Books by Enrique Martino
¿Qué es la antropología colonial?, ¿o es anti-colonial?. ¿Qué es el pensamiento afrocéntrico?, ¿o... more ¿Qué es la antropología colonial?, ¿o es anti-colonial?. ¿Qué es el pensamiento afrocéntrico?, ¿o es anti-africano? ¿A quién hay que leer y citar para entender – y ayudar a otros a entender – el pasado precolonial africano: a Cheikh Anta Diop o a E. E. Evans-Pritchard? O en el caso del pasado colonial y poscolonial: ¿a Frantz Fanon o a Georges Balandier, a Marshall Sahlins o a Stokely Carmichael, a Mudimbe, Hountondji y Appiah o a Césaire, Senghor y Nkrumah?
Respondiendo a los desafíos y a las contradicciones del mundo Africano que estudian y reflexionando críticamente sobre su propia práctica y las formas de abordar este pasado, antropólogos, filósofos e historiadores dentro y fuera de la academia española han dedicado recientemente una nueva atención al estudio de Guinea Ecuatorial y África. Esta clase magistral, reúne a dos de los más eminentes intelectuales que trabajan en este campo – Juan Aranzadi y Eugenio Nkogo – para debatir, en un formato polémico, algunas de las propuestas afirmativas y contestaciones lanzadas por el estudio de Juan Aranzadi titulado “Hacia un replanteamiento radical de los estudios sobre Guinea Ecuatorial” publicado en los volúmenes colectivos Guinea Ecuatorial (des)conocida. Lo que sabemos, ignoramos, inventamos y deformamos acerca de su pasado y su presente, editados por el Centro de Estudios Afro-Hispánicos (CEAH) de la UNED en 2020. Con contribuciones de Amancio Nsé y Miquel Vilaró, un prólogo de Juan Aranzadi y una introducción de Enrique Martino.
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Touts: Recruiting Indentured Labor in the Gulf of Guinea, 2022
Front matter and Introduction "Smugglers and Strangers"
Touts is a historical account of the t... more Front matter and Introduction "Smugglers and Strangers"
Touts is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea and a major contribution to the historiography of indentured labor, which has relatively few reference points in Africa. The setting is West Africa’s largest island, Fernando Po or Bioko in today’s Equatorial Guinea, 100 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria. The Spanish ruled this often-ignored island from the mid-nineteenth century until 1968. A booming plantation economy led to the arrival of several hundred thousand West African, principally Nigerian, contract workers on steamships and canoes. In Touts, Enrique Martino traces the confusing transition from slavery to other labor regimes, paying particular attention to the labor brokers and their financial, logistical, and clandestine techniques for bringing workers to the island.
Martino combines multi-sited archival research with the concept of touts as "lumpen-brokers" to offer a detailed study of how commercial labor relations could develop, shift and collapse through the recruiters’ own techniques, such as large wage advances and elaborate deceptions. The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of labor mobility, contract law, informal credit structures and exchange practices in African history.
Took a while as it has a whole historical theory of labour market creation based on the often entirely absent centerpiece of the colonial-era migration enterprise: TOUTS, otherwise and elsewhere called recruiters, labour brokers, agents, contractors or subcontractors, spirits or crimps sea-pimps, land-sharks, snakes, blackbirders, or ganchos “those who hook”; an “erratic” labour market whose most widespread and consistent feature was “knavery,” being “cajoled by plausible touts.”
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Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lectures Series, 2021
This study is, at once, a historical critique of neoclassical and Marxist economics of labour mar... more This study is, at once, a historical critique of neoclassical and Marxist economics of labour market formation, a critical history of the colonization of continental Equatorial Guinea by France, Germany and Spain, and a comparative inquiry of the labour recruiters who forged the gateways to expanding imperial peripheries of colonial production. A recruitment boom for the cacao plantations of the Spanish island of Fernando Po swept into Rio Muni and the Fang areas of southern Cameroon and northern Gabon during the first half of the twentieth century. By documenting the volatile phases as well as the recruitment techniques for this great boom and eventual bust, the author argues that recruiters have usually been empirically conflated or conceptually obviated even though they stood in sharp contrast to the slave trade or state-organized forced labour schemes. They were key informal vectors of commercial conquest across a variety of times and regions, and operated non-violently by way of persuasive and distorted communication and immanently through credit and money creation in the form of gifts and advance payments.
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Journal Articles by Enrique Martino
Comillas Journal of International Relations, 2023
The essay is divided and published into two parts: each separately assesses the main recent trend... more The essay is divided and published into two parts: each separately assesses the main recent trends in the national and international politics of Equatorial Guinea — spanning roughly between the Covid19 crisis and May 2023. Part II examines the so far unfounded claims regarding the Chinese Navy’s plan to build its first Atlantic base in Equatorial Guinea, which has been widely publicized by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Moreover, this piece delves into the origins and ongoing developments of international legal disputes between France and Equatorial Guinea, specifically concerning the prosecution of Teodorín for corruption in a Paris court. Part I profiled the current vice president, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, widely known by his moniker Teodorín. The resolution of and tensions within both the U.S.-China and French geopolitical and international dimensions provide the main global frames for Teodorín’s succession, which is practically set in stone, and quite imminent. The combined introduction in part I and in the conclusion in part II outlines the recent shifts across the domestic political, international geopolitical, and economic domains that have conditioned Teodorín’s active and seemingly inevitable rise to the presidency of Equatorial Guinea.
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Comillas Journal of International Relations, 2023
The essay is divided and published into two parts: each separately assessing the main recent tren... more The essay is divided and published into two parts: each separately assessing the main recent trends in the national and international politics of Equatorial Guinea — roughly between the Covid-19 crisis and May 2023. Part I profiles the current vice president, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, widely known by his moniker Teodorín. His dynastic succession seems practically set in stone and quite imminent, given that his father, the president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, is an octogenarian and has recently shown many signs of an already effectively retired. Part I focuses on Teodorín’s populist policy style, the demotion and persecution of contenders, and the punishment of anti-government figures both within and outside the country, which have served to display and consolidate his domestic ascension to power. The combined introduction in part I, and the conclusion in part II outlines the recent shifts across the domestic political, international geopolitical, and economic domains, that have marked and steered Teodorín’s active and seemingly inevitable rise to the presidency of Equatorial Guinea.
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Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, 2020
This article looks for the initial configuration of indentured labour in the final stages of the ... more This article looks for the initial configuration of indentured labour in the final stages of the Spanish Empire in the Gulf of Guinea to try to give, from this peculiar historical trajectory, a new spin on the concept of transition, or rather transformation, from slavery to post-slavery forms of unfree labour. The first labour contract in the Spanish colonial island of Fernando Pó, sitting off the coast of Nigeria and Cameroon, was brought over in the 1860s from Cuba, which combined both coolie indentures and emancipado (apprenticeships for slaves freed from slave ships) arrangements. I outline some of the emergent effects of this new colonial contract, such as the appearance of a new generation of labour recruiters by describing and examining the techniques used to try to attract and keep West African Kru workers on the island. By closely connecting Fernando Pó to the process of abolition of slavery in Cuba and to labour recruitment along the West African coast, I show how the founding and the effects of the contract can be tracked back to the partial fragmentation and mutation of slavery. I provide a conceptual outline in the conclusion in relation to a critical discussion of the metaphors of the “slavery of wage labour” and the sometimes just implicitly lingering premises of the concept of imperfect and inhibited transitions still underpinning much of the global labour history and the new histories of capitalism literature.
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Guinea Ecuatorial (des)conocida: Lo que sabemos, ignoramos, inventamos y deformamos acerca de su pasado y su presente, Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida y Juan Aranzadi (eds.) (Madrid, UNED), 2020
Dos grandes lagunas en la historia socioeconómica de Río Muni son la breve pero sorprendente pres... more Dos grandes lagunas en la historia socioeconómica de Río Muni son la breve pero sorprendente presencia republicana (1931-1936), sobre la que casi no se ha investigado ni publicado, y el periodo del primer franquismo (1936-1959) sobre el que se han difundido impresiones erróneas basadas en un corpus de libros publicados en la época franquista. Es testimonio de la extraña eficacia a largo plazo de la propaganda franquista, y de la inaccesibilidad de gran parte de su archivo colonial hasta principios del siglo XXI, que incluso las investigaciones académicas de la más alta calidad publicadas a finales del siglo XX repitieron las distorsiones de la auto-representación franquista y el olvido de las restructuraciones radicales de la economía durante la Segunda República. Solo recientemente se ha iniciado un replanteamiento académico de estos engaños y estas omisiones (como en los trabajos de Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida (2014b, 2016a, 2017) y Álvarez Chillida y Nerín (2018). La economía política en la época colonial y sus relaciones de trabajo en las primeras tres décadas del siglo XX en Río Muni han sido especialmente iluminadas por Gustau Nerín (2010) y Enrique Okenve (2008), quienes con materia archivística han ampliado el panorama de este periodo que hasta entonces se había trabajado críticamente, pero rara vez con riqueza empírica, como en los estudios Valentin Oyono (1985) e Ibrahim Sundiata (1990). Para subrayar los logros y las perspectivas de las citadas investigaciones, en la primera parte de este capítulo me basaré en sus trabajos y también aprovecharé para sacar nuevas fuentes a la luz sobre el trabajo colonial en este primer periodo. También haré algunos apuntes sobre las estructuras de poder entre los pueblos fang y sus transformaciones bajo imperativos coloniales a principios del siglo XX, para comprender mejor las aperturas y nuevas lógicas de las políticas del trabajo colonial. A continuación, enfocaré los cambios del periodo republicano, incluida la suspensión del trabajo forzado, la llamada "prestación personal", y la prohibición del sistema de reclutamiento de mano de obra por agentes privados y mínimamente regulados, la llamada "recluta". Estas reformas revolucionarias no fueron duraderas y se empezaron a revertir rápidamente con la toma franquista de Río Muni en 1936. Ibrahim Sundiata (1996: 144) en su magistral libro From Slaving to Neoslavery escribió de forma precipitada que "España se adhirió al Convenio sobre el trabajo forzoso de 1930, pero la prestación personal no fue abolida hasta finales de los años treinta". Diplomáticos españoles en Ginebra habían firmado el Convenio sobre la abolición del trabajo forzoso de la Organización Internacional de Trabajo de 1930, pero el régimen franquista lo anuló casi instantáneamente, e introdujo un renovado militarismo intensificando varias modalidades de trabajo forzoso (tributario, penal, disciplinario, etc.) tanto en la metrópoli como en las colonias (Mendiola, 2016). Como puede demostrarse a través de una amplia consulta de los archivos coloniales, el estado franquista remató el trabajo forzado orientado tanto a la infraestructura (obras viales e instalaciones militares especialmente) como hacia la plantaciones. Las diferentes modalidades de trabajo forzado fueron diseñadas y desplegadas 1 Agradecimientos: La investigación doctoral que ha llevado a estos resultados ha recibido financiación de la Unión Europea, Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), ERC Starting Grant no. 240898. Asimismo, esta investigación se ha realizado en el marco del proyecto del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad HAR2012-34599.
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HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2018
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Ayer: Asociación de Historia Contemporánea, 2018
Este artículo estudia el surgimiento de los contrabandistas y traficantes de mano de obra entre ... more Este artículo estudia el surgimiento de los contrabandistas y traficantes de mano de obra entre Fernando Poo y Nigeria, y su decisivo papel en el desarrollo económico de Fernando Poo durante el primer franquismo. Los detalles de las actividades ilícitas, promovidas por las principales instituciones de la burocracia imperial, nos acercan a una visión analítica del Estado colonial. Un pequeño grupo de altos funcionarios del Gobierno colonial obviaron la distinción entre lo legal y lo ilegal para aliarse con traficantes y contrabandistas, no solo para enriquecerse ellos mismos, sino también para configurar la economía según los intereses de poderosos grupos de colonos finqueros y comerciantes.
Abstract: This article studies the rise of canoe-based commodity smugglers and labour traffickers between Nigeria and Fernando Po, and their crucial role in the economic development of the island during early Francoism. By examining the details of these illicit activities, promoted by the main institutions of an imperial bureaucracy, we are able to gain a sharp analytical picture of the colonial state. A small group of senior officials of the colonial Government disregarded the distinction between legal and illegal and allied themselves with traffickers and smugglers. They were interested not only in enriching themselves, but also in reconfiguring the economy in the interests of powerful groups of planters and settler merchants.
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Africa, Feb 2017
Dash in pidgin English means an ancillary gift to an exchange. What happened when the dash became... more Dash in pidgin English means an ancillary gift to an exchange. What happened when the dash became attached to the indentured labour contracts that the Spanish Empire brought from Cuba to their last colony, Spanish Guinea? On the island of Fernando Pó, which came to be almost wholly populated by Nigerian labour migrants, the conditional gift in the form of a large wage advance produced a particularly intense contradiction. In the historiography of unfree labour, the excess wage advance is thought to create conditions for the perpetuation of bondage through debt. However, in imperial contexts, the wage advance did not generate compliance and immobility; exactly the opposite – it produced unprecedented waves of further escalation and dispersed flight. The dash was pushed up by workers themselves and relayed by informal recruiters. Together they turned this lynchpin of indentured labour and debt peonage into a counter-practice that almost led to the collapse of the plantations in the 1950s. The trajectories of the dash led to a more pointed version of the foundational thesis of global labour history: namely, that it was actually free labour, not unfree labour, that was incompatible with labour scarcity-ridden imperial capitalism.
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African Economic History, 2016
In the first half of the twentieth century, most of Fernando Pó's contract workers came from soci... more In the first half of the twentieth century, most of Fernando Pó's contract workers came from societies in southeastern Nigeria which had been heavily impacted by the transatlantic and internal slave trades. These contract workers were recruited by a new generation of labor recruiters, dispatched covertly by Spanish imperial employers, through a form of kidnapping known as panya. Panya was the largest labor smuggling and trafficking network in colonial West Africa, bringing tens of thousands of migrants to long and obligatory contracts on Fernando Pó. In contrast to scholars who have interpreted this history as a holdover from the pre-colonial period, this article argues that panya arose from the contractual order of Spanish imperial rule. Extensive archival research reveals the voices of those caught in the warp of post-abolition colonial labor regimes, in order to rethink the passage from the pre-colonial slave trade to imperialism within West African history. Using a series of vivid and precise petitions submitted by those who found themselves on the island of Fernando Pó, the article shows how these sources contain the potential to reconceptualize the disjunctures between enslavement in the slave trade and the recruitment of contract labor.
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Éndoxa: Series Filosóficas, Jun 2016
Utilizando nuevo material de archivo y revisando las etnografías existentes, intento mostrar cómo... more Utilizando nuevo material de archivo y revisando las etnografías existentes, intento mostrar cómo en la Guinea Española la fusión o casi perfecta articulación entre la “economía deudora” de los pagos matrimoniales Fang (“riqueza de la novia”) y la “economía crediticia” del reclutamiento colonial de trabajadores por los finqueros españoles acreedores entre 1928 y 1940 condujo a que casi 25,000 varones Fang de Río Muni, Gabón y Camerún fueran reclutados, pagados con un anticipo y descargados en las plantaciones de la isla de Fernando Póo con contratos de dos o tres años. El rápido desarrollo de esta constelación de reclutamiento se puede explicar, ateniéndose a los paradigmas teóricos vigentes, como una “articulación de modos de producción”; pero no puede explicarse así su colapso repentino. Los componentes y direcciones, la inscripción y circulación de los pagos matrimoniales Fang -del nsoa o “dote”- tejieron los mimbres de la economía colonial española basada en el reclutamiento de mano de obra con contratos de peonaje endeudado, pero asimismo, subsecuentemente, los destejieron.
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History in Africa , Jun 2014
Abstract: The archival sources gathered for my PhD research have all been posted to a blog, opens... more Abstract: The archival sources gathered for my PhD research have all been posted to a blog, opensourceguinea.org. Among other things, the sources trace the migrants and laborers in and around the plantation island of Fernando Pó, moving through numerous empires and societies in Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon for most of the twentieth century. Having sources “speak for themselves” to the “public” and even “amongst themselves” contributes not only to an expansionary information commons, but also to a methodological reorganization and pluralization. When a multiplicity of sources are displayed and interlinked as hyper-text, the static conceptual lenses of traditional social and cultural history dissolve.
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Debats: Revista trimestral editada por la Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 2014
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International Review of Social History, 2012
The “Labour Question”, a well-known obsession pervading the archives of Africa, was posed by colo... more The “Labour Question”, a well-known obsession pervading the archives of Africa, was posed by colonial rulers as a calculated question of scarcity and coercion. On the Spanish plantation island of Fernando Pó the shortage and coercive recruitment of labour was particularly intense. This article examines two distinct clandestine labour recruitment operations that took hold of Rio Muni and eastern Nigeria, on the east and the north of the Bight of Biafra. The trails of the recruitment networks were successfully constructed by the specifically aligned “mediators” of kinship, ethnicity, money, law, commodities, and administration. The conceptual focus on flat “mediators” follows Bruno Latour's sociology of associations and has been set against the concept of an “intermediary” that serves to join and uphold the structure/agency and global/local binaries.
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website with all my sources. open-source Phd by Enrique Martino
www.opensourceguinea.org/
This website gathers a montage of the archival sources gathered during my PhD, some four years wo... more This website gathers a montage of the archival sources gathered during my PhD, some four years worth of research, about a thousand five hundred items and counting, some one, others hundreds of pages long, from twenty-six archives and research libraries. The sources trace amongst other things, the migrants and labourers in and around the plantation island of Fernando Pó, moving along the intersections of the Spanish, British and French empires and through numerous societies in Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Liberia, Cameroon and Gabon for most of the twentieth century.
My PhD, "Touts and Despots: Recruiting Assemblages of Contract Labour in Fernando Pó and the Gulf of Guinea, 1858-1979" (Humboldt University of Berlin, 2016) is available not only open-access but also open source. All the footnotes contain hyperlinks to the complete and "original" sources here (the sources are either transcribed, licensed for reproduction or are shared on a 'request access' via hyperlink). This is what is arranged here, the heterogeneous sources cited along all the footnotes of my entire PhD thesis and the sources that are, in turn, an internal reference to those that are cited – whatever I could get my hands on or happened to choose. It's mostly bureaucratic debris, selectively selected from dispersed state-run archives; excisions from longer correspondences, samples of serial court files and bureaucratic logging systems, dozens of military dispatches, batches of statistics, bits of the kaleidoscope of colonial laws, old passports, etc. But also the sources that seem to be the most worthwhile to share are the unique and inimitable ones, the handwritten testimony, an astounding letter, an explosive meeting or courtroom, a verbose and delicate petition, those documents located under “miscellaneous papers” uncategorized at the end of an administrative sequence, appendices, the serendipitous, confiscated pamphlets, a particularly brutal dispatch, the private notes of an unusual administrator, attempts at a village history by a missionary, a covert operation, a visiting scientific expedition, etc.
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Thesis by Enrique Martino
This dissertation follows Fernando Pó’s labour recruiters wherever they went— between the 1860s ... more This dissertation follows Fernando Pó’s labour recruiters wherever they went— between the 1860s and 1920s recruiters traversed the entirety of the Gulf of Guinea and enlisted mostly Kru from Liberia and Fang from Rio Muni, Cameroon and Gabon; between the 1930s to 1960s they gathered particularly around the Bight of Biafra and brought an unprecedented number of contract workers into the island’s booming cacao plantations, mostly Igbos and Ibibios from south-eastern Nigeria. Recruiters tended to appear in a modality that I will describe and theorize as ‘touts’. They operated almost exclusively with an excess of language and money—deceit and informal advances. They operated ‘outside’ the law and the regulated, yet it was only the shape of the contract on Fernando Pó—forced, long and irrevocable—that allowed recruiters to deploy their techniques. Recruiters created and relayed a series of wholly impermissible twists: quasi-enslavement through fraud that was a form of kidnapping, quasi-debt bondage with informal wage advances enabled by the contracts, and even a movement of really quite free but fugitive labour across borders and work-sites. A sustained attention on the ambivalent practices of recruiters reveal a series of juxtapositions of free and unfree that produced creative potentials for intensification and unravelling, rather than single points along a ‘free-unfree’ labour spectrum.
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Book Reviews by Enrique Martino
Widerspruch – Münchner Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 2010
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Maps & Diagrammes by Enrique Martino
in Clandestine Recruitment Networks in the Bight of Biafra: Fernando Po's Answer to the Labour Question, 1926–1945
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Media & Pamphlets by Enrique Martino
The Republic, 2021
Referring to labour markets as ‘modern slavery’ creates a confused historical timeline that obscu... more Referring to labour markets as ‘modern slavery’ creates a confused historical timeline that obscures the direct predecessor of what is today called human trafficking and people smuggling—the turbulent and transformative colonial period. Looking at the colonial history of Fernando Po in Spanish Guinea and south-eastern Nigeria, it becomes clear that the new techniques of ‘modern slavery’, varied from deception and entrapment of unsuspecting migrants in a new territory to harshly enforced debt bondage and penal sanctions for non-fulfilment of contracts and other local legislation such as vagrancy laws. It is equally clear that such techniques were intricately created by the legal and economic conditions of colonialism and were not in any way a persistence of slavery and the slave trade.
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Books by Enrique Martino
Respondiendo a los desafíos y a las contradicciones del mundo Africano que estudian y reflexionando críticamente sobre su propia práctica y las formas de abordar este pasado, antropólogos, filósofos e historiadores dentro y fuera de la academia española han dedicado recientemente una nueva atención al estudio de Guinea Ecuatorial y África. Esta clase magistral, reúne a dos de los más eminentes intelectuales que trabajan en este campo – Juan Aranzadi y Eugenio Nkogo – para debatir, en un formato polémico, algunas de las propuestas afirmativas y contestaciones lanzadas por el estudio de Juan Aranzadi titulado “Hacia un replanteamiento radical de los estudios sobre Guinea Ecuatorial” publicado en los volúmenes colectivos Guinea Ecuatorial (des)conocida. Lo que sabemos, ignoramos, inventamos y deformamos acerca de su pasado y su presente, editados por el Centro de Estudios Afro-Hispánicos (CEAH) de la UNED en 2020. Con contribuciones de Amancio Nsé y Miquel Vilaró, un prólogo de Juan Aranzadi y una introducción de Enrique Martino.
Touts is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea and a major contribution to the historiography of indentured labor, which has relatively few reference points in Africa. The setting is West Africa’s largest island, Fernando Po or Bioko in today’s Equatorial Guinea, 100 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria. The Spanish ruled this often-ignored island from the mid-nineteenth century until 1968. A booming plantation economy led to the arrival of several hundred thousand West African, principally Nigerian, contract workers on steamships and canoes. In Touts, Enrique Martino traces the confusing transition from slavery to other labor regimes, paying particular attention to the labor brokers and their financial, logistical, and clandestine techniques for bringing workers to the island.
Martino combines multi-sited archival research with the concept of touts as "lumpen-brokers" to offer a detailed study of how commercial labor relations could develop, shift and collapse through the recruiters’ own techniques, such as large wage advances and elaborate deceptions. The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of labor mobility, contract law, informal credit structures and exchange practices in African history.
Took a while as it has a whole historical theory of labour market creation based on the often entirely absent centerpiece of the colonial-era migration enterprise: TOUTS, otherwise and elsewhere called recruiters, labour brokers, agents, contractors or subcontractors, spirits or crimps sea-pimps, land-sharks, snakes, blackbirders, or ganchos “those who hook”; an “erratic” labour market whose most widespread and consistent feature was “knavery,” being “cajoled by plausible touts.”
Journal Articles by Enrique Martino
Abstract: This article studies the rise of canoe-based commodity smugglers and labour traffickers between Nigeria and Fernando Po, and their crucial role in the economic development of the island during early Francoism. By examining the details of these illicit activities, promoted by the main institutions of an imperial bureaucracy, we are able to gain a sharp analytical picture of the colonial state. A small group of senior officials of the colonial Government disregarded the distinction between legal and illegal and allied themselves with traffickers and smugglers. They were interested not only in enriching themselves, but also in reconfiguring the economy in the interests of powerful groups of planters and settler merchants.
website with all my sources. open-source Phd by Enrique Martino
My PhD, "Touts and Despots: Recruiting Assemblages of Contract Labour in Fernando Pó and the Gulf of Guinea, 1858-1979" (Humboldt University of Berlin, 2016) is available not only open-access but also open source. All the footnotes contain hyperlinks to the complete and "original" sources here (the sources are either transcribed, licensed for reproduction or are shared on a 'request access' via hyperlink). This is what is arranged here, the heterogeneous sources cited along all the footnotes of my entire PhD thesis and the sources that are, in turn, an internal reference to those that are cited – whatever I could get my hands on or happened to choose. It's mostly bureaucratic debris, selectively selected from dispersed state-run archives; excisions from longer correspondences, samples of serial court files and bureaucratic logging systems, dozens of military dispatches, batches of statistics, bits of the kaleidoscope of colonial laws, old passports, etc. But also the sources that seem to be the most worthwhile to share are the unique and inimitable ones, the handwritten testimony, an astounding letter, an explosive meeting or courtroom, a verbose and delicate petition, those documents located under “miscellaneous papers” uncategorized at the end of an administrative sequence, appendices, the serendipitous, confiscated pamphlets, a particularly brutal dispatch, the private notes of an unusual administrator, attempts at a village history by a missionary, a covert operation, a visiting scientific expedition, etc.
Thesis by Enrique Martino
Book Reviews by Enrique Martino
Maps & Diagrammes by Enrique Martino
Media & Pamphlets by Enrique Martino
Respondiendo a los desafíos y a las contradicciones del mundo Africano que estudian y reflexionando críticamente sobre su propia práctica y las formas de abordar este pasado, antropólogos, filósofos e historiadores dentro y fuera de la academia española han dedicado recientemente una nueva atención al estudio de Guinea Ecuatorial y África. Esta clase magistral, reúne a dos de los más eminentes intelectuales que trabajan en este campo – Juan Aranzadi y Eugenio Nkogo – para debatir, en un formato polémico, algunas de las propuestas afirmativas y contestaciones lanzadas por el estudio de Juan Aranzadi titulado “Hacia un replanteamiento radical de los estudios sobre Guinea Ecuatorial” publicado en los volúmenes colectivos Guinea Ecuatorial (des)conocida. Lo que sabemos, ignoramos, inventamos y deformamos acerca de su pasado y su presente, editados por el Centro de Estudios Afro-Hispánicos (CEAH) de la UNED en 2020. Con contribuciones de Amancio Nsé y Miquel Vilaró, un prólogo de Juan Aranzadi y una introducción de Enrique Martino.
Touts is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea and a major contribution to the historiography of indentured labor, which has relatively few reference points in Africa. The setting is West Africa’s largest island, Fernando Po or Bioko in today’s Equatorial Guinea, 100 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria. The Spanish ruled this often-ignored island from the mid-nineteenth century until 1968. A booming plantation economy led to the arrival of several hundred thousand West African, principally Nigerian, contract workers on steamships and canoes. In Touts, Enrique Martino traces the confusing transition from slavery to other labor regimes, paying particular attention to the labor brokers and their financial, logistical, and clandestine techniques for bringing workers to the island.
Martino combines multi-sited archival research with the concept of touts as "lumpen-brokers" to offer a detailed study of how commercial labor relations could develop, shift and collapse through the recruiters’ own techniques, such as large wage advances and elaborate deceptions. The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of labor mobility, contract law, informal credit structures and exchange practices in African history.
Took a while as it has a whole historical theory of labour market creation based on the often entirely absent centerpiece of the colonial-era migration enterprise: TOUTS, otherwise and elsewhere called recruiters, labour brokers, agents, contractors or subcontractors, spirits or crimps sea-pimps, land-sharks, snakes, blackbirders, or ganchos “those who hook”; an “erratic” labour market whose most widespread and consistent feature was “knavery,” being “cajoled by plausible touts.”
Abstract: This article studies the rise of canoe-based commodity smugglers and labour traffickers between Nigeria and Fernando Po, and their crucial role in the economic development of the island during early Francoism. By examining the details of these illicit activities, promoted by the main institutions of an imperial bureaucracy, we are able to gain a sharp analytical picture of the colonial state. A small group of senior officials of the colonial Government disregarded the distinction between legal and illegal and allied themselves with traffickers and smugglers. They were interested not only in enriching themselves, but also in reconfiguring the economy in the interests of powerful groups of planters and settler merchants.
My PhD, "Touts and Despots: Recruiting Assemblages of Contract Labour in Fernando Pó and the Gulf of Guinea, 1858-1979" (Humboldt University of Berlin, 2016) is available not only open-access but also open source. All the footnotes contain hyperlinks to the complete and "original" sources here (the sources are either transcribed, licensed for reproduction or are shared on a 'request access' via hyperlink). This is what is arranged here, the heterogeneous sources cited along all the footnotes of my entire PhD thesis and the sources that are, in turn, an internal reference to those that are cited – whatever I could get my hands on or happened to choose. It's mostly bureaucratic debris, selectively selected from dispersed state-run archives; excisions from longer correspondences, samples of serial court files and bureaucratic logging systems, dozens of military dispatches, batches of statistics, bits of the kaleidoscope of colonial laws, old passports, etc. But also the sources that seem to be the most worthwhile to share are the unique and inimitable ones, the handwritten testimony, an astounding letter, an explosive meeting or courtroom, a verbose and delicate petition, those documents located under “miscellaneous papers” uncategorized at the end of an administrative sequence, appendices, the serendipitous, confiscated pamphlets, a particularly brutal dispatch, the private notes of an unusual administrator, attempts at a village history by a missionary, a covert operation, a visiting scientific expedition, etc.
La frase “el efecto llamada” es una especie de meme, de virus lingüístico-cultural propio de España que se viene repitiendo sin alteración durante más de una década tras cualquier acto político o humanitario que se pueda interpretar como una anti-hostilidad u hospitalidad.
Republished in Público and NuevaTribuna.es https://blogs.publico.es/otrasmiradas/23342/los-efectos-del-efecto-llamada/ https://www.nuevatribuna.es/articulo/actualidad/efectos-efecto-llamada/20190920200930166356.html