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
Other references in Nigerail reinforced the idea of male breadwinners and home- bound wives. A cartoon, for example, showed a woman with a baby on her back talking to her visibly shocked husband. “But if I spend more than you earn,” she says, “it’s just as good as if you were earning more.”’'1 Women, this suggests, had no understanding of rational economics: better to leave men in charge of finances and the world outside the home. Articles on child-rearing, cooking and sewing implied that these were the primary occupations of workers’ wives. Nigerail never acknowledged the usual domestic arrangement in Yoruba families, with women working outside of the home and controlling their own incomes. Why would this be? One answer is that Nigerail was an organ of the railway administration, which, as part of empire-wide efforts to stabilize labor and working class families, encouraged the development of European-style domestic units. The fact that the editor was Nigerian does not necessarily negate this interpretation. But although management published Nigerail, workers read it, which suggests that the attitudes expressed had some resonance with the railway workforce. As we have seen, by the late colonial period many urban workers were taking on more and more of their households’ expenses. At the same time, they (or at least their union representatives) increasingly described themselves as family breadwinners in official representations. As rail- waymen increasingly talked about themselves as breadwinners, in their households, in public pronouncements, and in the pages of their newsletter, it seems that steady earning and providing for one’s family became part of their conception of what it meant to be a man. But this notion of masculinity, like others, was a fragile and insecure one, in constant need of reiteration. Colonial administrators sent contradictory messages, valorizing the male provider while suggesting that this model did not fit African men. Low wages frequently made it impossible for a worker to meet all his household’s financial needs. And within Yoruba households, both men and women valued women’s income-earning activities. Perhaps the rhetoric of female domesticity and male breadwinning in the pages of Nigerail is so blatant precisely because it represents a fledgling ideology that faced many impediments. The same may be said for railway workers who proudly proclaimed their breadwinner status even while relying on their wives’ incomes to keep the household afloat. Money, Marriage and Masculinity on the Colonial Nigerian Railway ” Ibid. 243
