Günter Dinhobl (Hrsg.): Sonderband 7. Eisenbahn/Kultur – Railway/Culture (2004)
III. Soziale Ordnungen / Social orders - Lisa A. Lindsay: Money, Marriage and Masculinity on the Colonial Nigerian Railway: A Case Study of Imperialism, Railways and Gender in Africa
Lisa A. Lindsay Thus, for men, money was linked to masculinity in colonial Yorubaland in a number of ways. By marking marriage and helping to reconcile marital differences, payments symbolized and facilitated social agreements between parties; and by paying money a male suitor was able to become a husband and father. Later in life, money allowed adult men to take on the attributes of seniority by providing for children’s education, assisting lineage members, investing in the community, and building a house. Even more money could translate into greater social influence, patronage, and the status of “big man.” Yet these normative ideals did not include the notion that men should be the sole financial providers within their households, or that their wives should not earn money as well. The “male breadwinner" was a specific creation of colonial-era wage labor. Wage Earning and Changing Masculinities The target labor pattern, in which wage earning gave young men their start back in the home town, was changing by the WWI1 era. Increasing numbers of migrants were delaying their returns, making progressively longer or even permanent commitments to life in the bigger cities. What happened, then, when a man earned a long-term, steady paycheck? Did it make him a different kind of a man? What was the relationship between steady wage labor and the emergence of a male breadwinner ideal?14 1 address these questions by drawing on life histories of retired railway workers and their wives based in the towns of southwestern Nigeria. These retirees are officially classed as “pensioners,” meaning that they retired from pensionable appointments including station master, locomotive driver, or various grades of clerks. By and large, they worked their way from unskilled labor to skilled and supervisory posts. The life histories of these men and their wives suggest that salaried men’s relationships with women were refined in large measure because of two aspects of railway life - steady paychecks and transfers around the country. The stability of salaried railway workers’ marriages seems to have been linked to their access to steady paychecks. Overall, a much lower percentage of the retired rail- waymen I questioned had ever experienced divorce or a serious marital breakdown 14 For the links between labor stabilization and domestic behavior elsewhere, see Dunbar, T. - N da t s h e , Vivienne: Going for Gold: Men, Mines and Migration. Berkeley 1994; P a rpa rt, Jane L.: The Household and the Mine Shaft: Gender and Class Struggles on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1926-64. In: Journal of Southern African Studies 13 (1986), p. 36-56; and many studies of the Copperbelt from the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in the 1950s and ‘60s. 236
