Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (review)

African clerks and interpreters have long attracted attention from novelists and scholars who wished to examine the contradictions of colonial rule; however, no single historical study has investigated these intermediaries, who ensured the survival of European regimes in Africa. This book, based on essays originally presented at a 2002 conference, places the experiences of clerks and interpreters in comparative perspective. Many of the essays point out the perilous position of intermediaries who had to juggle their personal ambitions and personal and ideological rivalries among European officials, family and gender concerns, and their connections to various African communities. Much like Amadou Hampate Ba's famous character Wangrin (Ba 2000), African clerks under review here were skilled at manipulating and constructing narratives of political authority and indigenous knowledge that served their own interests. The editors deserve congratulations for a well-written introduction and a high level of copyediting throughout the book, as well as assembling a diverse collection of essays.

Questioning archival evidence and unpacking the ways officials decided to accept competing claims of legitimacy are central themes in this book. David Patten discusses the rise and fall of Usen Udo Usen, an Ibibo clerk, whom British officials relied on to uncover the true criminals in a wave of "leopard-man" murders in southern Nigeria in the late 1940s. Usen led a tour through Ibibo villages that combined recourse to supernatural oaths and inspections of state officials. He blamed a male-power association for the killings. Such expertise naturally helped his career and augmented his prestige. The provisionality of such claims to knowledge came out in his case, as new officials developed alternative explanations of the murders using forensic evidence that blamed the killings on animals, and Usen's former Ibibo allies accused him of unfairly blaming chiefs and the power association. He did not help himself when he refused to swear the same oath that he had compelled many others to make.

Likewise, the instability of archival knowledge is highlighted in Emily Osborn's piece on the close collaboration between a low-level French official and a former slave who became his trusted interpreter. Her contribution illustrates the tensions between high-ranking colonial officials, such as Antoine-Marie Frezouls, the governor of French Guinea, who promoted centralization and efficiency, and subordinate administrators and clerks in rural areas who sought to protect their own interests. Ernest Noirot, an old hand in Guinea since the 1880s, worked closely with Boubou Penda, who used his privileged position to claim the prerogatives of wealthy free people. Penda was accused of forcing a man to surrender the respected position of almamy over a dispute about a woman from a well-off family. When the family refused to allow Penda to marry the woman, he kidnapped and raped her, with his French patron's protection. Such behavior incensed Frezouls, who dismissed Penda and forced Noirot to leave the colony, but himself lost his position because of negative publicity back in France. Noirot found work in Senegal, while Frezouls became a colonial inspector who created new enemies through acerbic reviews of administrative incompetence in Gabon and other colonies. Such nuanced studies of individual ambition, administrative friction, and archival fictions make for a compelling read.

Self-representations of African clerks are a fascinating set of materials to work with. Ralph Austen's selection compares the autobiographical writings of Amadou Hampate Ba and the lesser-known Cameroonian writer Kuoh Moukouri. Hampate Ba highlighted the challenges of blending local concerns with the demands of often irrational officials and European influences. His Cameroonian counterpart draws on coastal Duala traditions of cultural mediation dating to the Atlantic slave era, as well as his European education to claim superiority as an enlightened African dealing with European racism. Theophilus Shepstone's claims of fluency in Zulu and English law delineated by Thomas McClendon show how individuals of European descent make the same claims of...