THE LAGOS STRIKE OF 1897: AN EXPLORATION IN NIGERIAN LABOUR HISTORY
1 AFRICAN HISTORY HAS BEEN TRANSFORMED IN RECENT YEARS. Scholars have ceased to think of the African past primarily in terms of the activities of Europeans in Africa, and now seek to emphasize the part played by Africans themselves in the history of their own continent. This re-interpretation has been based mainly on research in political history; the economic history of Africa remains largely a neglected subject, which so far has played a very limited rôle in this process of revision.
In the case of Nigeria, the economic history which has been written has concentrated on accessible topics, such as overseas trade, in which European influence was dominant. Little is known of the activities of Africans who were involved in the external exchange sector, as traders and producers, and still less of the working of the internal economy. The economic history of the rural and urban labour force, to take just one example, has scarcely received more than passing notice. This particular omission is all the more remarkable in view of the predominantly labour-intensive character of economic development in Nigeria, and indeed in West Africa as a whole, during the colonial period.
The main purpose of this article is to draw attention to labour history as an important subject of research in African studies by examining some of the problems which arose in south-west Nigeria during a time of rapid economic change at the close of the nineteenth century. The first part of the article will reconstruct the history of a strike which occurred in Lagos in 1897. This strike, which has not been investigated previously, was the first major labour protest of the colonial period; as such, it deserves to be rescued from obscurity. The second part of the article will concen-
I should like to express my gratitude to Mr. A. Hughes and Mr. D. Rimmer for reading and greatly improving an earlier draft of this article. Neither is responsible for any errors which still remain.
See B. Adhemer, “A Selected and Annotated Bibliography on African Labour with Special Reference to West Africa”, The Bull. of the Soc. of Labour Hist., no. 1o (Spring 1965), pp. 13-35. Scarcely any of the 224 items listed is concerned specifically with labour history. However, mention must be made here of the pioneering contributions of Elliot J. Berg, an economist with considerable historical interests, though his work has not been centred on Nigeria. Several of his articles will be referred to in subsequent footnotes. See also n. 19 below