LIKE most young Nigerians, I had a picture of being young and strong while white people were white and weak. I am sure that young white people also thought black people to be weak. No one had ever tested this but we believed this so strongly that we thought nothing of the holiday jobs we all did as students.
Ben and I worked in the freezing works where sheep was slaughtered, cleaned up and dressed ready for export. After cleaning, the wool and the innards, the hoofs, heads etc were stored separately – the bones were used to make buttons. Nothing was wasted – every part of the sheep had its uses. I worked in the paint house and Ben on the wool.
This freezing works was a very large factory, slaughtering over 20,000-25,000 lambs per day. As each lamb is slaughtered, the feet are hung on a moving convoy. At regular intervals, there are other workers who remove the pelts and other parts not meant for export. The pelts are thrown into a giant washing machine which spits pelts on a conveyor belt. These pelts still have wool on them. We spread the skin of the sheep on the conveyor belt to enable it pass a machine that coats the leather with a chemical which loosens the wool from the skin (leather). My job was to see that each pelt is well painted with the chemical – so I had to spread the pelts evenly for the process of chemical painting.
Thereafter, the pelts in a matter of minutes get to the wool floor where another set of workers spread the pelts on a waste high casel device. And in one go, by pushing their hands down the spread pelts remove the wool from the pelts which then are removed to another section of the plant for drying and tanning. Ben’s job was to make sure that all the wool thus removed was swept on to another conveyor that would now dry the wool. It is one of the softest jobs in the whole factory – sweeping wool to a conveyor belt. There are many who do Ben’s work but it does not take long before there is a pile up of wool which should have been moved. The whole factory is automated and if any part of the process is not up to scratch an alarm rings and every one would shout “uncle Ben again, please buck up” someone would run to this section and help clear the bleakly.
As for me I wear thick gloves and spread the pelts evenly so the chemical sprays only the skin of the lamb. After every two or three hours there is a break for five minutes for those who smoke to do so and others to go to the toilet. Myself and Ben having the easiest jobs were invariably the culprits when the alarm went off and the conveyor stopped. The fore man should be heard screaming “Ben, Patrick get a move on: you are slowing the job.” We never understood why the other New Zealand boys could do much harder work for much longer hours but we were the culprits of tardiness every time. Our bodies will ache and we would have pains in our bodies where we never thought we had muscles!!
Many Nigerians had summer jobs because then students were expected to work in summer and earn a bit of a living. Immediately after the exams in the UK is the fruit picking time. Many of us would arrive at the farm and we would see rows and rows of strawberries ready to be picked. White boys and girls, black boys and girls. Each person is given a bag, quickly shown how to pick a strawberry which you then put in the bag or basket given to you. At first we Nigerians thought this was easy work, some of us were from the farms, and others did farming in school.
At 7a.m., we all start off: you would see small white girls and boys go at the strawberries like rabbit – picking and begin to fill their baskets. We Nigerians, Tom and Eddie, would try to keep up. Before they got to ½ of the allotted rows the white boys had finished and were returning their baskets, to take another basket and attack another row of strawberries. By 10a.m. the white boys and girls would have a 10 minutes break to drink tea. Tom, Eddie and other Nigerians would look at themselves, their back and waists shut to pieces, but have not picked up one basket. We collapsed; go back to the beginning to tell the foreman we cannot do it.
But since we were paid according to the number of full basket strawberries none of us got paid. The foreman at one farm had asked us whether we really wanted to work at picking strawberries because in his experience he had never seen a Nigerian complete one day of picking with a full basket.
Ben and myself after the freezing works, decide to do three hours work every other night at a biscuit factory not far from where we lived. The factory was almost fully automated – the flour came in, was mixed, cut, sugared, baked and packetted – all on a conveyor belt system. My job was to look at the machine that certified that the biscuit had been properly packetted and sealed. I had to press a botton to certify inspection for the conveyor to move.
This is a mind numbing job, you may doze while standing or your concentration may waver or you may not press the botton hard enough, any of these infractions would cause an alarm and the red light on my spot would flash. “Patrick asleep again”, “No, I replied, I was lighting my pipe”. Ok, all systems go. ‘’Ben was at the very end of the factory – all the biscuits had been packetted, labelled, put in cartons.
His job was to move the cartons on a wheel barrow from the end of the factory to the waiting truck about six feet away. Needless to say in the three hours we worked, there were at least six stoppages due to the fault of either myself or Ben.
GUARDIAN
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