Kunapipi XXVI:2

JOHN O’LEARY
‘Out here to be pleasant’: Mister Johnson and the Rhetoric of Niceness

Early in the twentieth century, a Governor of the Gold Coast colony in West Africa circulated a minute to his staff. Such minutes were not unusual, and could cover any subject. This one, however, is memorable, for it dealt not with the minutiae of imperial administration but with a more difficult question: namely, how the agent of empire was to behave towards the subjects he ruled:

I wish all officers to remember that a very high standard of work and conduct is expected from members of the service. We must always remember that we are Civil Servants — servants of the public. We are in this country to help the African and to serve him. We derive our salaries from the Colony and it is our duty to give full value for what it pays us. I attach considerable importance to good manners, especially towards the African. Those people who consider themselves so superior to the Africans that they feel justified in despising them and insulting them are quite unfitted for responsible positions in the colony. They are, in my opinion, inferior to those whom they affect to despise, and often betray, by their arrogance and bad manners, the inferiority of which they are secretly ashamed. (Morris 1978 253)

It is a fascinating text. Analysing it can lead us to an understanding of the complex, often contradictory late imperial culture that produced it — a culture that much post-colonial theory has represented as simple, homogenous and monolithic — as well as to a deeper appreciation of the co-texts, such as Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939), that this culture created.

On the surface, the Governor’s minute is a liberal document, one that appeals explicitly to notions of dignity and respect for one’s fellow man (or woman). Beneath the humane sentiment, however, notions of racial superiority are evident — Africans have to be ‘helped’, the Governor notes, which necessarily implies that they stand lower on the scale of civilisation than the imperial agent who rules them. What is significant, however, is that this sense of racial superiority cannot be voiced. To do so — to speak openly of one’s superiority — is regarded as arrogant and bad-mannered. To ram home this point, the Governor ends with a subtle observation: those who despise Africans labour under a secret sense of inferiority. The inferiority here relates to socio-economic rank; Europeans who openly voice their superiority are, the Governor intimates, lower-class. This class discourse, which intersects so interestingly here with the discourse of race, is a subject I shall return to.