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1 Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/b22920-1
“Even if the whole world of [Nigerian] textile factories close, UNTL will be the one running.”1 This was the promise made by Dr. Cha Chi Ming, the founder of United Nigerian Textiles Ltd. (UNTL)—Nigeria’s largest textile-factory group since the late 1970s—to all his managers and senior workers at UNTL’s annual meeting in Kaduna in 2001.2 Having been born in the early twentieth century, Cha started his textile enterprise in the Shanghai area during the interwar period, relocated his factory to Hong Kong in the late 1940s due to the Chinese Civil War, and established UNTL in Nigeria in 1964.3 Cha’s seemingly risky move to Nigeria proved to be more than successful: UNTL quickly expanded, outgrowing all its rivals in Nigeria by the late 1970s, and Cha was dubbed the “Textile King of Africa.”4 Moreover, UNTL’s dominating influence over Nigerian textile production did not fade away with the overall decline of Nigeria’s textile sector and wider economy; rather, it attained a near-monopoly of textile manufacturing in the northern part of the country in the early 1990s. Ironically, perhaps, it was Cha’s fellow Chinese—manufacturers and traders from mainland China—who emerged as UNTL’s most formidable competitors at the end of that decade. UNTL’s market share rapidly shrank in the early 2000s, with many of its affiliated factories facing deficit and retrenchment. Nevertheless, Cha kept his promise amid the wave of textile-factory closures that swept Nigeria in the early 2000s, but when he passed away in 2007, his daughter shut UNTL down before the end of the year.
Cha’s life story is an excellent illustration of the transnational migration of Chinese people into Nigeria in the twentieth century. I argue that, far from being either homogeneous or recent, the Chinese presence in Nigeria, and in Africa more generally, was a complex, constantly evolving, long-term phenomenon. In the early twentieth century, Chinese migrants in Africa were often indentured laborers who worked in mines and plantations for European colonialists. From the 1950s to the 1980s, with Cha and other Chinese industrialists establishing factories in Nigeria and other African nations, the Chinese came to be valued as investors. And beginning in the 1990s, a dramatic influx of mainland Chinese migrants dramatically changed and diversified the Chinese community in Nigeria, and posed a serious challenge to Cha’s generation of Chinese industrialists by eating into the latter’s market share with much cheaper made-in-China goods.
Cha’s story also brings to bear the Chinese role in the history of postcolonial Nigeria: specifically, how Chinese migrants and the Nigerian state, workers, traders, and consumers interacted with and influenced one another. The book examines how decolonization and the subsequent pursuit of industrialization by independent Nigeria’s federal and regional governments both pressured and attracted Chinese industrialists to move to Nigeria. It also explores how those who did so survived and prospered from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, through the Biafran War, the Oil Boom, and decades of economic crises. It further discusses how a new wave of mainland Chinese migrants formed a community of shared interests with certain Nigerian government officials in the late 1990s. Beyond the sphere of the Nigerian state, my work looks into how Nigerian workers both benefited from, and suffered under, the influence of different groups of Chinese migrants over the past half century and how the evolving preferences of Nigerian consumers influenced the destinies of Chinese products, whether manufactured by Nigeria-based Chinese factories or made in China.
This study makes several historiographical contributions. First, this is one of a handful of historical accounts of Chinese presence in Africa and is the only book-length examination of the history of Chinese in Nigeria and their interaction with Nigerians. Second, this book fills the gap between the two eras that the role of Chinese in Africa was warmly discussed—the colonial era and the contemporary twenty-first century—thus presenting diversified images of Chinese from different dimensions. Finally, this is one of few studies to emphasize African agency in shaping the Chinese presence in Nigeria and examine how both state and non-state Nigerian actors interacted with the Chinese. I will expand on each of those points.
The Role of Chinese in African History and Contemporary Africa-China Relations
During the six decades that have passed since the beginning of decolonization, Chinese influence in, and upon Africa, has increased dramatically, yet the study of Chinese migrants in African history has remained marginal. Most of the scholarly literature on Chinese migrants has concentrated on their presence in Southeast Asia, North America, and Latin America. Moreover, whether indentured or free, Chinese migrants have mostly been examined in just three contexts: increasing demand for labor on plantations and in mines; the growth of a racialized global hierarchy; and the establishment of border controls by European colonies and the United States.5 In other words, the existing literature is largely limited to Chinese migration from a Western viewpoint.
Influenced by this main stream of Chinese migration scholarship, the few existing studies of the Chinese in African history have been more concerned with the British Empire and colonialism as systems, and with Chinese migrants as an unlimited pool of colonial labor, than with the myriad ways in which heterogeneous Chinese migrant groups encountered colonial and post-independence institutions in their daily lives.6 For instance, scholars have investigated the importation of Chinese labor into the Transvaal gold fields, the circulation of colonial stereotypes of Chinese and African labor, and the response of the Qing government to the suffering of the Chinese community in South Africa.7 Some examine British colonial officials’ idea of importing Chinese miners into the Gold Coast as the solution to labor issues there and African responses, including intellectuals’ refutation of the superiority of Chinese over African labor during the period 1873–1914.8
Other studies have attempted to put Chinese migrants at center stage, highlighting the formation of Chinese communities and the changing nature of the Chinese diaspora in Southern and Eastern Africa.9 Melanie Yap and Diane Leong Man, for example, trace the history of the Chinese in South Africa back to the seventeenth-century exile of Chinese convicts and narrate the origin and development of the early Chinese communities of laborers and traders there.10 Yoon Park also explores the long history of the Chinese in South Africa and argues that their identity was a fluid one, “constructed through often-contested processes of defining both the boundaries and content of ethnic identity.”11 Li Anshan greatly expands the discussion of the Chinese in African history in both geography and historical scope: covering eastern, southern, and parts of western Africa from medieval times to the early twentieth century, as well as the life stories of individual postcolonial Chinese migrants, mostly in southern and eastern African countries.12
As the above discussion implies, what is missing from this body of literature are the basic, yet geographically important, influences of Chinese migrants in postcolonial Nigeria. As this book will show, the influence of Chinese migrants in postcolonial Nigeria profoundly shaped its economy as well as the social and economic lives of millions of Nigerians. As the first book-length work on Chinese migrants in Nigeria, my study will challenge the Eurocentric narrative of Chinese migrants’ role as laborers in African history and reveal how different groups of Chinese migrants—entrepreneurs, traders, and workers—were shaped by, and in turn shaped, the histories of both Nigeria and China.
This book is also informed by literature from outside the discipline of history that focuses on Africa-China relations and the contemporary Chinese presence in Africa. At the macro level, scholars have devoted considerable attention to official China-Africa relations from a policy-driven or state-oriented perspective, within which the most-explored subjects are aspects of the state: foreign policies, China’s aid to Africa, and state-owned enterprises and policy banks.13 However, Chinese migrants, the key foundation of the Chinese presence, have been largely ignored in such studies. Other scholars, aware of the limitations of the state-oriented approach, have recently delved into the lives of Chinese migrants, their influence on African societies, and their interaction with Africans since the 2000s.14 They have also explored the practices of Chinese traders; social and cultural differences between Chinese and Africans; and African perceptions of Chinese people and Chinese goods, the two most visible symbols of China in African societies.15
Nevertheless, such studies assume that the Chinese presence in Africa is a twenty-first-century phenomenon, and ignore its earlier history. In the context of Nigeria, for instance, the dominance of made-in-China products in local markets is often treated as a fait accompli, and basic questions about when, how, and why Chinese goods came to prominence in the market have received scant attention. My book will answer these and other neglected questions, thus lending some much-needed historical perspective to contemporary study of Africa-China relations.
African Agency in Shaping the Chinese Presence in Nigeria
The sixty-year-long presence of Chinese migrants, factories, and commodities in Nigeria did impact the Nigerian economy and society in a significant way, but such transnational influence was in no way unidirectional. As the following chapters will show, the changing policy of Nigerian governments, the evolving preference of Nigerian consumers, the hard work of Nigerian workers, and the decisions of Nigerian traders have shaped the movement of Chinese migrants, the destiny of Chinese factories, and even the flow and design of Chinese commodities.
The book aims to emphasize the role of Nigerian governments in economic decolonization and industrialization by pushing the boundary beyond the Euro-Africa connection into their role in engaging Chinese entrepreneurs. During the mid-twentieth century when political decolonization was widely achieved, the newly independent African states were also in keen pursuit of economic development and progress via industrialization to get rid of the economic hegemony of their former European masters as well as justify their own legitimacy.16 Historians of economic decolonization tend to focus almost exclusively on the interaction between European multinationals and independent African nationalist governments.17 In spite of not being the absolute arbitrator of decolonization, European multinationals were still able to take defensive steps to protect their interests via collaborating with African nationalist elites and showing their goodwill in promoting economic development.18 As for independent African states, their pursuit of industrialization had to rely on European capital and technology, which spoke to the fact that many European companies were able to maintain their economic influence in the 1950s and 1960s.19 However, European multinationals were not the sole source of capital and technology, nor were they only participants in the industrialization blueprint of some African nations. Industrialists from East Asia, especially Chinese manufacturers, though largely ignored in previous studies, still occupied an important role in the industrialization process of some African nations. Using the case study of Nigeria, I argue in the book that the influence of the Nigerian governments’ industrial policy was sufficiently strong to be felt transnationally, acting upon certain industries in Hong Kong (China) as well as encouraging/forcing the migration of Chinese industrialists to Nigeria. The book will further show that policies of Nigerian governments kept influencing the rise and fall of Chinese entrepreneurs from after independence through the early 2000s.
The book focuses on the role of Nigerian traders and consumers in shaping the flow, design, and meaning of certain Chinese commodities, mainly via the case of enamelware. While the recent influx of Chinese products into Africa has influenced local manufacturing industries and the lives of local people as many scholars point out, the demands of Nigerian traders and consumers in turn actually determined the quality and popularity of Chinese goods.20 As Chapter 5 shows, a historical examination of enamelware made by Nigeria-based Chinese factories offers more insight into the way Chinese products and Nigerian end-users have influenced each other. Initially coming into Nigeria as a symbol of newness, foreignness, modernity, and levels of personal achievement,21 Chinese-made enamelware was gradually indigenized into the world of local containers, becoming an integral part of northern Nigerian tradition. Chinese enamelware industrialists, managers, and engineers well received the message from Nigerian traders and consumers, and therefore kept improving the designs, colors, sizes, and functionalities, and learning about the gendered cultural meaning of their products.
The book also pays attention to the experiences of Nigerian workers who worked for Chinese factories by delving into their life histories. Records of trade unions well represent workers’ collective voice of resistance and their institutional relations with governments and employers,22 yet the nature of such sources and relevant studies usually contain little information about the daily lives of individual workers beyond the workplace. Ethnographic and social surveys conducted in post-independence West Africa tend to approach the subject through the lens of African factory workers’ individual experiences. On one hand, scholars have examined Nigerian and Ghanaian workers’ migration patterns, adjustment to industrialization, experiences with urban life, and how their cases complicate the industrial man thesis by adding a new category to it;23 on other hand, they argue that the majority of Nigerian workers in Lagos and Kano suffered job insecurity, low living standards, and lack of upward mobility within factories, and thus often looked forward to leaving the factories and using independent entrepreneurship as a means of resisting proletarianization.24 These studies’ consensus that Nigerian and Ghanaian workers barely considered factories as sources of economic and social security or upward mobility may be flawed, however, as all were based chiefly or entirely on the “snapshots” provided by non-longitudinal social surveys. In other words, they provided detailed descriptions of workers’ experiences at a specific moment, but lacked data on their life trajectories and how their experiences changed over time. Using workers’ life histories as primary sources, my book contributes to post-independence Nigerian labor history by examining the changing situations of t...
