Paper short abstract:

From the late 19th century until 1975, Nigerian labour migrants were recruited and transported to the cacao plantations on the last remnant of the Spanish Empire in the Bight of Biafra. The shape of this migration is linked to the Atlantic legacy and to more contemporary labour movements in Africa.

Paper long abstract:

Fernando Po, the last remnant of the Spanish Empire in the Bight of Biafra, was a typical plantation island that relied on imported workers. The acute labour shortage on the cacao plantations of Spanish Guinea opened the way for significant labour population displacements, with contract workers drawn from Cuba and from all along the Gulf of Guinea.

This research focuses on, and the presentation will show, archival material from the middle decades of the 20th century and the Nigeria-Fernando Po labour connection. With the archival documents we trace the logistics and installation of, first, the labour laws that turned the trading based migrant populations of the island into a tightly regulated penal and contract labour force; second, the recruiters in Nigeria who ran a clandestine smuggling network on canoes which brought over tens of thousands of mostly Igbo workers; and third, the Anglo-Spanish Labour Treaty of 1942 that regulated this migration with indentured labour conventions.

New analytical frames for African labour history, that take into account the rise of "multipolar geopolitics" and "global history", allow for a repositioning of the material of the case study from its localized region and specific decades, onto the trajectories of the legal tools, economic tricks and conventions that had been configured around the imperial Atlantic economies in the previous centuries. The capitalist shape of this longue durée has endured, and can even be seen in contemporary Equatorial Guinea, where the fast expanding construction sector relies on tens of thousands of indentured Chinese workers.