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 Conclusion Within Yoruba communities, the working-class notion of a male breadwinner coexisted with ideals about adult and senior masculinities and “big men.” It was able to build upon them in the sense that all these variants of masculinity linked gender and status to money. But the normative male provider was a new development in a place where households did not pool money and women earned their own incomes. The experiences of railway workers and their wives suggest that steady paychecks and transfers around the country were decisive in reshaping workers’ households. Moreover, women as wives and mothers were active participants in the construction of a male breadwinner ideal, even when that ideal was a fragile one. Finally, rhetoric about male providers was instrumental in making wage and benefit demands from the colonial state. Postscript This paper began with an anecdote set in the context of railway pensioners’ current financial insecurity. In 1993 when I began this research, many former locomotive drivers, senior station staff, managers and skilled craftsmen were not receiving the pensions that they had looked forward to during their railway careers. In interviews, they expressed anger and frustration at an employer they felt had cheated them, along with humiliation because many were being supported by their wives. Women who thirty to fifty years ago were able to shape their own careers around a husband’s steady pay- check were now unable to retire from trading because they largely supported their households. When I returned to Nigeria in 1998 the situation had improved somewhat, yet inflation had so undermined pensions as to make them largely meaningless. The male breadwinner ethos described in this paper is under perhaps its greatest threat in these days of massive economic insecurity. I end, then, with this perhaps obvious point: gender transformations are not necessarily linear, and they must be considered within their material contexts. In southwestern Nigeria, the image of the working-class male breadwinner, which came into being through processes described here, may not outlive its sixth decade. 244
