This article examines the impact of the capitalist economy, colonial rule, and wage labor on African masculinity and how African ideas about manhood impacted behavior and expectations of work in the coal mines of the Enugu Government Colliery in southeastern Nigeria from 1914 until the great depression. These mines were a "site" where racism became a crucial part of British strategies to control African labor and is one of the first places African workers experienced the "colonial masculinity" of racist white bosses.