Labour agitation, newspaper press and radical nationalism in Nigeria: analysis of the Enugu Colliery Shootings

ABSTRACTIn the analysis of decolonization process and nationalist struggles for political independence of Africa, labour agitations and the press activism for human rights are common features. But most studies have treated labour crisis and the press activism during the period of decolonization as mere subsets of the linear narrative of independence movement. Drawing on the empirical data of the Enugu Colliery Shootings incident, this paper examined labour agitation as an independent event and reviewed the area of overlap with the nationalist struggles. It re-examined the Colliery Shootings beyond the preponderant nationalist view that lumped every social, economic and political protest of the decolonization period as a single metanarrative of nationalist movements. Lastly, the roles of Nigerian newspapers as mediators in the crises between the labour unions and the colonial government, and the nationalists with the colonial government were appraised. The paper argued that, despite the interconnection of labour agitations with nationalist movements of the period, the former was both characteristically independent and coincidental with the latter. Similarly, not all human rights agitations by the newspapers were independence-focused. Finally, the nationalists, through networking process, benefited from labour agitations and press activism by expanding and molding local protests as independence movements.KEYWORDS: Colliery Shootingslabour agitationpress agitationradical nationalism AcknowledgmentsI thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers of this paper. I also thank Prof. Saheed Aderinto and Dr Rouven Kuntsmann for their assistance in the collection of archival documents for this paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsShina AlimiShina Alimi is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. His research focuses on social and political history of Africa. He was a recipient of the 2022 Lagos African Cluster Centre postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of African and Diaspora Studies, University of Lagos. He is a non-residential Catalyst Fellow of the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His on-going research project sits at the intersection of death, space and material culture in Africa. His most recent article is titled “A Tale of Two Cities”: Cemetery Heterotopia and Spatial Relations in Lagos City, OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying, 2022 journals.sagepub.com/home/ome