Ever wondered what it meant to be an African employee in the colonial bureaucracy? Well, quite a bit. The role of African intermediaries in the colonial administration has been a topic of much debate. And that is to be expected – because colonial conquest was brutal and decisive, to put it mildly. It thus becomes anathema for the victims of such sobering defeat to work for the colonists. That’s one way to see it. Another way to consider the critical roles of these “agents of empire” would be to attempt a contextual evaluation of the administrative structure of the colonial state as historians Frederick Cooper, Philip Zachernuk, Benjamin Lawrence, Richard Roberts Stephanie Newell, Emily Lynn Osborn, Ruth Ginio have done, among other notable scholars. Exploring the second perspective often leaves one with the following questions: was empire an impenetrable monolith or a poorly orchestrated hegemonic ambition? Were Africans hapless victims and unthinking conduits of colonial power? How hegemonic was the colonial state? Were African employees indispensable to colonial rule? How did colonialism function on the ground? The list goes on. But such questions are important because they open new, and interesting conversations around the complex details of African lived experiences in the colonial moment.
To begin, Colonialism was built on an illusory vision of absolute control of African affairs. As Basil Davidson rightly notes, “if you had been living in the 1920s you would easily have thought that Africans could never again be free to run their own countries.” But after conquest came formal colonial administration and the grim reminder to imperial Europe that taking effective control of their “spheres of influence” in Africa required much more than a military solution. While conquest was decisive and relatively easy due to internal political dynamics in the 19th century, administration proved to be more complex; more like a tangled web of inchoate ideas and policies which would ironically come to depend almost entirely on local circumstances. To legitimize their rule, colonial governments turned to different versions of the British solution to local government – indirect rule (the formal incorporation of local political structures into colonial bureaucracy). Colonialism thus depended on indigenous systems of knowledge, power, and wealth to function optimally!
But this too, was not a one-way street, nor did it follow a simple, straightjacket rule as some historians assumed. It is important to note here that colonialism was processual, not definitive. It occurred in phases (conquest, consolidation, administration, and exit) and was profoundly shaped by local and global circumstances including the two World Wars, the Great Depression, epidemics, and the rise of civil society movements from the late 1940s. Africans responded to colonialism differently, too. They followed these global trends with keen interest, localizing some of the outcomes and weaponizing others against colonial governments. To put this in perspective, there were kinds and systems of colonial rule: settler and non-settler colonies, and direct and indirect rule systems, respectively. It has been argued that colonial presence tended to be more invasive in settler colonies where a white, vocal minority often swayed government policies in its favor to the detriment of Africans. The system of rule (direct or indirect) also determined the nature of the involvement of colonial officials in indigenous affairs. These variations had implications for local participation and how colonial power was interpreted on the ground.
As historians Ruth Ginio and Emily Lynn Osborn have shown in the case of African employees in French West Africa, officials “endeavored to shape a native legal system that would, on one hand, reflect the values of French civilization, and on the other hand, serve as an effective instrument of control.” But then the problem was not in drafting grand visions of imperial control but in implementing them. French officials, like their British counterparts and other European imperialists, failed to recognize the ricocheting impact of shared authority with local employees whether as assessors, missionaries, clerks, interpreters, or court messengers. Officials soon found themselves straddling the various parameters of control, as African intermediaries exploited the legibility of colonial symbols and the mutual ignorance of European officials and local populations to assert themselves in the bourgeoning colonial economy.
The main duty of African employees was to personify the colonial state by interpreting colonial policies and laws to maintain order. But rather than allow themselves to be simply servile channels of colonial power African employees leveraged the medial spaces that opened to them in the hierarchy of colonial bureaucracy by exploiting the barriers of language and knowledge for personal purposes, and as an affront to colonial regimes. Emily Lynn Osborn explores a similar situation within the context of French Guinea. Using petitions and appeals from the colonial archive, Osborn reveals “the malleable underbelly of colonial rule” by showing ways in which “African employees and local elites confronted French rule by filtering colonial policies and procedures and building unofficial networks that linked the colonial bureaucracy to indigenous hierarchies.”
There is no doubt that colonial conquest put Africans in double jeopardy, limiting their choice of engagement with the new regimes to the two opposing options of resistance or collaboration. But that dilemma eventually gave way to the selective appropriation of colonial symbols for individual and group benefits. By the late 1930s African employees had understood their significance to the smooth operation of the colonial mandate and begun to assert themselves through subtle means such as subverting official policies and even creating para-colonial systems of power. This, of course, was not the experience in every colonized society in Africa. But almost always, African intermediaries in both settler and non-settler societies found ways to sway official policies in favor of personal or communal interests.
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