Putting the family on track: Gender and domestic life on the colonial Nigerian railway.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the dynamics of family structure and ideology in two Nigerian cities, Lagos and Ibadan, as affected by the late colonial wage economy. Focusing on railway workers and their families, it charts the ways in which post-World War Two efforts to stabilize wage labor--and thus to configure men as career workers and family providers--affected working class communities and ideas about the proper behavior of men and women. Colonial administrators' attempts to forge a new type of family among their workforce met with only partial success and often were overwhelmed by Yoruba commitments to female economic independence and certain male household obligations. Still, railwaymen did become associated with a distinct type of masculinity. Crucial to this transformation was their regular access to cash, which in the context of pre-existing concepts linking money to seniority and power, brought these wage workers new status with their wives and extended families. The salaried workers studied here described themselves as modern men because of their association with the Railway, their partial acceptance of a male breadwinner norm, and their household structures and relations. Modernization carried different meanings for Nigerian railwaymen than for their colonial employers or subsequent social theorists, however. Through their continued aspirations to big man status, maintenance of large and complex households, and widespread participation in indigenous patronage networks--all of which European commentators saw as traditional--workers asserted that the attributes of modernity did not form a package to be adopted completely or not at all. The dissertation broadens historians' understanding of the expansion of urban wage labor by examining it in a West African context, on a household level, and with attention to the development of gender ideologies and relations. It provides a view of modernization from a Nigerian, working class perspective, and it points to the tensions and engagement between the practical strategies and ideological assumptions of various colonial administrators and African workers.