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By Root 1305 0

Edgar Wallace, who dispenses justice to ‘child-like’ west Africans while sitting cross-legged on a chair, an unlit cigar clamped in his mouth, a Browning pistol on his hip. ‘I am Sandi,’ he says, ‘I am a man quick to kill and no respecter of kings or chiefs. I have ploughed little kings into the ground and the crops of my people have flourished on the bones of princes.’* Edgar Wallace may have considered this sort of dialogue made for an amusing narrative, but as a picture of the colonial official it was complete tosh. The diaries and letters of district officers tell a much more mundane story. It was frequently a life of stoical endurance, rudimentary comforts, terrible food, tedious bureaucracy and numbing loneliness, in pursuit of small initiatives – a bridge here, a bit of irrigation there – which might better the lives of the community in which the DO found himself.

And in addition to the frustrations of life in the bush, DOs had to cope with the clods in London. ‘Documents no longer needed may be destroyed,’ a Colonial Office directive is imagined to have ordered, ‘provided copies are made in duplicate.’ The Whitehall bureaucrats so often seemed simply not to have a clue about the realities of life overseas. ‘Why, some of them seem to think that you can govern a West Indian colony with a fiddle and a ham-bone,’ exploded the Governor of the Leeward Islands (and former Oxford rower), Sir Clement Courtenay Knollys. The early twentieth-century diaries of Sir Hesketh Bell bubble with ideas he had for cultivating citrus fruit while governing in the West Indies (he’d been told that American men considered grapefruit to be good for the liver and American women thought it a contraceptive) or how to create an insurance scheme to protect islanders from the financial effects of hurricanes. These men might occasionally wonder whether the places to which they had been sent were worth the effort. But they rarely questioned the moral basis of their work: they believed they were ‘doing good’. In a world before the United Nations and aid agencies, this was another side to colonialism.

Recruiters for the Sudanese Political Service – which considered itself a cut above most colonial administrations – sought a very particular type of person. Within three years of Kitchener’s capture of Khartoum, small numbers of civilian officials began to arrive from Britain and between 1901 and 1930 there were never more than twelve men selected in a year. This was a tiny force in a vast expanse – at any one time a mere 125 men, running a territory four times the size of Texas, 150 times as big as Yorkshire. Since those chosen were likely to have to deal with anything from a broken town drain to the settling of vendettas by knife murder, the selectors were after candidates who could demonstrate leadership, stamina and a steady head. Most of those who made the grade were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, but the selection board had a definite preference for reliability over cleverness: one applicant was rejected because the selectors did not care for the fact that he had ‘by accident’ left his copy of that morning’s Times newspaper lying about with the entire crossword completed. They preferred the sort of man likely to have played sport for his university: Sudan was said to be ‘The Land of Blacks Ruled by Blues’. Those who satisfied the selectors were sent off to learn Arabic, how to administer the law, a little anthropology, some basic first aid and the rudiments of surveying and drainage: in one young man were to be contained all the necessities of civilization.

For the right sort of person, it wasn’t a bad job. The service offered three months’ home leave every year, on the grounds that nine months was quite long enough to expect anyone to endure the Sudanese climate, and for much of the year the young official might be alone out in the bush. There was the prospect of retirement at fifty, which meant the chance of a second career. But they were not expected to think about getting married any time soon. A very large proportion of those selected