Tubman Talks with Dr. Damilola Adebayo
Tubman Talks with Dr. Damilola Adebayo
Date: Thursday, March 6, 2025
Time: 3:00-4:30pm EST
Location: 314 York Lanes (York University, 4700 Keele St, Toronto, M3J 1P3)
In-person Registration: https://research.apps01.yorku.ca/machform/view.php?id=257442
Zoom Registration: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/Ur8REypSQVKDGkILHbBH9w
Bio:
Damilola Adebayo is an Assistant Professor of History at York University. He is a multi-award-winning historian of Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria. His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of the history of socioeconomic life (including labour, labour unions, and collective bargaining); the history of science and technology (including apprenticeships, as well as vocational and technical education); and the role of international organisations in the African past. His prize-winning publications have appeared in outlets, including Past & Present and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. His ongoing book project is tentatively entitled Power and the People: Electricity and Urban Life in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Adebayo holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge-Africa Scholar. He obtained his BA in History from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, where he was a Grace Leadership Foundation Scholar and an MA from the Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland, as a Hans Wilsdorf Foundation Scholar.
Abstract:
The historiography of labour in colonial Africa has been growing since the 1950s. Scholars have researched recruitment and conscription practices, wages and other employment conditions, discipline and punishment, productivity, protests, and nationalism. This paper builds on the literature by exploring the “afterlife” of everyday workers—janitors, messengers, army recruits, etc.—of the British administration in colonial Nigeria who died in service. Through an analysis of individual-level archival records of compassionate gratuities paid to the families of deceased Nigerian workers, the paper contends that colonial-era industrial relations did not end at retirement or death.
The paper argues that the politics of compassionate gratuity in colonial Nigeria resembles a kind of Necropolitics (as coined by Achille Mbembe) in which the state reserved the capacity to quantify and monetize the worth of a deceased African worker. The extent to which the colonial government sometimes went to determine eligibility for (and limit of) “compassion”—from extensive police investigations to multiple interviews with family members—denoted this capacity to decide which deceased worker (did not) matter(ed). Colonial workers were not only typically breadwinners of their families, they also served as an interface between their un/self-employed dependents and the government. Therefore, the discretionary resolution of each gratuity case had a tangible impact on the living standards (including food, housing, and education) of extended family members. Consequently, analyses of the politics of compassionate gratuity open another vista to examine the relationship between the government and the wider public, ultimately enriching our knowledge of African labour history.