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
than had other men of their generation. Since insufficient financial maintenance was one of the most frequent reasons women sought divorce, railwaymen’s ability to provide their wives with at least some consistent support was decisive in their marriages. (Men never sought divorce: they just abandoned or ignored wives.) Bi-weekly pay- checks also gave wage earners ready cash to use as “begging fees” or loans in the event of disputes with their wives. Discussing her reasons for marrying a salaried worker in the 1940s, one railway wife told me, If anybody who works in the railway comes your way, you would like to marry him. At that time, railway paid very well [...], so people loved them and liked to mix with them."15 Further, salaried earners could be relied upon for household expenses more frequently than other men could. Whereas otherwise, wives might have covered food or children’s school fees themselves, they insisted that steadily working husbands reimburse them after the paycheck came. This made both parties see husbands more and more as family providers. Railwaymen’s wives enjoyed greater flexibility in their own careers than many other women did because their husbands’ paychecks allowed them to stay home when they had babies and no older children to help them. Railway households were also forced into this situation by transfers to unfamiliar parts of the country, where wives lacked family and friends to facilitate child care and trading networks. But ideals about men as breadwinners developed even when wives’ incomes were necessary to support the household. For example, in the 1960s a retired railway worker I interviewed and his new wife had lived in northern Nigeria, where they had no personal connections. She began trading after a year of marriage and continued to do so after they had children because his salary was not enough to support their growing family. The wife’s income was crucial, she knew, as was help she secretly solicited from an uncle back home. But she did not tell her husband for fear of offending his masculine pride and his sense of himself as the sole earner. As she put it, “Fie would be thinking that the money he gave is enough but it was not so I had to add to it.”16 Another informant had to support herself and her children and even occasionally loan money to her husband when he was a railway worker in the 1950s, because he was Money, Marriage and Masculinity on the Colonial Nigerian Railway 15 Interview with Rebecca Uchefuna, Feb. 21, 1994, Ibadan, Nigeria. 16 Interview with Ruth Adekanola, assisted by Funmilayo Carew, Feb. 17,1994, Ibadan, Nigeria. 237
