This book's protagonists are Muslim interpreters who worked for colonial administrators in Saint Louis, Senegal, during a time of French territorial expansion and intensifying conflict with local rulers (c. 1850–1920). As previous studies have shown, interpreters and other intermediaries carried out complex work as cultural brokers and mediators between Europeans and other Africans.Footnote ¹ They exercised considerable power to shape not only decisions made on both sides, but also to produce knowledge about Africans in colonial contexts.

M'Bayo's goal is to contribute a full-length, empirically grounded study of interpreters — a group largely neglected in academic literature and plagued by a reputation for dishonesty (largely due to the duplicitous interpreter characters in Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s The Fortunes of Wangrin). M'Bayo's study illuminates the complexity of the interpreters’ positions. Neither collaborators nor resisters, he argues, Muslim interpreters in French colonial Senegal reveal a paradox: ‘while employed by a French colonizing regime they not only looked after the interests of their local community, but also strived to maintain some degree of autonomy’ (1). The book complements David Robinson's Paths of Accommodation (2000), which covers roughly the same geographical and temporal space and similarly focuses on the agency of Muslims who forged relations of accommodation with the French. But while Robinson's principal subjects are prominent Sufi leaders such as the founder of the Muride brotherhood, Amadou Bamba, M'Bayo focuses exclusively on the interpreter corps.

Chapter One reconstructs the biographies of some of the administration's most influential Muslim interpreters: Hamat Ndiaye Anne (1813–1879), Bou El Mogdad Seck (1826–1880), his son Mahmadou Seck (1867–1943), and Mambaye Fara Biram Lô (1869–1926). These portraits are drawn primarily from sources generated by and addressed to the colonial administration — such as personnel files, correspondence, and petitions —complemented, in some cases, by interviews with the interpreters’ descendants. Anne and the two Secks receive the most attention. As learned members of prominent Muslim families, they were community leaders in their own right and not simply interpreters for the French. Anne and Bou El Mogdad, for example, helped rally Muslims to petition the administration to establish a Muslim tribunal in Saint Louis in the 1840s, and both officials also served as qadis, or judges, once the court was established in 1857. The fourth interpreter considered here, Biram Lô, was possibly of slave origins and worked his way up in the interpreter corps after receiving a French education.

The diversity of the interpreter corps, despite their common identity as Muslims, is stressed in Chapter Two. Here M'Bayo considers a randomly chosen group of ‘inconspicuous interpreters’ at the lower end of the social hierarchy. Although fragmentary, the biographies of these interpreters illustrate the multiple paths that could be accessed to become an interpreter.

In Chapters Three through Five, M'Bayo sets aside biography and proceeds thematically and chronologically. Chapter Three examines the development of an indigenous interpreter corps in Saint Louis, largely due to reforms initiated by Governor Louis Faidherbe (1854–1865). These initiatives formalized interpreters’ conditions of service, transformed the School of Sons of Chiefs and Interpreters into a training ground for indigenous intermediaries, and created the Muslim Tribunal in Saint Louis in 1857. Such structures, M'Bayo argues, paved the way for France to emerge as a ‘Muslim power’ in West Africa by the end of the nineteenth century.

Chapter Four considers the 1850s through 1880s, when the administration's desire to extend its sphere of control beyond Saint Louis brought them into conflict with Moors in Trarza, the jihad leader al-Hajj Umar Tal, and the polities of Walo and Cayor. Chapter Five considers French attempts after 1880 to establish control over what is now Mauritania. M'Bayo successfully demonstrates how interpreters acted as mediators, disseminators of knowledge, and cultural brokers in each situation, although at times, the detailed narratives of events threaten to overwhelm the interpreters’ stories.

While M'Bayo thoroughly mines the colonial administration's archive, one wishes he had delved more deeply into sources that reflect the multiple linguistic, social, and cultural worlds in which colonial Muslim interpreters moved. For example, M'Bayo mentions that interpreter Mahmadou Seck ‘cultivated impressive literary skills, particularly in writing poems and letters’ and he also references Amar Samb's (1977) overview (and French translation) of some of Seck's Arabic poetic compositions (47).Footnote ² By relegating to the footnotes further discussion of Seck's prominence as an Arabophone writer, however, M'Bayo misses an important opportunity to crack open the narrow window on Seck provided by the colonial archive (58–9). I imagine that more exploration of the Arabic sources (including those that have been translated or summarized in European languages) would have yielded a fuller picture of some of the interpreters, their networks, and their significance in social worlds beyond the French sphere (see, for example, Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem's essay that employs Hassaniya oral and written sources to paint a portrait of the Seck family).Footnote ³ I mention this perspective, not so much as a criticism of M'Bayo's book, but to highlight the continued importance, when writing histories of Africa's Muslim societies, of seeking out and integrating sources in Arabic and ajami where they exist.

With this book, M'Bayo has made a distinctive and solid contribution to the historiography of intermediaries in colonial Africa; it should inspire future studies of colonial interpreters in other contexts.