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Nation on Board Becoming Nigerian at Sea [Paperback]

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  • Category: Books (History)
  • Author:  Schler, Lynn
  • Author:  Schler, Lynn
  • ISBN-10:  0821422189
  • ISBN-10:  0821422189
  • ISBN-13:  9780821422182
  • ISBN-13:  9780821422182
  • Publisher:  Ohio University Press
  • Publisher:  Ohio University Press
  • Pages:  264
  • Pages:  264
  • Binding:  Paperback
  • Binding:  Paperback
  • Pub Date:  01-May-2016
  • Pub Date:  01-May-2016
  • SKU:  0821422189-11-MPOD
  • SKU:  0821422189-11-MPOD
  • Item ID: 101429051
  • Seller: ShopSpell
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  • Delivery by: Dec 30 to Jan 01
  • Notes: Brand New Book. Order Now.

In the 1940s, British shipping companies began the large-scale recruitment of African seamen in Lagos. On colonial ships, Nigerian sailors performed menial tasks for low wages and endured discrimination as cheap labor, while countering hardships by nurturing social connections across the black diaspora. Poor employment conditions stirred these seamen to identify with the nationalist sentiment burgeoning in postwar Nigeria, while their travels broadened and invigorated their cultural identities.

Working for the Nigerian National Shipping Line, they encountered new forms of injustice and exploitation. When mismanagement, a lack of technical expertise, and pillaging by elites led to the NNSL’s collapse in the early 1990s, seamen found themselves without prospects. Their disillusionment became a broader critique of corruption in postcolonial Nigeria.

InNation on Board: Becoming Nigerian at Sea,Lynn Schler traces the fate of these seamen in the transition from colonialism to independence. In so doing, she renews the case for labor history as a lens for understanding decolonization, and brings a vital transnational perspective to her subject. By placing the working-class experience at the fore, she complicates the dominant view of the decolonization process in Nigeria and elsewhere.

Schler’s study of Nigerian seamen during Nigeria’s transition to independence provides a fresh perspective on the meaning of decolonization for ordinary Africans.
“This is an outstanding piece of social historical research and a significant addition to Nigerian labour and industrial/business history. Schler has made excellent use of a range of archives and interviews and crafted an attractively written book that will be accessible to a range of readers. I take my hat off to her.”—Peter Waterman, advisor,Global Labour Journal
“Schler places the sometimes abstract notion of nationhood inl“Ö