Workers to Soldiers: Coerced Labor and Conscription in Spanish Guinea and Eastern Nigeria, 1930-1970

This article connects two forms of compulsion which are seldom considered together in studies of war and society. These are the experience of coerced migrant labor, and the experience of being a soldier. Eastern Nigerians, and especially members of the Igbo ethnic group, were subjected to these two distinct forms of coerced in the l960s, which to many of the men who experienced them were related to one another. Recruitment for agricultural labor on the island of Fernando Po in Spanish Guinea between the 1930s and 1960s and recruitment into the army of the secessionist Republic of Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) were contemporaneous with one another, and they Followed similar patterns of violence and arbitrariness. Considering these two episodes in eastern Nigeria's history in one frame suggests that, to those involved, the line between military service and coerced labor was indistinct.