Liberated African children and state-imposed forced labor in colonial Northern Nigeria, 1900–1926

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ABSTRACT This article examines the experience of formerly enslaved African children who worked in colonial departments and private households in the early twentieth century. The abolition of slavery was a primary justification for British conquest, but colonial rule came with new forms of social and economic coercion, including what historians have referred to as slavery by any other means. The article presents a case study of state-imposed forced labor in Northern Nigeria, focusing on the experience of children as domestic servants and “apprentices.” It shifts attention from the “masculine” adult male workers found in the existing histories and addresses some vital questions relating to the mode of recruitment, contracts, wages and beneficiaries of child labor, and agency.