"Essential Things Such as Typewriters": Development Discourse, Trade Union Expertise, and the Dialogues of Decolonization between the Caribbean and West Africa

Abstract:This article examines how the liberatory ideals of transnational projects could become codified in particular processes of thought, deed, and expression. During his term of service in Nigeria between 1960 and 1962 the Trinidadian union leader McDonald Moses mobilized a number of phenomena central to the transformative projects of the mid-twentieth century: the paramountcy of psychology to "true" transformation and change; the embrace of programmatic action; and the belief that both psychological transformation and programmatic action could be articulated through new and enlightened forms of expression. While histories that embrace a "cultural turn" tend to look for this expression in creative forms and artistic production, this article looks to daily administrivia as part of an explicitly political project that aimed to improve the lives of workers by changing their modes of organizing and, consequently, the culture of politics and labor.

the Cold War politics of the 1950s, the Trinidad trade union movement Moses was involved with faced a serious cleavage over this same question of affiliation. What is curious, however, is that very little of this expertise was mentioned-by Moses, by the ICFTU, or by his Nigerian colleagues-during his two and a half years of work in Nigeria between 1960 and 1962. Instead, Moses's gift for detailed reporting, his emphasis on dialogue and discussion to solve conflict, and the ways these combined in his obsession with process and professionalization were the crucial components of his transcontinental deployment.
McDonald Moses entered Nigeria as one of a retinue of "experts" installed in newly independent states, who would aid in the goal of modernizing and developing these societies-in-transition. These experts were not entirely new installations in society. 1 Indeed, the arrival of British West Indians in West Africa as civil servants, railway workers, and entrepreneurs was a common feature of British colonial rule throughout the first half of the twentieth century. 2 The late colonial period in British and French Africa involved an intensification of the role of European bureaucrats, academics, engineers, and technicians. Union leaders were one of this group of experts sent to the colonies in order to ensure that infrastructure and laborers alike functioned with as little disruption to the colonial system as possible. 3 Postcolonial states transitioned from this late colonial development paradigm only slightly: modernizing and developing society would now serve to solidify the state, the nation, and its citizens. Just as the "nation" is designed to "appear as the fulfilment of a 'project,'" plans to modernize new nation-states in the 1960s were often conceived as "packages" that would be rolled out through careful planning and implementation. 4 The propensity for independence-era political leaders to undertake large-scale modernization projects has generated a significant amount of scholarship. 5 State-led infrastructure projects were informed by "a spectrum of technocratic ideals," while state institutions sought to "recalibrate" the mind and body of Africans in order to make them good citizens. 6 This culture of expertise, wrapped in a development rationale, produced significant changes to how politics operated in both metropole and colony in the late colonial period. 7 After independence, former colonial civil servants populated the boardrooms and field sites of government aid organizations, international NGOs, and intergovernmental organizations. 8 Former British colonial service officers brought colonial-era rituals, ideas, and networks of people into the international development profession of the postcolonial era. 9 Conversely, the rise of the expert in decolonizing Britain, which came about through regimes of professionalization in state and nonstate institutions, has had a profound effect on where and how politics is practiced in the former metropole. 10 McDonald Moses's term of service in Nigeria mobilized a number of phenomena central to these transformative projects of the mid-twentieth century in decolonizing territories: the paramountcy of psychology to "true" transformation and change; the embrace of programmatic action; and the belief that both psychological transformation and programmatic action could be articulated through new and enlightened forms of expression. I want to examine daily administrivia as part of an explicitly political project that aimed to improve the lives of workers by changing their modes of organizing and, consequently, the culture of politics and labor. The international trade union movement, as one such nonstate organization, sought to ensure a prominent and fairly remunerated role for its allied workers in the project of modernization. It did so, in part, by placing value on languages and idioms of professionalization, the layout and tools of workplaces-as Moses once put it, the "essential things like typewriters"-as well as regular schedules and efficient reporting.
In his 1996 rumination on the nation-state and the turn toward "postnational social formations," Arjun Appadurai argues that we find nonterritorial social formations "organized around principles of finance, recruitment, coordination, communication and reproduction." 11 Yet if "the post colony [was] in part a discursive formation," Appadurai criticized the tendency "to divorce the study of discursive forms from the study of other institutional forms, and the study of literary discourses from the mundane discourses of bureaucracies, armies, private corporations, and non-state social organizations." 12 The mundane yet still performative and ideological aspects of trade union discourses can help to illuminate some of the idioms by which transnational networks channeled not just ideas but ways of being. Like others in this special issue, I find Dipesh Chakrabarty's articulation of a "dialogical side of decolonization" 13 productive because he locates this dialogical style of politics-which emerged from the circulation of people and ideas "beyond the boundaries of the nation-state"-in the developmentalist project that accompanied political independence.
Dialogue, however, often harnesses words and practices that do not necessarily have the same meaning for all participants. The fact that both Soviet and American modernization discourse harnessed the vocabulary of progress, efficiency, and psychological transformation provides a clear example of how ideology can undergird the meaning of the same words. As Rachel Leow shows in this special issue, ideological divides between "communist" and "democratic" trade unionism applied the same syllabus to describe and teach the mechanics of trade unionism. Often, only geographic references signaled the ideological difference. Whereas Cold War ideological alignment could change the meaning of the same words, class and race essentialism could also homogenize identities. As Andrew Zimmerman has shown with the case of Booker T. Washington's earlytwentieth-century Tuskegee cotton project in German Togoland, these essentialisms led to the imposition of oppressive laboring regimes, economies, and commodities in West Africa based on a transnational generalization of the category of "Negroes." 14 In other words, it was ideological interpretation and historical context that provided substantive meaning to the prosaic routine of twentiethcentury development projects. Understanding Moses's term in Nigeria between 1960 and 1962-how he engaged with events in Nigeria, how he acted out his role as ICFTU representative, and how he came to emphasize professionalization and communication-requires an approach that places not just the people but also the events of Trinidad and Nigeria into conversation. Such an approach reveals that despite the fact that Moses's background did not feature in ICFTU correspondence, his experience in colonial Trinidad defined his trade unionism and thus the vocabulary and practices he articulated. Pan-Africanism in the 1940s, as well as the Caribbean combination of anticolonial politics and labor revolts, gave specific meaning to Moses's discourse of trade unionist development.

The Expertise of a Caribbean Union Man
As an ICFTU representative, Moses entered Nigeria in 1960 in an "internationalist" capacity, as one foot soldier in the cause of the international labor movement. 15 Yet, from the beginning, Moses mapped his internationalism within a specific colonial, racial, and diasporic heritage. Less than two weeks after his arrival, Moses addressed the opening session of the First Annual Congress of the TUC(N) (Trade Union Congress of Nigeria). He took pains to remind his listeners that "like yourselves I have suffered and still suffer along with millions of my countrymen in the West Indies" who were "dragged away from West Africa . . . under the most humiliating and cruel conditions." 16 "I am of Africa. I love Africa. So when I work for Africa, I am fortified in the knowledge that I am working for myself and the rest of our brothers in the West Indies and the Americas. Nigeria's success is our success, and so I, along with millions of our African brothers, though away from our native homeland, take pride and rejoice in the accomplishments of our African sons and daughters in the Motherland." Moses's position as a descendant of African slaves returning to Africa differentiates him from other examples in this special issue. Unlike A. Philip Randolph in Burma, Moses was not, so he argued, unfamiliar or outside the context he addressed. Nor was Moses applying a global frame to an internal trade union debate, as Tom Mboya was in Kenya. This was a diasporic dialogue of decolonization. At the same time, Moses addressed this crowd in order to urge ICFTU affiliation. To do this he wove a chain from the agony of his own African heritage, to a global community forged by technology, to the solidarity of workers against the South African apartheid state's degradation of African humanity. In "this gigantic task" of African liberation, black workers needed allies. "One of the most significant development[s] of the mid-twentieth century is the growing awareness that no country . . . can go it alone." Because "scientific and technological advances have ushered in a period of interdependence among all peoples, Africa needs to be aware of this new concept and trend in human relations." The efforts of trade unionists to organize a consumer boycott of South African goods, Moses noted, exemplified this new trend. These "solid contributions to the cause of Africa's freedom" proved that the ICFTU "is a massive fortress for economic, social and political freedom for all peoples." Finally, Moses emphasized that ICFTU finances are derived "not from Governments, employers nor shady sources" but from voluntary contributions from workers around the world. 17 In other words, the ICFTU was not the state. It did not extract resources nor demand allegiance through coercion. And its allegiance was not ethnonational but class-oriented and global.
This last point was what made Moses a reliable ally for the ICFTU. Around the world, the ICFTU took its stand on the crucible of "free" and "democratic" trade unionism ostensibly outside political allegiance. In Nigeria and in other parts of Africa, this manifested itself in debates about the role of pan-Africanism in trade unionism. For those who tilted toward the ICFTU, pan-Africanism was positioned as a "temporary" or subsidiary salve. Most importantly, the TUC(N)'s new general secretary, L. L. Borha, argued that good trade unionists must resist the "political manipulation of trade unionism" at all costs. 18 During the months and years Moses spent in Nigeria after delivering his opening address to the Lagos Conference in April 1960, he focused on ICFTU affiliation and the development of "good trade unionism." Yet to skip too quickly over his initial proclamation of his identity as an African and a victim of colonialism would miss the fundamental rationale at work in his subsequent interpretations and advice in Nigeria. Within Moses's address to the TUC(N) are the components of the expertise he claimed, beyond being a loyal democratic trade unionist.
Moses's speech indicated to his audience that while he was "of Africa" he was also, put another way, of colonialism. He began by describing the joy he experienced from attending a congress of workers on the threshold of independence, in a historic moment where "her noble sons and daughters would before long shake off for all times the degrading and humiliating yoke and shackles of colonialism" and "enter the community of free, civilised and independent nations." Moses described how this degradation had been overcome through the "profound skill and good sense" of both leaders and "the millions of Nigerians." 19 In other words, this was not independence given but won.
Moses's interpretation of Nigeria in 1960 was interlaced with the lessons he learned through participation in major strike activity in Trinidad in 1937. These revolts, which started on the oilfields and spread to the sugar estates, municipalities, and public works, were, according to a 1941 article written by Moses, "a revolt by the masses against a rule of tyranny by the economic overlords. It was a mass revolt against worthless economic social and political conditions." 20 Moses declared triumphantly that "the Trinidad labor disturbances re-echoed throughout the West Indies-nay! through the civilised world." For Moses, the degradation of colonialism met the organization of workers, and organization led to success.
Out of all the chaos, a movement has been born. On all those islands . . . trade union organisations and political parties have sprung up . . . Collective bargaining has been attained within a given measure. Hours of work have been regulated in many instances. On many islands steps are being taken to introduce social legislations to ease the sufferings of the people. What is more, those Crown Colony Governments have been forced to modify their labor policies. Those die-hards of the regime of plantocracy have also modified their policy in dealing with workers. On the oilfields in Trinidad, workers who were formerly looked upon as a people with no right, are today respected. Those days of absolute authority, as exercised by the oil barons, have come to a close.
Trade unionism was not simply a tool for winning better wages or working conditions. It was the avenue out of colonialism. For Moses, workers in Trinidad in 1937 and in Nigeria in 1960 were not given their freedoms: the workers themselves, through careful planning and fraught negotiation, captured them.

Developing Good Trade Unionists: Placing the Caribbean and West Africa in Conversation
Developing good trade unionists became a key strategy of British colonial rule after the 1940s. Across the British Empire, the project to create "responsible" trade unions involved a mutually desired and advantageous partnership between the metropolitan Colonial Office and the British Trades Union Congress. Each metropolitan institution worked to secure a foothold in directing the grievance process to avoid spontaneous worker revolt. British Members of Parliament, Colonial Office officials, and TUC representatives used the language of "supervision and guidance," of "passage" from backwardness to more enlightened forms of organization, and of "efficient trade unions." In 1946 one colonial labor officer argued that trade unions should contribute "not only to the welfare of the population generally but also to the efficient execution of the development programmes." 21 This officer used "efficiency" twice in the same sentence. His language of "execution" and "programmes" embodied the mantra of routine and professionalization.
The colonial-era campaign to "remake" the African working class in British Africa, at its strongest in the period roughly between 1945 and 1960, aimed to incorporate a specific class of male African workers into a system of industrial relations. 22 Workers were enticed not only with jobs and wages but housing, diet, and single-unit familial life. In Nigeria, gendered distinctions of labor were exploited to justify racial discrimination in wage-setting. 23 This endeavor thus "focused unparalleled attention on almost all aspects of working-class life," in a process of remaking similar to that experienced by nineteenth-century English workers. 24 And as Gareth Curless has summarized, this reframing of the labor movement relied heavily on attention to discourse as a tool for transforming how Africans understood their labor and its role in society. 25 Far from being distinct to British African territory, this ethos and this program of remaking paralleled events in the Caribbean. Concern over what British officials called the "detribalization" of the African worker permeated reports about strikes in both Northern Rhodesia and the British West Indies in the second half of the 1930s. 26 Indeed, the major instrument for the shift in colonial development policy, the 1938 British West Indies (Moyne) Commission (which was a direct response to the revolts Moses described), set the precedent for concern over the psychology of the worker. This Royal Commission recommended the establishment of the Colonial Development and Welfare Office after some informants noted a "new attitude of mind" among the colonial working class in British Caribbean territory. Importantly, the British concern was not simply that Caribbean workers were more class conscious in Marxian terms. Rather, the report noted that black Caribbean workers were developing both class and racial consciousness-they were "proud of being African." 27 The impetus to direct trade union activity in British colonies thus began from a fear of both spontaneous worker organization and transnational solidarities among the diaspora communities that colonialism had created. For Nigerians, the development planning conducted by the London-based Colonial Development and Welfare Office resulted in a Ten-Year Plan of Development in 1946 and a subsequent five-year Integrated Development Programme in 1955. The Ten-Year Plan involved twenty-two broad schemes and was intentionally designed to oppose the Soviet-style model of five-year plans, which were under discussion by several elite Nigerians. 28 This section places key aspects of the labor history of both Trinidad and Nigeria alongside each other in order to outline how the British Caribbean and West Africa might be viewed in conversation in this period. This was by no means a completely parallel nor conscious conversation. But it animated McDonald Moses's term in Nigeria in important ways.
From the early 1900s, protests, strikes, and riots in the British Caribbean increasingly challenged the poor social, political, and economic conditions on these islands. At their strongest, these revolts were led by workers and their families in all dimensions of the economy, overcoming the divisions between the public and private sector, urban and rural, and industrial and plantation workers. As protests and strikes flared spasmodically across the decades to the 1940s, the British Caribbean also served as a prototype for transition in colonial labor organizing: from unaffiliated protest, to "associational" schemes by the 1920s, to organized labor activism in the form of trade unions in the 1930s, and eventually to labor-based political parties.
Trinidad and Tobago emerged at the forefront of strike action and union organizing. Major strikes across the island of Trinidad in June and July 1937 led to the formation of new unions. It is estimated that by 1938 about eight thousand workers were members of a union. Within less than a decade this number more than doubled, reaching twenty thousand unionized workers by 1947 and fifty thousand by 1957. 29 By far the strongest and most well-known union in Trinidad was the Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU). Adrian Cola Rienzi, who was also, importantly, president of the All Trinidad Sugar Estates and Factory Workers Trade Union, initially led the OWTU. McDonald Moses and John Rojas served as vice presidents, and Ralph Mentor served as assistant general secretary. 30 By the late 1940s the OWTU had about seven thousand members, making it, according to the London-based Trinidadian pan-Africanist George Padmore, the "most stable and best organized" union in Trinidad. As evidence, Padmore stated that when the OWTU began in 1937, oilfield workers earned seven to twenty-four cents an hour, depending on skill. By 1949 they earned from 30 to 50.5 cents an hour. It was also the "only labor group on the island to own a printing plant, with press and linotype, as well as its own building," and had offices in "strategic parts of the country." Observers in London seemed to agree with Padmore's characterization of the OWTU. According to British trade unionists, the OWTU was "generally considered the best run and most powerful trade union in Trinidad." 31 It was not simply that the OWTU was a well-oiled (pun intended) organizational machine. With its offices, weekly newspaper, and a leadership that claimed both union and elected political office experience, the union was a quintessential example of the confluence between politics and labor in the Caribbean region. This "labor-political nexus" was the space from which almost all political leaders in the Caribbean emerged, from the early part of the twentieth century through to 1960. 32 During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the development of what were generally termed "Working Men's Associations" provided the organizational ground for political leadership. These were the embryos of trade unions, which began to form more solidly in the labor rebellions of the 1930s. As elected office positions opened up across British Caribbean colonies, the leaders of labor movements often filled them.
Yet this was more than simply a case of individual leaders gaining their popular foothold and training through labor organizing. The nexus between labor and a politically minded populace was part of the historical fabric of Caribbean society, embedded in the exploitation of land and labor that was so fundamental to the founding of the modern Caribbean. African slave labor and the plantation system were essential not just for the region but for the development of modern capitalism. 33 The perpetuation of the plantation system through Asian indentured labor after the mid-nineteenth century solidified the system's reliance on cheap labor, the extraction of raw materials, and racial hierarchies that subordinated dark-skinned laborers and pitted workers against each other along complex and variable race and class lines. This system also operated in a dysfunctional and capricious interdependence between imperial trade interests and networks, colonial administration, and an island planter class. Challenges to any part of this system necessarily operated on multiple levels.
In May 1938, in a crucial alliance between oil and sugar workers, Moses also became the Treasurer of the All Trinidad Sugar Estates and Factory Workers Union. Moses's appointment was important for two reasons. First, since he was also vice president of the OWTU, this represented a real connection between industrial and agricultural workers. Second, it marked an important collaboration between the island's African-descended and Asian-descended populations, since the majority of sugar workers were from the Asian diaspora populations only recently freed from an indenture system that lasted until 1919. Moses's union work in Trinidad was thus practiced at the very heart of Afro-Asian solidarity. The historical markers of Afro-Asian solidarity as well as its location-as this special issue emphasizes-existed in a range of places outside the diplomatic sphere represented at Bandung in 1955. And trade unionism as a pathway out of colonialism involved an organized attempt to overcome racial divides established through colonial policy.
Moses extended his Afro-Asian political work in Trinidad when he began a regular column in the weekly workers' newspaper the Vanguard in 1946. Moses's column, "Africa Speaks," announced a new postwar politics and ran, with the island's racial history firmly in mind and with a clear intent to build solidarity between the island's majority Asian and African-descended workers, beside another new column by E. Irving Lakshmana, "Voice of India." In his introductory article, Moses declared his purpose: "If there was ever a time when it was urgent for Africans at home and overseas to keep abreast of the struggles and progress of their fellow-men, that time is now! It is in the hope of speaking to a Trinidad public about conditions and deeds of Negroes in other parts of the world that I have decided to contribute a weekly column." 34 His first article focused on the history of Kenya and the encroachment of white settlers onto Kikuyu land. His second article praised the recent defiance of Nigerian workers during the June 1945 general strike, the growing strength of the Nigerian Trades Union Congress, and their "swell" efforts to achieve "a degree of solidarity hitherto unknown in African native affairs" by forming a West African Trades Union Congress. 35 Many of Moses's weekly columns were reprints of resolutions and petitions from organizations like the UK-based Pan-African Congress in 1945; clippings from the United States Workers' Party organ, Labor Action; or the pamphlets of the Fabian Colonial Bureau. Yet within the bulk of Moses's clippings, some rhetorical themes and ideological positions emerged. In their respective columns on September 14, 1946, Lakshmana and Moses covered the leadership that Indian and African diaspora organizations had taken in opposing South African claims on South West Africa. Lakshmana covered the government of India's economic boycott of the union, launched in July 1946, while Moses recounted the publicity and protest campaigns maintained since the 1930s by London-based African diaspora groups such as the International African Service Bureau. Moses identified the "millions of suffering Africans as well as other colonial peoples" as the litmus test for world peace, and positioned the South African government as the nexus point in this trial: "Their record of treatment to Africans, Indians and Asiatic peoples within the South African union is a lamentable history of human misery and exploitation, and of worthless native administration in the interest of a white ruling minority." 36 Moses's and Lakshmana's coverage of protest against South Africa in 1946 and 1947 was, of course, a tiny example of what is now recognized as one of the first major postwar global campaigns led from the "global South." 37 What is important, here, is Moses's mobilization of worthlessness and misery, the discourse of shame and desolation associated with imperialism and the ineffectual, unproductive character of white governance in South Africa. Moses's language contrasted the poverty of white minority rule in South Africa with the productive power of Indian and African-led protests around the world.
Finally, Moses's journalism employed a vocabulary of action and coordination. In the Vanguard's issue of October 5, 1946, Moses and Lackshmana toasted the establishment of the Interim Government of India. "The African world," Moses announced, "salute the nationalist leaders and India's teeming millions for their heroism, constant toil and sacrifice," which had served, for more than half a century, as "the vanguard in the struggle against imperialism and for freedom of all colonials." Now "Africans at home are on the march, they are organising the masses of Africa, conducting agitation, strikes and other revoluntary [sic] acts." In the face of widespread protest in Asia, Africa, and the United States, Moses rallied West Indians to "contribute their quota." They "have several natural advantages which must be utilised in the service of African freedom. I venture to suggest that the time for action in direction is now." 38 It is no coincidence that Moses's October 1946 column combined a transnational global frame with the discourse of racial unity, service, organizing, and action. Moses's journalism was a discursive form of organizing that was, as he emphasized, intentionally directed toward racial unity and service. In September 1945, he served as a delegate to the Barbados Labor Conference and produced a series of articles for the Vanguard about this landmark event. The meeting in Barbados inaugurated the Caribbean Labor Congress (CLC) and boasted attendance by almost all of the major labor leaders from each island of the British West Indies. The CLC also aimed to expand and include the Dutch West Indies and Puerto Rico, although this goal was largely unrealized. 39 Moses's reports from the event proved a dedicated exercise in detail. Beyond what the reader may have initially expected, he offered a didactic presentation of in depth information in order that readers "may appreciate . . . [the sacrifice] of the few for the good of many." 40 In addition to Moses's purposeful reporting from the CLC inaugural conference, which was a major initiative toward regional cooperation, he also served as a delegate to the World Peace Conference in Paris in 1949. 41 This gave him a front row seat to the growing Cold War divide. From Paris, Moses submitted another series of articles in which he emphasized the planning and preparation that went into the conference. Moses made special note of the physical logistics of the venue and the technology used to facilitate simultaneous translation in five languages. When some delegates were unable to attend because they were stranded in Prague, he made note that a second congress was organized to endorse and forward resolutions to Paris. 42 These articles were infused with precise information, technical description, and scrupulous detail. Moses explained to his readers that all this detail might bore them, but his purpose was to provide them with as much information as possible so that they could see how labor leaders planned and calculated for the best possible results. Moses summed up his approach to journalism when he selected and reprinted in "Africa Speaks" a poem by the Nigerian D. C. Osadebay.
Who buys my thought Buys not a cup of honey That's sweet to every taste; He buys the throb, Of Young Africa's soul . . . Of restless youths who are born Into deep and clashing cultures, Sorting, questioning, watching . . . 43 Moses's "Africa Speaks" column in the 1940s demonstrates his direct engagement with the labor struggles and politics of West Africa decades before he arrived in Nigeria. This Africa was pulsing, "throbbing" with contestation and contemplation. This was an inquisitive Africa whose thoughts were neither facile nor genial. Like Moses's style of journalism, Osadebay's Africa was "watchful" in a purposeful, "sorting" manner. When Moses arrived in Nigeria, he would apply this sorting and ordering in an attempt to reorder the minds and the practices of his Nigerian comrades.
McDonald Moses's arrival in Nigeria was a direct result of Cold War competition between the WFTU and the ICFTU. This competition between two rival international trade union organizations did not simply splinter unions; it shaped the temper and the lexicon of worker organization in profound ways. From whether and how unions got funding, to how they accessed information and news, to the composition of membership and leadership, the question of affiliation became a key driver for the vocabulary and, consequently, the philosophy of labor organizers. Jockeying for affiliates and influence was "more concentrated" in Africa than in any other part of the world during the 1950s and 1960s. The years between 1955 and 1970 in Africa were a period of "massive and sustained extra-African intervention" in trade unionism. 44 This story played itself out with particular ferocity in West Africa. In 1957 the ICFTU sought to leverage Ghanaian independence by holding its first regional conference for Africa in Ghana, with an ICFTU Executive Board member, Ghana TUC leader John Tettegah, as chairman. Never a puppet, Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah also sought to take advantage of the country's momentum as a leader in African independence. In December 1957 Ghana hosted the first All-African Peoples Conference, which set up the All-African Peoples' Organization under the chairmanship of Kenyan ICFTU leader Tom Mboya (for more on Mboya, see the paper by Gerard McCann in this special issue). Yet the politics of Cold War "affiliation" and pan-African unity quickly complicated these proceedings. The AAPO called for a purely African trade union organization, severed from other labor internationals. This call mirrored the requirement for disaffiliation set out by the Union G en erale des Travailleurs d'Afrique Noire (UGTAN), a French West African labor federation inaugurated in January 1957 with Guinean leader Ahmed S ekou Tour e as a key player. Following this mantra then, Ghana cut its ties with the ICFTU in 1958 to join its pan-African partner, Guinea (formalized in the Ghana-Guinea Union announced in November 1958), in the UGTAN.
Ghanaian newspapers began publishing frequent items unfavorable to Tom Mboya, and Tettegah traveled to Kenya to set up and finance a splinter labor organization there. Splinter unions, financed through the Ghanaian Bureau of African Affairs, were set up in other areas, including one in Nigeria under the leadership of Michael Imoudu. 45 This was, largely, the impetus for sending McDonald Moses to Nigeria in 1960. During his briefing in London on his way to Nigeria, Marjorie Nicholson of the British TUC informed Moses that while "tribal feuds, politics, struggle for leadership . . . competition for office" were factors, they were merely secondary causes of the Nigerian trade union splintering. The primary cause was the "international affiliation of the TUC(N)." 46 And the ICFTU viewed Nigerian affiliation as a litmus test. For "although there were other countries in the world as important as Nigeria," ICFTU General Secretary Omer Becu concluded, "this was surely the country to concentrate on at present. The international free trade union movement had to ensure that what had happened in Ghana did not happen there." 47 The problem was that Nigerian trade union disaffiliation from the ICFTU was precisely what appeared to be on the horizon. Nigeria shared with Trinidad a similar trajectory of labor union development, although radicalization occurred largely during the war years rather than the late 1930s. The worldwide depression hit Nigeria's economy hard, with dire social and economic consequences to already low wages and living standards. Conditions were compounded by large migration from rural communities to urban centers in these same years, straining the urban infrastructure and increasing rental rates at the same time that wages were actually dropping. 48 A few unions, like the white-collar Nigerian Union of Teachers and the Railway Workers Union, emerged in the early 1930s. After 1940, the Railway Union radicalized under its new president, Michael Imoudu, and led strikes in 1941 and 1942. These strikes resulted in the government introduction of a small cost of living allowance (COLA), which attempted to alleviate the effects of wartime inflation. Imoudu quickly became seen as an agitator. In 1943, he was dismissed from his job with the Nigerian Railway and placed in detention under war legislation for two years. 49 Between 1940 and 1944 membership in trade unions rose more than sixfold. TUCN leaders, including President T. A. Bankole, A. S. Coker, M. A Tokunbo, and Obafemi Awolowo, attempted to negotiate with the colonial government with little success. After the governor rejected a protest letter in March 1945 demanding a minimum wage and increase to the COLA, a more radical group took over TUCN leadership, including the recently released Michael Imoudu. On June 21, 1945, workers declared a general strike. The strike enveloped large parts of the colony and lasted forty-four days in Lagos, garnering significant international and especially pan-African attention. However, soon after the strike, the TUCN disintegrated into two factions based on strategic disagreements and personality clashes, one led by Imoudu and his allies and one led by T. A. Bankole. A pattern of splitting and regrouping followed throughout the 1950s, exacerbated by government initiatives to train labor and industrial officers, to urge affiliation to the ICFTU rather than the WFTU, and to encourage leaders the government deemed pro-Western, such as A. B. O. Cole and L. L. Borha. Both Borha and Cole would work with Moses upon his arrival in 1960. 50 In April 1960, with political independence announced for that coming October, two conferences took place. The first occurred in Kano on April 20 under the auspices of the TUC(N). The second conference began in Lagos on April 21 and announced the newly formed NTUC (Nigerian Trade Union Congress). The Kano conference of the TUC(N) immediately adopted a motion to expel its current president, Imoudu, while the Lagos conference elected Imoudu as its president. This latest splintering was the "reopen[ing] of old wounds," since the TUC(N) had only formed in March 1959 when the All-Nigeria Trade Union Federation (ANTUF) and the National Council of Trade Unions of Nigeria (NCTUN) agreed to merge. 51 At the conference, an apparently unclear merger document confirmed TUC(N) affiliation with the ICFTU, although some claimed they did not agree to this. Within this context, in August 1959, TUC(N) President Imoudu traveled to East Germany, Moscow, and Peking. Upon his return, he advocated accepting funds from both the WFTU and the ICFTU. Rumors also swirled that Tettegah had entered Nigeria clandestinely and was distributing funds to rival trade unionists. 52 To prevent "another Ghana" and to ensure that the TUC(N) developed good trade unionism within the fold of the democratic free trade union movement, the ICFTU turned first to another Trinidadian, John Rojas. 53 Rojas, who was elected with Moses in 1937 to serve as co-vice presidents of the OWTU, was slotted in 1960 to serve as a diplomatic representative for Nigeria's independence ceremony in October. The plan was that Rojas would stay for an additional two months to observe and advise. Rojas's politics had undergone important shifts in the bifurcated political climate prompted by the Cold War. For example, in 1946 Rojas characterized "The history of British Imperialism in the West Indies" as "a history of murder, suicide, inadequate hospital facilities, wage slavery, bad housing and frustration." The "wealth and material resources of Trinidad have been taken to the United Kingdom," while "the British Trade Union Federation has never opened its arms to us." 54 In 1953, Rojas was still one of several CLC radicals, along with Ferdinand Smith, John La Rose, Quintin O'Connor, and Richard Hart, who were banned from entering British Guiana by the colonial administration because they were believed to be "communists." The CLC at this time, however, was also in the midst of an ideological debate pushed to the surface, in part, by the question of whether to affiliate with the WFTU or the ICFTU. By 1953, when Rojas was still considered part of the CLC's radical "communist" element, the CLC was already effectively finished. Those who preferred the ICFTU path participated in CADORIT, the American regional organization of the ICFTU. And in 1960, the Caribbean Congress of Labor (CCL), an organization that Moses had a "close interest" in, held its founding congress in Grenada. 55 By 1960, Rojas was no longer on the "communist" side of the Cold War equation. Instead, he was a vice president of the CIA-backed International Federation of Petroleum Workers. 56 Pressing matters in Trinidad kept Rojas from actually traveling to Nigeria. 57 He was still president of the OWTU, and workers were agitating for strike action that he did not fully endorse. In the early part of 1960, Trinidad also throbbed with debate about the US-controlled Chaguaramas military base. Military bases were a contentious issue across the decolonizing world in the late 1950s and early 1960. It is worth noting that just as Trinidadians debated the United States' presence on their island, Nigerians divided over the Anglo-Nigerian Defense Pact. This bill, which allowed British troops to use the Kano and Lagos airfields and the harbors of Lagos and Port Harcourt, passed through the new Nigerian Parliament in November 1960 but was abrogated in 1962 after fierce opposition by youth and student unions. 58 In Trinidad, the well-known intellectual and political organizer C. L. R. James spearheaded opposition to continued US sovereignty over Chaguaramas and the failure of Britain to equally include Trinidad in negotiations about the base. James had returned to his native Trinidad in 1958 to join Eric Williams's People's National Movement (PNM) and to edit the party's newspaper, the Nation. In April 1960, the PNM orchestrated a public March for Chaguaramas, and the party amplified its antiimperial rhetoric. In June 1960, in the midst of these tumultuous national and international debates, the OWTU called the first official strike in its history, halting the operations of Texaco, Shell, and BP. At the same time, internal conflict within the PNM over Chaguaramas drew an irrevocable line between James and Williams. The Fourth Party Convention attacked James and his handling of the party newspaper, and James resigned as editor within months and withdrew his party membership within the year. Williams began to back away from his criticism of the British handling of the Chaguaramas issue, publicly declaring that Trinidad was "historically, geographically and economically" part of the West. Williams now warned that "communists and fellow travellers" would not find in him an ally. 59 Meanwhile, the oilfield workers won a 22 percent wage increase and a reduction in work week hours, but Rojas's reputation suffered. 60 With Rojas decisively occupied for all of 1960, the ICFTU looked elsewhere.
These heated debates formed the direct frame of reference for Moses's arrival in Nigeria. En route to Lagos, Moses stopped in London for briefing sessions with British trade unionists, including the general secretary of the British TUC, Sir Vincent Tewson. In addition to discussing the Nigerian situation, Tewson "showed a lively interest in developments in the West Indies" and worked to co-opt Moses's loyalty by reminding him of how the "direct assistance" of the British TUC had "completely rehabilitated" the Sugar Workers' Union of Trinidad and Guiana. 61 Moses informed Tewson that Rojas had become the "main target for [the] venomous anti-free trade union attacks" of the PNM and detailed the work of C. L. R. James as editor of the Nation. James's support for Ghana at the time meant that Moses read the trade union situation in West Africa through current clashes between the Trinidad trade union movement and the nationalist goals of Williams, James, and the PNM. According to Moses, James was "very much enamoured with the subservient policy of the Government of the Ghana TUC. He expressed to me personally . . . in resolute terms that Rojas and those who follow his lead must be destroyed at any cost." 62 The co-option of Ghanaian trade unionism into Nkrumah's state crossed the Atlantic and resonated directly in Trinidad's politics.
In Moses's eyes, James's nationalist fidelity contravened a commitment to the autonomy of trade unions outside of party affiliation. In reality, the gap that Moses alluded to between his own politics and that of C. L. R. James was much more complex than he represented to Tewson in London. James did not pledge allegiance to the nation-state in Trinidad. As we have seen, he broke with the PNM not long after Moses left for Nigeria. James's close working relationship with the OWTU in the later 1960s and with the opposition Workers and Farmers Party confirmed that his political allegiance was not to any state writ large but, rather, firmly on the side of workers justice and organization. Nevertheless, Moses's report to colleagues in London shows that he entered Nigeria in 1960 determined to avoid any attempt to "strip" the trade union movement "of its freedom and independence, and to subordinate it to the aims and policy of the Party," as he believed was occurring in Trinidad. 63 In personality and organizational approach, Moses could not have contrasted more strongly with the headstrong Imoudu, the Nigerian trade union leader at the heart of the trade union splintering in 1960. In many respects their personality and organizational approach existed at opposite ends of the spectrum. Imoudu, known for a pattern of appealing to the rank-and-file above the heads of leadership, was known as a "headstrong, militant, unrepentant leader." In both the moderate and radical sections of the Nigerian labor movement, Imoudu came to be seen as unreliable. Moses, on the other hand, joined the trade union movement in the 1930s because he believed it to be the best means of "properly organis[ing]" workers in order to "command respect." 64 He ran several bids for election onto the Legislative Council in the 1940s, but he did not make his name in elected politics. Moses was first and foremost a union man.
Yet in this last respect, the careers of both Moses and Imoudu bear remarkable comparison. Both emerged as leaders of trade unions within a few years of each other-Moses in the Oilfield Workers Trade Union in 1937 and Imoudu in the Nigerian Railway Workers Union and the cost of living allowance marches of 1941. Each had attained above-average levels of education, with Imoudu attaining a Standard VI that qualified him for work as a clerk, while Moses attended the University of London. 65 Both participated in labor movements that took major steps toward coupling worker demands with political demands. Both men's political consciousness emerged from their experience of racism by white foremen and managers in their respective industries. 66 Finally, both men are part of a group of "colonial unionists" who did not transfer their popular base into political office in the new nation-state that followed colonial rule. In the 1970s, sociologist Robin Cohen differentiated this particular group of men who hailed from the Caribbean and all the regions of Africa, arguing that "in the thrust of their politics [they provided] a far more salient challenge to colonialism than the big names (

Discourses of Development
After two months in the country, Moses's assessment of his Nigerian comrades was that while they were "zealous trade unionists," they were "extremely poor administrators with no idea whatever of the most elementary principles of economy in the use of scarce material." He argued that "because of a deep-seated individualism which appears to dominate their personality, they are slow to adjust themselves to the needs of collective activity which is basic to trade union organisation." After all, Moses opined, "people are conditioned by their environment, and in the present stage of development in territories like Nigeria where there is no tradition, experience and training in the type of organised activity with which we are concerned, this kind of teething trouble which is being experienced is inevitable." 68 Despite these deficiencies, Moses counteracted his essentialist assessment of his Nigerian colleagues by concluding that their zeal was "in abundance" and, most importantly, they had the "intellectual equipment" required to tackle the task at hand.
The principle that individuals are "conditioned by their environment" was the theoretical backbone of the project to make good trade unionists. Indeed, in many respects we can identify this principle as a driving logic for Cold War activity: it was central to both the liberal modernization theorists of the 1960s and to their alternate, Marxist-Leninist schooled planners. Moses's assessment of his Nigerian colleagues disregarded the heritage of worker organization in Nigeria, the existence of experienced trade union leaders in the movement he was attempting to cooperate with, as well as the training of some of these individuals in both colonial and communist training programs in London and Moscow. 69 Indeed, his journalism in Trinidad in the 1940s already proved that he himself took inspiration from the mass organization evident in the Nigerian General Strike of 1945. Yet Moses's blind spot was tempered by his inclusion of a subjective "type" of activity "with which we are concerned." This begs the question: what type of activity, exactly, was the international free trade union movement concerned with?
Moses's early assessment of the TUC(N) inventoried fourteen key "faults" within the "internal machinery" of the TUC(N). These included: the "complete absence of plan or programme for action"; breakdown in internal communication facilitated by "primitive" means of communication; failure to divide labor efficiently; and failure to supervise or assign work efficiently. The last fault resulted from the "appalling" state of general administration with "Records of finance, of minutes and conferences, of correspondence, and of membership accounts etc. . . . not systematically kept." 70 The activity of trade unionism, in other words, hinged upon discursive efficiency, mechanically and systematically applied using modern technology.
When Moses arrived in Nigeria, he also completed a comprehensive report of the ICFTU's Lagos office. This covered staff efficiency, salaries, and a detailed physical description of the office ("The upper floor is divided into six good size rooms leaving a passage in the centre . . .") and its contents. 71 He concluded that the stenographer was "not attentive and painstaking in the execution of his work," which meant that Moses's work "suffered both in output and quality." Moses placed the utmost importance on finding a good reliable typist whom he could trust, especially because of the confidential nature of his work and the atmosphere of insecurity. The office and vehicle were burgled during the first two months of his tenure, and he resolved to conduct his business with his typist mostly from his hotel and to keep all documents there, rather than in the office. 72 The standard of the typist and printing equipment were clearly central to the work Moses believed was required. His physical check of the office showed most necessary items were present, but the office was missing Linguaphone Records, a Gestetner Duplicator, and some books. 73 Moses therefore resolved to purchase a photocopier, especially to copy and send newspapers and articles from Ghanaian newspapers and the Information Bulletin of the Ghana TUC. 74 "Essential things like typewriters, duplicators, office furniture and equipment as well as the services of trained and experienced trade unionists should be made available to individual unions with a view to assisting them to develop their potentialities." Moses's approach "stemmed from a belief that National Trade Union Centres could only become strong and effective . . . when the affiliated units are themselves strong, stable and effective." Moses believed these items to be essential since he insisted that development must be built "from the bottom upwards, which was the only guaranteed method to achieve strength, stability and a movement which was capable of endurance." 75 Endurance, Moses believed, emerged from an organic movement from the bottom up. It could only survive by using "efficient" tools for communication and dialogue. His emphasis on efficiency applied not only to the use of modern equipment but also to systematic reporting practices and clearly delineated plans of action. "The real trouble with our affiliate the TUC(N) is their inability to act collectively, and their hopeless administration . . . They have never yet sat down to draw up a plan of action, and to sketch out the lines along which they want the TUC(N) to develop." When Moses arrived in Lagos, he set out a long memorandum, but his Nigerian comrades "simply copied this . . . and have presented it as their 'plan.'" After a year in Nigeria, Moses expressed exasperation at what he saw as a lack of organization and reporting. 76 He implored his TUC(N) colleagues to submit reports, reminding them that they needed to submit progress reports on activities and finance one month before the beginning of each quarterly interval, when the quarterly sum of allocated funds from the ICFTU would be authorized. But these were only submitted after repeated "prodding and urging." 77 Indeed, even this prodding did not seem to work. In August 1961 Moses noted that his refusal to pay out their quarterly budget until they submitted a report did not seem to have its desired effect. "It is about two months past due. They do not even have lights, for the bill has not been paid. They are being very stubborn about this and to my knowledge they still have not sent in the report." 78 In contrast to this inefficiency, Moses supplied regular and detailed reports to the ICFTU Head Office. From the internal communication in Brussels, it is clear that Moses's reliable reporting was one of-if not the most-important qualities that made him an expert trade unionist. His reports were ordered into neat sub-sections with "salient points" catalogued in sequential order. Most importantly, these reports were reflective, orderly, organized and thoughtful. Moses emphasized that the passage of time could help facilitate a "complete" grasp of the situation (he used this word in two consecutive sentences). And as the passage of time opened up the "true forms" of patterns in the country's labor situation, Moses's lengthy "detail"-especially in his intentional repetition of information he acknowledged the Brussels office already knew-was intended to "expand and to clarify" but also to give "depth" to "the closer reality" of these "evolving patterns." His careful manufacture of "more reliable material" would serve as the basis "for future guidance and for the determination of policy." 79 The Psychology of Dialogue: Winning the "Long Battle" through Patterns of Behavior As interlocutor and translator for the ICFTU, Moses believed that his vigilantly tabulated reports uncloaked the "real issues," which were "often obscured by dark mists of confusion and complication." 80 His emphasis on discursive transformation was tied to a belief that attitudes, habits, and practices required deep excavation over time. In The Wretched of the Earth, first published while Moses was stationed in Nigeria and based on extensive work for the Algerian liberation struggle, Frantz Fanon identified the "frequent existence of a time lag, or a difference of rhythm" between the leaders of political or trade-union organizations and the rank and file. While Fanon criticized the "fetish of organisation" that would "often take precedence over a reasoned study of colonial society," he argued that the failure of trade unions to establish links with the peasantry during the anticolonial period would prove the "anachronistic nature of their programs." 81 In other words, trade unions would prove themselves out-of-time with the population because they had not built the right relationships and because they had not adequately understood the historical and social relations of the most vulnerable and down-trodden members of society. Fanon's valorization of the peasantry meant that, for him, the "reasoned study" of society was unequivocally focused on appreciating the peasantry. This was, for him, how the "time lag" and rhythmic dissonance would be overcome. Moses was also concerned that trade unions would prove out-of-time with the population. But rather than focus on studying the peasantry, he hoped to open up the patterns of society through detailed reporting, allowing union leadership to match the rhythm of Nigeria's labor pattern by observing ("watching," "sorting") and recording the changes within the Nigerian labor movement.
Moses's repeated assessment of the situation in Nigeria was that "[i]ndecision, un-co-ordinated efforts, absence of proper communications at all levels in the trade union hierarchy, poor administration and general inefficiency, void of carefully thought out programme, lack of system and individual methods of approach, personal rivalry which stems from deep-rooted individualistic traits" were the main factors impeding progress in the TUC(N). Under these circumstances, it would be "impossible to produce one set formula to solve so complicated a case where a chain of interacting forces are simultaneously at work." Organizing a multistaged plan of action, systematically analyzed and pursued, was therefore crucial. The first stage, for Moses, was to gain people's confidence before moving to the second stage of "direct[ing] endeavour towards reorientation in the thinking of the people concerned. There are many old habits of thought and behavior which are deep-rooted. These must be modified, and if possible, replaced by new attitudes before real changes can take place in the field of practical endeavour." Moses conceded that common knowledge confirmed that adults do not change their established habits easily and certainly not when imposed from above. He therefore "employ[ed] the method of gentle persuasion and suggestion with a view to effecting the required changes in outlook and performance." 82 Moses's assessment unfolded a developmental psychological progression from worldview to action. Changing behavior (which would then serve as the root for appropriate labor organizing) meant changing the mind. This meant changing how people oriented their social worldview: how they related their own individuality to other human actors. During the early independence period in Africa, the notion of "cooperation" functioned on several different registers: cooperative modes of production, cooperative institutions for organizing primary producers, fraternal internationalist cooperation (organized through nonstate movements like trade unionism or pan-Africanism), and a cooperative "attitude" to social life that entailed orienting individuals to transcend their individuality for group well-being. Working alongside these contemporary African modes of cooperation, Moses emphasized standardized, efficient reporting that would facilitate group communication and thus a cooperative social worldview.
Yet Moses also took seriously the factors that divided the Nigerian workers' movement. He noted "the usual strains and stresses common to all forms of group interaction" but emphasized that the two factions in the Nigerian trade union movement "stand irrevocably apart on all fundamental principles" that "are not superficially held." 83 An experienced mediator from his years in Trinidad, Moses was able to look seriously at the disagreements between Imoudu's breakaway union and the TUC(N) and see that each group held "fully crystalised [sic] ideas and sentiments which condition the attitude and behaviour of the parties." The task of uniting these different groups, Moses believed, was not one for a laissez-faire policy since it was "a struggle for the survival of the fittest, for the triumph, in the long run, of either of the two fundamental principles and beliefs." 84 Moses's belief that overcoming ideological difference required a long battle pinpoints why reporting, ordered writing, and thinking were so crucial to his project. Orderly reporting and planning provided solid tangible resources for navigating change across time. "There is of course nothing like a permanent or static situation in group life, hence things are bound to change one way or another in the course of time. In the circumstances, one must remain alert and sensitive to the changes which are bound to arise sooner or later." 85 Given what we know of Moses's trade union work and his journalism in Trinidad, this assessment was not arrived at from a rote theory of industrial organizing. This was not solely the mechanical application of learned trade union principles. It came from listening to the experience of Nigerians and applying his own knowledge of union organizing in Trinidad. Over the decades in Trinidad, Moses observed shifts in allegiance, group organizing, and ideological orientation. For the ICFTU, Moses's expertise may have been in discursive practices, but this was by no means the whole story-he did not enter Nigeria an empty vessel. Moses's statement at the founding of the oilfield workers union in Trinidad in 1937 and his journalism in the 1940s show that for him, the practices of organization, process, unity, and mediation were key to the material and political freedoms Trinidad workers had won. Dialogue and discourse were the crucial components of Moses's expertise in Nigeria because of his interpretation of how these had functioned in colonial Trinidad. His concern with being "alert to changes" led to an emphasis on documentation but especially habits and practices.
The vocabulary of efficiency, of plans and programs systematically executed-words all deployed by Moses in his reports-have today become ubiquitous in the assessment of international and nongovernmental organizations. Indeed, this is no less true for evaluative frameworks for governmentality and state "failure" in the "developing" world more generally. Since the 1980s, when development shifted its purpose from nation-state building to "civil society," the culture of expertise and professionalization has only expanded. 86 How did we get here? As Greg Mann has recently shown for French West Africa, the opening up of civic space to nongovernmental organizations came from unexpected groups, and colonial and postcolonial intellectuals shaped understandings of community and citizenship in unintended ways. 87 The example of McDonald Moses in Nigeria shows that the "fetish of organisation" apparent in development discourse did not derive solely from ideology but, rather, from a blend of ideological principles, colonial experiences, and transnational conversation. The creative cultural production of decolonization sits unconventionally alongside this other, banal, dialogue of decolonization. But it was in the realm of the tedious, the prosaic, and the routine where transnational dialogue was often activated as a tool for historical and social transformation.

Endnotes
This article was written during a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their support. I want to thank Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis, who have provided excellent leadership and steering of this research project and to the wonderful team of collaborators on this special issue. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for comments on the article, particularly for the framing of "diaspora dialogues of decolonization." Address correspondence to Leslie James, Queen Mary University of London, School of History, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS. Email: leslie. james@qmul.ac.uk.