The Colonial Office and the Employment of Children in the Nigerian Tin Mines in the 1950s
Chapter
Abstract
The mining, smelting, and use of tin in Nigeria for, among other things, the making of luxury items such as jewelry date back to the period of the Nok culture, during the Middle Stone Age, 3500–1500 BC.1 In 1813, Muhammad Bello, one of the prominent leaders of the Sokoto Jihad and Caliphate, wrote that the “countries of Gwandara and Riruwe” were “where it is said tin is found.”2 But modern and capitalist tin mining in Nigeria only started in the first decade of the twentieth century. Its ultimate “success” was made possible by the deliberate destruction of traditional and indigenous tin mining and smelting by the Nigerian colonial state.3
Keywords
Indigenous People Child Labor Mining Company Wage Labor Colonial Government
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Notes
- 1.Elizabeth Isichie, A History of Nigeria (Harlow, Essex, UK: Longman Group, 1983), 52.Google Scholar
- 3.Bill Freund, Capital and Labour in the Nigerian Tin Mines (Harlow, Essex, UK: Longman Group, 1981), 33–42.Google Scholar
- 8.Freund, Capital and Labour, B. W. Hodder, “Tin Mining on the Jos Plateau of Nigeria,” Economic Geography 35(2), 109–22; Godfrey Fell, “The Tin Industry in Nigeria,” Journal of the Royal African Society 38, Number 151 (1939), 246–58; J. H. Morrison, “Early Tin Production and Nigerian Labour on the Jos Plateau, 1906–21,” Canadian Journal of Africa Studies 11, no. 2 (1977): 210–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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© Saheed Aderinto 2015