This study will describe and discuss the relationships of the main characters in Joyce Cary's l939 novel, Mister Johnson, about black-white relations in British colonial Nigeria.
The primary relationship in the book is that between the African clerk Johnson and the District Officer Harry Rudbeck. Most of the other relationships in the book---such as that between Johnson and Sergeant "Sargy" Gollup---are developed by Cary to help strengthen and clarify the relationship between Johnson and Rudbeck. These two characters are meant by Cary to symbolize the relationship between the white British colonial in the position of ultimate power in Africa and the subservient African who derives a major part of his identity from his relationship with powerful whites who he is continually trying to please.
We first see Johnson as he meets Bamu, his wife-to-be. He is a stranger to her town just as Rudbeck's people will always be strangers in Africa to some degree. Bamu is suspicious of Johnson and his promises of a better life, just as Africans were suspicious of the colonialists and their promises of a better life. Johnson makes promises to her that mirror the promises made to Africans by whites: "Oh, Bamu you are only a savage girl here---you do not know how happy I will make you. I will teach you to be a civilized lady. . . . " (11-12).
Johnson cannot accept that Bamu is already happy and civilized, and he will never fully communicate with her, or, in fact, with anybody. He is a man who is stuck between the worlds of whites and blacks, of those who have tremendous material power and those who must do whatever they can to stymie or adapt to that power.
Johnson is a man who lives for others. He steals for his wife and for Rudbeck. The only action he takes for himself and himself alone is the murder of Sargy who comes upon him suddenly when Johnson is in the middle of his crime. The act is instinctive and is a subconscious expression of...