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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.
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