The early colonial state in Africa was a fragile entity. It usually had grand ambitions, but lacked the capacity and means to implement let alone sustain them. Whatever hegemony it achieved, it did so, as Sara Berry reminds us, on ‘a shoestring’. Such a situation created all sorts of challenges for colonial rulers and opportunities for Africans. Philip Afeadi's slender book provides some insights into this situation during the formative phase of the development of colonial rule in Northern Nigeria with his focus on the roles of African political agents in colonial service.
The chronological scope of Afeadi's study spans the Royal Niger Company's charter through the first phase of Lugard's consolidation of colonialism in Northern Nigeria in 1914. Afeadi's discussion of the administrative structure of the Royal Niger period, from 1886 to 1900, when its charter was revoked, is thin in part because the Company had elaborate administrative structures on paper but only a sparse presence on the ground. Nor did the Company keep adequate records about its operations in the bush, so the evidence that Afeadi has discovered about the initial role of African political agents is negligible.
The evidence is richer and the research stronger when Afeadi discusses the roles of political agents during the early protectorate period from 1900 to 1914. These African political agents were ‘essential’ to the colonial administration because they ‘bridged’ the communication gap between British colonial officers and indigenous subjects, engaged in diplomacy, provided intelligence, brokered local services, and managed access to the British political officers. Linguistic skills were at the core of their skill set and many African political agents were multilingual. Only a few had sufficient English to read and write; most spoke some form of pidgin English that had emerged out of the sustained encounters during the centuries of the slave trade, and at least one African language. The more prized and successful political agents had better English and Hausa. As the British conquered the Sokoto Caliphate in 1903 and suppressed the revolts that flared afterwards, political agents with Arabic and English were especially esteemed, and several rose to prominent positions within both the colonial administration and the Native Authority administration.
Despite their essential roles in imperial administration, the number of African political agents in colonial employment was small. According to Afeadi's count in Table 1, there were 4 African political agents employed by the Royal Niger Company, 19 who appeared on both the Company's and the protectorate government's rosters, and 54 employed by the protectorate, for a total of 77. Many actually served only for a year or two; only 29 per cent served for five years or longer. Elsewhere, Afeadi notes that in 1900, with the onset of the protectorate regime, there were only 7 African political agents. By 1904 there were 32 and by 1910 the numbers had risen to 43. In part because the evidence on employment of African political agents appears mostly in minutes or brief correspondence, Afeadi does not explore some of the broader trends of colonial employment and career trajectories except for isolated agents whose lives were captured in more detailed archival or personal records.
Afeadi does, however, take seriously Ronald Robinson's formulation and Colin Newbury's elaboration of the idea of the ‘bargains of collaboration’ between indigenous subjects and colonial overlords. These bargains yielded ‘benefits of all kinds’ to the indigenous collaborators. Afeadi explores how some African political agents benefited from their enhanced status by praying together with the clerical elite and sharing meals with the Native Authority leaders, and how others used their influence over British colonial officers to extract extra resources for themselves, some increasing the size of their households by laying claim to former slave women and children. Others used their enhanced status to augment their meager official salaries by engaging in commerce on the side, sometimes even reselling the goods they received as part of their salary in kind on the market. Still others invested in their children's Western education and thus likely promoted a second-generation bureaucratic class.
Among the tantalizing issues that Afeadi raises, but does not fully explore, is the meaning of collaboration with infidels for African Muslims. He mentions taqiyya, a form of dissimulation that permitted Muslims to live in the abode of unbelief. British colonial recognition of both Caliphate authority and shari'a may have eased the challenges facing Muslims, but more attention to how African political agents in Northern Nigeria – most of whom were Muslim – dealt with these issues would have provided more texture to the overlapping worlds in which they lived. Afeadi conducted interviews with former African employees in Kano, Zaria, and Sokoto, but these are not well integrated into the analysis.
The most vivid aspects of Afeadi's study deals with the instances of political agents' abuses of power, precisely because this sheds light on the lived experience. It is not at all clear from his account what happened to African political agents after 1914, although he notes that, by 1920, Kaduna province sought to suppress the position of African political agents. Even with administrative pressure for British colonial officers to learn indigenous languages, only a tiny handful managed to communicate directly with Africans. African political agents were renamed ‘messengers’ and probably remained ‘essential’ to the colonial effort well into the 1950s.
Afeadi's study is organized into eight relatively short, thematic chapters dealing with recruitment, remuneration, diplomacy, intelligence, and political influence, among other themes. African political agents did not constitute the entire universe of African employees in the colonial state. They were only a ‘thin Black line’ of a much larger group of Africans employed by the protectorate and Native Authority governments. Each branch of the expanding bureaucracy had its own employees, including the established cadre of ‘clerks’, who are mentioned only episodically in this study. I would have liked to have known more about the fuller range of Africans who accepted the bargains of collaboration in order to assess what was special about the political agents.
