Confusion, struggle, commotion and absurdity: these characterise the urban encounter between the African immigrant community and colonial officials in Douala, Cameroon. Even the physical landscape reflects a painfully enduring history of marginalisation, of exclusion from power and privilege. This book studies a community of African immigrants - or 'strangers' - designated to quarters in New Bell, Douala, in Cameroon, during the colonial era. New Bell was created in 1914 as part of an extensive urbanisation and relocation plan intended to reserve the Douala city centre for Europeans. New Bell...

This book offers a broad range of perspectives on major transformations in the research of labor in Africa contexts over the last twenty years. This is a groundbreaking work by social scientists and historians; adopting innovative paradigms in the study of African laborers, working classes and economies, it moves away from stringent Marxist perspectives towards more localized and fluid conceptions of materiality and productivity. Against the backdrop of increasing mobility of labor and capital, the authors demonstrate the need for a simultaneous consideration of local, national and...

In the 1940s, British shipping companies began the large-scale recruitment of African seamen in Lagos. On colonial ships, Nigerian sailors performed menial tasks for low wages and endured discrimination as cheap labor, while countering hardships by nurturing social connections across the black diaspora. Poor employment conditions stirred these seamen to identify with the nationalist sentiment burgeoning in postwar Nigeria, while their travels broadened and invigorated their cultural identities. Working for the Nigerian National Shipping Line, they encountered new forms of injustice and...