Middle Passages Available to Purchase

Once in Africa, Caribbean administrators found themselves in-between. This chapter generalizes these experiences with six snapshots from the lives of René Maran of Martinique and Cunliffe Hoyte of Trinidad. While limited to Oubangui-Chari and the Gold Coast between 1910 and 1918, the chapter gives texture to the middle positions of Caribbean administrators in other parts of the continent, especially their fraught relationships with Africans and Europeans and their feelings of superiority, ambiguity, and alienation. Drawing mainly on the petitions of Maran and Hoyte, the chapter demonstrates how they challenged the inconsistencies of colonial categories. As they navigated the contradictions of colonial politics, their conceptions of empire and imperial belonging began to shift.