that barred them from carving out their lives in the image of their idealized imaginaries. Without doubt, the Nigerian seamen recruited by the British shipping industry in the 1950s entered a world of colonial hierarchies and biases, a hostile landscape of intersecting geographies of race, class, gender, and nation that converged on and limited the opportunities seamen had for navigating transnational spaces at their own will. Decolonization did not improve Nigerian seamen’s standing abroad. On the contrary, the 1960s and 1970s were marked by increasing hostility toward the presence of former colonial subjects in England in particular, and Africans faced increasing restrictions on their movement and settlement in the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, in their testimonies, Nigerian seamen celebrated transnational migrations as potential opportunities for unrestricted agency and freedom. Journeys beyond Nigerian borders were sometimes harsh confrontations with multiple methods of exclusion in both the colonial and the postcolonial eras, but they also held the potential for reaching new social and economic horizons. Seamen’s ability to circumvent or overcome exclusionary or racist practices and policies began with their capacity for imagining and then implementing countering strategies. Here, Charles Taylor’s notion of “social imaginaries” is very useful. Taylor’s theory refers to “the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”2 Social imaginaries are the background and foundation of social practice; indeed, they enable certain actions and collective “self-understandings” that are constitutive of a society.3 Nigerian seamen’s experiences and the stories they tell about themselves overcome cultures and politics of exclusion by embracing a brand of cosmopolitanism as an organizing principle of their lives.
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