Linga’s Dream?

Abstract

This article is about a young farmer named Linga and his encounter with a water spirit in Oubangui-Chari (present-day Central African Republic) in 1930. It is also about the telling and re-telling of Linga’s encounter as the story was transcribed into Banda, translated into French, and rewritten as an ethnographic folktale. Responsible for these transformations were two Banda interpreters and a colonial administrator from the Caribbean. In the last two decades, historians of colonialism have turned increasingly to interpreters and other intermediaries. Often missing from this scholarship, however, are analyses of the granular details—of how colonial intermediaries used transcription, translation, and other methods to create new words, texts, and ideas. Linguistic anthropologists refer to such interventions as “entextualization,” the process by which fragments of discourse are extracted from their immediate settings and rendered into detached texts. Drawing on this scholarship, I argue that tracing the granular processes of entextualization opens up new vantage points from which to study the role of colonial intermediaries in the production of knowledge. The article also illuminates a methodology for mapping otherwise invisible constellations of language, meaning, and colonial power.

More Than an Intermediary: James Bannerman and Colonial Space-Making on the Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast

“…In the last quarter century, Africanist scholars have not only emphasized the incoherence of European colonial regimes and overseas trading posts but also problematized the colonized/colonizer binary (Cooper 2005;Ochonu 2014;Lawrance et al 2006;Janzen 2022;Greiner 2022). This line of thinking is further reinforced by a growing body of literature on the role of African intermediaries and how they used their knowledge, autonomy, and experiences to help run colonial administrations.…”