Petitioners, ‘Bush Lawyers’ and Letter Writers: Court Access in British-Occupied Lomé, 1914-1920

On May 22, 1918, British Lome's Chief Political Officer, A. R. Holliday, took the unusual step of rescinding and demanding the surrender of the letter-writing license of one Lome merchant, a certain Robert A. Cole. According to the testimonies of Cole and Holliday, Cole had acted as a letter writer for a group of disgruntled subjects of Chief Abraham of Amoutive, a village adjoining Lome, who insisted that they had destooled the said chief. Cole was allegedly a party to the plot to destool Chief Abraham and had aided and abetted the plotters by preparing letters that questioned the authority of the "traditional ruler of the Amoutive people." Cole was described as a "troublesome man" who had received several warnings about coming frequently to court and "encourag[ing] people to reopen matters that ha[d] been settled." In his defense he countered that he was "only a letter writer" and that over the past four years he had written 1,072 letters, all in good faith. This brief but tense exchange sheds important light on the role of the public letter writer in the administration of British-occupied Lome. On the one hand, the letter writer, although not employed by the state, was in the position of acting as a go-between amid litigating parties and was charged with the task of conveying a legal matter to colonial authorities. Because letter writers functioned as intermediaries, albeit in a capacity different from that of interpreters and clerks and with different constituencies, they sparked concerns on part of colonial officials. On the other hand, the writer was frequently a partisan individual, one who charged a fee for services, and one whose legal authority as a middle figure rested completely in the hands of the colonial state, which at once could strip him of his profession and render inadmissible any letter or petition in an ad hoc manner reminiscent of la loi bureaucratique. Thus, anxiety about the roles of letter writers speaks broadly to colonial concerns about interpreters and clerks, as they occupy similarly ambiguous nexuses of power and authority. Among the most surprising changes instituted by the British occupation of Lome at the onset of World War I was the decision to regulate letter writers via the creation of a licensing system. Although a system of regulation itself is not particularly unusual, its invocation at this juncture, after the brief but violent conquest of German Togoland, sits uneasily with developments elsewhere in the British colonial empire, making it worthy of further investigation. The role of public letter writers (in French colonies and mandates the term ecrivains publics is equivalent), sometimes disparagingly referred to as "bush lawyers," is a central component of the social history of access to the colonial court system. Letter writing for hire operated as a mechanism whereby all colonial subjects – educated or illiterate – could have their grievances brought to the attention of appropriate legal authorities or to senior administrators in an act of supplication. The letter writers, like the court interpreters and the chiefly linguists, functioned as intermediaries in a multivalent legal environment: they negotiated access to the judicial tribunal; they framed and reframed the language of the plaintiff's case; they conveyed information between the chief, colonial officers, and a rural community; and they collected a fee for their services. To the African litigant they represented an avenue to legal review of justifiable expense. To the colonial official letter writers both facilitated and obfuscated judicial process. For the vast illiterate African majority, they were crucial to the court system, because written documents were far more likely to stimulate a civil or criminal proceeding. Letter writers were indispensable to the evolving legal apparatus but were frequently viewed as profiteers of personal misfortune, charlatans, and busybodies.