The original note, as written at the time
A tale that follows the mysterious labours of a translator for the British in 19th century East Africa.
Ongoing development
They gave me a tent of my own, which was the first mistake, because a man with a tent of his own has somewhere to keep a book.
I was engaged to translate. That is the word on the paper. What I actually did was stand between two men who both believed they were being lied to, and decide, in each sentence, how much of the truth it was safe to move from one side to the other.
A translator is not a neutral instrument no matter what the contract says. Every sentence has more than one honest rendering, and choosing between them is a political act performed several hundred times a day. When the elder said we have heard this before, I could put it as we have heard this before, or as we are not persuaded, or as the chief remembers what happened at the last treaty. All three are true. Only one of them gets us out of this tent alive.
The British officer was not a fool, which made it worse. He knew he was being managed. He had begun to watch my hands rather than the elder’s face, because he had worked out that my hands gave away the length of what I had decided not to say.
And the elder knew that too, and started speaking in a way designed to make my omission visible, so that the officer would see the gap and trust me less, and the whole arrangement would fall back to what it had been before I arrived. Which is what he wanted. He had never wanted a translator.
The thing nobody writes down is what happens to the translator afterwards. The treaties are in the archive in one language. The promises are in the memory of the people in another. And between the two there is a man who was paid to make a choice, and who has to live in the country where the choice was made.