African peoples quickly learned the rules of racial etiquette. They understood (even as they resented) that they should defer to whites, sit on the floor of NCs’ offices, come when called, make way for whites on sidewalks, and appear cheerful in the face of whites’ demands for their time, labor, and approval. At the same time, Africans just as quickly learned how to live honorable lives within the racial etiquette of deference that whites demanded. This required considerable social “agility”: act too deferentially and one lost honor; act too proudly and one faced humiliation or, worse, even physical assault. The drama produced by the performance of racial etiquette comes to life in the detailed complaints people lodged with colonial officers about racial rudeness. Since proper behavior includes much more than appropriate language, people often described in rich detail how a person's verbal inflection, posture, and gestures made the social rudeness more objectionable.

This chapter uses a couple of vignettes of racial etiquette from the 1930s to examine how people managed difficult social situations in which personal dignity and deference to whites seemed impossible to reconcile. The first story, of Lennox Njokweni, reveals that even as racial etiquette was solidifying into a code of conduct in the 1930s, some Africans were still able to find cracks and spaces in social practice and so make claims for personal dignity and social justice that powerful people could not ignore. What is more, even as government officials became more comfortable with their powers over Africans, they were not entirely secure in their authority. The small white community clashed with colonial officials in numerous ways—they accused officials of being too sympathetic with Africans, charged NCs with theft and abuse of office, and, sometimes, critiqued their work as unfair and inconsistent with the expectations of the officials working, ultimately, for the British Empire. As the chapter's second story, of Rose Comberbach, demonstrates, scandals over etiquette had consequences for policy toward Africans.

A Bewildering Etiquette

Officials were astonished that Africans did not defer to them as a natural reflex whenever the two happened to cross paths.