Colonialism from the Middle: African Clerks as Historical Actors and Discursive Subjects

I

In a review of my first published book one of the founding figures of african historical studies suggested that instead of giving so much attention to European colonial administrators and African traditional chiefs I should have focused upon “the clerks, the schoolmasters and the evangelists, who were to take the lead when indirect rule had failed.”¹ The terms in which this admonition was expressed implies a confidence in the nationalist project of “educated elites” that is less tenable today than it was during the 1960s.² Nonetheless, in the late stages of my own career I have come to the conclusion that of the various occupational categories cited by Roland Oliver, African clerks do deserve greater examination than they have received so far in the historiography of colonial Africa. However, if they do prefigure the political leadership of postcolonial Africa, it is less in the heroic and innovative mode of “nation-building” than in the more problematic and continuous role as “gate-keepers,”³ or “brokers” (honest or not) between subject populations and external sources of power/patronage .

I am not alone in this concern and an entire recent volume of essays has been dedicated to the study of such colonial “African intermediaries.”⁴ I contributed a chapter to this book and have continued to pursue a study of colonialism from “the middle” (as opposed to the “above” of my previous work as well as the social history “from below” that emerged in more recent decades).⁵ The focus of my research on this topic is upon two figures who are of both historical and literary significance: Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900–1991), the very renowned Malian writer and scholar who produced a memoir about his early career as a colonial clerk; and “Wangrin,” a clerk and interpreter of an earlier generation, who is the subject of Hampâté Bâ’s most widely read book.⁶

Given the visibility of these widely-circulated writings (along with their Anglophone equivalent, Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson [1939]) it is perhaps easiest to discuss clerks as objects of discourse about colonialism and, at least in the case of Hampâté Bâ,⁷ authors of such discourse. But as an historian I feel my first responsibility is to tell it “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” that is to explore primary sources which give us a more reliable account of what clerks and interpreters did rather than how they were imagined or imagined themselves in memory. My ultimate goal is to bring together the histories of both these figures (along with some associated African clerks) and their representations in various forms of obviously subjective writing. But for the present I will only deal with the historiography of my topic, by which I mean an examination of the documentation, both archival and “literary” (including photographic and cinematic representations) available to us rather than a presentation of the results I hope ultimately to produce.

II

Since colonial clerks worked within bureaucracies that defined themselves by the keeping of written records one anticipates that they would leave behind them a rich and easily traced paper trail. Archival research both confirms and contradicts such a supposition. I have found varying degrees of information in three kinds of records. One is printed: the “journaux officiels” (official gazettes) of the French colonies which were the workplaces of Hampâté Bâ and Wangrin. In the manuscript/typescript colonial archives there are rich accounts of clerks and interpreters who were caught in illegal actions but much less information about the careers of those (the majority, including the two individuals that interest me most) who did not get into this kind of trouble. Finally, more up to now as a hope than reality, there are collections of private papers might provide some information on these figures.

The “journaux officiels” are formal records whose accounts of events and statements remain very much on the institutional surface of legislation (in this case almost entirely unilateral “arrêtes” [decrees] by governors) and lists of promotions, transfers, leaves, awards and occasional punishments. But the decrees...