On May 18, 1916, the newly appointed Governor-General of British Southern Cameroon sent an urgent telegraph to Nigeria seeking 2,000 workers. The memo was sent with such urgency that many District Officers failed to mention the Governor General’s preference for southeasterners—who were tested agriculturalists, and whose populations were overwhelmingly Christian—and Hausa, Yoruba, Ibibio and Igbo men disembarked in large numbers at Victoria. The Hausa were not desired, as they were pastoralists and Muslim; and in 1906, had led the Satiru rebellion against the British. The Secretary of the Southern Province thus worked to recruit an additional 600 Igbo workers and promised to send more. These migrants hailed from Mbaise, the wider Owerri Province, and Calabar Province, which at 1,000 people per square mile was the most densely populated region in West Africa; and competition for land, work, and wages pushed young Igbo men to take part in out-migration beyond the traditional confines of Igboland. British Southern Cameroon, in contrast, was sparsely populated: with 200-300 people per square mile. The initial cohort of 600 Igbo men represented the beginning of a circulatory migration pattern that spanned the history of Southern Cameroon’s amalgamation with Nigeria and would have profound socio-economic and political consequences. My dissertation explores the history of this migration between 1916 and 1975, and expands traditional historical perspectives on masculinity, wage accumulation, and family ties, by showing how these developed among an Igbo population who, while indigenous to Nigeria, became strangers in Southern Cameroon.
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