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Part of
Towards an Atlas of the History of Interpreting: Voices from around the world
Edited by Lucía Ruiz Rosendo and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón
[Benjamins Translation Library 159] 2023
► pp. 120–144

Chapter 5
Mediating a complex cultural matrix

Indigenous Muslim interpreters in Colonial Senegal, 1850–1920

| West Virginia University

The complex cultural matrix within which Muslim interpreters mediated between French colonizers and colonized Africans offers a window through which we see how both unequal relations of power and cultural capital shaped the intercessions of indigenous intermediaries in colonial Senegal. Despite their subordinate position in the French colonial administration, the interpreters held sway over information/knowledge conveyed to their kinfolk, which could influence perceptions about the dynamics of power relations between the French authorities and Africans. Drawing on the mediations of Muslim interpreters in colonial Senegal from 1850 to 1920, this chapter engages broader issues about the provenance of sources, retrieving indigenous voices in historical reconstruction, and producing knowledge and counternarratives in African history.

Keywords: Muslim interpreters, intermediaries, mediation, Senegal, France, colonialism, African Agency, counternarratives, knowledge production
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • French colonialism, Muslim interpreters, and the Senegal River Valley in the mid-1800s
  • Retrieving African voices: The “Colonial Library” and beyond
  • Muslim interpreters as mediators and historians as knowledge producers
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.159.05mba
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