“Where There Is Freedom, There Is No State”: Abolition as a Forgery

This paper outlines the geography and networks of indentured labor recruitment, conditions of plantation and lumbering labor, and property repatriation practices of Nigerian British-subjects inveigled into “unfree” migrant “wage-labor” in Spanish Fernando Po and French Gabon in the first half of the twentieth century. African labor recruiters and smugglers appropriated European imperial abolitionist discourse representing “Spanish Guinea” as “a refuge from slavery” and used deception and forged permits to circumvent colonial surveillance, thereby, transforming colonial borders into cosmopolitan borderlands. In pursuit of freedom and economic uplift, migrants themselves reinforced illegal trans-colonial migration, forced labor systems, and transnational networks that shaped imperial capitalism. Their agencies and experiences clarify how abolitionism expanded forced labor and unfreedom, and broaden our understanding of global Black unfreedom after the end of trans-Atlantic slavery. Because monopolies and forced labor, instead of free trade and free labor underpinned European imperialism in post-abolition West Africa, Africans interfaced with colonial states through forgery and illicit mobilities, and subjugated others to survive and thrive.