IntroductionFootnote 1
Petitions constitute a major but overlooked source for the history of the Second World War in West Africa. Although they are abundant in African archives, petitions have been too often ignored “as a tool for understanding interactions within colonial settings;” notwithstanding a recent anthology of petitions focused on civilian life during the war, this article contends that we still have much further to go in order to appreciate “African voices and perspectives on the war.”Footnote 2 Despite the recent growth of research on the history of textuality and literacy in Africa, including sophisticated studies of epistolarity, petitions have been largely left behind.Footnote 3 A number of recent studies use petitions to elucidate the social history of childhood, agriculture and trade in late-colonial Nigeria, but soldiers’ petitions add a dramatically internationalized dimension.Footnote 4 Writing from India, Palestine, and Burma, soldiers made the exchange of African petitions truly global. We will see how the petitions of soldiers and their families show how military service came second place to the obligations men held towards their families, land, and local affairs.
Petitioners were as heterogeneous in their backgrounds as their complaints were in their content. But regardless of the tale they tell, most petitions address a common reader: the District Officer (D.O.). It cannot be overstressed that in putting pen to paper petitioners were grafting together two disparate worlds: they were narrating their most personal problems for a reader they barely knew. This meant that they had to astutely guess their reader’s prejudices about Africans, their families and their relationships, all subjects that were recurrent priorities for petitioners but that were beyond the knowledge of almost all 1940s British colonial officials. The matter could be greatly helped by a strategic portrayal of a competent and powerful official reader; but petitioners also sensed new pressures on colonial officials. Their efforts were informed by the attempts of colonial governments to regulate African lives following the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act, as well as the unprecedentedly interventionist wartime economy, but more importantly petitioners were also aware that officials in Nigeria were under scrutiny from British officers in Asia who wanted their men’s complaints to be taken seriously regardless of their skin color.Footnote 5
Examining the petitions of Ijebu soldiers preserved in the Nigerian National Archives in Ibadan, we will argue that the experience of military service in the often-overlooked area of southwestern Nigeria demands integration into the historiography of the Second World War. Before 1944 this area was peripheral to the priorities of military recruiters who, from the 1900s to the 1940s, focused on their preferred “martial” recruiting areas in the Northern Provinces.Footnote 6 Our contention here is not that the experiences of Ijebu soldiers were typical of all colonial African soldiers; rather it is that the Ijebu were indicative of the rapid changes in military service during the war, which led to a rapid expansion in recruitment away from supposedly martial races and career soldiers. The Second World War increasingly mobilized African soldiers who had no especial bond to military service, nor any tradition of serving the British Army. Recruiting in Nigeria expanded to the south from 1942, and in the Gold Coast from 1940, resulting in a “major increase in ethnic diversity,” one indirect indicator of this is the fact that in 1945 the Royal West African Frontier Force was 47% Christian (a faith typically associated with the coastal south), compared to 2% in 1939.Footnote 7 The existence of these new recruits remains marginal to historical scholarship on the Second World War in Africa, even though their incorporation into the military remains one of the most distinctive social dimensions of military service in wartime Africa.
Beyond the Socially Isolated Soldiery: Petitions and the Changing Demography of Military Service in the Second World War
The instrumental quality of wartime petitions makes them particularly valuable sources for assessing soldiers’ obligations at home. Unlike love letters and personal correspondence, these petitions were written with the specific purpose of engaging officialdom.Footnote 8 Petitions are texts that necessarily traduce the boundaries of private and public, in Barber’s words “yoking them together,” and, even while petitions are necessarily public records of grievances that have later been subsumed into the colonial archive, they contain insights into marital, family, and compound life.Footnote 9 Thus, in penning their letters petitioners were caught in a double bind; they were committed to both documenting their grievances and addressing officialdom. Majumdar characterizes this double nature of petitions as both “public documents of (…) grievances written in a rhetorical style” and “legitimizing the existence of” their official reader.Footnote 10 “Rhetorical style” is in fact a rather vague description of the discursive maneuvering engaged in by petitioners and it neatly evades engaging with the positionality of the petitioner. Too few social histories of petitioners themselves pay sufficient attention to the degree to which petitioners engage in the constitution of both their reader and themselves.
For social historians, the lure of a subaltern “voice” is one of the most compelling, but also deceptive, elements at play in reading petitions. Even though the petitions offer a rich collection of voices otherwise inaccessible to the historians, we must be cautious of heeding these voices without a preliminary awareness of the letters’ formal complexities. As Davis has demonstrated in her analysis of remission letters in early modern France, petitions have a long history of artfully incorporating apparently “fictional” elements not in terms of “feigned element[s], but rather (…) their forming, shaping, and molding elements” that contribute to “the crafting of a narrative.”Footnote 11 As if all of this was not enough, when considering soldiers’ relatives and their letters, a further problem concerns the prevalence of “collaborative” authorship.Footnote 12 Most petitioners required the help of an amanuensis and illiterate soldiers usually secured the assistance of their commanding officers.Footnote 13 The identity of these amanuenses are often absent from the petitions themselves, although in some cases we find that the Native Authority has arranged for a letter writer and translator to be employed. Organized letter writing was provided by voluntary organizations like the African Women’s Voluntary Service who in 1944 wrote six hundred letters on behalf of the wives and sisters of soldiers.Footnote 14 Literate soldiers and businessmen were easily able to compose petitions of their own, but this is hardly less ground for caution. Letter writing was a “cornerstone” of the educational process in colonial Nigeria, and educated colonial subjects were taught to access colonial power and knowledge through the letter.Footnote 15 In the case of both “collaboratively” and individually authored petitions, we must be aware that the singular authorial voice apparent in these sources conceals a multiplicity of power relations.
Most petitions provide little overt evidence of whether they were composed by an amanuensis or by the named petitioner. In some cases, Africans, such as one I. Akiyemi, organized a group “Pen Friends for Nigerian Troops Overseas;” this group hoped to collaborate closely with Native Authorities and Education Authorities to connect soldiers to potential pen friends.Footnote 16 Individual correspondents were encouraged to write at least once a month, and school students of Standard VI and upwards were allowed to participate.Footnote 17 In certain petitions, such as Bosede Dada’s request for divorce, the name of the amanuensis and his fee, or lack thereof, is recorded at the bottom of the letter; in cases where the local police obtained witness statements the name of the Yoruba translator is given.Footnote 18
Despite the opaque quality of the petitions, there are textual traces that imply careful self-presentation on the part of the petitioner, if not active collaboration with a skilled amanuensis. Soldier George Onawale invoked God to wish the British “brilliant success,” while fellow serviceman S. Adeyemi described his efforts as a “poor petition” that he trusted would receive careful consideration.Footnote 19 Statements of humility, or conversely of the power of the British official reader, can be read as flattery, but there is an element of coercion and threat here too. Such writings fit into what Korieh has termed “counter hegemonic discourse” drawing on a “rhetoric of humility and disavowal” to assert their claims.Footnote 20 One common feature of many petitions from otherwise humble claimants is the use of bombastic language, mixed with invocations of human dignity, universalism, and the worthiness of the Allied war effort that likely originated from a body of highly educated amanuenses who succeeded in turning colonial ideology back upon the colonizers; in many cases this remains a stylistic hypothesis due to the lack of concrete evidence about the composition of many petitions.
Despite these qualifications, petitions are indispensable sources within the colonial archive. As Heerma van Voss comments “in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the indigenous population was quick to adopt petitions.”Footnote 21 In Africa during the Second World War, petitions were written in a context informed by competing forms of colonial and military authority, as well the newly powerful languages of loyalty and patriotism specific to wartime. As Korieh argues in the case of Igbo petitioners during the war, petitions:
provide one of the very few opportunities to locate African men and women’s voices as they confronted the new political, economic, judicial and social system that emerged in the colonial context.Footnote 22
Petitions are inextricably social documents and “Africans”‘ preferred method of protesting against policies’ implemented by the colonial government.Footnote 23 Analyzing juvenile petitioners in 1940s Lagos, Aderinto concludes that petitions are “useful data for mapping out everyday encounters with colonialism.”Footnote 24 He attends to the textuality of these petitions and connects this to the historical insights they yield; petitioners “were conscious about their positionality,” articulating “strong feelings about themselves as individuals,” as well as regarding “their places within families, communities, and even the colonial system.”Footnote 25 These petitions reflect their authors’ positioning in relation to the colonial state, Aderinto contends, and demonstrate their awareness of their own “highly restricted access” to the colonial state, as well as their limited opportunities to engage officials whom “they believed were generally too busy to ordinarily entertain their concerns.”Footnote 26
Ijebu soldiers’ petitions draw attention to the porous boundary between military service and civilian obligations. This boundary between the army and the civilian world has long been overstressed in historiography of African involvement in the Second World War. Even when the informality of post-colonial conflicts is analyzed, colonial militaries are seen as exploiting “superior resources and bureaucratic effectiveness,” and the 1939–1945 war is often cited as the culmination of the tendency towards “the professionalization of war and military organization” that transformed African warfare from the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 27 The colonial army propagated the “idea of [a] common identity” among its troops, who were attracted by “the great power and influence which membership of the military establishment unofficially conferred” upon them; in Ubah’s memorable phrase “the gun carrying ex-slave in colonial service was no an object of dread.”Footnote 28 All of this might be true of early colonial warfare, or indeed of groups such as the Kamba and Hausa during the 1940s, but it has been transferred tout court into the historiography of the Second World War. This has led historians to place a high estimation on the dramatic capability of the military in wartime Africa; Killingray has thus argued that “demonstrations of European power (…) particularly in the two World Wars, must have convinced many Africans of the incredible might of the colonial state.”Footnote 29
These tendencies are particularly apparent in Parsons’ astute analysis of the King’s African Rifles (KAR) as a disciplinary and regulatory force that intensified the social isolation of its soldiery while fostering a proud Askari identity. “Soldiers,” Parsons contends that they “were part of a closed world in which virtually every aspect of their daily lives marked them as different and separate from the general African population.”Footnote 30
This regulatory capacity of the army to create a “closed world” was indispensable in reinforcing “the social isolation of the African soldiery,” by regulating areas of life such as conjugal relations.Footnote 31 Crucially, Parsons is not suggesting that Africans were hapless victims of this powerful institution; on the contrary, he stresses the opportunities for Africans to exploit and subvert military discipline. But the KAR nonetheless made considerable efforts towards “weakening” soldiers’ “ties to mainstream society,” and in the case of barracks, “physically segregated” soldiers from civilian life “through formal regulations.”Footnote 32 This account radically differs from the experiences of newly recruited groups, such as the Ijebu soldiery, who were determined to cultivate their links with home at any cost. It is true that Parsons provides a detailed account of soldiers’ families and of gender, but this is partly in relation to families based in barracks; in West Africa women had not lived in barracks since the 1930s and the practice was not associated with recruits from such groups as the Yoruba or the Igbo.Footnote 33
In their relations with home, Ijebu soldiers were not “simultaneously coerced and coercing (…) enforc[ing] the will of elites yet ma[king] demands themselves.”Footnote 34 Their conceptualization of military service as being subordinate to agricultural, familial and business obligations flew in the face of notions held by military and colonial officials. Nor is their experience accurately described by Parsons’ contention that “African perceptions of military service were determined largely by the degree to which the army transformed and reordered their daily lives.”Footnote 35
Given their profound geographical isolation, one might have imagined that West Africans in South Asia and the Middle East would be particularly susceptible to such a “transformed” worldview. But we will see that Ijebu soldiers strived to maintain the multiple obligations that tied them to their homes; they kept a meticulous correspondence with home and went to extensive efforts to manipulate far away colonial officials when domestic affairs went array. Again, the fact that their experience was not necessarily typical of military service among supposedly martial groups does not detract from the value of the Ijebu’s experience in assessing the newer recruits incorporated into a changing Royal West African Frontier Force (RWAFF).
Historians of Francophone Africa have gone further in exploring the domestic lives of soldiers, particularly the role of wives and siblings in influencing men’s military service. Zimmerman has explored how “women and soldiers challenged a secular colonial state” in Senegal in order to “redefine marriage,” and also reveals cases of West African women who traveled to North Africa and Madagascar to follow their husbands.Footnote 36 These women were not simply camp followers, but constituted “indirect clients of the (…) colonial state,” actively petitioning officials and making claims around marriage and divorce. Women petitioners were active in lobbying district heads in French Equatorial Africa, one of whom, as Jennings shows, specifically asked for more information about the movements of soldiers so as to keep concerned wives and mothers updated.Footnote 37 Male civilians also manipulated military service in beneficial ways and, as Mann contends, “opened up radical possibilities to soldiers’ families” creating opportunities for men of different generations within the same family unit to enter military service.Footnote 38 Moyd has shown in German Africa how African women and soldiers both made demands on colonial officials, with the latter wanting to bring their families on campaigns in order to “demonstrate their status within the gender sensibilities of the campaign communities and beyond.”Footnote 39 Ex-servicemen’s families could also carry symbolic resonance, as when veterans and their families were encouraged to participate in commemorative activities in 1950s Senegal.Footnote 40
But in our case, any construct of a shared “military life,” in the sense of families accompanying campaigns, or following men to Madagascar, is particularly problematic. Nor did reluctance to define oneself solely as a soldier equate to desertion, as Ubah implies in the case of Northern Nigeria, where those who “had neither imbibed the culture of military life nor had they any stake yet in military service” were particularly likely to leave the army.Footnote 41 The soldiers we will meet were on military service, yet they saw themselves equally, if not primarily, as farmers, businessmen, heads of compounds and actors in local politics. Nor did the army “reorder” their lives; indeed, geographical distance intensified their focus on home.
Tied to Home: Soldiers’ Domestic Obligations at Home and Abroad
What were these obligations that so pressured soldier petitioners? We will examine two distinct social arenas: conjugality and care for dependents. Such ties, as Barnes contends, bind people together “by reciprocal obligations” on varying scales varying from lineage to an entire urban area.Footnote 42 In the context of reciprocal obligations inside a descent group “membership (…) did not cease so long as members exercised their rights and obligations.”Footnote 43 This “dynamic process” of actively maintaining obligations recurs throughout this paper, and we will see the dramatic costs of failing to actively honor and assert one’s duties.
The key social unit we will encounter is the extended family, which was often codeterminate with the residential category of the ilu or compound. As Peel has observed of Ijesha “much of the economic activity of subsistence is organized through domestic role,” a major consideration in an area of Nigeria where, in 1952, 70% of males were still engaged in farming.Footnote 44 Significantly, the “economic” elements of these obligations went far beyond earning money; as Fadipe argues “mutual help” in terms of “goods” and “free services” were key forms of non-monetary obligations and, even when money was involved, we must never assume that simply amassing capital oneself was adequate to become wealthy in Yoruba terms. On the contrary, social expectations dictated that a wealthy individual or gbajúmò was generous in sharing money and resources within “the wider kin group.”Footnote 45 All of this fueled a complex web of social obligations that linked compound inhabitants and often, although not always, cohered around consanguinity: “[T]he feeling of solidarity is very strongly developed around the members of a compound. A large amount of mutual help goes on among consanguineal and affinal relatives.”Footnote 46
The impact of often mundane obligations such as sharing utensils and maintaining farmland was immense. Soldiers were not isolated by the disciplinary cohesion and the force of the colonial military, but because military service disrupted their primary social and political identity at home. A man “derives his position in the wider political community in which he lives only through his membership in his compound.”Footnote 47 Thanks to their military service overseas, soldiers were ripped out of this web and sought to exercise their influence at home by any available means.
Absentee Husbands, Beaten Wives and Rivalry: the Perils of Maintaining a Marriage from India
Marital problems formed an inevitable preoccupation for soldiers. We will subdivide these difficulties into three areas: soldiers’ losing touch with their wives, women’s expectations of their soldier husbands, and violence against women. Conjugality across Africa was in flux during the 1940s and soldiers throughout the continent found that, as Byfield observes, “young men could evade the control that older men had over their ability to marry.”Footnote 48 This was partly because, as Mutongi demonstrates, soldiers brought home more pay compared to their contemporaries and contributed to dowry inflation. Soldiers’ wives, for their part, remarried in significant numbers, with women across Yorubaland leaving home to move to Lagos.Footnote 49 Colonial and military officials lagged behind all of this, and often tended to conceptualize soldiers’ families along Eurocentric models that emphasized the role of the male as sole financial provider for his wife and children.Footnote 50 Although open to manipulation by African soldiers, this tenacious assumption nevertheless meant that soldiers’ powerful obligations to their compound, extended family and local politics were largely invisible to British observers. In particular, officials ignored the web of customary obligations that surrounded marriage. The husband was not only expected to feed and house his wife but his obligations went far beyond monetary support. Men were also expected to settle their wives’ debts, protect them physically, and provide labor to their parents.Footnote 51
- Fraying Connections: Losing Touch with Home
An immediate sign that soldiers were struggling to maintain their social obligations came when they lost contact with their wives. Ijebu soldier Hamzat Raji had sent his wife money, but he complained that “she never write me,” a situation which “is very abnormal to me.”Footnote 52 Soldier Moses Amkiyeti similarly complained that “my home affair” had “averagely deprived my mind;” his wife had been in receipt of financial allowances from him for a year, but had not written to him in all this time.Footnote 53 In an attempt to prompt the D.O. to investigate his case, Amkiyeti refers the official to his “genuine brother, who stand(s) as a father for me” domiciled at Lataura Street in Shagamu, he also gives references to his former employer at EFI Marina in Lagos. But then Moses provides a further clue: “the house holder where I was born at Shagamu.” This category of “householder” is not explained in Moses’ petition but we may note that his brother is named as Mr. Mathew Amkiyeti, while the “householder” is a further but unspecified member of Moses’ extended family. Deprived of any other correspondence from home, Moses is attempting to compel the District Officer to locate those males he believes to be suitable intermediaries who can help to maintain an influence over his wife during his absence.
These fraying connections indicate how far soldiers’ social obligations transcended the monetary. Corporal Onisamusin wrote from Sierra Leone to protest that his wife had left his father’s house with their three-year-old daughter and neglected the child. Frustratingly, Onisamusin then found that his wife was divorcing him. Even though he explained to her that “when I went home on leave last year that I am not the only man in overseas (service),” and that she was “not the only woman who did not see her husband;” his protests fell on deaf ears.Footnote 54 Money alone, it seems, was no help, as Onisamusin admitted that “I have made (an) allotment for her since Nov 1st, 1942 and she since been drawing it.” Eager to reclaim this money, he wanted the Magistrate’s Court to take up his case, but without an intermediary to act on his behalf this was unlikely. From the British perspective, Onisamusin was supporting his family by sending financial assistance and thus acting as a “breadwinner,” but this misses the fact he was not physically present in the community to maintain his obligations to his wife and the local community; he was thus unable to prevent his wife from divorcing him. Onisamusin’s wife soon left for a man who was not in the army, while leaving the child with the soldier’s mother.
The degree to which claims about money were enmeshed in local social relations can be seen in the case of a Middle-East based solider, Adeyemi Adenuga. Petitioning the D.O., Adenuga complained that his wife “does not write since 8 months ago.”Footnote 55 In a later letter Adenuga speculates “the reason why she does not write:” “I think she is annoy(ed) with me, because, she wrote to me to come home one leave and I wrote again to her that I am too far.”Footnote 56
Despite his promises that “when it is time” he would visit and “comfort her father and herself,” the Native Authority investigation of Adenuga’s case revealed a very different story, and unearthed grievances that show how far Adenuga had failed to maintain his obligations as a suitor. His problem turned out to be bound up with his failure to honor the elaborate engagement duties surrounding dowry payment. Adenuga’s claim that Ayodele was his wife was also untrue; in fact, she was not married to him. Because he had “never paid anything in the way of dowry,” or asked for the Army’s Separation Allowance to be sent to Ayodele, there was now no prospect of marrying her.Footnote 57 Losing touch with home was a traumatic experience, but soldiers fought against it at every opportunity; in doing so, they revealed that their social obligations back in Ijebu went far beyond money.
- Women’s Expectation of their Soldier Husbands
If soldiers were perplexed by their domestic difficulties, their wives had few illusions about their husband’s duties at home. In a petition witnessed and composed by the Native Authority representatives, “a young lady (…) native of Ode Remo and a wife to one of the soldiers now on active service somewhereabout” raises her complaint that her husband has stopped financially supporting her and that, to add insult to injury, his brother has written to her father accusing her “of many things that I knew nothing about (…) fornication, insolence, insubordination, greediness, theft, lying etc.”
All of this culminated in the petitioner being sent back from her husband’s brother’s house in Abeokuta to her father’s house back home in Ijebu “according to native custom.” In a desperate bid to salvage her reputation, the petitioner’s father publicly defended his daughter’s character before the husband’s father and “in the presence of some elders of the town:” but the situation could not be salvaged and the petitioner was sent to live with her father. She prioritizes two problems that force her to seek divorce from the soldier; both relate directly to his inability to maintain his obligations towards his wife. She contends that husband’s left her “desolate” and “without sustaining allowance,” and claims that “I am too young to remain all alone without a husband who is taking care of me and I cannot help but get another husband.”Footnote 58
Although money is key to the petitioner’s complaint, the crux of her grievance is not the income per se, nor is it the slanders against her character by the husband’s brother. Instead, the petitioner emphases the fact that her husband’s lack of support is socially indefensible; she asserts her right to a husband who will fund her, but also who “take[s] care” of her. Being left “alone” and “desolate” carry the particular disadvantage of having an absentee husband who provides no “allowance” but cannot defend her against his brother’s accusations of infidelity, and his father’s throwing her out of the marital home. Back home with her father, she faces an uncertain future outside the informal obligations that bound the husband to the financial, affective and social defense of his wife. There was no reason why this woman should wait; she had no access to tolerant or positive valuations of colonial military service.
The degree to which stalled obligations led to precariousness is amply illustrated in a petition written by Oyinga, the wife of a soldier serving overseas. Oyinga found herself thrown out of her husband’s mother’s house seemingly at the behest of her husband, and sent to live with her parents. Arguing that “the said husband might not use his influence” over her due to her changed circumstances, Oyinga admitted that she was in her parents’ “custody till I can secure another man to marry me, when I shall then establish divorce action before the native court, and then question of dowry refundment comes up.”Footnote 59
A key element of Oyinga’s complaint is that it is “doubly dangerous” for her to stay in her husband’s house because she lacks protection. Key here is Oyinga’s understanding of the wife’s right to be defended; this refers directly to the mutual rights and duties of marital life in which the husband was expected to defend his wife verbally, physically and politically. Oyinga understood herself to be “an elected woman seeking protection under her parents till divorce action or refund of dowry is affected.”Footnote 60 Her aspirations were plausible; divorce was becoming more common during the 1930s and 1940s, and increasing numbers of women were willing to risk parental and social condemnation, the financial burden of refunding ife or courtship costs, and sue for divorce. Even if divorce was never achieved, returning to the parental home remained a popular alternative.Footnote 61 Once again Oyinga’s troubles reveal just how little incentive there was for a soldier’s relatives to tolerate his inability to maintain his obligations.
- The Casualties of Broken Obligations: Domestic Violence and Soldiers’ Wives
As we have seen, a soldier’s inability to “protect” his wife, and to enter into negotiations on her behalf, was often fatal to his marriage, even when he sent home ample financial allotments. In terms of physical protection, the soldier’s inability to use force to deter other men had dramatic consequences. In his absence, other males, including supposedly trusted intermediaries and brothers, felt entitled to demand sexual access to a soldier’s wife. In any case, there were long traditions in many areas of southwestern Nigeria that a wife could be shared among the husband’s male relatives, often as a way of avoiding divorce.Footnote 62
Husbands were obliged to protect their wives “against assaults and insults” and had the right demand redress against all other males who mistreated his wife, but in order to do this they needed to be physically present to negotiate with elders, sanction junior males and use the Native Court system that continued in Ijebu during the war.Footnote 63 A soldier’s absence resulted in shattered obligations and often in rape, sexual exploitation and domestic violence: all activities that were largely invisible to colonial courts during the 1940s; even in Lagos, where a nascent social welfare infrastructure was being installed, official perceptions were limited by their faith in “breadwinner masculinity.”Footnote 64 Violence against women was complicated by the fact that Yoruba culture permitted a husband to beat his wife, and that “nobody interferes until she is judged to have had enough,” but there remained a further sense in which gross abuses of power, as determined by men, were frowned upon and, in Fadipe’s words, “a man is not allowed to ill-treat his wife” and a wife could sue for divorce on the grounds of her husband’s mistreatment or disreputable behavior. Footnote 65
Soldiers stationed in Asia, such as R.H. Lawani, urged their European superiors to heed their wives’ complaints of abuse; this was a last-ditch way of trying to patch up unfulfilled obligations.Footnote 66 Although Lawani was a resident of Lagos, rather than Ijebu, his case illustrates the extent to which soldiers’ wives risked domestic abuse; this tawdry reality was a direct result of the husband not fulfilling his social obligations. Lawani’s case is also important because the neighboring metropolis of Lagos was a popular destination for Ijebu women who left home; because of his military status, Lawani’s complaint was mediated by his commanding officer, a man unschooled in colonial racism who expected that Lawani’s complaint would treated just as seriously as that of a white British soldier. For the D.O., Lawani’s petition carried the added pressure of his commanding officer’s scrutiny. Alimota Alayi Jibibe, who was Lawani’s wife, had written to her husband in Asia to report being pressurized by her brother into having sexual relations with Lawani’s friend, a fellow Lagosian named Muyibe Apiunmobi. Lawani’s wife apparently rejected Apiunmobi, remaining loyal to Lawani, but she was soon to become the target of threats. In Lawani’s words, “she has refused [to consent to sexual activity] and they have threatened and tried to make her take poison.”Footnote 67 The suggestion that she be made to take poison implies that she might have been invited to commit suicide and, in turn, indicates the extent of her dishonor and subsequent exclusion from the family unit. Lawani’s wife was under such grave pressure to agree to marriage with Apiunmobi because, in the absence of a male intermediary to maintain his obligations, many saw that a soldier stationed overseas had ceased to play a role in the community and assumed that he would never return.Footnote 68
Rape and domestic violence were real threats in Ijebu too. The wife of Ijebu driver Saka Tijani was left in her brother-in-law’s care after he had enlisted and travelled to India. Complaining that her husband’s father had forced her to have sexual intercourse with the brother-in-law, Tijani’s wife was soon planning her escape from the household.Footnote 69 The wife’s attempts to leave the household, rather than the violence within it, soon attracted the wrath of her husband’s father who claimed that she was merely “behaving in a foolish fashion.”Footnote 70 Rape and beatings were the most dramatic manifestations of the breakdown in soldiers’ social obligations concerning their wives. Even though domestic abuse was possible at the hands of the husband himself, these cases reflect the way that the husband’s absence from home provoked rival claims to sexual access on the part of his brothers, or at the hands of strangers.
Once in Asia soldiers could not negotiate in person to defend access to farmland, property and capital. Nor could they physically defend their wives from the attentions of males who were present in the community. But this geographical distance still falls far short of the long term and deliberate social isolation of those soldiers who spent long years in barracks, or the career soldier who had “not made a success of whatever they were doing [and] (…) had no viable alternatives to soldiering.”Footnote 71 Our contention here is that the obligations that tied a husband to his wife and her relatives in Yoruba culture were frustrated by military service and in the most extreme cases a soldier’s inability to maintain his obligations led not to the disciplined isolation of the professional soldier, but to a form of anguished social death.
Soldiers’ Obligations to Elderly Parents
Seniority carried considerable status in Yoruba culture, entitling adults to a “greater share of good things” and the right to expect labor from younger adults.Footnote 72 “In an emergency,” Fadipe explains, “one can get out of an uncomfortable and uncompromising position by shifting responsibility from one’s own shoulders to that of some junior…”Footnote 73 But for the elderly relatives of soldiers on military service, the privileges of seniority soon turned sour. Confident in their right to comment on this situation and culturally certain of their wisdom, such elders were quick to petition colonial officials and to remind soldiers of the importance of their obligations to the elderly. In the eyes of these individuals, military service did not exempt younger adults from offering their labor, and “a dutiful person is expected to make no protest when this occurs.”Footnote 74
- Beyond Money: Soldiers’ Non-Financial Obligations to their Parents
As in the case of their obligations towards wives, we find that soldiers’ duties towards the elderly departed dramatically from official assumptions that support would necessarily be characterized by the receipt of a financial allotment. After his wife’s death, Private K.G. Belo’s two children were cared for by his mother, aged 82, and with his mother’s deteriorating health his family came under increasing pressure.Footnote 75 Belo’s response to the situation was to petition for a posting back in Nigeria, citing compassionate grounds.Footnote 76 Military service was no longer a viable option for him, because he needed to lead his family.Footnote 77 Like nearly all soldiers who requested compassionate leave, Belo’s pleas fell on deaf ears and he remained in Asia; but he was not alone in perceiving military service as a commitment that could be interrupted in order to maintain one’s obligations at home. Conscious of the fact that he needed to be physically present in his community, another soldier named Joseph Banjo, petitioned the Ijebu District Officer requesting that he be allowed to return to Nigeria to take control of family affairs. Since his father’s death in 1943, Banjo’s “only junior brother who is now about seven years old and my own aged mother are all suffering greatly.”Footnote 78 Even though Banjo was stationed in South Asia, he was now effectively responsible for his family, and was trying to exercise these responsibilities from overseas; he could expect no help because his one elder brother but “has been mentally deranged as from November 1944 and till now there is no recovery whatsoever.”Footnote 79 Desperate to secure his return home, Banjo bargained on framing his appeal in terms of patriotic loyalty to Great Britain, he argued that “I am a soldier in His Majesty’s Force (…) I have proved obedient and loyal to my King and Country playing my part always.”Footnote 80 His is no expression of confidence in military service as a profession that must necessarily isolate him from home, instead Banjo draws strategically upon patriotism in order to leave the Asian theatre.
Sadly, these efforts tended to fall on deaf ears. Faced with an increasingly decrepit father waiting for him at home, Corporal E.A. Shoivan soon began to realize that his military service was unsustainable. He wanted to intervene in his family affairs to guarantee educational opportunities for his son, and thus ensure continuing support for his children. Petitioning the Nigerian government for help, Shoivan even tried his hand at bargaining with officials, and offered to pay his son’s fees in return for their helping to arrange for his son to be sent to a boarding school.Footnote 81 It was to no avail. Officials refused to find his son a school and there is no record as to what became of Shoivan’s family.
- Soldiers’ Obligations to the Elderly as Understood by Chiefs
Village chiefs provide an insight into reactions of outsiders towards military service. Petitioning on behalf of the elderly, their appeals confirm that, in the eyes of indigenous political authority in Ijebu, military service was very much an inferior commitment to soldiers’ local obligations. One chief, for example, cited agricultural work as a justification for returning men from South Asia. In the case of an infirm elderly man, a local guardian appealed to the District Officer to allow the man’s son to return home from the Nigeria Area Signals. “Unable to rise unaided from his bed” the father “now (…) has no one to look after him.”Footnote 82 He “remained for a whole day unattended under the (…) pain of both the illness (…) and hunger there being no one to serve him with food.”Footnote 83 The petitioner here subtly focuses moral pressure on the District Officer by noting that the elderly man “deserves sympathy.”Footnote 84 Another petitioner, the Alafin of Shagamu, suggested that one Corporal I.O. Tikare should be allowed to return home from Sierra Leone. This was because the family kolanut plantation “has been cleared” and “had become neglected.”Footnote 85 All of this meant that Tikare had been “compelled by an uncontrollable circumstance” to return to Yorubaland.Footnote 86 Crucially, the tasks outlined here such as maintaining a kolanut planation and delivering care to an elderly relative were not obligations that could be honored through monetary income alone, as assumed in the model of breadwinner masculinity, but instead required physical labor and proximity, as well as negotiation with other farmers. Like soldiers and their wives, the chiefs were keenly aware of this web that bound soldiers in India to elderly relatives in Ijebu.
- Anger at Failed Obligations: the Elderly as Petitioners
This article concludes with those petitioners whose struggle to maintain social obligations in the face of colonial military service was the most eloquent: the elderly. Ignoring the supposedly self-evident social isolation of the military, Joseph Fowokan wrote to demand the return of his son from the army. He stated that “I am now stricken in age and lonely in this house.”Footnote 87 This isolation also had social consequences as Fowokan complained that “the village[r]s are now [taking] advantage of this to ride me in matters relating to personal affairs.”Footnote 88 Fowokan believed that his son’s enlisting in the army had brought his whole family into crisis. Specifically, he did not simply lose sources of income and labor, but he had been deprived of his capital in people: there was nobody left to maintain their obligations towards him and, in doing this, to constitute his authority as a senior and patriarch of a large family: “My two wives had all (…) eloped [with] another men. Why (…) because they know that I have no helpers. They also know that the only son I have is in the Army.”Footnote 89
The grounds on which Fowokan had tolerated his son’s enlistment were that “I was strong and healthy then and my wives [were] still [with] me.”Footnote 90 But now he was shorn of junior adults and without males to act as intermediaries in community affairs, he feared that the other villagers would use his death as an opportunity to confiscate his property. Faced with this grim prospect, Fowokan could see no future for his family:
As necessity compels me to petition both the Imperial and Colonial authorities to please kindly arrange for the release of my son, to return home to look after my health for the few days, if God willing to spend on the earth, until the end comes. I feel daily that I am deteriorating in strength and health. I am afraid therefore that if this continue I may eventually die, and in consequences of this, the reason (…) of my things will perish.Footnote 91
Critically, Fowokan’s petition suggests (unfortunately incorrectly) that a soldier could easily be “released” from military service; his conception of the flexibility of military service here differs dramatically from the assumption of an isolated soldiery that has remained common in the historiography of colonial African militaries. To understand how unlikely this was, we may consider the Ijebu D.O.’s judgement that compassionate posting weakened the British Army and was only possible “in really exceptional cases.”
In blithe ignorance of soldiers’ complex social obligations and the degree to which they preoccupied enlisted men, the D.O. opined as to how “there is usually some relative (…) who can help.”Footnote 92 By contrast, Fowokan understands military service not as a job excluding other forms of labor and social identities, still less does he recognize that the military was fundamentally at a remove from civilian society. Instead he regards his son’s occupation as being one among several competing obligations and stresses that it is not military discipline, or the war itself, that keeps his son away, but instead “the Imperial and Colonial authorities” who can be personally engaged to grant Fowokan the favor of releasing his son. These assumptions are echoed in the case of another elderly petitioner who demanded that his son, Private S.O. Kayode, be released so that “when I die (…) as [he] is the only surviving son out of my children and of whom must would bury me, God sparing his life.”Footnote 93 This conceptualization of military service stands at odds to any emphasis on the formal professional identity of the soldier and instead regards soldiering as temporary, seasonal and peripheral to the really key duties to farm and compound.
Elderly women were perhaps the most vulnerable to the loss of labor, social bargaining power, physical protection, and care represented by the breakdown of soldiers’ obligations. Despite the tendency of some Yoruba widows to deliberately live alone in old age, their position was particularly grave because women without younger relatives could not “participate in family exchange relationships.”Footnote 94 An anonymous petitioner of Imobido Street in Iperu wrote to the Ijebu District Officer: “Kabiyesi [your majesty], I am the unfortunate mother of only two sons and no daughter.”Footnote 95 She complained that she was overwhelmed by daily life without her son to help with domestic labor:
The war, like the wicked wand of a wizard, strikes me and carry away all that I have loved to look upon as the fruit of my exclusive labour, leaving me a destitute to a desolate home. Every day brings my grey hair near my grave.Footnote 96
This construction of the war as being comparable to a magical agent, “the wicked wand of a wizard,” establishes the far-off conflict (but not the soldiers themselves) as being utterly alien to contemporary society and hungry to consume social relationships. In contemplating her “desolate home,” the petitioner laments the real cost of military service: it has stripped her of her “wealth in people.” Her predicament is not dissimilar from the elderly informants in Peil’s ethnography who seek “services” from their farmer sons, “because they are more likely to live (…) nearby.”Footnote 97 Their goal was “to build up a large network of dependents who will help them in diverse ways whenever they need it.”Footnote 98 The son is not missed because of his earning capacity, but because of his labor. The petitioner’s anger at the “wicked” war should be read as the pronouncement of a woman confident in her wisdom; the “claim to experience” through seniority comments Fadipe, “is almost synonymous with wisdom.”Footnote 99
Petitioner Idokah Ojoko of Ijebu Igbo complained that she was deprived of the support, labor, and care that were determined by social obligations:
I am an old woman and have two children who should be able to take care of me at this my weary age. Sometime ago, the elder son left home for the army later on the younger child suddenly disappeared from home.Footnote 100
Her eldest son Isaiah Ogunsanwo was unable to care for her due to his military service. Lest we still feel tempted to imagine that soldiers could support their family solely through monetary allotments, or to perceive Ijebu soldiers as definitively isolated from the civilian world of compound life, local politics, and labor, we should consider Ojoko’s plea for the return of Ogunsanwo. Focusing on the non-monetary elements of customary obligations, including physical labor, proximity, and affective contact, her plea constitutes an eloquent synopsis of soldiers’ families’ priorities: “Since the latter’s departure, I have no one to take care of me; no one to fetch me water, wood or bring anything I want within my reach, on one prepare me food. In short, I have been suffering much.”
Conclusion
Social obligations bound Ijebu soldiers to home. Rather than identifying as professional soldiers disconnected from civilian society, these men regarded themselves as playing a primary role in life of their communities. Their relatives conceptualized their role not as sources of income, but as providers of labor, care, physical defense, and land management. Ijebu soldiers prioritized their complex social obligations which they went to great lengths to actively maintain during their years of soldiering. Military service played a subordinate role to these priorities and was to be tolerated so long as it did not disrupt the men’s primary obligations towards managing their families, maintaining their compounds, keeping up farmland, caring for dependents, and defending compound members against outside aggression. Aside from brief statements of pragmatic patriotism, there is very little evidence that Ijebu soldiers substantively shared the ideology of the Allied war effort. Nor is there much in their petitions to indicate that their army pay, and their ability to send financial allotments back to Nigeria, was a sustainable route towards maintaining a political and social presence in their family, compound, and local community. Fundamentally, these men were neither radically estranged from their civilian lives, nor were they substantially conditioned by a disciplinary and ideological regime on the part of the colonial military.
Naturally, Ijebu soldiers were physically isolated in South Asia and the Middle East, but this geographical distance did not equate to social isolation in the sense of cultivating an institutional identity, building of a specifically militaristic professional ethos or fashioning of a colonial Ijebu militarism. Existing studies of “martial races” in the KAR or RWAFF in their variegated and disciplined military barracks are of little help in understanding Ijebu men’s military service. Indeed, the transcontinental traffic in petitions indicates that geographical separation from home drove soldiers and their families to try ever harder to maintain their obligations at home. South Asia and the Middle East promoted a more intensified focus on the locality and home. If Ijebu soldiers were dispersed across continents thanks to their colonial military service, then both the soldiers themselves and their families were forced to be more articulate about their concerns back home.
In this context petitions form a problematic but invaluable source thanks to the unique conditions in which they were crafted. Korieh is doubtless correct to observe that the Second World War “redefined relations between colonizing powers and African nations,” while simultaneously “affect[ing] every facet of life for the Nigerian population.”Footnote 101 But this analysis misses the specific character of the international world of wartime military service that drove men and women to commit to paper visions of local authority, family life and sociability that were rarely stated so forcefully, and for an intended reader unfamiliar with their culture. Geographical distance served as the oxygen for this intensive African presentation of intimate domestic and familial life to European officials. Necessarily, we must be aware of the petitions complex authorship, the questionable cohesion of their narrative voice and their pragmatism of purpose, concerns which cannot be fully examined in this article; but even despite these caveats the petitions tell of worlds that differ radically from the scant information on African family lives in military and colonial administrative sources. With the goal of securing concessions from their local District Officer, petitioners deliberately attempted to conjure entire lives in ink: in doing so, they showed how their ties to home endured, and that, in comparison to these bonds, military service came a poor second.
Oliver Coates is a college supervisor in History at Cambridge University, and is a Fellow of the Institut français de recherche en Afrique. His research focuses on West African colonial history, and has been published in Research in African Literatures, The Journal of African Cultural Studies, and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. E-mail: orc20@cam.ac.uk
