. The decision to move and take up a contract was to be made without undue influences or duress coming from stranger-brokers or even from over-bearing family members. In Nigeria, with the Labour Ordinance No. 1 of 1929, as in other colonial territories, bureaucratic means were brought in to license recruitment and emigration to “ensure that illiterate or inexperienced men were safeguarded against rapacious employers, traders and others.”¹³⁷ Their impulse was to “de-victimize” indentured labor recruitment by removing randomness and innocence, though this by itself did not lead to less exploitative working conditions. Attempts by the British through the 1942 labor treaty to create a paper trail for the declarations of consent were a way to make labor movements and relations conform to imagined laws of exchange and self-interest. It was a bureaucratic mechanism intended to disenchant the labor market through a congruent arrangement of expectations and realities. This was a way to legitimize employers’ exploitation, allowing them to continue their plantation regime under practically unaltered conditions of work, and sustain the perpetuation of colonial plantations. The colonial plantation island required a certain set of contractual templates and vagrancy ordinances to sustain itself, its order and productivity. The formal legal structure of the colonial plantation economy was the same one that allowed touts to flourish in the first place. Contracts were bondage contracts, with their own bounded consistency, which nevertheless generated potential outgrowths and prefigured disparate modalities of recruitment. The contracts of panya allowed the randomness and violence of panyarring to be, as dialecticians would say, “sublated,” or simultaneously eliminated and preserved, carried on almost purely through the broken prism of language on the West African coast.

A look at the specific periods and places where touts ruled recruitment through economies of deception raises some interesting questions for global labor history, and particularly for the “mesmerizing contrast between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labour.” That the “recruitment of labour proceeded in more complex ways than our stultifying orthodoxies suggest” is clear by now.¹³⁸ Touts were one of the indispensable and varied rhythms of the “middle” of the spectrum, but they were not simply a “blur”—“semi” or “half-way” types. Their ossification into a type, or their blurring into a spectrum, forecloses the reasons for their range of maneuvers and potentials. Touts intensified and unraveled either end, throwing the conceptual pillars of clarity—free and unfree, coercion and consent—into disarray. Their frequency was volatile and ambivalent. While relinquishing the bravura of binary ultimatums, the historiography has seemed to stagnate on the same realization that disturbed nineteenth century abolitionists who also saw labor along a foggy order of slippages and resemblances, along “a very broad continuum rather than as a binary opposition,” without taking the actual operations and experiences of such blurs into account.¹³⁹ Abduction could be experienced as a beam of shock and removal to the unknown, but also the displaced result of encounters plagued by an awry two-facedness of snares and lures. This range was considered by many British abolitionist officials in an imperial world to be a “species of slavery or kidnapping.”¹⁴⁰ Those naming the practice sprinkled their terms with important prefixes generating a parallel whose gap or degree of similitude was uncertain. This uncertainty, along with the intensely localized nature of the practice, is one of the reasons why such recruiting techniques generated so many slang terms to designate itself: shanghaiing, blackbirding, to be barbadosed, trepanned, phuslaoed or spirited by crimps, spirits, land-sharks, snakes and the like, an “erratic” labor market whose most widespread and consistent feature was “knavery,” being “cajoled by plausible touts.”¹⁴¹

Panya shares specific junctions with a global labor history, where the same pattern of recruitment is found, lasting also from one to several decades, and containing the same constant spatial shift: between London and Barbados or Virginia in the 1640s or during the Napoleonic wars in the 1790s; across the early nineteenth century American seaboard, first east then west; in the 1840s around many places, including the Windward coast, the port towns in the Bay of Bengal and Xiamen and Macau, late nineteenth century Oceania, between Vanuatu, Solomon Islands or New Guinea and Queensland, Fiji and Peru. The medium-term persistence of touts has been amply demonstrated for early twentieth century Southern Africa, shifting at the junctions between Mozambique, Southern Rhodesia, and the Transvaal. There the creative process of “fraud and misrepresentation” by unlicensed “ ‘rapacious labour touts and criminal gangs,’ ” who made “promises which they did not intend to keep,” were described by local administrators and academics as having “degenerated into ‘nothing more or less than a sort of slave trade.’ ”¹⁴²

The economy of deception in the recruitment of indentured labor is usually attached to “force” by its analysts: blackbirding was “dishonest and violent,” spiriting was “fraudulent and coercive,” and meant being “violently taken away or cheatingly duckoyed,” “either through deception or direct violence,” “victims were kidnapped, tricked by offers of good jobs,” “all forms of persuasion and coercion were employed” by recruiters who painted “a rosy picture” and the “poor workers often fell prey to these ploys,” finding themselves becoming “victims of empty promises,” all in all, a kind of “enticement/kidnapping.”¹⁴³ The different segments of a recruitment trajectory are often collapsed. The same range of conflationary vocabulary is used in definitions of “trafficking in persons” in the twenty-first century.¹⁴⁴ This double bind of language and violence is connoted in panya, but logically they occur apart, in place and in time. This ambivalence provides credence to more recent critiques of the widely deployed notion of “human trafficking” and the (mis)representation of its victims. While sociologists often speak in terms of choice and risk, assuming an individualistic configuration of personhood, they highlight the importance of accepting the migrants’ own nuanced gradients of dysphoria and transport needs, their acceptance of the opaque and unpredictable logistics of illicit brokers. It is touts who have the means and know-how to “assist” the unauthorized emigration to destinations with a labor market, where migrants may or may not experience or expect severe coercion at the hands of disciplinarian employers or the punitive state—both of which were brought to bear on Fernando Pó against anyone who refused work, or wanted to change employers, or sought to return home before the expiration of the contract.¹⁴⁵

The pattern of the technique is clear: first the trick, then the force; first the farce, then the tragedy. The first segment is referred to with endless synonyms for deception, that in comparison to “force,” borders on the obscenely light-hearted, almost playful, infantilizing and incredulous—to trick. However, the “trick,” as a vector of instrumental language for the commodification of the desire, is an axiomatic, consistent and creative capitalist praxis, present also in the grease that allowed imperial labor recruitment. Touts were one of the symptoms of the expansion of the internal limits of capitalism and its arenas of operation, everyday commercial dealings with opaque others, containing hazards and seductions. Out of the imperial establishment of port towns and transport junctions, the global depression of crashing palm oil prices, colonial tax hikes and the localized monetization of social life, came the crushing promise of possibilities—and the need to be on the move in order to draw on these.