Abstract
In the first half of the twentieth century, most of Fernando Pó’s contract workers came from societies in southeastern Nigeria which had been heavily impacted by the transatlantic and internal slave trades. These contract workers were recruited by a new generation of labor recruiters, dispatched covertly by Spanish imperial employers, through a form of kidnapping known as panya. Panya was the largest labor smuggling and trafficking network in colonial West Africa, bringing tens of thousands of migrants to long and obligatory contracts on Fernando Pó. In contrast to scholars who have interpreted this history as a holdover from the pre-colonial period, this article argues that panya arose from the contractual order of Spanish imperial rule. Extensive archival research reveals the voices of those caught in the warp of post-abolition colonial labor regimes, in order to rethink the passage from the pre-colonial slave trade to imperialism within West African history. Using a series of vivid and precise petitions submitted by those who found themselves on the island of Fernando Pó, the article shows how these sources contain the potential to reconceptualize the disjunctures between enslavement in the slave trade and the recruitment of contract labor.
Highlights
In Nigeria, across various languages, panya is the colloquial name for Bioko, formerly the Spanish colony of Fernando Pó
The same is true in Ibibio, though I would add the important qualification that “force” in panya stresses a series of social and physical forces that keep someone from coming back rather than the act of violent “seizure” which in West Africa in the pre-colonial period was referred to as being panyarred.[1]
In Southern Nigeria, by the early twentieth century panya had become a term to refer to a range of relationships linking a class of illicit commercial intermediaries with a host of impoverished job- seekers from specific regions in Nigeria
Summary
In Nigeria, across various languages, panya (páɲà) is the colloquial name for Bioko, formerly the Spanish colony of Fernando Pó. It is an amazingly wealthy little island.”[73] Much of the money to be made went to those who “import foreign men to suck dry its honey.”[74] For the mix of official and underhand payouts from the Spanish labor officers and from individual planters, the recruiters were “prepared to shangai, trick or, by any method open to them to persuade their country men to come over here, provided that they themselves make a handsome profit out of the deal.”[75] The “recruiters at certain seasons asks and gets as much as £15 per head [with] no questions asked,” a sum higher than the wages for a two year contract, and about the same as the annual average income in the Eastern Provinces.[76] it was the “lucrative commissions” which Fernando Pó’s recruiters could command that gave their activities, in the eyes of scandalized colonial contemporaries, “the character of a slave trade.” These commissions were seen by British colonial officials across the empire as “ ‘a reward for extra cunning in inducing coolies [or even as a] compensation for the risk run in unlawfully inducing or compelling them to go.’”77. They only stopped operating once the planters got their labor in other places or through different means
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
