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This is at once a fascinating and a frustrating book. What Dr. Kuklick, an
American sociologist, sets out to do is to construct what she calls a Colonial
Service "ethnography" of the Gold Coast Administrative Service between the
wars. This is, we are told, "a dispassionate inquiry into the social structure
of British overlordship". Thus she has chapters on recruitment into the Service,
career patterns and "The European Community and the African Milieu" to take
care of the socio-career interpretation, and others, such as "Administration
in the Field" and "The Changing Face of Colonial Administration" to set the
professional context against which her biographical data on Gold Coast D.C.s
is to be interpreted.
The data has been painstakingly constructed: much of it is new and some of it
unique in print, e.g. her access -- in Accra, not London -- to confidential reports
and personal files. Thus we have interesting tabulations of the occupations of
applicants' fathers and unusual accounts of the role of the Service wife and
of why men wanted to join the Colonial Service in the inter-war period. Some of
her quotations from confidential reports have a potential for embarrassment.
It is, however, the interpretations put on the material as well as one
particular source heavily relied on which will cause those members who were in the
Gold Coast Administrative Service at the time to shake their heads and wonder
whether Dr. Kuklick's perceptions are really of the same life and work and Service
that was theirs. She does seem to depend over-heavily on the unofficial diaries
kept by D.C.s; yet these were by no means universal within the Service,
and not even within the Gold Coast Service -- they were very much a
characteristic of the N.T.s' administration. And how justified is the simple faith
that these must convey more reliable impressions of work in the districts than
other forms of colonial service autobiography? Appendix B, with its mass of
sociology-directed tables and Tables like those showing "Skill in Handling
Africans and Final Rank" or "Diarists' Relations with African Rulers and
Assistants" will understandably cause many an ex-Gold Coast D.C. to, as my own
first D.C. used to put it, 'purse his eyebrows and raise his lips'. And where, oh where, are all of us whom Dr. Kuklick should and could have interviewed
yet whose names are so conspicuously absent from the sources? Or could it be that
such is her own suspicion of written autobiography and oral recollection that she
resolved not to jeopardize her findings on the Gold Coast Administrative Service
by letting her writing be tainted by any contact with us ex-D.C.s?
I think that all of us who were in the Colonial Service should take a look at
this book. In particular, I shall look forward to hearing the views of former
Gold Coast D.C.s on it (rumbles have already been heard). It is not warts alone,
and it is rarely uninteresting, so that I do not recommend the advice --
to quote my own unforgettable first D.C. again -- on how to deal with
Secretariat circulars: 'Burn before reading'. But it cries out for the stamp of
authenticity, and that is something no American researcher can hope to achieve
here without at least interviewing the subjects of his/her research . . . . as long as
we are still alive to talk and to temper head-over-heels deduction with the
sobriety of actuality.
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