Metropolitan Adventure as Colonial Mediation: The Case of Nigerian Emirs

The travel of Northern Nigerian emirs and aristocrats to Britain for sightseeing adventures between 1920 and 1960 may be viewed as a type of mediatory endeavor. The itineraries for these trips were scripted jointly by colonial authorities and the traveling aristocrats. Muslim travelers proactively leveraged their metropolitan travel to bolster their position as translators and mediators of colonial modernity and as models for the proper way for Muslims in Northern Nigeria to navigate colonial culture without running afoul of Islamic prescriptions. By writing travelogues, travel memoirs, and other travel texts on their adventures in the metropole, they inscribed themselves more firmly in the colonial middle position. Scholars have shown that African middlemen intervened vigorously and robustly in the colonial situation and in some cases stamped the imprimatur of their interests on important colonial encounters and exchanges. As illuminating as it is, the current literature of colonial mediation hardly accommodates the ways in which travel, mobility, and the ability to traverse colonial space facilitated and expanded the task of mediation. Northern Nigerian metropolitan traveler-narrators used the institutions of travel, participant observation, and travel narration to enrich their mediatory repertoires. Travel to the metropole supplied more empirical material, more context, and more epistemological resources with which to translate colonial cultures, institutions, and practices for Africans who could not travel themselves. Travel to Britain concretized, consolidated, or dispelled impressions forged in the crucible of colonial power relations. Positioning oneself to fellow subalterns as an expert on British society was a form of mediation.