African intermediaries were ubiquitous in encounters between Europeans and Africans throughout the continent from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries. In Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts explored a cross-section of African personnel employed at the lower levels of European colonial administrations in Africa, namely, the marginalized local go-betweens – interpreters, translators, clerks, letter writers, and "bush lawyers" – whose mediations shaped relations of power between Europeans and Africans from the early 1800s to the 1960s. This first panel, of a two-panel sequence, revisits this important community of historical actors with a new perspective, focusing on the role of Africans as mediators, collaborators, and agents of power within imperial and colonial authority, both European and African to revisit the "bargain of collaboration," a term borrowed from Ronald Robinson. Moses Ochonu explores peripatetic Nigerian emirs, who went to Britain for sightseeing adventures between the 1920s and 1960s and then returned to leverage their experience and bolster their mediatory repertoires. Richard L. Roberts examines the remarkable Mademba Sèye, a previously marginal African employee who joined the post and telegraph service in 1869, served the French loyally, and was rewarded by being enthroned as king of a newly conquered region in French Soudan. Allison Shutt revisits the attempt by the infamous sell-out, Jasper Savanhu, a prominent African member of the Central African Federation (1953-1963), to refashion his political respectability. And Etana Dinka focuses on role of the balabbat, a local indigenous elite cadre, who asserted control over resources while bargaining for power in imperial Ethiopia.