We Are All Slaves: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery, Nigeria (Social History of Africa)

This book documents an important, but understudied, sector of a West African working class. The coal miners of the Enugu Government colliery became nationalist icons for many Nigerians following a colonial government massacre of striking miners in 1949. Carolyn Brown argues that the experiences of these miners deserve to be studied as something more than appendages to the political history of the birth of the Nigerian nation. Through the lens of gender, race, and class, she documents the tumultuous history of the Enugu miners and reveals how they developed characteristics of self-awareness and class-consciousness similar to those of their Western counterparts in British or North American mines.