Abdullahi Mukhtar, Before Our Sweat Dries: The Labor Movement in the Sokoto Successor States (Zaria: Alliance, 1988)
… By the end of the 1840s, the Sahel’s fledgling industrialization had begun to spread beyond the Sokoto Republic. In Adamawa, the establishment of a state-run military foundry at Yola had sparked the construction of other ironworks and bronze foundries by private entrepreneurs. The neutral cities of Zaria and Kaduna - the latter, especially, favored by its position on a river that was navigable most of the year - invested the riches gleaned from acting as middlemen into foundries and mills of their own, and continued to do so after becoming vassals of the weak Sultanate of Zamfara in 1852. Moreover, as glass, ceramics and furniture were added to the initial textile and ironworking industries, small factories began sprouting up in other towns. The Sokoto successors never experienced the sort of explosive industrial growth that Britain or the United States did during the early 19th century - that would have been impractical given the available infrastructure and capital - but the industries employed a significant fraction of the population, and by the 1850s, an urban working class existed alongside the traditional farmers, herders and artisanal craftsmen.
New ways of work and production inevitably brought disputes over wages and working conditions. In the metal works, which were owned by a small number of industrial barons, these clashes were particularly acute, but even the mills which began as craftsmen’s cooperatives quickly grew beyond their origin and were dominated by wage-earning employees. In the Republic, with neither the government nor the stakeholders themselves experienced in resolving this sort of dispute, their adjudication fell to the qadis, who attempted to adapt traditional Islamic labor law to new circumstances.
The qadis’ rulings were, in many ways, surprisingly progressive for their time. Islamic law took a paternalistic, quasi-feudal view of employment as a relationship of mutual obligation. According to hadith, a worker must be paid “before his sweat dries,” meaning that wages must be paid regularly and not withheld, and those who stole wages from workers were regarded as enemies of God. Just as importantly, workers must be paid enough to provide for the basic needs of themselves and their families. The qadis differed somewhat as to which needs were “basic” - some held that adequate food, water and clothing were sufficient, others added medicine and education, and there were differences of opinion as to how much of each must be provided beyond the minimum for survival - but they could and did order factory owners to raise their workers’ wages. Ultimately, the consensus was that workers must be paid enough to be liable for zakat - in other words, that they should not be poor by the standards of their community, and that the nisab (the “poverty line” below which zakat need not be paid) was effectively a minimum wage. [1]
Employers are also enjoined by Islamic law not to make employees work beyond their capacity, which the qadis interpreted as forbidding working hours that were dangerous to health. Again, there were varying opinions as to where this threshold lay, but the majority held that work should not begin until half an hour after fajr and must cease half an hour before maghrib, which in an equatorial country meant a twelve-hour day. Finally, an employer’s paternal obligation to his workers was held to require provision of medical care to those who fell sick or were injured on the job, although this obligation did not extend to sickness unrelated to work or illness in the employee’s family.
Employees did, to be sure, have their own duties and restrictions. The qadis ruled that they must work loyally for their employers and that they could be fired if they failed to measure up to the employer’s standards and rules. Also, because the employer was the head of the factory “family,” employees were not permitted to combine against him any more than children were allowed to organize against their parents. Thus, while the qadis set a legal minimum wage and maximum working day, employees were not permitted to organize collectively for still higher pay or shorter hours, and their recourse in labor disputes was to the courts rather than to self-help.
Little of this changed with the Republic’s law code of 1846. Paulo Abacar, who empaneled the law revision commission, was broadly sympathetic to workers and shared the qadis’ paternalistic world-view, and the panel’s final product didn’t stray far from his vision. The qadis retained jurisdiction to fix wages and regulate working conditions, and the new code explicitly set the nisab as the minimum annual wage. In towns which had populist governments after the 1847 election, including Sokoto city and Ilorin, the qadis provided an effective check against employers’ power.
With the fall of the Republic, the successor states began to go their separate ways. In Ilorin and Jebba, which had a liberal Abacarist government, the 1846 code continued unchanged, the qadis were generous in adjusting the minimum wage to rising prices, and the cooperative ethic of the local industries, which viewed employees as part of the business, allowed most disputes to be settled through mediation. Conditions were far from a paradise by modern standards, but discontent was muted enough that, ironically, the labor movement got started much later than in the less progressive states to the north.
In Sokoto proper, Amilcar Said sought to reform the labor code to favor the large merchants and industrialists who had backed him, but with Abacarism still a strong political and religious force, there were limits to how far he could go within the bounds of acceptability. His legal reforms of 1854 retained the qadis’ wage and hour jurisdiction, and even permitted employers to discharge part of their zakat obligation by hiring displaced workers or paying more than the minimum wage. But the reformed code also placed the minimum wage in the discretion of the qadis rather than tying it to the nisab, and under Said’s regime, qadis were appointed centrally rather than being chosen by local councils. His judges were chosen for sympathy toward the industrialists, and they allowed wages to stagnate or even fall, and workers won fewer and fewer of their lawsuits against management.
Adamawa, which had never been part of the Republic and where the 1846 code had never held sway, developed along yet a third pattern. Although Abacarism was never a state ideology, the itinerant jaji teachers had spread it widely among the populace, and the ideals of Belloist communal living had also filtered down from Bornu. This meant, on the one hand, that industries tended to develop out of artisans’ cooperatives as in Ilorin rather than being owned by a few large shareholders, but on the other hand, that employees saw themselves as communal brotherhoods entitled to a say in setting wages and managing the enterprise. The government, which owned several foundries itself and considered the metalworking industries to be a key military resource, naturally sided with management, and the qadis’ rulings placed much more emphasis on the duties of employees than the reciprocal obligations of employers. While the Islamic judges did restrain the worst excesses and the cooperative ethic prevented others from occurring, labor relations in many shops became increasingly contentious by the mid-1850s.
Most contentious of all were Zaria and Kaduna. The industries of those cities were founded by small groups of wealthy merchants rather than cooperatives and, knowing they would have to compete with the already-established foundries of Sokoto and Ilorin, they sought to carve a place for themselves by using low-wage labor to produce cheaper goods. They were also in firm enough control of the city governments to shape the labor codes to their liking, and admitted neither a minimum wage nor any meaningful regulation of hours or working conditions. The late 19th-century class struggle would be at its grittiest here, especially after the 1856 collapse of the Gusau radical regime brought in many refugees with explicitly socialist interpretations of Islam.
The workers in the successor states faced daunting obstacles in organizing. Even in liberal Ilorin and Jebba, unions were illegal, and in the more conservative countries, labor leaders faced arrest or violence. Workers organized instead around daily prayers - no employer would dare deny his employees the opportunity to pray - and around the irmandades, or religious brotherhoods, that the Malê had brought with them from Bahia. Since religious activity was at least partially sheltered from official harassment, the brotherhoods and mosques doubled as unions and political meetinghouses, and labor activism took on a religious cast. “Before our sweat dries” became the rallying cry of the Sahelian workers, and strikers or labor protesters would often dress as if for prayer.
The first recorded strikes in the northern successors occurred in Kaduna in 1855, with the employees of several textile and furniture mills downing tools and occupying their shops. The city government called out the militia against them, but the militiamen were themselves workers or from working-class families, and many refused to fight. After several days of pitched battles, the employers agreed to a modest wage increase, but they were already recruiting their own security force in anticipation of the next strike. For decades to come, labor relations in Kaduna and Zaria would be a tearing battle between the workers’ brotherhoods and the industrialists’ private guards, with the city governments blatantly favoring the employers. In Adamawa and Sokoto, the struggle was somewhat more restrained, but only because the regular army was reliable enough in suppressing labor protests that private militias never formed.
By the 1860s, the industrial workers were beginning to see themselves as a class and to think in terms of ultimate goals rather than merely the conditions in their particular shop. For many, better wages and shorter hours were all they wanted, but others favored wider political reforms, such as the institution (or, in Sokoto, return) of universal suffrage, the legalization of unions and the formation of labor courts with worker representation. Some sought inspiration in Abacar’s Thawra, arguing that however flawed his radical conception of ijma (consensus) might be in running a state, it pointed to an ideal way to manage an industry, through councils in which a consensus of workers and employers might be reached. A few argued that employees’ labor should be treated as an investment in the company, and that in addition to their wages, workers should receive progressive amounts of equity ownership. The artisans’ cooperatives should, in effect, expand to workers’ cooperatives.
In the meantime, of course, a way had to be found for the proponents of all these views to work together. Thus it was that in 1864, delegates from workers’ brotherhoods throughout the Abacarist world made the difficult journey to Ilorin, meeting clandestinely in the first of many Labor Shuras…
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[1] For the basic principles of Islamic labor law, see Adnan A. Zulfiqar, “Religious Sanctification of Labor Law: Islamic Labor Principles and Model Provisions,” U. Pa. Journal of Employment Law 9(2): 421-44 (2007).
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