ABSTRACT
So began Lord Hailey’s chapter, ‘ e State and Land’ in his voluminous An Afr ican Survey (1938). It is hardly surprising that land proved such a contentious issue between British administrators and Africans given the o en underhand way that British sovereignty was initially obtained. From the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans looked to establish control of land via treaties with local leaders. e dubious legal status of these treaties was recognized by Sir Frederick Lugard who noted that they ‘were produced by the cartload in all the approved forms of legal verbiage – impossible of translation by ill-educated interpreters’.2 Furthermore, chiefs o en signed away communal rights over which they had no jurisdiction. To Lugard, though, these treaties served a purpose: they provided the way for ‘the conscience of Europe’ to nd ‘relief ’ and allowed politicians ‘to persuade themselves that the omelette had been made without breaking any eggs’.3 Despite the unequal nature of the power in this new exchange, the documents that follow demonstrate that encounters between Africans and British administrators over land issues could lead to unforeseen or unintended consequences.
