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Just over twenty-five years ago I sought help over the Colonial Service in fiction from
the Overseas Pensioner Journal. Some of the data
gathered was incorporated into my pan-departmental contribution The Colonial Service
in the Novel presented at the conference organised by J H Smith in 1999 as part of the
programme to mark the closing of the Colonial Service. In my first exploration of how
the Colonial Service was portrayed in the novel, I emphasized how such novels
traditionally have "the ability to open a window on the personal as well as the public life,
the ideas and ideals, the views and values of the Colonial Service, in a way that no
textbook on or history of colonial administration can ever do".
Without becoming involved in any controversial Eng Lit discourse on 'when is a
novel not a novel?' it is nevertheless helpful to bear in mind that many of the DO novels
contain a sizeable measure of autobiographical material because the novelist is himself a
DO. Post-colonial literary studies, inspired by Jeffrey Richards' Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (1999), have devoted a lot of attention to the influence of juvenile
literature and adolescent adventure tales on the mind and imperial ambition of British
youth in the half-century between the triumphalism of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee
and the end of World War II. Novelists like G A Henty and Rider Haggard, as well of
course as Rudyard Kipling, are widely credited with having helped, in Charles Allen's
estimate, "to despatch generations of English, Scots and Irish Protestant gentlemen off to
do their bit in the farthest reaches of the British Empire". It is interesting to note that
among the most widely read - excluding juvenile readership magazines like the
Boys' Own Paper - and cited as influential by young men who had the Colonial Service
in their sights as a likely career, were Sanders of the River (1911), including its later film version, K G Bradley's The Diary of a District Officer (1943); and Arthur Grimble's
A Pattern of Islands (1952), this time reinforced by a radio presentation. Dedicated to "The District Officers of the Colonial Administrative Service and their long-suffering
wives", reprinted five times in its first five months, and translated into eight languages, the
last-named soon sold half a million copies. Both Bradley and Grimble are examples of the
'factitious' genre of memoir-novel hybrids. But because Grimble's book was too much a
latecomer to make the major impact on recruitment that the Bradley 'novel' had done a
decade earlier, virtually coinciding with the replacement of the Colonial Service by
HMOCS in 1954, and because its location was the Pacific and not the Africa of our focus
here, it is to The Diary of a District Officer and Sanders of the River that we turn first.
Bradley's book was first published in 1943, in a war-time edition, and then reprinted
in hardback in 1947. This was the peak period of modern CAS recruitment.
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It was mentioned as an influence by more CAS applicants than any other written source.
Parts of it had already appeared in that epitome of imperial short story writing,
Blackwood's Magazine, back numbers of which graced many a colonial club library.
"A narrative of this kind". Lord Hailey noted, "serves better than any formal record to illustrate the work such an officer does and the place he fills in the life of the people".
If Bradley's book was not designated as a novel pur sang, its story-telling nevertheless
generated as much eager reader-attention and offered as much entertainment as any
novel, and in the case of the image of the DO in Africa it has long been recognized as an
influential story-portrait of this work.
Bradley's autobiography-cum-novel shared its status as a primary source of
inspiration in the putative DO with Edgar Wallace's Sanders novels. There were eleven
of these in all, with titles like Sandi the King-Maker, Sanders and Again Sanders,
featuring not only Mr Commissioner Sanders but also his military side-kicks, Capt
Hamilton and Lieut Tibbetts (Bones) as well as the local Chief Bosambo, with the
scenario encapsulated in the initial Sanders of the River. Published in 1911, it swept to
the fore in the potential DO's mind with Alexander Korda's film version of 1935.
For most Britons in the 1920s and 1930s to whom the work of a DO in Africa meant
anything at all, it meant Sanders. However 'juju in the jungle' their setting and 'bravely
alone in Darkest Africa' their eponymous hero, these adventure novels established
Sanders in Britain's inter-war popular culture as the instantly recognizable symbol of the
colonial administrator. Such a hypothesis was reinforced when in 1951 the Sunday
Express, as John Lewis-Barned quotes in his autobiography, found it unnecessary to
elaborate on careers overseas beyond its says-it-all headline of "Sanders of the River:
Still the Best Job for a British Boy".
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Sanders, who must have been in his early thirties when he was posted to his
West African territory "the land which curves along the border of Togo", was no
newcomer to that continent: "Mr Commissioner Sanders had graduated to West Central
Africa by easy stages... He had met the Basuto, the Zulu, the Fingo, the Pondo, the
Matabele, Mashona, Barotse, Hottentot and Bechuana, then northward to the Congo,
eastward to Masai, and finally by way of the pigmy people he came to his own land"
(Southern Nigeria). In the physical description of his DC hero, Edgar Wallace left little
to the imagination of Hollywood: "He stood by the steersman, a slim and dapper figure
in spotless white, his pith helmet at a rakish angle, for an elephant fly had bitten him on
the forehead the night before, and the lump it had induced was painful to the touch.
Between his regular, white teeth was a long, black cheroot". Of medium height, spare
and clean-shaven, Sanders would sit "cross-legged on his canvas chair, chewing an
unsmoked cigar and drawing little patterns with his ebony stick on the sand". At his hip,
he carried a Browning in a leather holster: "the grip was shiny with use". Generally
abstemious, he enjoyed champagne and port on special occasions: "O Abiboo (Habibu),
bring me from the cold cellar one bottle of the wine with the golden end and also one
bottle of the wine with the dust of many days". Two of Sanders' features are emphasised
time and time again: his eyes, "cold and prohibitive", and the steely timbre of his voice
when he spoke as the Keeper of the King's Peace, "bleak and cold". Both constituted
danger signals to a transgressor, whether legal or social. On such occasions Sanders'
voice had "the quality of an ice-cold razor", as he addressed the wrong-doer with "his
hard little smile"; and "his cold eyes were unnerving". The secret of Sandi the
Kingmaker's administration lay in its simplicity and strength. "I am Sandi, who sits for
king on the Great River", he informed the paramount chief of Ochori. "I am a man quick
to kill, and no respecter of kings or chiefs".
Closely bound up with his uncanny intimacy of the people and problems of his area
was Sanders' acquaintance with the local language. Typically, the DC "did not favour
coast English", always insisting on speaking coast Arabic, "a language allowing of nice
distinctions". Sanders was a fluent speaker rather than a master of the language:
"In the black land which Sanders governed, 800 words form an extensive vocabulary".
Sanders supplemented his own tireless touring with "a large number of native agents
who kept him in touch with events of interest to himself and his government".
These formed "so competent an intelligence service that at any moment he could have
given a rough survey of the social and economic conditions of every one of the 23 trivial
communities it was his job to govern". Thus informed, Sanders was able to learn of a
rumour almost before it was born, to scent trouble before it was cooked up. Sanders'
attitude towards the officials at headquarters hardly changed among DOs down the years.
Like his field colleagues throughout the Colonial Service, he had little love for the
artificial life of the capital: "The officers of the territories regarded a summons to attend
at this unholy place with the same enthusiasm as the mother of a family might look upon
an invitation to the White House if it was quarantined for measles". In Whitehall, few
could claim to rival the Sanders legend: "Sanders was a tradition at the Foreign Office".
So there we have Mr Commissioner Sanders, spare of limb, short on speech and stern to
behold, self-controlled, self-possessed and self-reliant, the archetypal African
administrator of English fiction. While few colonial administrators alive might care to
recognise all of themselves in this image - and fewer still, of course, after the
professionalisation of the Colonial Administrative Service from 1926 - there would not
be many on the West Coast (and likely elsewhere) who did not at times find echoes of the
Sanders saga in their work. If Sanders was no more than a stereotype, at least it was a
stereotype that had its roots in fact as well as in fiction.
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Beyond this duo of foundation 'fiction' sources for the study of the DO in Africa,
K G Bradley and Edgar Wallace, four working categories of novelists can be
distinguished. The first is the surprising number of DOs who, sometimes in their
retirement but frequently while still in their job, decided to write a novel about the life of
a DO, either under their own name or using a pseudonym. Among them were the
Tanganyika DO, K A Dobson, with no less than four East African novels to his credit,
one pointedly titled District Commissioner (1954), and M Kittermaster, a skilful
miniaturist of Nyasaland boma life, one of whose novels is simply called District Officer (1957). H Best's A Rumour of Drums (1962) and W Fowler's Harama (1962) are both
set in N Nigeria, while I Brook's (a pseudonym for I Brinkworth) Jimmy Riddle (1961)
and The Black List (1962) are located in W Nigeria. From an older generation,
A C G Hastings wrote two DO novels about Nigeria, Gone Native (1928) and Jane's Way
(1936). In the latter the DO, Allen, has little time for or interest in anything other than his
job, "his work was waiting for him and work was the main thing" ... until, of course, he
meets Jane. M Taafe's (a pseudonym for DC R A J Maguire) The Dark Glass (1963) is
set in Tanganyika.
Looking into this impressive list of DO novelists for images of the DO, Dobson's
District Commissioner opens with a personality clash between Fenton and Redmayne,
from whom he is to take over Kulago district. Fenton's personal troubles, exacerbated by
"the loves and hates of small town life", dominate the story. The two DOs are depicted as
opposites, both of them the sort of characters quickly recognizable by 'real life' DOs
from among colleagues they have known. Redmayne is portrayed as impressive, "tall and
big, suave and genial with everyone - bit of a window-dresser but efficient, to give him
his due. People believed in him, HQ believed in him. He talked big, too, contriving to
give the impression that difficulties were nothing to him, that he was taking the strong
line". Fenton, on the other hand, "could not be like that. Physically he was small and
light... Compared with his predecessor he felt he must look insignificant. He was sure he
knew his job Just as well, but he could not bluster, he could not pretend confidence that
he did not feel, he could not advertise what he did not believe in".
In Kittermaster's Katakala the DC, Worthington, has made himself something of an
expert on witchcraft cases, cleverly exploiting his gift for ventriloquism and cashing in
on his need for a glass eye. "This made his stare rather forbidding, since the Africans
were never quite sure which eye was looking at them". An autocratic monarch,
Worthington used to tour his district in style, "his progress from village to village was
like that of an Oriental potentate". In Best's novel, the theme is once again of a sharp
antipathy between two DOs, Ian Keith on his second tour returning from leave, and his
senior Pettibone, a brilliant egomaniac, who jealously guards his kingdom against every
hint of interference with his personal rule: "White men have a knack of creating
difficulties where none existed before". The inevitable physical and mental silences of
the tropics raises the personal irritations into a conflict between ideals and values,
"an absorbing duel to the death, each DO becoming harshly primitive as the civilized
veneer is stripped away". As for W Fowler, he presents a cast of over twenty CS
characters in his novel, among them half-a-dozen DOs, one of whom. Wood, is the
narrator. The seniormost DO, "sallow after years in the tropics, was below average height
but straight and compactly built... A friendly smile enlivened his face as he came
forward to meet me". Another DO was "a handsome man with an assured manner", who
was so anxious about his health that "at night he drank hot milk inventions, and who had
a special nerve tonic sent out by the Army and Navy Stores". Behind the "domineering
and ruthless" image he was plain fussy. Jimmy Riddle is the name of the DO in I Brooks'
eponymous novel, "quite a man, a sort of Sanders of the River", who is visited by a
formidable female Westminster MP, Iris Pratt.
A second group of novelists is the relatively, perhaps surprisingly, large number of
established authors who took the DO in Africa as the central character in at least one of
their novels. In literary ranking, the list is headed by Joyce Cary. (Unlike colonial
Malaya and Hong Kong, Africa never earned the attention of that masterly story-teller,
W Somerset Maugham - for better or for worse.) What is more, Cary also properly
belongs to the previous group of novelists, those who were at one time a DO. His five
African novels, not published until the 1930s and one posthumously in 1974, were all set
in Nigeria, where he had been a DO during World War I. He left early, having learned he
could earn infinitely more money by selling fiction to magazines like the Saturday
Evening Post at almost a year's CS salary for one story. The DO also appears in Cary's
collection of short stories Spring Song (1960), and is the principal character of one of his
unpublished novels, Daventry.
In Cary's first African novel Aissa Saved (1932), the DO Bradgate is a secondary but
authentic character behind Aissa. "Petitioners usually found it easy to see Bradgate because
he made a rule that when he was on trek anyone could approach him at any time", thereby
by-passing his parasitic office staff. In An American Visitor (1933), Cary reflected on how
some of the American missionaries he had met in N Nigeria looked on the DO as "the
equivalent of anti-Christ, whose crimes were that he had left native religion alone, that he
drank two whiskies and sodas every evening, above all he represented the British Empire
and administered the law". In The African Witch (1936), the problem faced by the DOs
Burwash and Eisk is with a "nationalist spell-binder", Aladai, educated at Oxford. The
'Scotch Club' evenings are powerfully portrayed. Cock Jarvis (1974) appeared
posthumously, based on one of Cary's one-time colleagues in Nigeria. Cary could never
quite complete his portrait, and at the end of twelve years and half a million words he put it
aside. Yet he felt it contained "some of the best stuff I ever wrote". Certainly as a portrait of
one of the larger-than-life characters of that early period. Cock Jarvis is unrivalled.
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But the greatest of Cary's African novels, and an unsurpassed presentation of the various
kinds of DO so familiar to DOs serving right up to the 1960s, is Mister Johnson (1939). If
the principal character is arguably the Nigerian clerk Mr Johnson, he shares centre-stage
with a galaxy of instantly recognizable DOs: the senior Bulteel, "a little, fat, bald man with
a pink head and a small white moustache"; the burnt-out Blore, "a short, fat man with a
snub nose and gold spectacles, [who] walks with a hasty shuffle like one pushing his feet
through deep slush... bald and pensive as a Buddha... his expression is mild and benign...
a deeply reverential man"; the young and ambitious careerist Tring, "one of those people
who can always catch the right eye at the right time"; and as co-star the young enthusiastic
bush ADO, Rudbeck, "a modest young man, ready to take knowledge from his seniors. He
soaks it in unconsciously and has picked up even mannerisms from his various DOs". His
senior DO, Blore, with his passions for tax assessment and "always collecting statistics",
has no time for Rudbeck's despisal of office work and his driving passions for roads, which
Blore looks on as "the ruin of Africa and a typical threat to established things". Always
kind and courteous to his African clerks, Blore has seen it all before and takes comfort from
the belief that nothing - and neither his seniors nor his junior ADOs - can last for ever.
Tring is a "popular young man", assigned to the provincial office, "thin, small, handsome,
with smooth fair cheeks and blue eyes. His shirt is clean every day, his shorts are pressed
down the sides so that they stand out like a Greek guard's kilt. He is hard-working, shrewd,
even-tempered, obliging, and already people say of him 'Tring will get on, he's the stuff for
a Chief Secretary'". Rudbeck respects Tring's mind but has no wish to be posted to
provincial HQ and leave his beloved road project behind. He has recently married Celia,
who is determined "to be useful to him, an encouragement and an inspiration", but he soon
finds her getting in the way of his total commitment to the new road, "work which he
enjoys more than play and at which he works harder". As for Bulteel, "like all old officials
in the world he hates a fuss or a scandal" - just what the eagle-eyed Tring discovers in the
murky account books of expenditure on the road kept by Rudbeck's clerk, Mr Johnson, and
accordingly reports the misdemeanour to Bulteel. The latter saves his ADO by removing
words like "embezzlement" and "forgery" from Tring's report before it is sent off to the
Chief Secretary and substituting "unorthodox accounting for expenditure". Cary emerges as
the second-to-none memorialist of the early inter-war DO in Africa. No DO can have any
difficulty in identifying Cary's DOs from his own mental Staff List.
Other major novelists who have featured the DO among their characters include Gerald
Hanley, in his The Consul at Sunset (1957); Nicholas Monsarrat, with his The Tribe that Lost its Head (1956) and its follow-up Richer than All his Tribe (1968); and Simon
Raven's The Feathers of Death (1959), in which Matthew, the DO Gikumo, is said to be
based on a well-known DO of the 1950s in Kenya. Written round that rich source for
novelists, the Mau Mau uprising, Elspeth Huxley's A Thing to Love (1954) is arguably
superior to the American novelist Robert Ruark's Something of Value (1955) and Uhuru
(1962), though the DO appears in them all. Structurally, Peter Dickinson's Tefuga (1986) is somewhat oblique, for it focuses on the DO in early N. Nigeria through the mechanics
of a film-maker going out in the 1980s to make a film about the 1920s. The novel by the
prize-winning Canadian M. G. Vassanji, A Book of Secrets (1994), is set in Tanganyika,
where the diary of the DO Alfred Corbin unlocks stories and secrets from seventy years
ago.
When Gerald Hanley's The Consul at Sunset appeared in 1957, it was hailed by the
Evening Standard as Africa taking over where Kipling left off. Set in Somaliland, "the
hot, god-forsaken African desert", it is essentially a novel about colonial administrators,
with "the whole problem of governing natives portrayed in all its human intensity, sexual
as well as social". Because this is Somaliland in the late 1940s, the civil administration
temporarily includes military personnel serving as political officers, such as Captain
Milton, who gets mixed up in a disastrous relationship with a Somali woman. However,
Captain Sole, the leading character, is a regular DO, though keen to give it up, "a career
he had so idly chosen". "I can't believe in my job any more, I mean as an official. I can't
get near the people. I'm either the big, kindly father to them, or I must punish them, often
when I don't want to". On the other hand, for his superior, Colonel Casey, a regular army
officer, "the Empire was a sacred thing, a sacred club of which he was a member, a man
conscious of certain responsibilities to the backward people, as long as those people did
not worry him too much". Sole argues that younger men can no longer look on the empire
as a religion. Nor does he accept that being a DO is a vocation. "It was a good job, with
plenty of freedom and decent rewards", but he wants out. This bleak presentation of
colonial administration and the moral disintegration of empire ends with the image of Col.
Casey saluting the flag at sunset, "pride and loneliness stirring in him. The sun did not set
in the flag, but it had begun to set in the hearts of those who saluted it and the Empire it
had represented, and he could not understand that terrible sunset".
When we first meet the DO Forsdick in Nicholas Monserrat's The Tribe that Lost its
Head, he is "sweating in the noonday heat, his khaki shorts wilting, his florid face a ruddy
purple under the sun". Further up-country, the DO Tom Ronald and his young wife "lead
a lonely existence... his only link a radio schedule, his only strength a 12-bore shotgun" .
Despite his reputation of "an oldish man, of legendary strength and endurance, whose name alone, 'Great White Father', made murderers kill themselves outright and thieves
throw away their spoil in despair", the visitor finds Ronald to be "laughably different
- young, cheerful and thickset, with fair, shiny, curly hair, an ex-footballer, probably
[thought the visitor] given to hearty reminiscences and endless glasses of beer after the
game". His welcome, unlike Forsdick's, did not surprise. "What ho, chaps! Glad you got
here in one piece. I bet you're about ready to wet the old whistle!" Yet behind the residual
inanity of a minor public school boy lay something else, of a different quality altogether,
"something strong and tough and competent... He certainly knew his territory and what
was going on in it". In all these novels it is noticeable what detail is given to the DO's
physical descriptions and their mannerisms.
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Three other well-known novelists have brought in the DO, not in his work and life
in Africa but in his retirement. In Nadine Gordimer's A Guest of Honour (1971), the
former DO James Bray, who had been expelled by the colonial government for having
sympathized with the African nationalists, is invited ten years later by the new African
government to return for independence day and is pressured into taking up employment
with them. The returnee also featured in M. Taafe's semi-autobiographical novel The Dark Glass (1963), where J. Hume, a former DO, returned to Tanganyika in the early 1950s
after many years in retirement, explaining his visit by his inability to stay away any longer:
"the ghosts of the past were all around him". John Le Carre, who in Smiley's People
(1979) pondered on "why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Ships' engineers,
colonial administrators, spies", introduced into A Small Town in Germany (1991) a former
DO, "an ex-colonial man who liked to offer common-sense as an antidote to intellectual
hot air". More explicitly still, Graham Greene in The Human Factor (1978) presented the
head of the Secret Service, Sir John Hargreaves, as a one-time DO in the Gold Coast, who
"had acquired the knack of snatching his siesta in the most unfavourable circumstances,
even surrounded by quarrelling chiefs" . He had also "during his years in Africa grown
to appreciate the novels of Trollope", not because he was a reader of novels but "because
they reinforced the patience which Africa required". Mr. Slope would remind him of
"an importunate and self-righteous DC" he had once known and Mrs. Proudie of the
governor's wife.
Women occupy a third and notable group of our novelists, and it is not difficult to find
a number of them choosing colonial society, and in particular the DO, for their scene.
Among those whose husbands were in the CS were the American Erick Berry, whose mix-and-match 'factitious' vignettes in Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1941) throw a lot of light
on the DO's work in N. Nigeria (her husband was H. Best, DO and novelist), and Carol
Christian, author of Into Strange Country (1959), whose husband was a DO in E. Nigeria.
Writing as the wife of an agricultural officer, a rather different portrait of the DO appears
in Elizabeth Hargreaves' novel of up-country Sierra Leone, Handful of Silver (1954). Here
the DO's wife, Helen Pomfret, is fondly remembered by an Old Coaster lover "as she had
been when she first came out to the West Coast, before she acquired any veneer, any idea
of her official position, any knowledge of the Staff List", and long before her husband had
begun "to train her to be a DO's wife" - he used to go hot and cold with embarrassment
at dinner parties, "watching her working up for some ghastly faux pas ruinous to his
career". Elspeth Huxley's numerous novels about Kenya frequently contain sketches of DOs, including her thrillers Murder at Government House (1937), Murder on Safari
(1938) and The African Poison Murders(1939). It is, however, in her sole Nigerian novel, The Walled City (1948), that Huxley classically used the DO for her central characters:
the career-contrasting Freddy Begg, the perfect Secretariat man obviously heading for a
governorship, meticulous, cautious, admirable on paper but less commendable when it
comes to human relations; and Robert Gresham, "young, ardent, full of dreams", who sees
every problem in terms of flesh and blood. To add to the electricity of their relationship,
each of them is married and their public lives become dramatically intertwined with their
personal ones. Begg, "with the zeal of the ambitious and the relatively young added
to his industry and talent for compromise", can already point to accelerated promotion.
Gresham on the other hand is noted as an officer who "chafes a little under authority... a
little over-enamoured of his own opinions which have not always coincided with those of
his superiors".
Finally, and perhaps surprisingly to many, the academic Margery Perham gave us one
of the most thorough images of the DO, in her novel Major Dane's Garden (1925), set
in Somaliland where she had gone to visit her sister and DO husband. Once more the
plot revolves round a clash between two men in authority, with the DO falling in love
with the colonel's wife, Rhona, described in memorable period prose as "the sort of girl
that all boys can like and all girls can love". Dane is depicted at length, culminating in
the projected image of "altogether a weather-beaten but reflective person, who looked as
though he knew how to keep silence and was not to be classed as any one particular type".
For all that, he had a mind, and was determined to keep it agile in the difficult conditions
of outstation life, as the library in his bungalow showed. As he sat on his verandah, "his
hands were empty, but he was busy. He was pondering alternative methods of attacking
a problem in higher mathematics, a rather unsociable recreation he had developed in
loneliness". We learn that "ten years of his life in Africa Dane had spent learning one
lesson, that of self-control". Setting this youthful novel against a lifetime of academic
analysis of the DO, it is possible to identify in Dane many of the qualities which Margery
Perham came over the years to associate with her evolving image of the beau ideal DO.
The fourth, and last in terms of chronological emergence, class of novelists who have
written about the DO in Africa is at the same time one of the most revealing. This is
the African novelist, essentially a feature of the final years of colonial rule and into the
present. Two leading African novelists, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe and Kenya's Ngugi wa
Thiong'o, featured the DO in their first novels. Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart (1958),
which sold several million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages, closes
with a memorable passage on the received image of the anti-hero DO in the opening years
of Britain's gradual occupation of south-east Nigeria. Captain Hamilton reflects, as his
escort cuts down the corpse of Chief Okonkwo and "the resolute administrator in him
gave way to the student of primitive authority", on what unique data his work is providing
for a possible book (or at least a chapter), which he might well title The Pacification of
the Primitive Tribes of Lower Niger. By the time Achebe's Arrow of God (1964) came
along, Capt. Hamilton's book has become a manual for new DOs. Here the unpromoted
DO, Capt. Winterbottom, dutifully puts on his white uniform with sword when taking the
march-past of school children on Empire Day, despite his poor health and sleepless nights. He was "something of a school prefect" in the way he kept his fellow Europeans up to the
mark. His aide is Tony Clarke, who has just arrived on the station as a replacement for
an ADO struck down by cerebral malaria. As he dresses for dinner in the irksome heat,
he reads Hamilton's inspirational call in his book for Britain to send its finest young men
out to West Africa to "play their best in the game of life". Irritated by a directive from the
Lieutenant-Governor urging the introduction of a policy of indirect rule, Winterbottom
reflects that "the great tragedy of British colonial administration was that the man on the
spot who knew his African and knew what he was talking about found himself being
constantly overruled by starry-eyed fellows at HQ". Achebe also criticizes the way DOs
looked down on their departmental colleagues.
 
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Ngugi's DO in A Grain of Wheat (1967) belongs to a much later group than Achebe's
DOs of 1930. Kenya is on the verge of independence, though some DOs such as John
Thompson, "tall, a leathery skin that stuck to the bone", are thinking about staying on
under the new government. In the boma he had over the years "developed a mania for
writing letters. He scribbled notes to everyone". For Thompson, the secret of being a
first-class DO was always to do the unexpected. He begins to find the news about uhuru
in the papers so distasteful that, rather ashamedly, he turns over the picture of the new
Prime Minister and refuses to look at it again. Yet "he had worked as a DO in many
parts of Kenya. He worked hard and his ability to deal swiftly with Africans was widely
recognized. A brilliant career in colonial administration lay before him". In the end,
Thompson comes to grief over an incident when he was in charge of a Mau Mau detention
camp. It was "the tragedy of his life" and "the wound never healed". He leaves Kenya
a disillusioned man, feeling guilty that his one-time enthusiasm and success as a DO
had crumbled and his earlier good relations with Africans had given way to autocratic
behaviour and even personal violence. In despair, he looks back and asks himself "What
was it all about?" Thompson resigns, in haste to quit Kenya before independence. "Why"
he angrily asks, "should people wait and go through the indignity of being ejected from
their seats by their houseboys?" Like Achebe's Hamilton, he too plans to write a book of
his experiences as a DO, a novel to be called Prospero in Africa.
Among other African novelists fascinated by the DO, T.M. Aluko has portrayed in his
One Man, One Matchet (1964) both a European DO, Stanfield, whose pass in the Yoruba
language exam "was completely inadequate for understanding any farmer speaking not
the standard Yoruba accepted by the government", and a young Nigerian DO, Udo Akpan,
known locally as "the black white man". So firmly placed in the mind, with the respect
he commanded, was the image of the DO that two of his real-life African successors have
written autobiographical novels about their own life as a DO, A. Adebayo's I Am Directed
(1991) and M.A. Ogunyemi's The D.O The D.O. (1987), a frank and forthright title which at once
recalls the novels by Dobson and Kittermaster. But the African novelist who has written
more about the DO than any other is the female Ibo author Adaora Lily Ulasi. The DO
emerges as a generally negative character in all three of her novels. The old-style, nononsense
DO Maurice Mason, who is "quite content with the status quo. I'm paid to be
a DO after all, not a ruddy Governor", features in Many Things Begin for Change (1971),
where he is murdered. Mason was "heavily built for his height, who gave the impression
of being a lazy man - which he is not". His ADO is "a tall, lanky, sandy-haired young man with a zealous air about him". There is also Hughes, a DO whose reaction to a crisis is
"I may be earning my meal ticket here but I'll be damned if I'll sign my death warrant as
well" . In her mystery novel The Man for Sagamu(1978), Ulasi introduces two "Resident
Officers", one of whom, Mr. "Whitticar", [Whittaker] becomes the main character.
A Central African satirist fixated by the character of the DO is Kapana Makasa, a truelife
anti-colonial 'agitator' in the N. Rhodesian nationalist movement whose damning
indictment of "The Great Sir of Taxes" was published as Bwana District Commissioner (1989). It is enhanced
by its telling line-drawings. One excerpt will indicate the acid rhetoric of the whole. For
Makasa, the DCs come as "instruments of oppression. They imposed heavy taxation,
caned people, had indiscriminate imprisonment, forced tribute of chickens and cassava,
made people build shelters for them on tax circuits, made women draw water or ululate,
making roads without pay... A whip and a handcuff were the two instruments of colonial
brutality which demoralized the African people into submission". Boma, we are told,
stood for "British Overseas Military Administration".
Africans too young ever to have known a DO in their life have a fine opportunity to
recoup in the novels of writers like Achebe, Ngugi, Aluko and Ulasi. Britons, who showed
more indifference to than interest in their African colonies and may perhaps have now
and then come across an ageing ex-DO in Sussex or the warmer climate of Cheltenham,
are equally fortunate to have the character of the DO in Africa enshrined in the writings
of an extensive list of British novelists. This literature is likely to continue to offer to the
general public a primary and potentially persuasive perspective on the image and identity
of the DO in Africa for a long time ahead. The DO has earned a permanent niche in
the novel, by British and African novelists alike. As I have concluded elsewhere, while
scholars working on the activities and personalities of the District Officer will continue
to find it rewardingly de rigueur to analyse the notably rich Colonial Service holdings of
the Oxford Colonial Archive Project (OCAP) and the oral history recordings in the British
Empire and Commonwealth Museum collection at Bristol Museum, no serious researcher should overlook the unique
resource of data, description and detail on the DO available in the novels written, by
British and African authors alike, about the DO in Africa.
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