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Research ArticleArticle

Panya

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

ENRIQUE MARTINO
African Economic History, January 2016, 44 (1) 91-129; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/aeh.44.1.91
ENRIQUE MARTINO
Enrique Martino () received his PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2016. His published articles include “-Peonage: The Contradictions of Debt Bondage on the Colonial Plantations of Fernando Pó,” in “Clandestine Recruitment Networks in the Bight of Biafra,” in and “Open Sourcing the Colonial Archive,” in .
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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.

  • © 2016 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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African Economic History: 44 (1)
African Economic History
Vol. 44, Issue 1
1 Jan 2016
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Panya
ENRIQUE MARTINO
African Economic History Jan 2016, 44 (1) 91-129; DOI: 10.3368/aeh.44.1.91

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Panya
ENRIQUE MARTINO
African Economic History Jan 2016, 44 (1) 91-129; DOI: 10.3368/aeh.44.1.91
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  • Article
    • Abstract
    • Introduction
    • Fernando Pó’s Drift in the Gulf of Guinea
    • Economies of Deception, 1930s–1940s
    • Touts and the State, Nigeria
    • Language and Violence on Fernando Pó
    • Conclusion: Panya People Smuggling
    • Footnotes
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  • References
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