Houseboys: Domestic Labour Practices in Spanish Settlers’ Homes in Colonial West Africa

Afropolitan Masculinity: Forgeries of Wife-Owning Husbands in West Africa, 1850s–1950s

“…As Liberated African returnees from Sierra Leone to Old Calabar in the second half of the nineteenth century, and as migrant forced labourers from Nigeria to Spanish Guinea cacao plantations and French Gabon forestry concessions in the first half of the twentieth century, Igbo, Efik, and Ibibio men experienced abolition forgery as displacement and coerced "boyhood" (Morrell, 1998;Gardini, 2016;Brown, 2003;Shear, 2003). Held in the neoslavery of imperial bondage (Sundiata,1996;Martino, 2016) when the Atlantic slave trade, but not slavery, was illegal and later subjugated to debt slavery by colonial taxation and forced indenture through abolition-imperial definitions of wage labour after slavery was abolished , southeastern Nigerian men, some already fathers and husbands, experienced imperial emancipation as derogatory boyhood, and became "plantation boys," "servant boys," "farm boys," and "houseboys" (Vizcaya, 2022) abroad to fulfil natal expectations of adult masculinity.…”