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. They operated almost exclusively with an excess of language and money-deceit and informal advances. Recruiters tended to appear in a modality that I will describe and theorize as ‘touts’. 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.
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