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
families (like railway workers), and therefore they should be granted the same allowances. Nigerian labor activists also made the broader argument that wages were not sufficient for workers to support wives and children, and that in the interest of social reproduction the government should pay family allowances. In a 1944 radio broadcast, union leader I.S.M.O. Shonekan pushed this point: Some employers forget that his [a worker’s] children are not given free education, but he tries his best [...] to educate them. They forget that his children are a valuable contribution to society who in the future, will assist mentally or physically in developing the wealth of the nation and defend the State. He is not paid any family allowance by either the State or the employer for these. He is forced to distribute his scanty wages on these important items which go to make him and his family good citizens.15 Eight months later, Shonekan raised the issue at the annual congress of the Federated Trades Unions of Nigeria. Arguing that “many of us have wives and children to support,” and that wage levels were insufficient, Shonekan recounted arguments in favor of family allowances made by politicians in Europe and South America. His motion, [t]hat the Government of Nigeria be requested earnestly to formulate schemes for family allowances, and to enact an Ordinance sanctioning their payment by all employers to all married African workmen throughout the country, passed unanimously amid cheers by those present.2" The Nigerian trade union movement of the 1940s was dominated by the Railway Workers’ Union, the colony’s largest and the first to be formally organized. This union was at the forefront of the 1945 general strike in Nigeria, which united workers throughout the country in calling for cost of living increases and other benefits. Family allowances, as a counterpart to European “separation allowances,” were part of the workers’ demands and were brought to the attention of W. Tudor Davies when his commission investigated labor conditions in the strike’s aftermath. Tudor Davies’ report called for greater stabilization of the Nigerian labor force, but it did not fully sup- * 20 Money, Marriage and Masculinity on the Colonial Nigerian Railway 15 Excerpt from 26 April 1944 speech on Lagos Radio Distribution Service. In: The Nigerian Worker 1, no. 5 (April 1944), p. 4 (published by the Federated Trades Union of Nigeria), in GMS 310/2, “The Nigerian Worker” (NRC headquarters, Lagos). 20 Excerpt from speech entitled “Family Allowances”. In: The Nigerian Worker 1, no. 7 (December 1944), p. 2, in i b i d . 239
