Fernando Pó, West Africa's largest island, ‘which Livingstone reportedly called an unpolished jewel’, was by the mid-twentieth century being studded with an imperial agro-capitalist crown.Footnote 1 The large cocoa and coffee plantations that came to envelop this Spanish island employed between 30,000 and 60,000 braceros – ‘arm people’ or agricultural contract workers. The majority of both the island's inhabitants and the braceros were ‘Nigerian migrants under peonaje contracts’ (Sandinot Reference Sandinot1967: 104). Half of their formal wages were withheld until the very last day of a contract to discourage desertions and to make the accounting of deductions easier. There also tended to be an unregistered initial payment before the signing of an irrevocable contract. This informal payment was made possible by the long duration of indenture ‘bondage contracts’ (Campbell and Stanziani Reference Campbell and Stanziani2013: 17–19). In post-war Fernando Pó, the two-year contractual bind could be doubled and extended, ‘as the system of wage advances, over and above the salary, means that the workers are frequently indebted’. This gave the planters in the ‘always present conditions of labour scarcity a way to oblige braceros to work off their debts’ by signing on to a ‘further contract’ (Velarde Fuentes Reference Velarde Fuentes1964: 174). However, the ‘casually authoritative way’ in which this Spanish colonial economist refers to the device of debt in Fernando Pó’s hiring arrangements should give us pause, not only because it skims over the many instances of actual violence within the ‘deceptively transparent’ relation of peonage, but because it papers over the history and ethics of resistance on the part of those who demanded the advance (Taussig Reference Taussig1987: 65; Retsikas Reference Retsikas2016).
Why did tens of thousands of labour migrants indenture themselves to the planters in Fernando Pó in the decades after the Spanish Civil War? H. Rylands, a British colonial officer stationed in Owerri, where the mostly Igbo braceros were from, says that he had ‘heard all about the “evil” conditions of Nigerian labourers in Fernando Poo from those who [had] previously been’ there. In 1947, he was dispatched to the island as vice consul and concluded that the ‘illiterate candidate for the Fernando Poo labour market knows more or less what to expect’.Footnote 2 The ‘candidates’ could expect openly practised police torture and overseers committing manslaughter with impunity: so why did the majority stay on for a second and sometimes a third contract, but almost never a fourth? And why did the informal modes of payment of these subsequent contracts constitute a remarkable instance of a vast counter-movement that brought the system of planter power to its knees? The answer to these questions is dash – which, in Fernando Pó’s pichinglis, as in many of the pidgins spoken on the West African coast, meant a gift as an ancillary component to an exchange (Jones Reference Jones1963: 20; Guyer Reference Guyer2004: 59).Footnote 3
The ‘peculiarity of the process of contracting labour’, writes a Spanish planter in the 1940s, ‘is the age-old custom of giving advances to the braceros the moment a contract is made’.Footnote 4 The Spanish called this advance regalo or prima – a gift or bounty – while the Nigerian labour migrants on Fernando Pó, most of whom learned to speak pidgin on the island, called it dash. The braceros who demanded and invariably received this ‘very substantial inducement to recontract’ found themselves between contracts and already on the island.Footnote 5 The dash was not reducible to something else – to an extension of credit used to uproot or to cover initial transport costs. The dash, an axiom of Nigerian commercial life, had its own autonomous trajectory and political meaning. As the dash became inextricably part of the peonage contracts on Fernando Pó, it produced its own sociality and space of renegotiation, the contradictory character of which came to destroy the viability of the plantations. Recruitment techniques involving debt generated a two-way movement, a mobile form of submission and subversion, a friction that both enabled and undermined imperial plantation economics. Without informal credit wages and the ancillary dispensing of lump sums, the plantations on Fernando Pó would have fallen apart; almost none of the Nigerian braceros would have gone to or stayed on the island. At the same time, plantations repeatedly almost collapsed because these same braceros continued to sign on to further contracts because of the advances.
Rather than being a predictable moment in the interplay of domination and subordination, the dash heralded an ‘unstable’ promise of ‘plenitude’ and produced a plethora of tactics for ‘unsanctioned’ wealth (Guyer Reference Guyer1995: 16; Roitman Reference Roitman2003: 211; Berry Reference Berry and Guyer1995: 308). As I will go on to detail, with every contract came a higher dash, whether braceros acquired it after deserting or not. This double excess – the inherently inflationary, the incitement to escalation – propels the principal social dynamic of circulation in Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le don (Reference Mauss2002 [1925], translated as The Gift). This fundamental instability and potential for reversibility are underestimated counterforces in studies of debt bondage. The idea that wage advances are always a sort of poison of entrapment lingers within scholarly and popular conceptual frames – Das Gift, after all, means poison in German (Derrida Reference Derrida1992: 12). This, as I will argue, is misleading, because the dash wielded by the bonded braceros was a show of their creative and collective power.
When the dash appears in African labour history, it is sometimes an advance on the first few months of a contractual wage, though often it is not technically an advance but an excess that surpasses the official wages of a total contract (Kubicek Reference Kubicek, Konczacki, Parpart and Shaw1990: 78).Footnote 6 Historians and anthropologists, generally and everywhere, have continuously underlined the ubiquity of debt in the creation of bonded labour. The entire premise and effectivity of the wage-veiled-as-credit (Banaji Reference Banaji2003: 87) – for example, the munnpanam (money given beforehand) in Tamil Nadu or the girmit (agreement) money in the tea plantations of colonial Assam – lay in the fact that it was so high that it became an unpayable debt, leaving workers unable to walk away (De Neve Reference De Neve1999: 387; Behal Reference Behal, Behal and van der Linden2006: 164; Breman Reference Breman1974: 236).Footnote 7 Wage advances have also been thought to index a modicum of worker ‘bargaining power’ as well as various degrees of patronage and dependency – arguments made especially in the so-called ‘revisionist’ Latin American literature on debt peonage (Bauer Reference Bauer1979: 36; McCreery Reference McCreery1983: 744; Knight Reference Knight and Archer1988: 110; cf. Brass Reference Brass1999: 202; Gudeman and Rivera Reference Gudeman and Rivera1990: 97). The braceros on Fernando Pó, as elsewhere, were the ‘initiators of habilitación’ – the cash advance; they ‘activated’ it and so they were clearly ‘far from the passive victims of domineering patrones [employers] in need of cheap labour’ (Walker Reference Walker2012: 152). In late nineteenth-century Santa Clara, Cuba, workers seemed to turn ‘credit to their own advantage’, because it ‘meant an effective increase in wages’ – while also being a ‘risky business, since it could lead to lasting debt’ (Scott Reference Scott1985: 235). The ‘advantage’ and ‘activation’ of advances ignited more unpredictable and volatile relationships than they are usually given credit for.
As Prabhu Mohapatra (Reference Mohapatra and Breman2009: 121) notes in relation to early nineteenth-century Bengal, the ‘customary practice of receiving advances before commencing work’ was not so much an imperial ‘imposition’ designed ‘to tie down labourers’, but rather an ‘absolutely necessary compromise in face of workers’ demands’. The imperial wage advance in South Asia sprung from the indenture-like contracts made with sailors, and, as the sailors were continuously escalating their demands for them, the besieged British officials on site took it to be a principal ‘cause of their mutinous behaviour’ (Sinha Reference Sinha2014: 43).Footnote 8 In Assam, British tea planters started complaining in the 1870s that ‘time-expired coolies’ had themselves generated an informal ‘bonus-system’ and thereby had ‘become “complete masters of the situation” due to competition for their labour-power’ (Behal and Mohapatra Reference Behal and Mohapatra1992: 147; Varma Reference Varma2005: 53). Coolies from the Bay of Bengal, along with engagé labourers from Mozambique and Madagascar, had made very similar demands in the plantations of Réunion and Mauritius – but only during the second round of contracts from the 1840s onwards. Their ‘weapon: competition among employers’ resulted in an uncoordinated rise of ever higher advances and rates of desertion (Stanziani Reference Stanziani2013: 74; Carter Reference Carter1995: 271; Allen Reference Allen1999: 59). While the dash was not an oppositional movement, it could invert the assumed default flow of power relations.
In the early twentieth-century gold mines of the Witwatersrand, ‘wage advances bound the voluntary workers’ because they ‘had to accept employment on one of the mines’ (Jeeves Reference Jeeves, Konczacki, Parpart and Shaw1990: 116), although it is clear that advances were so welcome that many accepted employment at two or more mines. In Southern Africa, recruiters ‘induced’ potential wage workers to ‘enter into contracts [with] such large advances that the borrower “remained in debt”’. At the same time, mobile workers were ‘accepting advances from several agents’, with evidently ‘no intention of honouring their debts to any of them’ (James and Rajak Reference James and Rajak2014: 462, citing Schapera Reference Schapera1947: 109). Advances had become ‘so large that the incentive to desert before contract completion was considerable’ (Stichter Reference Stichter1985: 114). Attempts to track deserters down were often hopeless and haphazard. In spite of decades of imperial experiments in paper-based contraptions – obligatory contracts, registration regimes, pass laws and the like – most deserters, oscillating at around 10 per cent of the workforce, emerged triumphant (Breckenridge Reference Breckenridge2014: 87; MacDonald Reference MacDonald2014: 156). Charles van Onselen (Reference van Onselen1976: 231–2) characterizes these movements along a ‘stop–go labour route’ as a political victory, ‘a relative coup which improved their lot’. He imagines that there ‘must have been some comfort in “working the system” in such a way that it left the exploiters exploited!’
The African history literature that gives ‘a rare glimpse into the actual mechanics of the labour market’ (Murray Reference Murray1995: 376) has shown that the internal logistics of advances and desertions were largely arranged by informal recruiters. But these ‘rapacious labour touts’ have nevertheless been explicitly disparaged as ‘lawless’, ‘depraved’, ‘unscrupulous’ or ‘dubious’ at best (Murray Reference Murray1995: 376; Jeeves Reference Jeeves1985: 240; Harries Reference Harries1993: 115; MacDonald Reference MacDonald2014: 157; Cooper Reference Cooper1996: 44; see also Schuler Reference Schuler, Curtin and Lovejoy1986: 177; Mark-Thiesen Reference Mark-Thiesen2012: 27). Touts – those self-schooled virtuosos of commercial life who came from the bottom up, or rather from sideways in – were primarily motivated by their share of the dash, but they were also personally solicited as they enabled a radicalization of workers’ strategies and expectations. On Fernando Pó, it was a dispersed set of touts that laterally relayed the worker's dash, constructing but also cracking open the edifice of imperial bondage on the final African shores of the Spanish empire.
The dash produced a double excess: both the prolonged bind and the incited flight. In African labour history, the moments and passages implicated in the handing over of monetary wages have not received the sustained attention and appreciation they deserve.Footnote 9 On Fernando Pó, the dash – the cash that employers intended to advance as a debt trap – left colonial capital in retreat, trying to fend off escalations on a front line populated by reenganchos – the ‘re-hooked’ labourers signing on to a further contract. The reenganchos were accompanied by relatively small but disproportionately effective groups of ganchos and fugados – ‘hook people’ and ‘fugitives’, or recruiter-touts and deserters. For the rest of the article, I follow the intersecting movements of these three figures in the archival sources in which they make an appearance. The dash could emerge only from the reign of long contracts, but its flourishing was the outcome of touts and workers combining.
Assembling an economic coup in 1952
From the sparse and distantFootnote 10 existing literature, the movement of people from eastern Nigeria onto Fernando Pó’s plantations is seen to have had two phases. During the first phase, for over a decade after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, up to 10,000 people per year were being smuggled onto the island by canoe owners from the Cross River Delta – illegal recruiters had ‘shanghaied’ or kidnapped many of them (Osuntokun Reference Osuntokun1978a: 38; Martino Reference Martino2016: 93). The second phase (1943–73) saw an ‘indentured labour treaty’ organized by the John Holt company and the government of Nigeria, which expressly aimed to ‘control and regulate on a sound humanitarian basis a traffic which existed on a slave basis’.Footnote 11 Under the auspices of a new centralized recruiting agency in Calabar, potential braceros signed contracts in Nigeria and received a small advance officially capped at five shillings, a ‘safeguard’ measure that sought to keep workers from becoming ‘heavily indebted’ to Spanish planters.Footnote 12 From the archive, there emerges a distinct and overlapping recruitment channel containing the escalating dash component that fully unravelled mid-century.
The number one complaint among Nigerian braceros in 1950 was that ‘the Spanish Labour Office forced them to recontract with the same employer’. Until the 1950s, the ‘system in force’ for ‘re-engaging workers on second contracts was quite irregular’ to say the least. Spencer-Cooke, the British Vice Consul on the island, explains that it was often ‘sufficient for an employer’, without the bracero, to appear ‘in the Spanish Labour Office and state that the particular labourer wished to enter into another [contract] with the same employer’; as ‘all employers keep the personal copies of workers’ contracts this practice was all too easy’. The Labour Officer or Curador, Sebastian Llompart Aulet – a post he held between 1943 and 1962 – happily rushed through and re-stamped these contracts on the grounds of the outstanding debts generated by a nominally ‘illegal system of inducements’.Footnote 13 Depending on the amount of the dash, Llompart Aulet would eventually also authorize the release of these ‘indebted’ braceros after they completed two or more contracts with the same employer. Peonaje on Fernando Pó was akin to Igbo precolonial ‘debt-slavery’ (Uchendu Reference Uchendu, Miers and Kopytoff1979: 128) in that the Spanish promised an in-built but ill-defined expiry date to a form of contractual bondage partly held together by a debt relation.Footnote 14 Without a nullified contract on Francoist Fernando Pó, ‘the labourer is unable to leave the island by orthodox means and the military control of the island is such that it is virtually impossible for him to leave by canoe’.Footnote 15 While there are scattered traces of small groups of braceros ‘stealing a canoe’ and trying to ‘row themselves back to Nigeria’, the rise of the dash took the shape not of a permanent subtraction, or an escape onto the mountain tops, but of an internal split, a drill inside the patchwork of towns and plantations.Footnote 16
The regalo or dash ‘through times past has served as an index of the variable scarcity – but always scarcity – of labour power on this island’.Footnote 17 In the three decades of colonial Francoist rule, thousands of new settlers and a large number of corporate plantations rushed onto the island. The axiomatic ‘labour scarcity’ was obviously intensified: in 1948, barely half of the island's self-declared ‘labour needs were being met’.Footnote 18 A resident social scientist noted in 1951, the year when the dash was reaching ‘a distressing and agonizing limit’, that ‘demand for labour has been so intense that the bounty given to the braceros the moment they sign the contract is swelling day by day. On the shoulders of this desperate necessity, the braceros have organized a picaresca laboral’ – a picaresque labour movement – ‘that has been very much to the benefit of the unscrupulous bracero and pretty damn onerous for our agriculture’ (Romero Moliner Reference Romero Moliner1952: 91). Wages for a two-year contract were held down at a constant level of 700 to 1,000 pesetas, while the dash briefly reached 7,000 pesetas (or £60), at which point the reenganchos were pocketing the entire surplus value being produced on the plantations – and in some cases twice as much. The ‘uncontainable rise of the regalo [has] turned las fugas [desertion] into a habitual affair. The braceros have been changing their names, and hiring themselves to multiple employers, creating a malign indiscipline and an invitation to continuous fraud.’Footnote 19
Dash rising: reenganchos
Any bracero could become a reengancho, irrespective of whether they had previously arrived on the island as shanghaied or authorized subjects. The band of reenganchos was narrower as many braceros left soon after their first contract – and many others fell ill or died. Three broad figures populated the ranks of first-time labourers in early Francoist Fernando Pó. The first, says Bona Ekatem, a Nigerian columnist and travelling merchant, were those ‘who did not want this work’, those who were ‘recruited by deceit and shoved into the plantation by force’. The second were the ‘volunteers, the good ones, the bien conformados’, which means those who had acquiesced or been knocked into shape; this was partly a provisional category and largely a figment of the planters’ imagination. To sum up the ‘third class in one word’, Ekatem uses the figure of the ‘maleteros’ or ‘suitcasers’, those ‘who until now have dedicated themselves to trying to carry the trunks of passengers in Calabar's port in order to live off the tips. These types have gone to Fernando Poo following the scent of the regalo which the [clandestine] recruiters then swindled them out of.’Footnote 20 Spencer-Cooke, the Vice Consul, thought it ‘strange that so many workers are persuaded to come here [but] the fascination of being promised such a large sum of money as £15 to £30 is a temptation hard to resist [for someone] who has probably rarely handled a greater amount than 1/’ (one shilling, with twenty shillings to a pound). The ‘hopes’ of these newly smuggled recruits were ‘never realised of course’; a first-time bracero was ‘lucky to get £3’ at the end of their contract, while ‘the remainder’ invariably went ‘into the pockets of the illegal recruiters’.Footnote 21
O. Archibong, a political activist in Calabar, sums up the mood among these braceros, once they realized what type of exchange had just taken place: ‘every thinking man can prove beyond doubt how these victims felt when they were landed at Fernando Po, their wages [meaning their own promised dash] having been paid to the middle-men’.Footnote 22 A petition by a group of braceros tells how, after a week into their first contract, ‘we saw one man who shows us [the] road back to the town’, where they complained to the Curador, who ‘repl[ies] us that the parties who brought us here have claimed £6-0-0 per each head [and] so we must go and work for the farm for good 2 years’. As another petition of a group of braceros explains: ‘They always sell man two years called sign.’ When they ‘strictly refused’ to be interned in the plantation, the Curador ‘held us in prison until we are agreed to go back to the farm, as up to date we are in prison with heavy punishment’.Footnote 23 The Curador, an agent of neo-slavery, pulled the carpet from under the feet of new braceros, but this happened only once. This neo-Atlantic arrangement was upended by reenganchos who transformed the dash from being a component of a recruiter's capitation fee into a moving medium for assessing and asserting their own bargaining power.
The ‘odd thing’, says a surprised British Consul General in 1953, ‘is that although men who are sent to Fernando Po by illegal means, such as trickery or kidnapping, tend to be resentful at first, many of them give in’ – and, indeed, ‘stay on there for years’.Footnote 24 In the early 1940s, W. Evans, the British Labour Officer on site, gathered from some of the migrant workers who served as his informants that those who were ‘completing their contract’ were not returning to Nigeria but had instead started to ‘put a high premium on their future services’. The reenganchos did not leave the island without the total wages they considered to be their due; they did not return home with nothing to show for their many years of hard work abroad. The ‘recruit soon learns that without his services the employer will be ruined and at the expiration of his first contract he may himself employ a tout to offer his services for re-engagement to the highest bidder’. Evans describes the reenganchos as being ‘fully alive to the possibilities’ and ‘out to make capital of the situation’. During this reshuffling for the second round of contracts, he witnessed how ‘“intermediaries” who have scented the elements of a racket are springing up wholesale. These “agents” – themselves Nigerians – haunt [the capital] Santa Isabel and the neighbouring farms in search of likely recruits and, of course, take their cut out of the bonus offered.’Footnote 25 This was a novel shift. A German Nazi scientist who found refuge in Fernando Pó at the outbreak of World War II observed that ‘usually the Nigerian Gastarbeiter returns home’ after their first contract with ‘about three pounds in savings’ (Wolff Reference Wolff1942: 98).
During the late 1940s, the convoys of canoe-going clandestine recruiters started encountering obstacles in the form of the Nigerian navy, which had set up a base on the Cross River Delta, and the numbers of smuggled labourers dropped sharply. While licensed recruiters were allowed to operate in Nigeria from 1943 onwards, they had difficulties persuading a substantial new generation of formally recruited workers – at least until the late 1950s. And so, during the post-war decades, it was reenganchos – ‘as many as 25,000 non-Treaty labourers’ in 1952 – who made the majority of contracts – some fifty a day.Footnote 26 These Nigerian reenganchos were the first generation to radically escalate the dash. They renegotiated its twenty-fold increase in a little over ten years – doubling the effective wages of braceros every time they were released from an expired or sabotaged contract. Thrown and kept on the bottom rung of the colonial economy because of an initial ruse, a dire need, or dreams of excess, they figured out a way to stay on the plantations only as long as necessary. This they did through an uneasy alliance with touts.
Up until the early 1930s, there was a standardized and registered regalo of exactly 300 pesetas ‘for re-engagement [which] changes hands in front of the Spanish labour officer’. This was a small sum – about the price of fifteen bottles of olive oil or ten dozen eggs or 25 metres of cloth in Santa Isabel's markets – but it almost exceeded one year's worth of official bracero wages.Footnote 27 In the 1940s, however, ‘outside the door of the Labour Office’ and due to the negotiations of decentralized tout emissaries, a much ‘more substantial dash’ was now changing hands. This ‘unofficial regalo’, laments a planter, ‘has been consecrated by the reality of the bargaining power of labour’.Footnote 28 In 1949, the Curador refused to inscribe the real amounts of this ‘free playing system of primas’ in his registry. The ‘300 peseta limit’, he says, one imagines in a desperately raised voice, was the ‘only way to brake the regalos of the underground market of labour which have been elevated to absurd levels’. For Llompart Aulet, the Curador – who received an annual reward of some 45,000 pesetas for fulfilling his duties – the ‘regime of regalos, free playing as to [their] quantity is a danger’. This was not only because it ‘defrauds the fiscal regime’, since it was tax-free, but because, he says, it was driven by the ‘venality of the uneducated native and the maliciousness of men in general, when they are moved by economic reasons alone’.Footnote 29
The turbulence introduced by the rising dash was well on its way to seriously undermining the plantation economy even after ‘reforms’ kicked in: there were violent scenes of repression outside the doors of the Curaduría, where the dash was being renegotiated and informally paid out. The dash – and the touts who linked dash-givers and dash-receivers – emerged from this void of registration surrounding the Curaduría, from the thwarted ability of dirigiste political economic power to make reenganchos stand in an orderly queue behind unilaterally stipulated terms of payment. Such state-coordinated contract monopsonies had been set up across imperial islands and enclaves of indenture in order to drive down and cap wages and worker bargaining power (Arrighi Reference Arrighi1970: 200; Rodney Reference Rodney1981: 657; Behal and Mohapatra Reference Behal and Mohapatra1992: 143). As a 1909 collective petition of mine workers in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe says: by ‘putting down the amount of wages to be paid on the Registration Certificate the native is prejudiced through subsequent employers refusing to advance or increase the rate of pay!’ (cited in van Onselen Reference van Onselen1976: 231). For European colonials in the post-emancipation world of recruitment, what ‘was at issue was not so much the capacity of market penetration to loosen workers from the land but an excess of commercialized labour mobilization, over which neither the planters nor the state was able to establish effective control’ (Sen Reference Sen2010: 11).
Dash renegotiations: gancho touts
For the ‘prospect of returning to Nigeria with £24 [or eventually £60] in their pockets’, braceros were ‘prepared to risk work in Fernando Po’ and ‘prepared to suffer poor conditions of service’ – to put it mildly.Footnote 30 Contracts on the island were irrevocable and fixed in length. The dash marked one's entry into them, a threshold with a very ambivalent sign: ‘it [is] generally recognized by the labourer that the higher the “dash” the worse the conditions are on the farm, but quite often their cupidity gets the better of them’.Footnote 31 Once on the island, however, reenganchos were ‘very discerning when signing second contracts’ and stayed clear of planters ‘who had a reputation of ill-treating the labourers’.Footnote 32 The dash for reenganchos far exceeded the ‘trade dash’ commanded by clandestine recruiters because planters were paying extra for experienced hands – for the skilled wielding of long-armed sickles, making exact incisions on the dangling cocoa pods without which any subsequent blossoming was irreversibly lost; for the keeping constant of furnace temperatures in the tin-roofed, chimney-sprouting cacao drying houses; and for much more. During the late 1940s the labour force had actually ‘fallen steadily in number’ while ‘production figures however [had] not’, so it was clear that the experienced reenganchos were being ‘kept under pressure all day from 6.30am to 5.30pm without any established rest period’.Footnote 33 The ‘high productivity of these most diligent reenganchos quickly generated a group of agent entrepreneurs, the ganchos’, or recruiter-touts (Velarde Fuentes Reference Velarde Fuentes1964: 165). Out of interactions with ganchos came a realization that effected a radical coup against an arrangement that officially promised only poverty wages and a high risk of being incapacitated or killed – there were one to two deaths per day – by what can euphemistically be called the guardians of public order and work-related injuries.Footnote 34
Ganchos were a discontinuous and unrelated group of resident ‘headhunters’ who often started off very modestly, armed only with the capacity to handle, relay and embellish language and money. They were drawn from the ranks of lowly and landless Spanish and Portuguese pichinglis-speaking settlers, from the community of urban Creoles or Fernandinos and West African self-employed immigrants, from the existing entourage of Calabar-based recruiter kingpins, or they were former braceros themselves with a few contracts under their belt – they were ‘neither planters nor merchants, they [were] usually not even actual proxies or company agents’.Footnote 35 The dash was fomented by refractory mediators who never operated with the full blessing of the planters or the administration. A planter pleaded: ‘make these intermediaries disappear, for, as a rule, they are persona extraña’ – strangers, but also strange or startling – ‘external to real colonial interests’.Footnote 36 Labour touts could confound and re-route the imperial economics of labour scarcity – they spotted gaps, forged loopholes and pushed them to extremes. As would have been said in Nigeria, touts pocketed commissions ‘by hook or by crook’, proposed unnecessary fees, and some even became fully fledged con men – the underground has its contradictions too.
Fernando García Gimeno (Reference García Gimeno2004: 45–8) grew up in Santa Isabel working at his uncle's restaurant; this catered to an African clientele, so he spoke fluent pichinglis. One of his first jobs was working as a labour contractor for a group of Portuguese planters, for whom he enrolled a small but peaceful army of Nigerian touts. These ‘ganchos would bring potential recruits to the best farms we had’ – often not the ones ‘they were actually going to be destined to’ – and would ‘win them over by inviting them to lunches and things. We even paid for a session with a woman of the night.’ With almost theatrical pathos, planters started complaining that the ganchos were ‘twisting the will’ of the braceros who were abandoning them after their first contract.Footnote 37 The sometimes Dionysian pampering that accompanied dash negotiations was an inversion of plantation patio life, with its early morning roll calls, its unchanging food rations of rice and stockfish, and its prohibition and repression of ‘vice’ and various forms of respite in the evening. It was a liminal phase that corresponded to the validity of a fourteen-day papel de libertad, a ‘freedom paper’ handed over to braceros when finishing a contract so that they could buy a ticket and wait for the bimonthly steamer to Nigeria, or so that they ‘may look for work without risk of being taken by the police’.Footnote 38 A contract was always laid out at the end of this self-imploding grid of reallocation and inducements, because the anti-vagrancy ordinances revamped by the Francoists had made unemployment totally illegal on the island: ‘any person who failed to produce satisfactory evidence of being in employment is arrested and detained’.Footnote 39
In the mid-twentieth century, a colonial accountant noted anxiously that the ‘pequeño regalo’, the ‘small gift’, had become the ‘single largest expenditure’ for planters: the dash was ‘having negative repercussions on the costs of production’ and becoming antagonistic.Footnote 40 When, in 1952, the dash had ‘risen to amounts oscillating between 6,000 and 7,000 pesetas, the benefits of the harvest [were] squarely falling into the hands of the braceros themselves or to the intermediaries who intervene on their behalf’.Footnote 41 The growth of the dash was paid for by large Spanish and capital-rich corporate plantations that were the ones ‘needing a large amount of braceros and constantly renewing the contracts of their recruits’.Footnote 42 Until the early 1950s, these hegemonic planters fuelled the increases in the dash in order to drown out the undercapitalized small farms owned by Spaniards, Portuguese and Fernandinos who had not been ‘able to stand the pace’ of the increase and had ‘no alternative but to sell out to the larger concerns’.Footnote 43 Only during ‘peak dash’ in June 1952 did the Cámara Agricola – the sole planters’ lobby representing big and established capital – call upon the Governor to ‘resolutely intervene in order to cut the rising costs of labour in its tracks’.Footnote 44 Within three weeks, the Spanish colonial authorities had ‘put in motion a study to wipe out the escalating regalo’, but they found that they could not get rid of it. They partially rearranged it into a registered bonus, a reduced ‘lump sum paid out only at the end of a contract’, because ‘the total suppression of the prima would have completely paralyzed the island's agriculture’.Footnote 45
The Vice Consul gathered that braceros ‘did not take to this new method at all’.Footnote 46 Those ‘who completed their contracts had no interest in staying’ because their ‘calculations or estimation of the regalo were no longer being taken into account’ (Llompart Aulet Reference Llompart Aulet1961: 68). The dash was a way for workers to guarantee for themselves some form of payment in the first place, because formal wages were often left unpaid. This was either because, over the course of a contract, planters went bankrupt or because employers were ‘in the habit of delaying paying the labourers whose contracts have expired’, which resulted in braceros having to ‘pay out most of the money which is due to them for their living expenses until they are unable to leave the Island, then they are forced to recontract’.Footnote 47 New dash prohibitions notwithstanding, over a third of the planters continued to pay upfront and off the books; if not, they were simply unable to harvest their crop. The growing amount of cheaper ‘treaty labour’ that did not receive the dash was being ‘blatantly directed’ to the Cámara’s Spanish-only members. No new ‘treaty labourers’ were ‘allocated to foreigners’, and ‘very very few to Spanish emancipated natives’, so the many large Portuguese, Fernandino and German plantations and the small Bubi farmers – about a hundred or so who usually had only one bracero under contract – had to ‘rely on retaining their pre-treaty labour or obtaining illegal [smuggled or deserting] labour in order to carry on’.Footnote 48
Dash life: smugglers, prostitutes and planters
The ‘point of view of the bracero is to never want to remain a bracero but for the shortest period of their life as possible’ (Romero Moliner Reference Romero Moliner1949: 42). The Nigerian reengancho found himself on ‘Fernando Po with the sole object of making his fortune in his small way’;Footnote 49 his overriding purpose was apparently to figure out how to ‘make money as quickly as possible’ (Osuntokun Reference Osuntokun and Akinyemi1978b: 10). A former Hausa bracero – who, in the 1950s, turned himself into a prosperous smuggler of canes and batons – remembers the Fernando Pó of the booming post-war heyday as ‘a place of many profits’, ‘money everywhere’: ‘if something was a luxury in Nigeria, here it was in abundance’.Footnote 50 The thousands of Spanish settlers – when not bossing people about and attacking them on the plantations or manning most of the administrative positions – were largely busy running the ‘many, many, many factorías that plague Santa Isabel’ (Pozanco Reference Pozanco1937: 25; de Terán Reference de Terán1962: 60). These merchant shops openly catered almost exclusively to a clientele of wholesale brandy and tobacco smugglers from the Cross River Delta and the Wouri Estuary who sailed to the island in large ocean-going canoe convoys. By the 1950s, they had orchestrated the largest contraband network in coastal West Africa.Footnote 51
While on a fundraising tour in Santa Isabel, the secretary of the Ibo State Union – a kind of democratically arranged ‘development’ association (Ahanotu Reference Ahanotu and Obichere1982: 154–6; van den Bersselaar Reference van den Bersselaar2005: 69) whose members on the island were being continually arrested, beaten and deported – ‘witnessed with [his] own eyes the much talked about Fernando Poo. It is truly a “market country”. In its entirety it is filled with gigantic mansions and warehouses with innumerable merchandise for sale.’Footnote 52 ‘In reality,’ says a British colonial officer (Brook, Reference Brook1966: 196), ‘the Ibo went for two reasons: to make money and to take advantage of the opportunities the island presented for smuggling.’ In Calabar he caught a glimpse of the ‘great sea canoes filled with Africans being taken to Fernando Po for illicit engagement’. On their return trip these canoes were ‘laden to the gunnels with brandy, guns and trade goods for sale in Nigeria. Labourers also at the end of their contract shipped contraband.’ The dash was also being used to purchase expensive bicycles, gramophones or Spanish-made ‘sewing machines, before returning home’ to Nigeria, where many former dash-braceros turned themselves into independent transport workers, bar owners and tailors. ‘In fact,’ says a thinly veiled advertisement in a Nigerian newspaper, ‘as the Milton Lotion washes away any stain in a cloth, so Fernando Po washes away poverty from the starved and unemployed Nigerian Citizens.’Footnote 53 Positive propaganda for the island in the Nigerian media was a very rare sight.
For half a century, every few years, and sometimes daily for months, a Nigerian press storm laden with scandal and outrage formed over Fernando Pó (Akinyemi Reference Akinyemi1970: 243; Ejituwu Reference Ejituwu, Barkindo, Asiwaju and Mabale1995: 45; Obadare Reference Obadare2001: 85; Falola and Fleming Reference Falola and Fleming2005: 152). Journalistic exposés contained interviews with deported politically active labourers who told ‘newsmen in Calabar that they had suffered “the most inhuman, hellish and brutal treatment” they ever had heard of in their lives’ – principally at the hands of the colonial police. Fernando Pó was known in the press, and popularly, by the epithet ‘Hell's island’.Footnote 54 While journalists never mentioned the dash directly, if they had, they might have described it as a deal with the devil. From afar, and even from up close, it seemed that ‘conditions are such that on completion of his term of work, [a bracero] is forced to sign on for another term. This vicious circle continues till the victim has wasted the better part of his life serving inhuman masters.’Footnote 55 Many braceros were a bit more nonchalant; one ‘Chinebu Echu, from Okigwi’, after returning to Nigeria at the end of a four-year contract, told a journalist that the conditions on the plantation where he worked ‘were fine’ and that he had earned ‘some £35’ because of the ‘bonus given by employers’.Footnote 56 Labourers made it clear to anyone who asked them that the ‘principal attraction of a term of employment in Fernando Poo [was] the acquisition of a lump sum’ – ‘the inability of the individual to save when employed in Nigeria on even well paid work is well known’.Footnote 57
One of the Vice Consul's informants gave him the impression that ‘the majority of labourers, on receiving the lump sum bonus on contracting, paid a large part of it over to a woman and this gave them the right to spend the night with her, whenever they came to Santa Isabel’. This was only partially true; she was more than a sex worker. Several thousand Nigerian and Cameroonian women ran and staffed the market stalls, brothels and bars that populated Nu Billi (New Village) or Campo Yaounde – the migrant slum of Santa Isabel.Footnote 58 These women acted as the so-called ‘money-keepers’ accounted for elsewhere in West Africa, because informal dash money was obviously unbankable (Berry Reference Berry and Guyer1995: 309; Peebles Reference Peebles2014). The peseta lost its value fourfold vis-à-vis the West African pound between 1936 and 1952, so it made sense to quickly convert the dash into fixed assets such as bottles of liquor that could eventually be smuggled back and easily sold in Nigeria – a conversion usually arranged by these women. Braceros never actually held onto the dash money for long. Keeping unattended valuables in the housing barracks of plantation patios was not a good idea – theft was common.Footnote 59 Also, as there were no official receipts for the dash, braceros would avoid carrying around large sums of cash for fear of being accused of illicit earnings or theft and immediately being thrown into jail or forced to join the penal road gangs of the public works department.
Given the commercial intensity of the island, it was unsurprising that braceros were ‘tempted to fritter away’ the ‘ill-gotten gains’ of the dash on ‘wine, women and tobacco’, while ‘the more prudent of them’, says the Vice Consul, ‘invest the money in goods with which to trade on their return to Nigeria’.Footnote 60 The Methodist minister on the island lamented that his churches were being neglected because the bracero went on Sunday shopping trips to ‘spend his money in shops [with] fine displays offering a bewildering variety of cheap Spanish drinks’, for export and consumption.Footnote 61 In a rare archival find, the confiscated diary of a bracero, a politically conscious and torn convert, a young unmarried man called Monde, reads: ‘Shameful, I had over doze [sic] shots of illicit gin and palm oil wine and adultered and woke up to 12 noon at the premises in the Afonta local Bar. My action when I was very high was rewarded as madmans way of life.’Footnote 62 Those with the intrepidness to stay on the island for several contracts, says Israel, a former treaty-bracero, were given the nickname ‘griho’, derived from the Spanish word for the nocturnal and noisy cricket: ‘this simply means that those people were carried away by the high life in Fernando Po that existed in the form of women and alcohol’ (Oham Reference Oham2006: 71). While the dash had much to do with the labour economics of scarcity, its pace, direction and outlet were set by the relationships braceros established with touts, bar owners, prostitutes and smugglers. The latter did not operate a parallel ‘second economy’ but configured the consistent interdependencies and contradictory ruptures between wage and informal labour (MacGaffey Reference MacGaffey1991: 12; Bolt Reference Bolt2012: 116), between regulated contractual exchange and gifts and thefts, and between needs and desires.
Dash desertion: fugados
The 1952 decree that tried to ban the dash was explicitly geared ‘to stop labourers deserting and recontracting, under false names, with false documents in order to obtain the engagement bonus’. Deserters ‘appeared to consider that the risk of breaking the law is well worth the “dash”, which they would receive for contracting, if they were not caught’.Footnote 63 A ‘great many Treaty labourers’, at times up to 30 per cent, were defecting to the spiralling dash. They did this by simply ‘adopting a new name’. They ‘realise that if they run away and obtain false papers, which can be bought[, they] receive a “dash” of some £30’.Footnote 64 The labour market into which the fugados inserted themselves was characterized by an excess of paperwork. It was a costly routine, but a routine nevertheless, to acquire paperwork and fill the pockets of one of the ‘at least 400 functionaries who easily succumb to the temptation to falsify a paper or document as soon as the opportunity presents itself’ (Romero Moliner Reference Romero Moliner1949: 43). Marck Oturu, a clandestine Nigerian tout from Bende, was arrested and held in the police headquarters of Santa Isabel, where he assured his interrogators that any ‘necessary paperwork could all be arranged for right here’.Footnote 65 Deserters tuned in to circuits of localized knowledge and again enlisted the collaboration of Nu Billi’s bar owners, who ‘protect[ed] fugados in their homes’ while they awaited a supply of new paperwork.Footnote 66 Ganchos brokered and sold any supporting documentation to deserting labourers. This was usually arranged beforehand, because the ‘detaining of immigrants without the appropriate papers’ was almost instant. Dozens of Guardia Colonial (military police) detachments and roadblocks were placed around the only road that encircled the island in the 1940s – a road largely built and maintained by imprisoned Nigerian braceros.Footnote 67
The division of value between capital and labour on Fernando Pó was often jarring, verging from absolute injustice to spectacular coups. A group of braceros told George Dove-Edwin, a Nigerian Krio lawyer visiting his brother-in-law on the island, that ‘a note from any one of their employers was sufficient not only to confine them in prison but for them to be treated as convicts’: that is, subjected to unpaid penal labour (Bernault and Roitman Reference Bernault and Roitman2003). In addition, ‘if a labourer's employer has any sort of grounds of complaint he can send the labourer along to the Police and have him soundly flogged’.Footnote 68 Someone who hit the employers where it hurt them was a man who went by the female aliasFootnote 69 Okpara Anita. With a forged ‘freedom paper’ and after receiving an ‘envelope of money’, Anita deserted from his second contract at a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant and then proceeded to send a letter taunting his former employer. Anita explains how his flight was a conscious act of retribution for deductions from the accrued wages kept in arrears: ‘Now Pedro the [w]hole palaver in the month of September could you remember what you told me when paying me? Could you remember how much money you have cuted [cut] me with out reasonable point?’ Insisting on the more or less ethical conduct of his operation, Anita also noted that ‘the money was given me by Master Pinga, not by night or hidden thing it is in day time’, in broad daylight.Footnote 70 The sabotage precipitated by the dash worked only if performed with theatrics and props – with aliases, forgeries and simulations – in the light of day rather than through predatory night-time banditry or the stealth of the burglar (see Bastian Reference Bastian, Comaroff and Comaroff1993: 149). If deemed just or worth the risk, a bracero could ‘contract himself to five different employers in the course of a month, each time receiving a handsome “dash”’. ‘One man [who] had 13 current contracts’ might have broken a record, but all except one of his hopeful employers denounced the bracero as a fugado.Footnote 71 The cumulative play of flight was one of withdrawal and tactical re-entry, a guerrilla warfare without bloodshed.
Deserters and touts reassembled the techniques of financial capitalism – generating speculative debts based on their labour – within a state of generalized corruption. The dual spiral of the dash – escalating advances and desertions – did not, of course, involve any syndicalist organization; ‘in that island of terrorism and brutality strikes are illegal and agitation is criminal’.Footnote 72 It used to be said of desertion that it was a ‘conservative’ and ‘inhibiting’ form of resistance, because – as with the dash – success was variable and individualized and the whole ‘tramping-system’ was sustained by a ‘spontaneous and ephemeral … communications network’ of ‘touts’ (Harries Reference Harries1993: 42). Recent scholarship even suggests that negotiating higher advances and deserting with forged papers was not a form of resistance at all; instead, it was a ‘self-interested act of duplicity’ (Allina-Pisano Reference Allina-Pisano2003: 192) or just a technical search ‘for slightly better wages’ (Cooper Reference Cooper1996: 45). However, the decentralized and fragmentary renegotiation of total wages held up and enacted a devastating critique of the entire colonial contract system itself. Touts and workers, the ‘hooks’ and those ‘re-hooked’, the ganchos and reenganchos, with or without deserters, opened up the space for a form of contestation that first of all managed to get rid of the most abusive overseers and planters, and then struck the plantations at their very core, their bottom line. Drawing on the repertoire of dash negotiation techniques – self-evident demands, up-to-date scripts, and sometimes masks made with forged papers – they outwitted the imperial capitalist system that had engineered low wages on bondage contracts, and they did this with an indispensable dose of confidence and dexterity. It was a remarkable manoeuvre.
Conclusion
Conditions for debt bondage arise when employers use wage advances to ‘manoeuvre workers into a system of forced labour (which is still wage-labour) or contain their mobility’ (Banaji Reference Banaji2003: 87). However, such binding properties did not emerge from the quasi-magical invocations of sheer debt alone, but rather from the ‘organized violence’ of those who measured and enforced repayment through labour (Graeber Reference Graeber2011: 121; Taussig Reference Taussig1987: 65; Prakash Reference Prakash1990: 242). In postcolonial Latin America, as in colonial Africa, the advances of peonaje ‘usually involved indebtedness and always involved the machinery of state to make the system work’ (Dore Reference Dore, Clarence-Smith and Topik2003: 218; Washbrook Reference Washbrook2006: 390). This, rather than the dash, was the source of bondage in the imperial labour relation. When the prolific adviser on African labour matters Major Orde-Browne (Reference Orde-Browne1967: 72; see also Cooper Reference Cooper1996: 60; Brown Reference Brown2003: 83) described the ‘cut-throat competition’ that ‘set in when competing recruiters give increasing advances’, he immediately recommended that ‘some written statement of any obligation of this nature should be drawn up at the time of incurring it’. As Keith Breckenridge shows, the elements of an ‘archival government’ – templates for contracts, centralized registries, traceable receipts and sundry identification techniques – were only deployed in colonial economies in the first place to try to regulate the mushrooming of both wage advances and the related desertions that accompanied ‘capital intensive forms of labour recruitment’ (Breckenridge Reference Breckenridge2008: 22; see also Singha Reference Singha2000: 161).
The dash was the result of an uncompromising commodity economics achieved through constant negotiations that reflected the ‘real value’ of bracero labour as a type of ‘free’ labour, in the elementary sense of agreed wages and the ability to exit contracts (Marx Reference Marx1906 [1887]: 256; Turner Reference Turner1995: 14–15; Amin and van der Linden Reference Amin and van der Linden1997; Moulier Boutang Reference Moulier Boutang1998). As Isaac Pepple, a Nigerian journalist arrested on the island in 1956, found out from ‘a group of five thieves [in a] prison cell’: ‘strangely enough’, the Nigerians who bypassed the treaty and ‘smuggled themselves’ onto the island did so ‘because as free men, they can bargain for high wages’ in the form of a dash.Footnote 73 Needless to say, the autonomous escalations of the dash took place entirely outside imperial self-definitions of ‘free’ contract labour. For braceros, the dash was their own criterion inserted into unstable parameters of exchange; it was even a just moment that could be pulled out from inside the predetermined terms of an imperial labour contract. Even though the spiralling of the dash was a provisional and rare feat, the self-propelled trajectory of the reenganchos on Fernando Pó was sustained by a praxis based on a sense of fairness – a moral economy of radicalized economics – in one of the most structurally violent colonies of its day. Only the dash could overturn a plantation economy that depended on conned and kidnapped Nigerians during World War II; only the dash could ward off the ‘labour treaty’ with Nigeria that was a West African variant of apartheid's labour recruiting system. Dash-peonage had a deeply ambivalent and highly volatile trajectory that underpinned, straddled and then circumvented the free–unfree labour binary and the colonial economy itself.
Notes
Abbreviations for the archives: AGA = Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Spain, IDD 15, Fondo África; C = Caja; E = Expediente; BNM = Biblioteca Nacional de Guinea Ecuatorial, Malabo, Equatorial Guinea; NAE = National Archives of Nigeria, Enugu Branch; TNA = National Archives of the UK, London.
Abbreviations for correspondence: DGMC = Dirección General de Marruecos y Colonias (Colonial Office, Madrid); GG = Gobernador General de los Territorios Españoles del Golfo de Guinea (Governor, Santa Isabel); Curador = Curador Colonial, from 1941 on Delegado de Trabajo (Labour Officer, Santa Isabel); Policía = Jefe de Policía Gubernativa (Police Chief, Santa Isabel); Cámara = Presidente de la Cámara Agrícola de Fernando Póo (Head of the Agricultural Chambers of Commerce, Santa Isabel); British VC = British Vice Consul (Santa Isabel); British LO: British Labour Officer (Santa Isabel); Comm'r = British Commissioner of Labour in Nigeria (Lagos).
Acknowledgements
The doctoral research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under ERC Starting Grant no. 240898. I wish to thank the journal's two anonymous reviewers, Bill Freund, Prabhu Mohapatra, Zachary Kagan Guthrie, Dmitri van den Bersselaar and Keith Breckenridge for their very helpful readings and reflections over sources; and Barbara Cooper, Cheikh Babou, Benoît Henriet and Stephanie Zehnle for their comments on an earlier draft presented at the Journal of African History authors’ workshop held at Re:work, Humboldt University, in June 2014.
