Silences in the Mines: How Censorship Buried Nigeria’s Mining Tragedies

On a quiet September day in 1943, five young boys slipped out from the police barracks in Enugu, Southeastern Nigeria, tasked with collecting firewood for their masters’ households.^[1] Drawn by the allure of a quicker fix, they ventured into an abandoned coal mine in search of leftover coal. What happened next barely made the news: the mine’s upper layer collapsed, burying the boys alive. Two died instantly, and three were rescued with grievous injuries.^[2] The local newspaper, the Eastern Guardian, mentioned the tragedy only briefly – a few sentences tucked in a column – and then the story vanished from sight, as if the earth had swallowed it whole along with the children. Such is the fate of many mining disasters in Nigeria: fleetingly reported, then forgotten.

This heartbreaking incident, now a fragment in an old archive, speaks volumes about what Nigeria’s land remembers even when its media and archives do not.^[3] Those boys were not playing or trespassing idly – they were driven by necessity. In a wartime colony starved of resources, coal meant heat for cooking and light for their families.^[4] Yet, beyond the Eastern Guardian’s terse report, their fate elicited no public outcry. No headlines demanded safer community protections or questioned why children had to scavenge in lethal pits. In the decades since, the silence around such events has only deepened, enforced by laws and regimes that made telling the full truth about mining dangerous.

Colonial authorities were among the first to impose these silences. The British colonial government in Nigeria had little tolerance for press reports that exposed the darker side of their extractive enterprises. As early as 1909, after nationalist Herbert Macaulay dared to publish allegations of corruption in the colony’s railway and mines, the administration rushed to pass the Seditious Offences Ordinance.^[5] It criminalized any writings deemed likely to bring the government into disrepute or “hatred.”^[6] Newspapers risked fines, jail, or shutdown if they dared to report on “sensitive” issues – like a mining accident that might reveal official negligence or local dissent over forced labour. One contemporary observer noted that the ordinance, modelled on laws from British India, aimed to allow only “reasonable” debate while punishing anything designed to influence an “excitable and ignorant populace.”^[7]

“Whoever… brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt… the Government established by law in Southern Nigeria, shall be punished with imprisonment.” — Government Gazette, 1909^[8]

Printed in the Gazette above, the blunt decree exemplified how censorship was coded into colonial law. Criticizing how miners were treated or how many lives were lost could be interpreted as sedition – effectively silencing open debate on labour abuse and safety. Reports of accidents or maltreatment were often filtered into sanitized bureaucratic language or left out entirely. … (article continues)…