African Intermediaries and the ‘Bargain’ of Collaboration

The goal of this chapter is to examine the wider range of roles Africans played in the making of colonial legal and political orders. We recognize that Africans were employed in a wide range of service roles, including menial workers and skilled artisans, but our focus will be on those Africans who served as interpreters and administrative intermediaries. We have discovered a rich historical vein of insight and detail into the colonial experience through our focus on African intermediaries. What these intermediaries had in common was not only their strategic positions within the colonial edifice, but their centrality in the flows and circuits of information. These intermediaries controlled information and intelligence through their cross-cultural brokerage roles, which depended upon their knowledge of European languages and European cognitive categories. We want to stress the differences here: it was not enough for intermediaries to know European languages or African lingua franca, such as Kiswahili, Hausa, or Malinke, but they needed to master European cultural and legal categories to translate African experiences into terms that made sense to Europeans. As such, African intermediaries and interpreters lived in social worlds that straddled both African and European universes. These two worlds provided opportunities and challenges to those who tried to navigate them